Ageing, Experience,Biopolitics: Life’sUnfolding

Brett NeilsonUniversity of Western Sydney

AbstractIn the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensionsof bıos and zoe, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. Whatremains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – itsunfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both ofapproaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences andthose that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In thecontemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up in global flowsof information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, thegeneral preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central tovalue creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes acost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes withregard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessingcurrent debates regarding the ageing of people and populations.

Keywordsageing, biopolitics, capitalism, care, experience, Foucault

In what sense does a life unfold? Foucault (1978: 138) writes

famously in The History of Sexuality: ‘Now it is over life, throughout

its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion.’ This brilliant

observation, which initiates a whole area of research concerning

life’s relation to power in the modern era, does not, in any sense,

begin to explain how and why such unfolding occurs. One can hazard

to say that life, in the biopolitical tradition, is emptied of experience.

Whether the debate focuses on the tensions of immunity and

Corresponding author:Brett NeilsonEmail: b.neilson@uws.edu.auhttp://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

community, generation and thanatopolitics, bıos and zoe, life tends to

remain an object that can be added or subtracted (as in the debates on

abortion, euthanasia or cloning).

The absence of a deep consideration of experience in biopolitical

thought becomes apparent when life is conceived in relation to age-

ing. Certainly, the ageing of people and populations has been a key

concern in biopolitical debates, especially as they bear upon ques-

tions of fertility and mortality relevant for the general administration

of human populations. But the experiential dimension of ageing,

which, in an important sense, is common to all human lives, has not

received great consideration in the expanding body of literature on

biopolitics. Countering this tendency, this article asks how

experiences of ageing interact with knowledge practices and govern-

mental processes that position life as an object of power in contem-

porary capitalist societies. Such an investigation is difficult because

there are so many different kinds of experience, which, in turn, are

susceptible to different kinds of interpretation or distortion. While

the category of experience provides a conceptual opening through

which material evidence can be introduced to test and complicate

theoretical positions on biopolitics, it does so only at the price of

an almost unbearable multiplication of possibilities that threatens

to disorient as much as guide the analysis.

There is thus a need to narrow the field of investigation. In the dis-

cussion that follows the introduction of experience into debates about

biopolitics enables an analysis of contemporary transformations of

care. Changes to geriatric medicine, shifting responsibilities between

states and markets, global migration patterns – all affect the organi-

zation and administration of care, which is one of the most funda-

mental ways in which we matter to ourselves and to each other. To

generalize inadequately, it is possible to point to processes by which

the care of self begins to eclipse the care of others. The tendency

under current policy arrangements for ageing to become more of

an individual risk and less of a collective responsibility means that

increasing numbers of people are compelled to care for themselves,

whether economically or physically, as they age. These changes are

relevant to a biopolitical consideration of ageing because they shift

the parameters within which people experience the trajectories and

transitions that punctuate their lives. Indeed, without an understand-

ing of such experiences it is difficult to piece together the disparate

Neilson 45

factors that contribute to the changing shape of the life course in

contemporary societies.

One reason why biopolitical approaches alone are insufficient to

inform such an engagement with practices of care is because, in Fou-

cault’s wake, the debate surrounding biopolitics has split in two direc-

tions. On the one hand, thinkers such as Agamben (1998), Hardt and

Negri (2000) and Esposito (2008) ask how biopolitics functions at the

macro-scale of political processes, investigating the counter-forces it

mobilizes and inquiring into its difference from historical forms of

political representation and articulation. On the other hand, figures

such as Rabinow (1999), Franklin (2003) and Rose (2007) focus on the

molecular level of life, addressing technological developments in

bioscience to ask how the transformation and reproduction of life pro-

cesses connect to questions of knowledge, ethics and value. As Lemke

(2010: 172) observes: ‘While one side is interested in the political

sphere or macro-level, formulating questions of power and resistance,

subjectification and subjugation, the other side investigates technolo-

gies on a micro-level, often at a distance or even cut off from political

questions.’ Introducing the question of experience interrupts this divi-

sion of labour. It draws attention to how developments at both the

macro- and micro-levels impact upon the unfolding of individual and

collective lives. Moreover, it exposes the contradictions and

discontinuities between the various imperatives and tendencies that are

elaborated at these different levels, with profound implications for the

government of life, not least with respect to ageing.

My ambition in this article is twofold. First, I show how a focus on

experience highlights the interactions between two biopolitical

developments that unfold respectively on these divergent scales: the

massive capital investment in the vitality of molecular life and the

marked social disinvestment in forms of care and welfare that

address the well-being of the body. For reasons that will become

apparent, I name these tendencies the immortalization of the flesh

and the amortization of the body. Second, I ask how the crossing

of these processes affects two transformations that mark contempo-

rary experiences of ageing: the attempts within medicine to redefine

ageing as a disease and the growing pressure for ageing subjects to

perform practices of self-care. With regard to these changes, experi-

ence is both an epistemological and ontological category. It pertains

not only to phenomenal ways of knowing the world and the holistic

46

experience of life as it unfolds between life and death but also to

informational relations between systems and environments. While

my focus is upon varieties of experience that apply to human subjects,

whether individual or collective, the overall aim is to gain a sense of

how contemporary capitalism shapes life’s unfolding, a process that

encompasses but cannot be reduced to the biological aspects of ageing.

Perturbations of Care

Consider the following scenario. A worker approaches the age of

retirement in an advanced capitalist nation. The pension scheme in

which she is enrolled asks her to choose whether to take her retire-

ment savings in a lump sum or in the form of a regularly paid life

annuity. How does she decide? The situation in which she is

embroiled requires her to make a wager on how long she will live.

Expectations about how life will unfold – for example, about life-

span or the likelihood of medicine to enable functional living – are

likely to influence such decisions. These, in turn, have an impact

upon financial systems, the lives of family members, processes of

intergenerational transfer, and so on. There is need for an analysis

that can account for the different factors operating in such a scenario.

But this cannot emerge without an approach that balances questions

of life, power and financial administration against more qualitative

and elusive matters of experience. The predicament is clearly biopo-

litical since the introduction of market-mediated pension schemes,

many of which require such decisions at retirement, is part of a more

general shift in the administration of ageing populations that has

occurred over the past three decades. Yet without an appreciation

of how individual and collective experiences of health, economic

uncertainty, family history and other life matters bear upon such a sit-

uation, it is difficult to ascertain its relevance for changing social

experiences of ageing.

Like the scenario described above, many other routine practices

pertaining to ageing, care and the administration of life require a

sense of the tonalities and rhythms of experience if they are to be

fully situated in a biopolitical frame.

There is a need to re-open and rethink the relations between expe-

rience and life. Whether accumulated or fleeting, remembered or

sensed, coherent or jumbled, collective or individual, experience

Neilson 47

materializes in, or, perhaps more accurately, creates specific forms of

life. But this is not a process with predictable results. Despite its creative

and relational impulse, experience does not supply firm grounds of evi-

dence or authority. As Joan Scott (1991: 797) explains, what ‘counts as

experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always con-

tested, and always therefore political’. To enter this contestation, to

move experience into the nexus where politics meets life, is not merely

to question the occlusion of experience in biopolitical thought but also

to rethink the ontological and epistemological grounds of the concept of

biopolitics itself. It is to unmoor the debate on biopolitics from the

anthropological constants of birth and death and to set it loose in the

uncertain domain of that which unfolds while we are alive.

The field of geriatric medicine is a strategic one in which to trace

these contested relations. It is at once a body of knowledge that dis-

ciplines ageing subjects and a set of administrative practices for their

care. Traditionally the field has maintained a strong anti-theoretical

bias and an emphasis on problem solving (Birren, 1999; Settersten

and Dobransky, 2000). From the 1960s, practitioners of geriatric

medicine invested heavily in the task of tracking and improving the

functional capacities that enable older people to exercise self-care.

These capacities were codified in elaborate systems of performance

and quality of life measurement, such as the so-called ‘activities of

daily living’ (ADLs) (Katz et al., 1963). Such standardized evalua-

tion tools mapped and quantified the most banal and instrumental

of everyday experiences: dressing, eating, washing, defecating,

walking, communicating, shopping, preparing meals, performing

housework and so on. It was thus against the foil of quotidian expe-

rience, submitted to observation and the rigour of rating scales, that

geriatric medicine established its most widespread ambition: the

compression of morbidity.

First described by Fries (2005) in an article published in 1983, the

compression of morbidity involves attempts to maximize the period

of life in which people can care for themselves by reducing experi-

ences of senescence, infirmity or chronic disease to a relatively short

interval prior to death. Considered in relation to the biopolitical con-

cerns of population management, it has wide-ranging implications

not only for health professionals, managers and scientists but also for

insurance companies, financial operatives and government agencies

interested in lessening the demands of ageing populations upon the

48

public purse. For geriatric medical practice, it implies a heightened

attention to risk factors arising from lifestyles, the increased

deployment of ‘screening’ technologies to detect and address health

problems before they emerge and a growing personalization and indi-

vidualization of medicine. As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008: 285)

observe, ‘the compression of morbidity witnesses the emergence of a

self entrepreneurially responsibilised to secure its own health care’.

The ambition and care paradigm of the compression of morbidity

rests on the assumption that the fundamental biological processes of

human ageing are unalterable. While it includes the possibility of

increases in average life expectancy, this approach does not project

an extension of the maximum life-span for the human species. The

aim is to secure long lives free of chronic disease and disability fol-

lowed by a relatively swift death as the individual reaches the sup-

posed limits of the human life-span. But with the genetic and

genomic developments that have marked biomedical innovations in

the past two decades, many ingrained assumptions about the biology

of human ageing have been questioned. Some medical researchers

now suggest that the processes of ageing can be slowed and average

life-span and/or life expectancy increased. Binstock (2004) outlines a

number of claims in this regard. The more cautious argue for the

deceleration of ageing (so that future 90-year-olds, for example,

might be as active and healthy as current 50-year-olds). More adven-

turous researchers suggest the possibility of restoring vitality and

function to those who have lost them. At their most radical, such

claims become arguments for the identification of ageing as a dis-

ease. At stake in this notion, which is gaining increased currency

among biogerontologists, is the proposition that ageing is a condition

that can be manipulated, treated and potentially reversed. This is also

a claim with implications for practices of care. Understanding ageing

as a disease changes how individuals and institutions respond to it.

To be sure, the claim that ageing is a disease is highly contested

(Moody and Caplan, 2004). Many social gerontologists (Katz,

2001/2; Vincent, 2009) worry that such an approach reinforces med-

icalized and discriminatory perspectives on ageing, while medical

researchers debate whether biological innovations at the molecular

and cellular levels can feasibly lengthen the human life-span. Much

of the controversy has focused on organizations such as the American

Academy for Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), which makes radical

Neilson 49

claims for the possibility of extending the human life-span

through regenerative and biotechnologies but restricts its activi-

ties to the promotion of hormonal and nutritional products, fitness

and dietary regimes, cosmetic surgery and the like. The claims

and rhetoric of A4M have been strongly countered in a position

statement entitled ‘No Truth to the Fountain of Youth’

(Olshansky et al., 2002), published in Scientific American and

signed by an international roster of 51 scientists and physicians.

But this organization offers an appealing message of care to age-

ing individuals who sense that established geriatric medicine

offers them little scope for self-definition or longer lives in social

contexts where ageist attitudes are rife.

If one grounds a biopolitical analysis of ageing exclusively with ref-

erence to scientific debates, it is difficult to understand the appeal of

organizations like A4M, which have spread their message throughout

the world by means of conferences and internet marketing. Also crucial

is the experiential dimension of people who are compelled to negotiate

their life trajectories in governmental and social contexts prone to the

rollback of socialized programmes of care and the proliferation of neg-

ative images of ageing people. Based on in-depth ethnographic inter-

views with users of anti-ageing medicine in Australia, Cardona

(2008) reports a range of experiences that inform their decisions to initi-

ate and maintain rigorous and expensive programmes of self-care: per-

ceptions of increased vitality in others, feelings of slowing down,

desires not be a financial burden on family or society, fears of being

sidelined in the workplace, the sense of not feeling or acting one’s age,

coupling with younger sexual partners, and pressures to remain produc-

tive and take advantage of opportunities. These are not surprising moti-

vations for people enmeshed in current market and governmental

rationalities but they are profoundly social experiences. As one of Car-

dona’s interviewees explains: ‘I am an opportunist, and I’m a chame-

leon, so I do it because I think well, it helps me get what I want out of

my life because I live in a society. I haven’t opted out yet’ (2008: 428).

The question is how to move between such experiences of social

life and the permutations of biological life highlighted by recent

biomedical advances. Claims to deliver arrested ageing assume a

number of forms: from growth fields like tissue engineering and tel-

omere maintenance to techno-utopian and populist projects like that

associated with the World Transhumanist Association. From

50

epistemological and social viewpoints, there is a danger of conflating

serious efforts of scientific research with marketing and advertising

platforms that draw upon desires for longer lives. Developments in the

field of regenerative medicine, for instance, cannot be immediately

conflated with the claims and promises circulated by organizations

such as A4M. By the same token, there is a blurring of boundaries

between such enterprises. The processes of capitalization that have

invested biogerontological research raise issues of access and of the

wisdom of financing such activities on the basis of a desire to indefi-

nitely extend life when general health care resources are already

stretched (Callahan and Prager, 2008). There is a need to approach

developments in this field in ways that neither assume nostalgia for the

20th-century welfare state (and its particular modes of dealing with

ageing) nor assert a teleological narrative by which current forms of

governance are inevitable or unchangeable.

One important terrain where this need is pronounced is in the

intersection of financially driven rejuvenation medicine and policy

discourses of ‘healthy’ or ‘positive ageing’. Policy agendas, which

emphasize the need for individuals and communities to replace and/

or supplement government efforts to support ageing, have come to

dominate in the current global environment of disinvestment in

pensions, health services and so on (Neilson, 2006). This contri-

butes to a social atmosphere in which individual investments in

health and well-being are encouraged. While governments may

warn populations against some of the more extreme and scientifi-

cally dubious variants of anti-ageing medicine, they can also assist

in the creation of environments where agents promoting such prac-

tices can effectively operate. On the one hand, the emergence of

individualized practices of care tends to marginalize approaches

that search for social causes and preventions. The ageing subject

begins to assume ethical worries that centre on the care of the body

in ways that match prescribed notions of functionality, enablement

and even appearance. On the other hand, users of anti-ageing med-

icine frequently understand themselves as exercising agency and

responsibility in challenging traditional biomedical conceptions

of ageing as decline and loss. For this reason, anti-ageing medicine

can be described as a patient/practitioner movement, since, as

Mykytyn (2006) points out, many practitioners begin their engage-

ment as users.

Neilson 51

My purpose is neither to explore the ascendant emphasis on perfor-

mance and functionality in geriatric medicine nor to negatively contrast

this with more experiential approaches to ageing that emphasize narra-

tive, life-story and reminiscence (Woodward, 1997). Rather I suggest

that the emphasis on self-care implicit in approaches to ageing as a dis-

ease diminishes the relational dimension of human life, substituting an

emphasis on economics (or, more accurately, management or adminis-

tration – oikonomia) for a concern with the political aspects of biologi-

cal innovations. The situation is far from straightforward, since the

relational aspect of life is itself one increasingly enclosed by market

rationality. This is particularly evident if one considers another field

in which the perturbations of care are manifest: the domain of care work.

As populations across the world age, there is an increasing demand for

workers to provide bodily and emotional care for ageing individuals.

Given the predominantly domestic setting of such work and the growing

unavailability of family members to perform it, this is a form of labour

increasingly conducted by irregular migrant workers (particularly

women) in many parts of the world.

Care work, it might be said, involves not care of the self but care of

others. It is a form of affective labour that collapses the boundaries

between labour and life, sitting on a continuum with other forms of

domestic labour or ‘dirty work’ (Anderson, 2000). At stake in care

work is not just labour time but the entire personality of the worker,

her capacity to produce and sell affects. This type of work encapsu-

lates, at an abstract level, some characteristics that are emblematic

of the current changes to labour as such, including the blurring of the

lines between life and work and the increasing difficulties in distin-

guishing productive from reproductive labour (Hardt, 1999). But it

is also a particular kind of work, involving close bodily encounter

(usually in a domestic environment unfamiliar to the worker), issues

of communication and translation, and vulnerable labour market posi-

tions (due to the often murky legal status of migrant care workers).

The debate on care work is wide, including interventions that con-

cern its connections with migration (Andall, 2000; Parrenas, 2001), a

more general feminization of labour (England and Folbre, 1999) and

the crisis of care in the western ‘family in disorder’ (Roudinesco,

2002). In policy circles, the experiential and corporeal aspects of this

kind of labour tend to become submerged. Twigg (2000) argues that

the dominant discourses informing the field are social work and

52

managerialism. Social work has never wholly claimed care work, and

its emphasis on case work and interpersonal relations stops short of a

consideration of the body. Managerial discourses tend to stress effi-

ciency, effectiveness, targeting and allocation, sidelining the

embedded and messy concreteness of the care scenario. Twigg’s inter-

views with care workers in the UK bring out the concrete experiential

aspects of this form of labour, including dealing with shit, pee, vomit,

sputum, false teeth and toenails. Her interviewees discuss the com-

plexities of negotiating nakedness and touch, including the physical

and symbolic role of rubber gloves as way of constructing distance

in these intimate and gendered transactions. As one care worker mem-

orably states: ‘The smell stays with you’ (2000: 396).

The occlusion of experience in the dominant discourses surround-

ing care work can be linked to both the newly contested status of age-

ing in medical practices and the tendency for governments to

disinvest in age care. In the first instance, there is a tendency to con-

struct or at least imagine a body that would never require care (or

only for a very short period of morbidity at the end of life). As an

extended life-span emerges as a possibility (or at least a hope) for

ageing subjects located in the global marketplace, care of the self

begins to overshadow the care of others. But as long as this remains

a tendency or a process, the ageing body still requires care and is thus

viewed as an economic burden upon society. Discourses of efficiency

and management begin to dominate governmental calculations,

while private householders begin to turn to migrant or other forms

of informal labour to provide care, which is increasingly considered

a strain on public resources and the time of family members. To rein-

sert the materiality of experience into the analysis of care work is to

highlight how its affective and corporeal features not only disrupt

these processes but are also central to the production of subjectivity

for those who perform such labour. Additionally, it shows how life’s

unfolding bears not only upon the experiences of ageing people but

also on the experiences those who surround and come into contact

with them.

Immortalization of the Flesh

Unpacking the social and biological variations that lead to the pertur-

bations of care requires an investigation that begins at the small end

Neilson 53

of the scale. Starting with the molecular level of life is an

organizational and analytical choice, which does not necessarily

attribute an ontological priority to this scale. An influential line of

thought observes ‘that the big is never more than the simplification

of one element of the small’ (Latour, 2002: 123). But there is also

something to be gained by jumping between scales, by gaining a

sense of how occurrences cut across scales, bear differently upon

them, and produce scale not as a predetermined hierarchy of levels

but as an open and dynamic set of relationships. With regard to expe-

rience, this not only means allowing for its operations and effects at

levels below the body, involving cells, neurons, firing patterns and

the like. It also means asking how these operations and patterns map

onto social experiences that subjects can describe. The experience of

ageing is caught up with an overall sense of life’s unfolding that has

social, historical and political consequences. But it also has a biolo-

gical, cellular and molecular moment that has been increasingly

highlighted in biomedical studies. Since Hayflick and Moorehead’s

(1961) discovery that human cells derived from embryonic tissue can

only divide a finite number of times in culture, the biomedicine of

ageing has focused primarily on the question of cellular senescence.

To write of the molecular politics of ageing is to explore the con-

flicts and contradictions that invest attempts to reinforce or overcome

this limit to the cell’s ability to divide. For Hayflick (1982), the

phenomenon of cell death reflected an intrinsic, predetermined limit

to the human biological life-span, a kind of death sentence that made

ageing the inescapable destiny of the human body. While pathologi-

cal or cancerous cells could divide indefinitely, the hallmark of the

normal cell was its unavoidable senescence. This association of inde-

finite cell division with malignancy or pathology was unsettled by

Thomson’s (1998) isolation of human embryonic stem cells capable

of continuous division in culture. While the implications of Thom-

son’s discovery are still being worked out, the immortalization of

stem cell lines has had a profound effect not only on the biomedicine

of ageing but also on its social imaginary. Combined with other bio-

technological developments, it has reignited ancient dreams of the

fountain of youth. Authors such as Shostak (2002) and organizations

such as A4M have promoted the notion that ageing is a reversible dis-

ease and that radically extended human life-spans are within the tech-

nological reach of living generations. Meanwhile biomedicine has

54

moved away from a temporally homogeneous model of the body,

involving uniform growth, renewal and ageing. Biological research

now focuses rather on the non-coincidence between the general ageing

of the body and its multiple reserves of renewable tissue. The body is

viewed less as an organic substrate than as a kind of molecular soft-

ware or reserve of information that can be read and rewritten. As

Lemke (2010: 170) observes, this gives rise to a new ‘political episte-

mology of life’, no longer centred on ‘the control of outer nature’ but

on the ‘transformation of inner nature’.

What are the implications of this ‘political epistemology’ for the

question of life’s relation to experience and the related perturbations

of care? Biotechnological innovations have fostered a vision of life

that operates both inside and outside the human body’s boundaries.

Similarly, phenomenological attempts to wrest experience away from

the dualism of subject and object offer a vision of the world that does

not necessarily revolve around the body. The concept of the flesh,

introduced in the late work of Merleau-Ponty (1968), describes the

intertwining of the sensible and the sensate in a kind of transindividual

network of tissue. The flesh underlies and gives rise to both the percei-

ver and perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activ-

ity. Merleau-Ponty identifies the flesh as an element in analogy with

the ancient elements of water, air, earth and fire. He describes it as

‘a general thing . . . a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style

of being wherever there is a fragment of being’ (1968: 139). For him,

the flesh is a social being that passes between as well as subsists within

individual bodies. Like the vital materials identified by biomedicine, it

has the capacity not only to animate existing life forms but also to gen-

erate to new ones. Insofar as it is a common element, however, the

flesh is radically different from the kind of tissue isolated by biotech-

nological processes. This is because historical processes have inserted

such tissue into circuits of production and distribution that establish a

connection between biological life and capitalist modes of extraction.

The flesh has become a new site of enclosure.

The concept of the immortalization of the flesh that I wish to

introduce describes not only the technoscientific procedures that

establish the biological immortality of cell lines but also these pro-

cesses of enclosure. By means of such immortalization, the flesh has

been converted into a kind of tissue that can be harvested, engi-

neered, recombined, banked and socially redistributed to facilitate

Neilson 55

the regeneration of bodies or body parts that are perceived or

determined to be lacking in vitality (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006).

Importantly, such an instrumentalization of life has been inseparable

from its capitalization. The flesh has become a source and creator of

value. Biological knowledge and life forms can be patented and mar-

keted. Moreover, as critics such as Franklin (2001) and Cooper

(2006) document in the case of the California start-up company Geron,

biotechnological research can attract considerable financial speculation

even when it has yet to yield viable therapeutic products. Rajan (2006: 3)

argues that ‘the life sciences represent a new face, and a new phase, of

capitalism’. To be sure, the emergence of such a new phase of capitalism

is tendential and has not been without contestation, variations and

exceptions. It is ‘simultaneously, a continuation of, an evolution of, a

subset of, and a form distinct from’ capitalism in general (2006: 10).

Nonetheless, the immortalization of the flesh has been enabled and

driven by capitalist processes and relations that are central to our times.

One peculiarity of contemporary biotechnological advances is the

way they allow life to be represented in informational terms. While

molecular biology has long conceived of life as information, it is now

possible to materialize such information in forms that can be pack-

aged, commodified and sold as databases. The immortalization of the

flesh implies its informationalization and ultimately its separation

from its material biological source (such as tissue or cell lines). Such

a representation of life is inseparable from processes of abstraction

that have a long history within capitalism. Marx (1977) famously

argued that the abstraction of living labour into measurable units is

intrinsic to the process of capitalist valuation. But the relations of

materialization and abstraction that invest the genetic coding of life

not only affect its capitalization but also raise questions about its con-

stitution. In other words, the question about life’s entry into circuits

of capitalist production is not separate from questions about its onto-

logical status, form and substance.

‘Information is alive’ (Lash, 2004: 102) has become a catchcry of

contemporary social theory. Biotechnological innovations have

sparked a ‘new vitalism’ (Fraser et al., 2005) that abandons phenom-

enological and humanist ideas of life for a conception of life as

energy or unrestrained inventiveness. The aim is to ‘extend ‘‘life’’

beyond the narrow boundaries defined as legitimate by the natural

sciences’ (2005: 5). Life is no longer ‘confined to living organisms’

56

but is conceived ‘as movement, as a radical becoming’ (2005: 3).

This implies an ‘informationalization of experience and a moving

away of it from the human subject and towards post-human experi-

ence’ (Lash, 2006: 340). Experience, in this view, is generated on the

cusp between system and environment. It is no longer locked into the

coupling of subject and object that marks Kantian and phenomenolo-

gical notions of sense-making. Thus it applies not only to human indi-

viduals and societies but also to digital media, neuronal networks,

phenotypes, urban forms, cellular organisms and inorganic matter.

Experience becomes the noise that inhabits a system’s environment,

although such an environment is perhaps only ‘another system’ with

which the first one ‘structurally couples’ (2006: 340).

It thus becomes possible to discern the varieties of experience that

accompany the molecularization of life. Far from necessarily attach-

ing to a human subject, these kinds of experience are animated by

informational circuits that can be remote from the matrix of the flesh

or the drama of life’s unfolding. While the sociological notion of the

life course describes the processes by which historical, institutional

and biological factors interact to construct the various phases, transi-

tions, and trajectories of a person’s life, the unfolding of molecular

life occurs at a smaller scale that at once underlies experiences man-

ifest at the bodily level and eludes explanation through standard

sociological categories. To be sure, the molecularization of life has

given rise to a new ‘somatic self’ (Rose, 2007) that faces individua-

lized risks and negotiates biological life as part of its life’s work.

When it comes to ageing, however, this negotiation of the politics

of life has been held remote from informationalized or posthuman

conceptions of experience. The ethical debates about ageing sparked

by biotechnological innovations tend to appeal to more traditionally

humanist or phenomenological views.

Consider the work of Christine Overall, whose book Aging, Death

and Human Longevity (2003) presents one of the most cogent cases

for a (qualified) prolongevitism that favours the extension of human

lives through technoscience. Overall rejects cost-benefit arguments

against the extension of life (old people are too expensive) but also

weighs the possible social drawbacks of moving towards the devel-

opment and use of prolongevity technologies. Despite her awareness

that biotechnological interventions at the molecular and cellular lev-

els provide the greatest potential for delivering longer life-spans, her

Neilson 57

case for prolongevity rests on an appeal to experience at the (individual)

bodily level: ‘It is rational to want a longer life because life itself is the

precondition for all else that we might want. At its most fundamental

level, prolonged life offers the opportunity for additional and varied

experiences’ (Overall, 2003: 184). Life itself here refers not to vital mat-

ter that circulates between bodies but to the vitality of the living individ-

ual who accumulates experience. The opportunity to accumulate

experience furnishes the justification for the prolongation of life. Inver-

sely, life itself provides the precondition for the accumulation of expe-

rience at the individual and social levels.

The point is not to contest Overall’s careful and limited support for

the life extending promise of biomedical developments. After all,

hers is a single intervention in an ethical debate with many twists and

turns (see, for instance, Moody, 2004). What is notable is how her

argument jumps to the scale of the human body and seeks to justify

prolongevity measures on the basis of a humanistic, phenomenologi-

cal notion of experience. There is nothing necessary or inevitable

about this shift, but it highlights a familiar tendency in ethical discus-

sions of life, ageing and technology. The informationalized notion of

experience has no role in this argument, which glosses over the tech-

nical detail of biomedical developments to engage in ‘thought

experiments’ that presume already existing and effective prolongev-

ity technologies. As Turner (2004: 220) comments, ethical debates

about life extension ‘typically offer no concrete discussion of the bio-

medical technologies that are supposed to enable us to become the

new Methuselahs’. Conversely, posthuman accounts of molecular

life tend to be elaborated in isolation from compelling arguments that

grapple with the human dimension of life’s unfolding.

The parameters of the situation are clear. The molecularization of

life sets the scene for a new and expanded concept of experience that

does not necessarily apply to phenomenological negotiations of

human sensation and subjectivity. At the same time, the transindivi-

dual network of the flesh has been reduced to a kind of tissue ani-

mated by capital. This has implications for the perturbations of

care. The biomedical developments that inform these changes inspire

prolongevity and anti-ageing initiatives that move beyond the care

paradigm of compressing morbidity. These innovations also have

relevance for ontological discussions of the constitution of life. But

when it comes to ethical and practical negotiations of the new care

58

paradigms that emerge from these developments, such questions tend

to give way to more traditional concerns of human lives and bodies,

temporality and the capacity of narrative, as opposed to information,

to organize our sense of life’s unfolding. What I call the immortali-

zation of the flesh needs to be critically assessed with regard to the

amortization of the body – that is, the tendency within contemporary

societies for the upkeep of the human body to become a responsibil-

ity and cost that is passed on to individuals or communities. Under-

standing the intertwining of these processes – the immortalization of

the flesh and the amortization of the body – is crucial both for track-

ing changes in the governance of ageing and discerning the occluded

role of experience in biopolitical debates.

Amortization of the Body

This is not the occasion to fully explore the biopolitical complexities

of the phenomenon known as population ageing. Suffice it to say that

population ageing is one of the most important processes of transition

bearing on the current global moment, entangling biology with pro-

cesses and events such as migration and the financialization of daily

life. The global demographic transition from high to low levels of

fertility and mortality is unprecedented, meaning the proportion of

the world’s population aged over 60 years is expected to more than

double over the period between 2000 (10 percent) and 2050 (21 per-

cent) (United Nations, 2002). While this process is more advanced in

the wealthy parts of the globe, it is currently proceeding at a faster

rate in developing regions.

These demographic pressures evolve and amass at the global level,

bearing upon individual experiences of ageing in very different ways

from biomedical developments that unfold at the molecular scale.

While genetic and biotechnological innovations feed the dream of

extended human life-spans, the aggregate effects of population ageing

contribute to the creation of social conditions that devolve the respon-

sibility for the care of ageing people to individuals, households and

communities. Nation-states have largely perceived population ageing

as a threat, which upsets the balance between tax-paying workers and

retirees, and thus necessitates disinvestment in areas such as pensions

and health care (Estes, 2001; Gregg, 2000). In previous writings, I

have tried to detail the ways in which the biopolitics of population

Neilson 59

ageing, far from being merely a medical matter, is held between the

twin pincers of global financial governance and sovereign border

control (Neilson, 2003). Here I restrict myself to some brief

observations about how the global demographic transition and the

transformations of contemporary capitalism intersect. This implies

attention to the ways in which experiences of ageing are shaped by

changing relations between labour and life.

I remarked earlier that the questions and debates surrounding care

work bear upon more general transformations to labour insofar as they

track the tendency for work to increasingly deploy capacities that are

intrinsic to human life itself. The claim that the time of life has become

increasingly indistinguishable from the time of work is a central pillar

of Italian postoperaista thought. Figures like Virno (2003) and Mar-

azzi (2008) have argued that work can no longer be measured as

labour-time since it tends to colonize the whole sphere of human rela-

tionality, ingenuity and communication. According to such an analy-

sis of the current capitalist conjuncture, we are in the midst of a general

anthropological transformation where the species-being of human

beings, which is without any function and always open to change, is

appropriated and subordinated to the specific tasks and aims of a par-

ticular historical period. Not only has the working day become longer,

thanks to information and communication technologies that have

increased demands for connectivity, but also the labour process has

become more intense, drawing on competences and faculties that are

inherent to the human animal itself.

As usually elaborated, this argument is used to make a point about

the productivity of the general biopolitical body and its vulnerability

to capitalist capture (Hardt and Negri, 2000). What I want to add con-

cerns the way in which these changing relations between life and

work render unstable the very division between workers and retirees

that fuels the statist anxiety about population ageing. This requires a

movement away from the view by which ageing entails the disen-

gagement from production, a passage of decline or retirement that

marks the body’s exit from the networks of productive human inter-

activity. While ageing may involve the onset of disability that

restricts participation in the circuits of capitalist valorization, this

must be carefully differentiated from the productive activity of life

itself, which inheres in the collective biopolitical body and precedes

any production of surplus value. At stake is a rethinking of concepts

60

of citizenship and economy that presuppose able-bodied subjectivity.

Such a presupposition applies as much to notions of the ‘third age’,

which suppress the knowledge of eventual bodily breakdown, as to

the normative concepts of well-being and human capability that

derive from the body-related universalisms of western thought

(Breckenridge and Vogler, 2001). What is also called into doubt,

or held up for political challenge, is the way in which contemporary

capitalist production writes off the body as a cost to be amortized as

quickly as possible.

In an article entitled ‘Ammortamento del corpo-macchina’, Chris-

tian Marazzi argues that the place of the machine as fixed capital in

the factory of the industrial era has been substituted with the worker’s

body:

The dematerialization of fixed capital and service-products has as its

concrete correspondent the ‘putting to work’ of human faculties such

as the linguistic-communicative and relational capacities, the compe-

tences and contacts acquired in the workplace and, above all, those

accumulated in the non-work environment (knowledge, emotions,

versatility, reactivity, etc.) – in short, the combination of human facul-

ties, which interacting with autonomized and informatized systems of

production, are directly productive of value-added. In the model of the

‘production of man through man’, fixed capital, if it disappears in its

material and fixed form, reappears in the mobile and fluid form of the

living. (2007: 3, my translation)

Just as Marx (1951) maintained in his polemic with the Physiocrats

that the amortization of fixed capital is not explicable on the basis

of the labour theory of value (or that living labour cannot create that

part of the value of fixed capital that is consumed in the process of pro-

duction), so, in the current system of production, the costs of maintain-

ing the worker’s bodily existence are ones of which capital tries to

acquit itself as quickly as possible. While the Fordist-Keynesian order

invested in the upkeep of the worker’s body (pensions, health, hous-

ing, etc.), contemporary capitalism devolves these costs to the worker,

who must manage them in the contexts of financialization and popu-

lation ageing. This increases the precariousness of life and makes age-

ing into a matter for the individual to negotiate within commercial and

familial networks rather than a life process that warrants social support

because it contributes to the general productivity.

Neilson 61

Just as capital invests in relationality and flesh (or in the vitality of

molecular life), it divests in the human body. In other words, the

immortalization of the flesh accompanies the amortization of the

body. The corollary of this realization is the assertion that informa-

tion is alive or possessed of a vitality that is susceptible to capitaliza-

tion in isolation from any form of living labour. The so-called

information economy, which encourages the speculative behaviour

that fuels financial market dynamics (an important part of the global

pension regime), also takes an interest in the regenerative properties

of certain biological materials, extracting and repackaging them

(when they are not simply the objects of hype) for consumption by

ageing subjects who desire and can afford them. It is no secret that

the intensity of capital investment in this sector, which now drives

the economy of certain sub-national regions, relates to the expecta-

tion of high returns as new technologies of rejuvenation become mar-

ketable to ageing populations. Thus there is a rush to patent certain

forms of genetic information and to enforce these intellectual prop-

erty rights on the global scale. It is not difficult to foresee the result

of such speculation: the increasingly uneven distribution of longevity

and the corresponding polarization of power and wealth derived from

these same biotechnological investments (Neilson, 2003).

Where is the experience of life in these developments? Is it an

accident that the growing submission of care paradigms and biome-

dical developments to an ethics of performance occurs at the same

time as biopolitical philosophies that occlude the dimension of expe-

rience begin to circulate and gain popularity? It is important to

approach this question without nostalgia or easy invocations of a

Zeitgeist. Clearly it is dangerous and deceptive to posit a ‘golden age’

of ageing before the current era of financialization, government dis-

investment and self-care. As historians of ageing such as Laslett

(1965) and Cole (1992) point out, older people were often much

more excluded and neglected in the past than they are today in many

societies.

By relating the amortization of the body to the immortalization of

the flesh, I am not trying to construct a narrative of decline. Rather

these relations are crucial to negotiate the politics of ageing. They

provide an analytical grid through which to critically map how differ-

ent and often contradictory pressures are exerted upon ageing bodies

at different levels of governance, intervention and knowledge

62

production. It is not a matter of one of these levels mastering the others

– as if all social innovation was driven at the molecular level or as if the

global politics of population ageing always overshadows develop-

ments at the local or national scales. Indeed, in a certain sense there

are no levels, since the attributes that an element or event owes to its

incorporation at a particular scale or in a delimited context do not

exhaust all its leanings. The very notion of a nested hierarchy of scales

prevents an analysis that is attentive to the complex and highly provi-

sional interlacing of relations across different fields of action and sig-

nificance. This is why the notion of experience is so important.

Attending to the nuances and contingencies of experience across and

between scales gives us the capacity to move beyond both macro- and

micro-reductionist approaches to ageing. As the fracture between

informationalized and narrativized accounts suggests, this does not

imply the integration of experience into a seamless flow. Rather it

demands a respect for the heterogeneity of different qualities of expe-

rience and an avoidance of approaches that seek to fuse such differ-

ence into closed or static wholes. This is particularly important

when it comes to studies of ageing, which is a multi-scaled process that

is often reduced to either biological fact or social construction.

Why then does biopolitical thought, which has the theoretical

capacity to negotiate the relations between organic life (bios) and

politics, tend to sideline the experience of life’s unfolding? Perhaps

this is because the relational and generative qualities of experience

tend to exceed the historical and governmental mechanisms that

position life as the object of politics. Experience seems constantly

to elude structures and processes aimed at the rationalization and

coordination of administrative approaches to life. Thus, for instance,

the experiences of care workers tend to be occluded in governmental

discourses and practices regarding aged care. Pointing this out does

not license a reversal of the biopolitical positioning of life – i.e. the

claim that life should be the subject of politics. Rather, it implies an

attempt to move beyond subject/object oppositions and to gain a

sense of the political that not only engages the biological substance

of life and its macro-organization in populations but also its experi-

ential qualities, tonalities, rhythms and timbres. These features of

life, which – importantly – reach across different scales, do not reg-

ister within the measure that gives rise to the statistical construct of

the population. Nor are they necessarily evident within the indicators

Neilson 63

of performance and functionality that increasingly inform medical

practice. It is probably no accident that the eclipse of experience in

biopolitical thought accompanies the tendency for the dichotomy

normal/pathological – which for Canguilhem (1978) structured the

field of medical practice – to be matched by that between the func-

tional and dysfunctional (Marshall and Katz, 2004). There exists

something like an elective affinity between these ways of thinking

and practising, which becomes clear when considering the relevance

of biopolitics for analysing the transformations of care.

Conclusion

The occlusion of experience I point to is as much a symptom of con-

temporary biopolitical thought as an effect of current developments

in geriatric medicine or the administration of care. Held at the inter-

section of the processes identified above as immortalization of the

flesh and amortization of the body, this sidelining of the experiential

aspects of life finds its constitutive theoretical moment in Foucault’s

identification of biological life as the object of modern politics. It is

not a matter of questioning this formulation in order to press experi-

ence into some representative (more or less Kantian) form. At stake

is rather an attempt to discern a path by which biopolitical thought

might be renewed and made adequate not only to sociological

description but also to the political contestation of the current global

order in which life is increasingly detached from the body and

invested with a vitality that masquerades as capital itself.

As is well known, Foucault’s concern with biopolitics was short

lived, giving way almost immediately to his interests in security, pas-

toral power, liberalism and ancient practices of self-government (see

Patton, 2007: 206–9). He never really elaborated a politics that was

attentive to the meanings and tonalities of life as such. Rather he

quickly became interested in the politics of populations, a politics

that measures, regulates, constructs and produces human collectiv-

ities through governmental initiatives. Insofar as Foucault discusses

biopolitics at all in the lectures of 1977–8 and 1978–9, recently trans-

lated as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Bio-

politics (2008), it is in relation to the administration of populations.

The question of life itself, as form and value, as that which constitutes

the substance of existence and forms the experience of living, tends to

64

disappear from his work. To reintroduce it to the debate on biopolitics

is thus to make a gambit. As Fassin (2009) argues, it is to raise the

possibility of ‘another politics of life’ that centres on life as it is lived

through a body and as a society.

To be sure, both life and experience are contested categories.

What needs to be noted is how these contestations overlap. Sig-

nificantly, this was a problem that Foucault touched upon in his

last written essay – ‘Life: Experience and Science’ (1998) – a text

dedicated to his former teacher, Georges Canguilhem. In this

piece, Foucault distances himself from the phenomenological

view of experience developed by thinkers like Sartre and

Merleau-Ponty. Drawing on Canguilhem’s distinction between the

living (le vivant) and lived experience (le vecu), he argues that

the first is more fundamental and commands the second. In so

doing, he advances a concept of life rooted in the form and power

of living matter. This understanding of life is strongly affirmed

by those who draw on Foucault to address recent research in the

biosciences. But the question remains as to whether Foucault ever

fully manages to escape the phenomenological concept of experi-

ence (Gutting, 2002). He was also prone to asserting the central-

ity of experience to his work and method, describing his books,

for instance, as ‘direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free

of myself’ (Foucault, 2000: 241–2). Lemke (2011: 27) argues that

Foucault’s later work rests on a theoretical re-evaluation of expe-

rience as a ‘dominant structure and transformative force, as exist-

ing background of practices and transcending event, as the object

of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond histor-

ical limits’. The question of experience thus remains present in

Foucault’s work as a kind of sounding board against which his

approaches to life and knowledge are elaborated and tested (Law-

lor, 2005). In this sense, his engagement with experience is open

and complex. On the one hand, it is cast against phenomenologi-

cal orthodoxy. On the other hand, it remains crucial for any

investigation that wants deeply to interrogate his engagement

with the politics of knowledge and life.

Equally, I suggest, the question of experience is crucial for any

attempt to negotiate the relations between the divergent strains of

biopolitical thought that have stemmed from Foucault. Crucial in

this task is the question of scale, from the molecular to the global

Neilson 65

through the levels of the body, the population and the social. Moving

between these scales and investigating the different qualities and

theorizations of experience that match, inhabit and stretch across

them is not a matter of inclusiveness or coverage. It is rather a nec-

essary analytic exercise in sorting through the biopolitical and

experiential aspects of the ageing process, which acquires its com-

plex character largely through the interactions between events and

entities that exist on different or multiple scales. In this context, an

emphasis of life’s unfolding cannot be equated solely with a contin-

uous flow of experience between life and death. Rather experience

becomes fragmented and dispersed – informationalized in some con-

texts, narrativized in others, corporeal in some instances, abstract in

others. Only by negotiating between these varieties of experience is

it possible to gain a sense of the constraints that structure the unfold-

ing of contemporary lives and the relation of such unfolding to capi-

talist developments.

At stake in this article is not only an attempt to account for how

current capitalism impacts upon life’s unfolding but also an effort to

bring into contact two strains of biopolitical thought that tend to

occupy different domains of debate and intervention. On the one

hand, there is the line that emerges from philosophy and social and

political theory, which emphasizes large-scale political processes,

changing forms of sovereignty and governance, and their implica-

tions for subjectivity and struggle. On the other hand, there is the

strain of biopolitics that emerges from science and technology stud-

ies, cultural anthropology and gender studies. The focus here is on

the molecular substance of life and the relevance of biotechnological

developments for changing notions of knowledge, ethics and value.

Staging an encounter between these lines of biopolitical thought,

which usually occupy different domains of reference and investiga-

tion, is not a task this article pursues in isolation. Nonetheless, its

emphasis on experience and ageing provides a means of negotiating

the different contexts and directions of intervention. Far from merely

unearthing some of the historical limitations and blind spots in the

Foucauldian elaboration of biopolitics, the aim is to return the dis-

cussion on the politics of life to a sense of struggle and contestation.

It is an ambition that, as Simone de Beauvoir (1972: 543) put it in

her reflection on ageing, ‘cannot be otherwise than radical’ – an

injunction to ‘change life itself’.

66

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the audience at the Centre for Study of Invention and

Social Process at Goldsmiths College, who offered valuable com-

ments when I presented a preliminary version of this paper in the

seminar series entitled ‘What is Medicine?’ in January 2007. Thanks

also for the comments offered by respondent Robyn Ferrell when a

subsequent version of the text was presented at a workshop entitled

‘Thinking through Things’ at the University of New South Wales,

December 2008. The article has also benefited from discussions with

Ida Dominijanni, the research assistance of Catrin Dingler and the

comments of five referees. This research was supported by an Aus-

tralian Research Council Discovery Grant [DP0559830].

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Author biography

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Univer-

sity of Western Sydney. He is coordinator of the transnational research

project ‘Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders’ (http://transitlabour.

asia). With Sandro Mezzadra, Universita di Bologna, he is writing a book

entitled Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor for Duke

University Press.

Neilson 71