Agamben Again: Reflections on Medicine as Religion

 

From the most recent of Giorgio Agamben's pandemic interventions, published on the website of Quodlibet we read: "Somewhere there is a sheet of paper on which the names of those who, in a world of lies, have testified to the truth that is written. This sheet exists, but it is illegible. Then there is another sheet, perfectly legible, which records these same names: it is in the hands of police officers and journalists".

The number of these short interventions now count in the dozens. Many - like this one, which is accompanied by quotes from Dante Alighieri and Bertolt Brecht - are of a gnomic, aphoristic type. For a philosopher known for his detailed examinations of the obscure corners of deep European history and thought, backed up with all the resources of citation and decades of specialist learning, these "real time" comments are akin to nakedness. One of the more extended pieces which has held my attention since it was published in May of 2020 is titled Medicine as Religion. In it Agamben claims that the pandemic has given rise to a new "cultic" practice elevating medicine and health more generally to the level of a religion, something we believe we believe. This most recent transformation is itself only the latest form that the long running veneration of science as the religion of Western modernity has taken.

This intervention was written months before the Covid vaccination program began, and even before the WHO changed its advice on masks. Over eighteen months later I frequently hear the more zealous supporters of vaccination and covid restrictions being compared to religious fanatics. And with my own eyes I've seen the frantic genuflections of people practicing the UK government's 'Hands, Face, Space' rituals (which someone wittily noted has displaced the Catholic "spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch" as the Faithfull's quotidian sacrament). There was, then, something prophetic about the general thrust of Agamben's analysis. But with many of these short pieces there is a tendency to generalise, and without broader exposition Agamben's noted inclination towards hyperbole ends up being the dominant factor.

"That science has become the religion of our time, that in which people believe they believe, has been obvious for some time now. In the modern West there have coexisted and, to a certain extent, still coexist three great systems of belief: Christianity, capitalism, and science. In the history of modernity, these three “religions” have often intersected, entering from time to time into conflict and later reconciling in a different way, until they progressively reached a sort of peaceful, articulated coexistence, if not a true and proper collaboration in the name of a common interest".

This schema is a rather drastic simplification of the methodology Agamben deployed in different ways and with different emphases throughout his rightly celebrated Homo Sacer series of books. There he frequently refuses the notion that historical forms and ideas can be neatly divided in this way. Commonly, he prefers to talk about "zones of indistinction" when it comes to concepts that appear to reside in the liminal space between otherwise familiar categories. This counts as much for the Homo Sacer herself - cast out between the divine and earthly realms - as it does for the "signatures" which in his examination of the writings of the early Church Fathers Agamben identifies in concepts such as Oikonomia, acclamation or hierarchy, the effect of which is to displace them into a constant oscillation between the secular and religious. As he states in his methodological text The Signature of All Things (2009), "a signature does not merely express a semiotic relation between a signans and a signatum; rather, it is what - persisting in this relation without coinciding with it - displaces and moves it into another domain, thus positioning it in a new network of pragmatic and hermeneutic relations".

Elsewhere, during an elaboration of Michel Foucault's use of the term dispositif (usually rendered as apparatus in English) written in 2006 he offers a definition of religion which again emphasises the dynamic and boundary dissolving nature of the sacred/profane divide: "...one can define religion as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transports them to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation contains or conserves in itself a genuinely religious nucleus. The apparatus that activates and regulates separation is sacrifice. [...] , sacrifice always sanctions the passage of something from the profane to the sacred, from the human sphere to the divine. [...] From this perspective, capitalism and other modern forms of power seem to generalize and push to the extreme the processes of separation that define religion".

And finally, in a passage that would seem to have obvious relevance for understanding the past two years, we read in Capitalism as Religion (2017): "But it is in every sphere of experience that capitalism attests its religious character and, at the same time, its parasitical relation with Christianity. [...] If the Church seems to have closed its eschatological office, today it is above all the scientists, transformed into apocalyptic prophets , who announce the immanent end of life on earth. And in every sphere, in the economy as in politics, the capitalist religion declares a state of permanent crisis (crisis etymologically means "definitive judgement"), which is, as the same time, a state of exception that has become normal, whose only possible outcome presents itself, precisely as in the Apocalypse, as "a new earth". There are echoes here of anthropologist Carlo Caduff, whose work on pandemic preparedness and epidemiology anticipated so much about the confluence of expertise and government during the crisis, and who wrote in 2014: "Precaution has become a solid ground for dire prophecy and the thrill of terror, allowing experts and officials to commit a leap of faith and proceed as if the most frightening scenario was about to come true. In the political economy of disaster capitalism it is always better—ethically, politically, economically, and institutionally—to assume that the apocalypse is nigh".

Each of these quotes from Agamben implies a method operating on the level of ontology. A seemingly commonplace distinction is shown to have a more fundamental basis, rooted either in a signification which exceeds its referent, or in a deeper, more primordial structure, within which the distinction forms two modes or the excluded category is captured. Rarely if ever does Agamben talk about the psychology or epistemology of religious belief, but much of his short essay in May 2020 seems aimed at that level, certainly where he talks about cultic practice; which is to say, the everyday, pragmatic or liturgical side of religion. 

 Giorgio Agamben's contributed virtually for the launch of the Commissione Dubbio e Precauzione (DU.PRE), Dec 8, 2021

“What is new is that between science and the other two religions there has ignited, without our noticing it, a subterranean and implacable conflict, the successful results of which for science are daily before our eyes and determine in an unheard-of way all aspects of our existence. This conflict does not concern, as happened in the past, theory or general principles, but, so to speak, cultic practice. Indeed, science too, like every religion, knows diverse forms and levels through which it organizes and orders its structure: to the elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatic there corresponds in practice an extremely broad and widespread cultic sphere which coincides with what we call technology”.

The simplified historiological schema I highlighted above bears some resemblance to Carl Schmitt's analysis in The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929), where he claims European statecraft has always attempted to govern from out of a neutralised central domain, which in the past included religion and economy. The 20th century, he went on to argue, appeared not just as the age of technology but of the religious belief in technology; "The question of the significance of overwhelming technicity should for now be left open, because the belief in technology is in fact only the result of a certain tendency in the shifting of the central domain - as a belief, it is only the result of this shifting".

Now, according to Schmitt we have been living in an age marked by the religious belief in technology for some time. His analysis was rooted in the experience of Germany's rapid industrialisation during the latter half of the 19th century. This context means his religion of technology and its miraculous powers is comparable to what otherwise we might call the religion of progress, much exemplified by Anglo-Saxon industrialists and pretty much the unofficial ideology of the British Empire. Indeed Schmitt had a notorious animosity towards English (and later American) technical domination, seeing it as the wellspring of global disenchantment and spiritual impoverishment, not to mention Germany's status as also-rans in the colonial scramble. Agamben, no doubt drawing on these thoughts, is nevertheless talking about much more recent events, and moreover he is specifically imputing a religious character to medicine during the pandemic.  

A straight-forward response here might be to ask whether medicine and cultic practice were not always aligned from the start? All cultures of the earth have known some form of witch doctors, healing rituals and rites in which the pragmatic/cultic part is paramount, forming as it were a bridge or mediating zone between the state of the individual and their community, or even the cosmos. Modern medicine, having benefitted from the results of diverse scientific fields has largely dispelled its superstitious and cosmological supports, at least where causes are concerned. Nevertheless it is certainly true that vestiges of the older holism persist where the medico-technical intervention coincides with broader social factors, among them being: the nature and meaning of recovery, the social status of the illness, and the network of complexities situating the "patient' within the heath culture of the society at large.

And is not the continuing significance of cultic practice within health most strongly confirmed in the case of the placebo?; a "treatment" which carries an effect without the presence of an active agent? The term originates in the Vulgate, psalms 114:9 Placebo Domino in regione vivorum. (I will please the Lord in the land of the living.) This psalm was commonly used in the  Office of the Dead where we also find the well-known Timor mortis conturbat me (I am scared to death of dying), which has become something of an silent guiding maxim for many during the pandemic. Over time placebo became a shorthand for any deceptive act to please, apparently owing to the common practice of mourners with no connection to the deceased participating in the ritual for the purpose of getting a share of the funeral meal. 

Agamben certainly has a point about the pandemic leading to an explosion of strange public rituals, be they obsessive hand-washing - which compares to the Islamic Wudhu, performed before entering a mosque - to the diverse practices around masks which have been such a flashpoint in Europe and America. This might be more easily explained if modern European societies were places where rituals and superstitions were still thriving, rather than having been melted into air by the white heat of consumerism. As Max Weber famously analysed, Capitalism and the Protestant faith share a common ethos, one expression of which are multiform processes of rationalisation. Consequently, both are lacking in ritual, in lingering, in acts which signify the marking of (non-clock) time.

We should perhaps concede that there was a space open for a new cultic practice to be introduced for the disaffected classes (most of all the professional middle classes) to fall into. But it is also true that the Covid cult furnishes rituals of a unusual kind. Lingering is by no means encouraged, particularly in proximity with others. And a deadening suspicion falls upon anything that denotes a commitment to the intensity of a life well lived. In his book The Disappearance of Rituals Byung-Chul Han reflected on this fear when discussing George Bataille's distinction between strong and weak play. For us moderns, he claims; "Only weak play is tolerated and it forms a functional element within production. The sacred seriousness of play has entirely given way to the profane seriousness of work and production. Life subordinated to the dictates of health, optimization and performance comes to resemble mere survival. It lacks splendour, sovereignty, intensity. The Roman satirist Juvenal expressed this well when he spoke of 'losing the reasons to live for the sake of staying alive'".

Is there not something of the Timor mortis conturbat me in this line from Juvenal? Timorousness is certainly as near to us as any of the more virtuous responses to the crisis. In stark opposition to the splendour and intensity of ancient rituals, the pandemic offers only empty rituals, rituals of stasis which tie the practitioner to the present as a state of fear and constant threat. As such, the characteristic utility of religious and cultic practices for making life more bearable is absent. Instead, every vigorous scrub with the alcohol gel or hasty fumble for the mask on reaching the threshold of a shop is a reminder of the unknowable evil which now hangs over the everyday.

“The enemy, the virus, is always present and must be fought unceasingly and without any possible truce. The Christian religion also knew similar totalitarian tendencies, but they concerned only some individuals—in particular, monks—who chose to put their entire existence under the emblem “pray unceasingly.” Medicine as religion takes up this Pauline precept and, at the same time, reverses it: where monks gathered together in convents to pray constantly, now the cult must be practiced even more assiduously, but while remaining separated and at a distance”.

Again the spectre of Schmitt hangs over this passage, as the evocation of absolute enmity makes clear. Perhaps this is unavoidable, as it is true that from the beginning much of the political messaging around the pandemic has been couched in terms of war and military struggle against a foreign invader. There are, however, dangerous consequences to propagandising in this way. In an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty the cult becomes a means of organising this generalised enmity, opening the way for politically managed ostracism and othering. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the increasingly punitive actions being directed against the unvaccinated. A historical example is instructive here. In the 14th century, partly in response to the Black Death, a popular phenomenon which came to be known as The Flagellant Movement appeared in Northern and Central Europe. Processions of ordinary people would perform public acts of penitence, most notably by whipping themselves in the hope of cleansing their sins or earning mercy from whatever ill was afflicting their community. During the plague in Europe these zealous groups would lead the persecutions against marginalised communities, accusing them of lacking piety and being the cause of the disease. Jews were especially targeted. Pope Clement VI officially condemned them in a bull of October 20, 1349.

14th Century depiction of a a procession of Flagellants

One does not have to stretch the imagination far to see a parallel in the way politicians and the media have whipped up resentment against apparent rule breakers and unvaccinated persons. Even to question the efficacy of lockdowns and other modern penitential methods is to invite scorn for a lack of piety. As for modern flagellants; double maskers, ostentatious social distancers and vaccine eulogists, all tend to be quick to demand harsh action against those who resist the cult, even if only in thought. Other Medieval methods of disease prevention which have seen a revival include amulets and charms (masks and health passports) and despite the theory of miasmas having long been superseded we nevertheless have seen the practice of fumigating “bad air” make a return, notably in classrooms full of freezing children.

The historian Norman F. Cantor associates modern explanations for plague with a rational synchronic method (we might also say non-teleological), whereas the Medievals viewed the plague diachronically and told stories. It is perhaps too optimistic to conclude this latter mode of explanation has been consigned to the past. We are now overly familiar with stories from both the conspiratorial side and the so-called followers of science as to the ultimate meaning of the pandemic (sins of the Chinese fishmongers anyone?).  If the modern scientific synchronic explanation were sufficient, why do we need a story about the evil of the unvaccinated to explain the failure of our containment strategies?; just as during medieval times Europeans scapegoated Jews, women accused of witchcraft, and those lacking in piety for the disease? The millenarianism which accompanied the reaction to the Black Death is mirrored in explanations for Covid rooted in ecological exploitation and climate collapse. The virus entered a world (well, the West really) already gripped by eschatological fervour.

We have long become accustomed to the cult of health and "body fascism" through the media's veneration of youth and the now commonplace desire amongst citizens of the most developed economies to use medical technology as a way of modifying the corporeal form they were given, in pursuit of some ideal, often just the latest trend pushed by digital influencers. Diet fads, mass gym membership, body shaming, cosmetic surgery,  supplement addiction, performance enhancing drugs; all of these are tributaries running into the torrent of health terror which we are now swimming in. For transhumanists and post-modern gnostics the pandemic is just one more sign that it's time we jettisoned Brother Donkey.  

Does this amount to evidence of medicine being treated as a religion? One of the commonplaces attributed to religious belief is that it gives you a story about how the world is, allows you to face living in a universe governed by irreducible uncertainty. Agamben himself once offered a provisional definition of religion as a form of social ordering centred around the sacred. There is also a fundamental epistemological side to this. Adhering to a rule, even an entirely arbitrary one, can function like a founding gesture, akin to drawing a line in the sand, and can have the effect of dispelling uncertainty for the one who obeys. Here we might reflect on the role played by the increasingly discredited epidemiological modelling used repeatedly to justify government restrictions. As Carlo Caduff noted in his work on "pandemic prophesy", apocalyptic scenarios cover over the uncertainty inherent in the crisis, instead presenting a situation governed by the pure necessity to act. This has the effect of securing legitimacy for the governing power to act maximally without the need to justify itself as to alternative courses. The fear this produces in the population similarly converts contingency into necessity, rendering them governable.  

If medicine has taken on the character of a religion then this represents a corruption of medicine which can only be detrimental to the public good. Witness the wholesale abandonment of comprehensive public health during the pandemic and the enthusiastic support for lockdowns and other measures which raise fighting the virus to the zenith, while ignoring everything else worthwhile in life. An excellent article in the BMJ in 2020 made just this case. This week I've read that several hundred thousand cancer screening appointments were missed in the UK during the lockdowns, likely resulting in many missed diagnoses and a reduction in health outcomes for cancer sufferers.  

“Like capitalism and unlike Christianity, the medical religion does not offer the prospect of salvation and redemption. On the contrary, the recovery which it seeks can only be provisional, since the evil God, the virus, cannot be eliminated once and for all, but mutates continually and assumes ever new, presumably more dangerous, forms. Epidemic, as the etymology of the term suggests (demos is in Greek the people as a political body and polemos epidemios is in Homer the name for civil war) is above all a political concept, which is preparing to become the new terrain of world politics—or non-politics”.

Could the present cultic status of medicine and health practices be a temporary phenomenon rather than the gestalt switch which Agamben claims here? This is not the first time he has written on modern medical technology. He devoted a quite chilling chapter of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life to the consequences of life support machines on our understanding of death, notably shifting it from the cessation of the pulmonary function onto so-called brain death.

There is no more ghoulish example of the end-point of sacralising bare biological life under the reign of technology than the body of a brain-dead individual kept nominally “alive” indefinitely by life-support machines while relatives - for religious reasons - will not allow the earthly remains to pass away. Agamben makes the point that this technologically suspended death realises in practice the abstraction wrought by modernity between the biological existence of human beings, and their social, emotional and cultural existence. Modern science and medicine direct their interventions upon the former, with the latter either being ignored completely or considered an epiphenomenon of biological systems, and thus themselves calculable and potentially malleable by medico-scientific means. The pandemic has seen this abstraction applied vigorously as societies across the globe have been reduced to the level of base productive systems; an ant hill or battery farm, which must be managed so to preserve biological productive capacity at the expense of all else. 

Perhaps then we might better understand the sudden appearance of this "cult of medicine" as having its conditions of possibility in other pre-existing discourses? Rather than medicine having found a new cultic vocation by taking on the characteristics of a religion, could we not also attribute the near hysterical permanent "celebration" of the cult to the fact that biomedical sciences have been radicalised through historical contamination with the Security State? Here too there is the Gnostic-Manichean duality of an unceasing battle against implacable evil, which - in accordance with the logic of worst cases - we can never be certain to have won. For how long now have we suffered the cultic rituals of security as we go about our daily business? And how totally has the equally pernicious cult of "risk management" polluted every area of human life, leaving anything that escapes the calculation of risks as either suspect or irrelevant. 

 It is not insignificant that pandemic preparedness was an outgrowth of Cold War disaster planning. One way of understanding the management of the pandemic (at least in its early stages) is as an application of so-called "vital systems security", where the maintenance of certain national systems (health services, supply chains, government functioning, etc), are prioritised as vital to the survival of the country under existential threat. This way of conceiving disaster planning developed primarily as a response to the threat of nuclear attack, confirming both Agamben and Caduff's observations regarding the overwhelming power of apocalyptic thinking within what are meant to be cool headed and rational scientific approaches. But such an apocalyptic and militarised framing is caustic to comprehensive public health. It's not really a public health strategy at all. It's a brutal strategy of survival where the religious logic of sacrifice and penitence are writ large. All the more so owing to their appearance as emanations of our best science.

Whether the cult will persist and be integrated into a more permanent regime of global health security is unclear. The flagellants disappeared, though practices of penitence at times of crisis did not. There are also some signs that the damage done by abandoning comprehensive public health is gaining public awareness. Agamben's essay, like many of his interventions since the start of the pandemic, is pregnant with pointers and portent, but lacking on the detail which usually characterises his work. This doesn't mean there isn't something there to think about.

A Politics of Facts will not Resolve Britain's Brexit Crisis

Nowadays we hear it repeated ad nauseam that ours is the post-truth age, the age of alternative facts and fake news. It is similarly repeated that this state of affairs has contributed to some of the more surprising events of recent years, notably Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of so-called populism from Italy to the Philippines. For some people it's easy to pin this all on the Russians; their governing through chaos, their interference in foreign elections, their undermining of international norms, their mockingly deadpan sense of humour, etc. For others, predominantly of a liberal shade, it's the abandonment of facts in political affairs that has let in the spectre of civil unrest and international discord. A politics not grounded in facts - they argue - is a perfidious thing, libel to stir up the emotional and the credulous among globalisation's less fortunate souls; inciting them into acts of self harm such as voting to leave the cosy neo-liberal bosom of the EU. As for the British Parliament - slouching into the New Year in deadlock over the Brexit deal - the clamour for a second referendum continues to grow. Here we find the question of facts raised pointedly.

Leading proponents of a second poll point to notorious incidences like Boris Johnson's Brexit bus, plastered with the claim that £350 million a week could be invested in the UK National Health Service after exiting the EU, as proof that the people were deceived and sold a pipe dream of Brexit Britain that could never have been delivered. Others say that now the terms of the deal are known people should be able to vote on the facts rather than speculations and promises. On the face of it there's nothing controversial about the facts of an issue being known (as if what constitutes ‘known’ isn’t itself controversial in matters of mass democracy), but the Remainers who argue that a politics of facts will deliver them the result they want, or heal the divisions in Britain are fundamentally mistaken, both about the Brexit conflict and the nature of politics more generally.

This valorisation of facts and the notion that if everyone has access to the same information they should come to similar conclusions, is rooted in Enlightenment ideas about objective reason and more deeply an inherent liberal distrust of political contestation over values and what used to be called 'the life questions'. Consensus politics (liberal politics par excellence) assumes similarly that people given the same facts and without obvious distorting prejudices will not end up taking incommensurate positions. All that would then be needed to resolve an issue and form a general will would be a degree of compromise on all sides and perhaps some level of debate with reasoned argumentation as the leading light. This is of course the logic not only of political liberalism but of that mode of quasi-anthropological thought that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries along with the scientific method more generally. The twin advent of political liberalism and modern science is well known, as are their shared premises of economic, technological and political progressivism. Less well understood is what has been excluded in political life the more it has become a matter for technocratic horse trading and global economic consensus.

2a) The Elimination of Conflict and the Rise of the Fact

The Brexit debacle has done much to challenge the illusion that good governance is always conducted from the centre ground. Ever since the vote in June 2016 political and social polarisation have increased and now culminate in the factional deadlock at Westminster. Liberal Parliamentarism  seems unable to restore what has been broken by the uncharacteristic move to hold a plebiscite on Britain's membership of the EU. What this breakdown has also shown up is the huge distance between the position of the governing class and that of the governed. 52% voted to leave the EU but it has been obvious from the outset that the establishment position and that of the vast majority of MPs was and still is to remain. With the process seemingly stalled, this contradiction has become ever more apparent and is feeding the growth of the far Right who have parasitized the conflict, polarising it still further by attempts at painting remain MPs as pro-immigration, anti-democratic traitors, putting foreign interests ahead of the "native" British population. Former English Defence League thug Tommy Robinson has become something of a poster boy for the combined forces (including UKIP and a panoply of conspiracy theorists) leaning in this direction.

From its origins in the early modern period, liberalism has forever been a means of excluding conflict from political affairs. This has been achieved substantially by a centuries long development whereby the scope of politics has been increasingly restricted and rationalised to matters of individual rights and economic management.  Many of the most familiar terms of contemporary liberal discourse testify to this history. Common sense, the centre ground, consensus, and of course the neutrality of facts are all terms that denote a degree of naturalism and necessity which by reason should exclude serious conflict between interlocutors. The British model is perhaps the most successful in history in this regard. Since the settlement after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the British system has withstood all the revolutionary movements in Europe, the industrial revolution, the rise of the workers movement and seen the rise and fall of its own Empire. All the while it has stuck steadfast to a constitutional system that absorbs and manages the changes happening around it.

If it is the case - as many Marxists argue - that Britain's modern parliamentary system has been predominantly a way of managing and promoting the interests of the propertied classes, beginning with the land owners and nascent industrial class of the 17th century, and continuing today with the financial elites, we can see how Brexit has truly created a scission at the heart of British politics. Business and finance elites both globally and in the UK were almost unanimously against Britain leaving the EU. The frictionless movement of goods and capital as well as a common system of rules regulating (or not regulating) their activities has been a core driver of globalisation. But now Parliament, that institution which for over three centuries has been in the front row serving the interests of capital, is tasked with striking a blow against the global consensus, against the very concept of global governance itself. More than that, it has pitted the Tories against their natural base in business, effectively alienating the ruling class from their traditional representatives in the Conservative party. This antagonism has led to factionalising within the Tories themselves as one side attempts to reverse the Brexit process and side with their base while the likes of Boris Johnson and Rees-Mogg conjure up Churchillian rhetoric in support of building England's post EU Jerusalem. All this before we even consider the divisions in the Labour party between a youth driven resurgent socialism and the Blairite centrists who in effect form a third party with the remain faction of the Conservatives. None of this has come about through a paucity of facts.

2b) In the same period during the 17th century that saw England's finest hour when the head of Charles I was divorced from his body, it was determined, in the wake of the wars of religion and the English revolution that politics would take place on the plain of artifice. Consequently, political life would increasingly be delimited to a specialised and exclusive administrative art. The life questions, to say nothing of contestation between forms-of-life would come to be banished from the public realm. Matters of ethics, the Good life and of course religion were increasingly determined as purely private concerns, matters of conscience. This is the backdrop to the formation of liberal parliamentarism that extends deep into the social fabric not only of Britain but of Europe as a whole.

Thomas Hobbes epoch defining description at the introduction to his masterwork presages not only the direction of English politics but of the modern "globalised Leviathan" for which his national model was the prototype: "Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, (in Latin Civitas) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul as giving life and motion to the whole body;..."

Here stated plainly is most significant gift bequeathed by the 17th century; the mechanistic model of nature as an enclosed system of efficient causes with Man at its centre. The "artifice" of statecraft is in mimicking the rational form of natural processes as closely as possible, thus bringing the realm of artifice (politics) and the realm of nature into a harmonious totality. A correlate of this naturalistic and supposedly scientific view of political life is that anything which does not conform to it, that bases its communality on other values, is excluded as irrational, unnatural or simply groundless opinion. This wasn't yet the dominion of empiricism that we live under today, but the work of theorists like Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke substantially delimited the scope of politics, laying the foundations for what was to come.

Luther publishes the 95 Theses, painting of Julius Hubner (1878)

Looking further back it was the intractable series of conflicts during the Reformation that began the process of relegating the 'life questions' to the private sphere. In the wake of the reformers return to the Gospel, scholastic speculation gave way to scriptural objectivity, which rather than settling truth claims about religious doctrine by grounding them in the Word, instead opened up endless conflicts over interpretation. Magisterial and radical Protestants, united in their rejection of the authority of Rome, fought each other over the meaning and extent of their reforms. Sola Scriptura, so seemingly simple a notion opened up a whole new plain of conflict. And since such questions could never be settled agreeably between all parties they were either settled by authority through the creation of confessionalised states and universities, or deemed not to matter in political life and were relegated to the private domain of individual conscience. Religion was progressively neutralised as a site of political conflict just as politics was increasingly secularised. An attendant result of this process was that politics increasingly became an arena for rational technocratic solutions, administrative problems and questions of good governance rather than a contestation over values and forms-of-life. This is political liberalism’s basic epistemological ground.

3) Neutralisations and Big data

Each of these developments share a commonality in that they sought a form of knowledge and politics that excluded the possibility of conflict between different forms-of-life. In doing so the scope and potential for political contestation became increasingly circumscribed. The "centre ground" and English common sense have their roots here, as does the valorisation of rational empirically based political claims rather than assertions of values. The result has been that the things which give people's lives meaning have become entirely separated from political life, all the while our lives have become increasingly controlled by impersonal forces we scarcely understand.

The German jurist Carl Schmitt in the first half of the 20th century described this process as a one of "neutralisations and depoliticizations". He glosses the history of the last four centuries as one of shifting "central domains" from which politics has attempted to govern from a position of neutrality. From the theology of the late middle ages to the metaphysics and science of the 17th and early 18th centuries and then onto the moral and economic centrality of the late 18th and 19th centuries; each time the central domain became a site of struggle politics shifted towards another supposedly more neutral domain. Each time this occurs the previous domain is deactivated as a site of political importance, rendered a matter of personal preference (in the case of religion and morality) or incontestable objectivity (in the case of economics and metaphysics).  Whether we accept Schmitt's schema or not, he is I think correct in asserting that today's central domain is not - as is it usually understood - the economy, it's technology. "Unlike theological, metaphysical, moral and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them. They are easy to solve, and it is easily understandable why there is a tendency to take refuge in technicity from the inextricable problems of all other domains".

Big data and the digital revolution are the latest stage in this development, portending of a "post-political" world of algorithms and managed outcomes. German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has in a series of books detailed the possibilities of this new technology of power. He argues it leads to an era of "psycho-politics" in which big data technologies are increasingly used to bypass any form of "subjective arbitrariness" in decision making. Intuition, context or deeper understanding of cause are all irrelevant in the mass collection of data. He quotes Chris Anderson's article The End of Theory to emphasise the attendant attitude of the big data gurus: "Out with every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves". 

This barbarism of data as Han calls it is just the latest stage in the centuries long process I have sketched above. The progressive elimination of values and possible subjective conflict reaches its apogee in big data's correlationist utopia, in which knowledge itself is reduced to its lowest common denominator. Every click and digital interaction contributes to a vast storehouse of correlations that can be deployed to micro-target individual voters or groups with political advertising, smear campaigns directed at opposition politicians, rage-fodder or outright fake news. The individual subject of Rights - in modern liberal parlance - is reduced in the era of big data to the totality of preferences as expressed through their digital interactions. This totally empty and artificial individual will be the "fact" governing political decisions of the future.

4) Conflict is the Irreducible Core of Political Life

It is precisely through the lens of this modern "politics of technicity" that the liberal centre attempted to frame the question of EU membership during the time of the referendum and continue to do so today with their demands for a second poll. The question is posed as purely technical, to do with economic realities and empirically measurable outcomes. The suggestion that it might involve ideological commitments or different value systems is ignored. But this is precisely what was brought into play by directly evoking the constituting power through a referendum. It opened a window onto parts of Britain that had been ignored by the neo-liberal consensus over decades of stagnating wages, "bullshit jobs" and stigmatisation by the media. Suddenly they had the chance to remind Westminster (and much of the South East of England) that they existed. This window cannot now be closed.

In this context it should be noted that the 2016 referendum did not create the factions we now call Remain and Leave, but it did name them. That alone was sufficient to bring the present conflict, either side of which they stand, into public actuality. What we see with the ongoing deadlock and ever more entrenched positions at Westminster is the undeniable reality of that schism within the nation. It is a real antagonism between very different value systems and visions of what a future Britain should look like. No amount of facts about the value of the common market to UK GDP or the vital role immigration has played in maintaining Britain's public services is going to override the immediate and irrefutable feelings of many people across the UK, that the EU and globalisation have done nothing for them. Nor will such facts placate those whose opinions are rooted in racism and xenophobia, the same prejudices that successive UK governments have played upon over the last thirty years when it suited them. Thus, it may be the case that the notorious statement plastered across Boris Johnson's Brexit bus was false, but it aimed at a sentiment and perspective that is real and refuting the lie will not make those sentiments disappear.

Parliament’s deadlock stems from the attempt to come to a decision regarding values and possible forms-of-life using institutional mechanisms and a type of political discourse that have developed expressly to avoid making such decisions. The persistent referral back to the facts or to economic necessity merely dodges what is really at stake, which is the potential for Britain to break with the post-war consensus and forge a path away from neo-liberalism, toward something radically different. The Brexit vote has precipitated a rupture of genuine political conflict in British public life for the first time since perhaps the Miners Strike of the Mid Eighties. Unlike that conflict, which was settled by the authority of the state (deploying a good deal of violence in the process), it is the very authority and legitimacy of Britain's political institutions that are now in question as each side vies for control over what appears like an increasingly empty seat of power.

Facts are weightless things until they are embedded within a system of values and a form-of-life. Only then do they find their pathos and take on meaning, only then can they contribute to a decision. A politics of facts and technocratic administration can attempt to obscure and neutralise social conflict but it cannot abolish it. It was Carl Schmitt, in providing one of the 20th century's most acute diagnoses of the 'crisis of parliamentary democracy', who never ceased to emphasise that facts, whether of a textural, scientific or economic type cannot do away with the eternal question of who judges and who interprets. Therein lies the struggle. There is politics.