Abstract
Cressida J. Heyes’s latest monograph offers a wealth of insights for feminist political theorists and philosophers about the normative edges of “experience” in the twenty-first century, with concern for liminal experiences that exceed, exclude, or refuse what typically counts as “experience.” Heyes is concerned here with “all of the compulsive, numbing, addictive activities that render working life under neoliberalism more tolerable” (7), sites of temporary withdrawal that provide a constitutive outside and a respite from the demand to accumulate distinctive activities into a unique sense of self—that is, to have experiences (10). The political question here is not only whose experiences count but also who has access to this respite, as Heyes explores through a nuanced analysis of the harms of sexual assault while unconscious (chapter 2), as well as of the North American marketing of “mommy wine” to upper- and middle-class white mothers, distinct from the criminalization of substance use by poor and racialized women (chapter 4). Refusing to exacerbate the self-depleting habits that the book itself traces, Anaesthetics of Existence is delivered with impressive brevity and wit. This extends from the opening anecdote in which Heyes, exhausted at a conference, productively mishears the phrase “anaesthetics of existence” as a panelist reads too quickly from a paper on Foucault’s later ethics—an “aesthetics of existence”—to the candor and sensitivity with which the author describes their own experience of giving birth (chapter 5). Through these significant sites of inquiry, Heyes develops a feminist method for approaching “experience” that draws on Foucauldian genealogy in dialogue with the kind of attention to lived embodiment foregrounded in phenomenology. This method has significant implications for feminist thinking about agency and the meaning of resistance.
Following the introduction, Heyes’s first and lengthiest chapter intervenes in the feminist debate about method arising from Joan Scott’s 1991 essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” which championed Foucault’s genealogy for critically engaging the conditions of experience, and Linda Martín Alcoff’s response that such discursive analysis fails to engage adequately with experience as it is embodied and lived, especially for marginalized subjects whose accounts may be less intelligible to dominant institutions. 1 It is worth emphasizing that Heyes’s literature review of feminist scholarship on Foucault here—particularly on the controversial Jouy case in History of Sexuality Volume One—is the most comprehensive and up-to-date that this reader has come across, from a careful reading of Alcoff’s initial critique of Foucault through recent interventions by Johanna Oksala (2016) and Shelley Tremain (2017), among others. 2 In addition to Heyes’s own methodological innovations, this literature review will be eminently useful to students and junior scholars new to these debates about Foucault’s value for feminism.
Refusing the two traditional horns of the dilemma, Heyes asks: How might feminist theorizing do justice both to the contingent arrangement of our institutions and practices alongside the lived and all-too-real way that these “social constructs” can impinge on one’s body and psyche? Heyes’s method shares in what feminist, queer, decolonial, and disabled scholars have called “critical phenomenology,” which pursues phenomenological concerns alongside genealogical engagement with the conditions of “experience.” “Critical” here designates an emphasis on the contingent (non-necessary) formation of institutions, practices, and other conditions of that lived undergoing. Lisa Guenther (2020) explains that, rather than isolating a transcendental ego with the phenomenological reduction, critical phenomenology seeks to analyze systemic forms of oppression as “quasi-transcendental” structures of consciousness, or “ways of making the world that go unnoticed without a sustained practice of critical reflection.” 3 In other words, critical phenomenology rejects an account of consciousness that could stand apart or above the specificities of embodied social location. Rather, this method engages with structures of lived experience in order to reveal how contingent and oppressive structures have sedimented into our present sense of reality. One might object that “critical phenomenology” just rearticulates the ethnographic method of “thick description” in terms of attention to social context and motivations; yet, Heyes finds distinctively feminist resources in this explicit methodological link between phenomenology and genealogy, such that one could simultaneously hold in view lived realities of oppression with the historical contingencies that generated them, attuned to critical intervention.
In earlier work, Heyes has written extensively on questions of gender, agency, and practices of self-making in political philosophy. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (2007) explored the ethos of “making oneself a work of art” as it is deployed through distinctive somatic practices like weight-loss dieting, cosmetic surgeries, and gender-affirming interventions, each of which bear possibilities for resistance as well as for normalization. 4 Anaesthetics of Existence continues to explore the late ethics of Foucault in dialogue with feminist philosophy, but Heyes’s attention has shifted to the generalized exhaustion that comes with this mandate to work on oneself, as part of the multitasking of neoliberal productivity. In the third chapter especially, Heyes extends Foucault’s famous account of the disciplinary organization of time—via surveillance and scheduling—to name our context in the early twenty-first century as “post-disciplinary time.” 5 In this temporal mode, one’s attention is not focused on a single task but on many at once, such that the separation of work and life blurs into a “ruthlessly linear” checklist, oriented to the future with a risk-averse and reward-seeking anxiety (85). Heyes observes that this postdisciplinary way of life is both “privileged” and “depleting,” a kind of neurological overload to which we respond by seeking “anaesthetic time,” respite from all tasks that can at times only be accomplished with the assistance of drugs, both legal and nonlegal. Together, the postdisciplinary and anaesthetic form an “economy of time,” which we experience psychosomatically (122). Postdisciplinary time cultivates sleep disorders and stress whereas anaesthetic time allows intentionality to “slacken” without a clear object of focus, a respite and, at times, a “necessary solace” from these draining expectations (123–24). Importantly, Heyes does not criticize anaesthetic time but interprets it as “a logical response” and “a way of surviving” in a “relentlessly depleting” temporal economy (99).
Given the bombardment of sensory inputs that condition everyday life in the twenty-first century, as well as the differential distribution of our access to respite from these inputs, Heyes writes that “we cannot so straightforwardly rely on experience anymore as the basis for an enduring subjectivity” let alone as the basis for organizing with others (9). Rather, experience must be understood as itself a political category, especially in a twenty-first century context in which we find ourselves “faced with demands that we prove our personhood by demonstrating certain capacities associated with agency” (11). How might a traditional liberal view of agency, understood as active self-assertion, in fact constrain rather than enable feminist theorizing? In turn, how might passivity or even incapacity—for instance, the right to retreat into the “restful anonymity” of sleep (56)—offer sites of political resistance?
Corinne LaJoie (2020) has recently underscored that Anaesthetics of Existence “pushes back against the primacy of active agency for political theory” by considering how this normative assumption (about the productivity and ethical value of action) “harmfully nullifies and silences ‘sensations and undergoings’ that do not fit the normalizing frame, including violations of bodily integrity and anonymity in rape.” 6 In resistance to this normalizing frame, Heyes underscores “the dangers of assuming the autonomous individual as the basic unit in political ontology” and instead turns to three significant “edges” of experience: “asking how the interruptions of unconsciousness can be thought for a politics of experience; revealing the normative constitution and exclusions of experience as temporal; and asking after the possibilities of experience at the limit of subjectivity” (24). These experiential edges show the historical contingency of agency, as well as the neoliberal demands for productivity and transparency that such a concept shores up and the purportedly neutral (purely epistemic and apolitical) account of experience on which it rests. These edges also suggest alternative starting points for resistance and for organizing across and among our shared experiences, sensitive both to their historical contingency and to their sometimes-inescapable lived reality. Given the importance of activism for feminist and related justice efforts, one might worry that Heyes’s concern for experiential edges could lead to individual inaction or armchair contemplation. Yet, Heyes can counter that our capacity to intervene meaningfully in everyday life will only be deepened by narrowing the gap between political theorizing and personal stories, such that we might avoid “doing violence to either” through more “robust” terms (13).
Of course, Anaesthetics of Existence was written before any inkling of a global COVID pandemic, but this dramatic unsettling of temporal habits has shaped so much of the time since the monograph’s release. We can more readily see what Heyes articulates of late liberal capitalist life through its interruption and remote rerouting. As I have written elsewhere on the relevance of Heyes’s book, the asynchronous conditions of pandemic time blur the boundaries between work and life even more, and in turn demand more completely both the capacity to multitask as well as the self-soothing need to numb oneself from anxiety at the (increasingly indefinite) end of the workday. 7 Pandemic time at once intensifies and strangely interrupts postdisciplinary temporal habits. Indeed, postdisciplinary rituals of caffeination and intoxication have crystallized in ways that Anaesthetics of Existence could not have foreseen but can theoretically accommodate. Since the book’s publication, Heyes in recent months has turned to write about “pandemic time” directly. 8 Yet, already in the early months of 2020, Heyes cannily observed that our “lived experience of time has meaning, finally, because lived time is synchronized with others in a shared world” (102). Anaesthetics of Existence is a remarkably timely text because, as we desperately hope for an end to pandemic time, we must also critically consider the prepandemic world we’ve missed and how, in light of this disruption, we might establish different habits.