an epistemology of life insurance
TRANSCRIPT
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An Epistemology of Life Insurance Luis Lobo-‐Guerrero
Published as: Lobo-‐Guerrero, Luis. Insuring Life: Value, Security and Risk, London: Routledge, 2016, ch. 8 Please cite from that source
Insurers are responsible for the making of their own world. As put by Clark and
Anderson in their edited book The Appeal of Insurance,
[p]erhaps more than any other business, insurance grew in concert with a
clientele largely of its own making. Left to its own devices, the public has
preferred to avoid confronting the certainty of fatality of the probabilities
of catastrophe. It has therefore been the particular task of insurance
promoters to create a demand for their products, first by persuading the
public to see the world as ruled less by divine judgments and more by
statistical patterns, and second, by proclaiming a moral imperative of
hedging against death and disaster by the prudential recourse to
insurance (Clark et al. 2010, 3).
In creating their world, insurers are also responsible for creating an order that is
by no means natural. It is an order that results from coupling their own
imaginaries with their insurantial practices, imaginary and practices that are
part of the liberal forms of life the have historically sought to serve and from
which they have served themselves. The order that insurers contribute to is one
driven by uncertainty where individuals and collectives are always exposed to
risks they were not even aware of. For insurers, any form of activity can have its
associated risks and is therefore in need of protection. Their products and
services are advertised as fit to serve such exposure to the uncertainties of life.
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The pragmatic approach that insurers offer to the public must, however, be the
subject of careful epistemological analysis. The order they contribute to create
and the security they promise to provide are anchored on a logic that brings
together beliefs, emotions, expectations and aspirations, with practices of
reckoning and managing the uncertain, and sometimes aggressive marketing
strategies to colonise the imagination and fears of the public. In the process, they
create a market for securities in the form of multiple product lines, products
which in turn are to become the basis for derivative products in financial and
capital markets. Insurers constitute their own order of the real.
Orders of the real can be understood as authoritative ways of rendering the
world. A rendering entails imagination but it is in itself a performative practice.
To render involves a representation of the world. It involves an assemblage of
beliefs, knowledges, attitudes, discourses, and traditions that taken as a whole
constitute what, following Nietzsche and Foucault, can be called regimes of truth.
As regimes, they display a form of prevailing power, not a single one, not an
absolute, but one that will endure for as long as the conditions that gave rise to it
remain unchanged. Regimes of truth are precarious effects of power that require
a continuous, if heterogeneous and complex, agency. Their role is to ascribe
validity to decisions.
Orders of the real do not reveal a state of affairs as natural. If approached as
empirical sites, as sites for creative investigation, they help understand how the
world is known, how a knowledge-‐base is produced or inferred, and how
decisions on acceptance or rejection of new ideas and knowledges are made
possible. When investigated they expose the presuppositions of knowledge and
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belief, the rationalities, logics and technologies at play in making systems of
thought operable.
Approaching orders of the real as sites for investigation allows for an
observation: rendering is always an empirical endeavour. An authoritative
rendering of the world is therefore not disconnected from epistemology; the
practice of rendering is always linked to the system of thought that allows an
imaginary to be possible. The empiricism of rendering relates to an
epistemological problematisation of being in the world. The way in which
insurance renders the world constitutes an empirical order that can be
interrogated as an epistemological formation.
This chapter engages with a reflection on the epistemological formations of life
insurance. It does so by focusing on five insurantial effects. First, life insurance
operates a problematisation of fear by posing and acting upon an understanding
of uncertainty. Second, life insurers assume capable life as an aging course that
constitutes the basis from which to develop an almost frontierless market. Third,
life insurance provides a form of credit that renders life as capital. Fourth, life
insurance creates moral economies which intervene in the governance of the
conduct of individuals and populations. And, fifth, life insurance is a
technological effect of liberal governance that helps understand the ways in
which liberalism transcends.
1. Uncertainty and the operationalisation of a problematisation of fear A problematisation, as nicely put by Bacchi, a follower of Foucault, is an ‘enquire
into the terms of reference within which an issue is cast’ (2012, 1). These terms
of reference are not based on ready-‐made-‐objects but on relations (Veyne 1997,
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181). Relationality becomes the effect of power relations, the site where these
become visible, observable, and analysable. These relations are usually not
explicit. They require from the analyst an effort to give them form, to extract
them from a discourse where they play a fundamental role but where they
usually remain tacit and anonymous. The point of the analysis is then ‘a matter of
distinguishing the components of any historical formation, any set-‐up, finding
the links between their components and revealing the singularity of everything’
(Veyne 2013, 35). The purpose of doing so is to expose the truth of the discourse
in its own terms. As put by Veyne, ‘[a]s soon as one makes a discourse explicit, its
arbitrary and limited nature becomes apparent’ (Veyne 2013, 37).
Life insurance problematises fear by rendering life and the future capability of
life as uncertain. Uncertainty is a concept that, paraphrasing Foucault when
challenging the unities of discourse, ‘must not be accepted without question’, the
tranquillity with which it is presented and accepted must be disturbed (Foucault
2002, 28). The urgency of doing so lies in the role uncertainty plays in the
articulation of security discourses within liberal governance. Taken for granted,
uncertainty is generally understood as an undesirable ‘non-‐state’ of affairs, a
limbo which escapes the realms of governance and stability, a site of non-‐order
where knowledge ceases to provide a basis for action, an exposure to the
unknown and the unknowable. Such assumptions beg the question as to why a
liberal imaginary requires uncertainty to be understood in that way. An
approach towards an answer, explored in chapters two and eight, is that such an
understanding of uncertainty is a necessary condition for the intellectual plane
on which liberal discourses and practices operate.
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Uncertainty on its own does not signify disorder or vulnerability. Uncertainty
refers to exposure, to an openness derived from a lack of stricture to sense (c.f.
Nancy 1998), to a non-‐state lacking order, to the absence of an operating
structure. Assuming uncertainty to be a negative state is anchored on a moral
judgment based on a way of thinking that assumes certainty, stability and
continuity to be a desired state of affairs. Assuming uncertainty as an
opportunity is supported by a way of thinking that seeks to liberate thought from
its moral strictures. Whereas the former relates to a politics of continuity in
which what matters is the creation of stability and order, the latter emphasises
the possibility of alterity and possibility. As noted in chapter two and followed on
in chapter seven in this book, the first leads to a politics of capability, the second
to a politics of potentiality.
Koselleck used the term ‘horizon of expectation’ (2004, 255–275) as a space for
action in a future which will be continuously postponed. He illustrated the idea
by retelling a political joke where Khrushchev in one of his speeches declared:
‘Communism is already visible on the horizon’. When asked by a member of the
audience about the meaning of horizon, he replied, ‘look it up in a dictionary’. In
doing so the definition that came out read: ‘Horizon, an apparent line separating
the sky from the earth, which retreats as one approaches it’ (Drozdzynski 1974,
80 -‐ as cited by Koselleck, 2004, 261). Horizons of expectation are of course not
the privilege of liberal imaginaries, as evident in the joke. What is the privilege of
liberal imaginaries are the rationalities, logics and technologies through which
these horizons are created. By creating horizons of expectations governments as
well as other agents make plans in the present with the intention of generating
effects in a future.
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Planning, as elaborated in chapter four, is a form of prognosis as explained by
Koselleck, who argued that the advent of modernity can be understood by the
challenge to the medieval imaginary of God’s omnipotence which led to the need
to render the future actionable. A prognosis entails the projection of what he
referred to as experience into a future in the form of an expectation. Experience
‘is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered.
Within experience a rational reworking is included, together with an
unconscious modes of conduct that do not have to be present in awareness’
(Koselleck 2004, 259). Expectation is also a present idea. ‘It is the future made
present; it directs itself to the not-‐yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to
be revealed. Hope and fear, wishes and desires, cares and rational analysis,
receptive display and curiosity: all enter into expectation and constitute it’
(Koselleck 2004, 259). Both concepts are to be understood in relation to each
other, although they are of different orders (2004, 259). ‘No expectation without
experience, no experience without expectation’ (2004, 257). Without a horizon
of expectation it would not be possible to prognosticate, and without the
possibility to prognosticate it would not be possible to calculate into the future in
the form of probabilities. Without the calculation of probabilities it would not be
possible to define calculable life as an object of governance and rule.
To argue that the intellectual plane of a liberal imaginary requires a negative
conception of uncertainty in order to exercise governance relates to this idea of
planes of expectation. Uncertainty is a concept that lacks its own meaning and
can only be defined relationally with regards to its opposite, certainty.
Uncertainty and certainty constitute a semantic field. Uncertainty relates to the
creation of expectations of certainty. Certainty is understood here as that which
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is expected to be or to become true. Traditionally defined as the opposite of
certainty, the concept requires an engagement, a relational engagement with
how certainty is construed as as fact, as a matter of truth. As widely discussed by
Nietzsche and Foucault and many of their followers, within discourses of truth,
as soon as a form of knowledge becomes authorised or is granted the authority
to speak by virtue of its origin, method, or tradition, it becomes the legitimising
object of discourse. In other words, truth becomes the vehicle for the
legitimisation of authority. When the source of knowledge and its authorisation
changes so do the ways in which it legitimises discourse. Likewise, when
something considered certain changes, so do its correlated uncertainties.
The question of what uncertainty is should therefore be addressed as a question
of how a certainty is constituted, a questioning of the horizons of expectations on
which it relies, an interrogation of the forms of knowledge, beliefs and affects
that interact in constituting regimes of truth that in turn legitimise discourse and
action. To state that life insurance problematises fear refers to the ways in which
its technology operates as rendering reality uncertain. Uncertainty relates to
how those planes of expectation are created, and as argued throughout this book,
such creation is a technological outcome, in this case, the outcome of a
technology of life insurance.
The way in which life insurance problematises fear is tightly linked to its role as
a security technology. Life insurance creates a promise of protection. A promise
creates an expectation, an imaginary of security ‘which will retreat as one
approaches it’. The temporality involved is important. The security life insurance
creates is yet to come and should materialise only if the insured event happens
to occur. Its value as an expectation, however, does not materialise in a future
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but takes effect in a present. The security of life insurance secures a present
capacity to become and remain a liberal subject and to dwell a liberal life. This
present must not be understood as an instance that is to pass and that precedes a
future. It is instead the contingent moment of life, of lived life, which never
ceases to take place; a continuous present. The life object of insurance is always a
present one. The fear upon which this problematisation operates, however, is
not a natural one. The technology of life insurance needs to simulate a telos of
security and stability which can be achieved by the consumption of its products.
In a similar way in which Christianity instantiates an economy of salvation
around imaginaries of heaven and hell, which need to be depicted, life insurance
is only possible through the formulation of an anxiety of life’s precariousness, its
exposure to uncertainty. It is not for granted that life insurance advertisements
constitute a form of eschatology. ‘If you care for your dear ones, then you must
protect them’. As a problematisation, the fear that life insurance creates is
inexhaustible.
2. Capable life as an aging course Populations have here been understood following Foucault as described by
Hacking in his ‘Making up People’ (1986). Populations are not a natural entity
but the result of statistical exercises that involve decisions on what to count and
how, with the purpose of generating knowledge about a particular phenomenon
and acting upon it. Populations are an instrument of a form of governance, a
liberal one in the case of this book, that requires detailed knowledge about
individuals and collectives, the way they live, reproduce, work, the specificities of
their health, their economic life and work, their beliefs and values, and their
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expectations and aspirations in life. By knowing about people, economic and
political projects can be advanced by classifying individuals and collectives into
populations and targeting planning and policies on these groups. In this respect,
populations become epistemic objects, objects of observation and analysis from
which knowledge can be extracted, and simultaneously, subjects of governance
and intervention through which the aims of economic and political projects can
be furthered.
Insurers sit at the intersection of an economic project and a political one.
Detailing these projects in their generalities is important to understand the kind
of subjectivity they create and expect from clients. Economically, their business
model operates on the capacity to transform uncertainties into risks, create
products through which these risks can be managed, and invest income
generated through policies into property, financial products, and bonds.
Politically, commercial insurers require a system where they can accumulate and
invest the money collected through policies, a legal order where the rule of law
allows them to enforce contracts, and a market economy where they can trade
their products. The populations they observe and the subjects they act upon are
part of these economic and political projects. They are not individuals and
collectives on their own right, they are consumers within markets economies
who seek insurance in order to promote and protect their livelihoods and
lifestyles, and liberal subjects who participate of a system of governance and rule
under the belief that such system can enhance their freedom and protect their
rights.
Individuals and collectives, as clients, are already constituted as a population
that seeks or could seek insurance as an instrument for developing a liberal life.
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When insurers approach them as an epistemic object they are already
constituted into the client or potential client, a broad population which renders
them observable in insurantial terms. Such observability is important since as
epistemic objects they are not taken as raw, undefined material, but as
individuals with the predisposition to be insured. It is important, therefore, to
introduce a clarification on how an epistemic object is understood here. Hans-‐
Jörg Rheinberger, in his Toward a History of Epistemic Things, distinguished
between epistemic things and technical objects when analysing experimental
systems. For him, the distinction was relevant since an epistemic thing would
remain open to observation until operated upon by technical objects that would
be used to do, precisely what they were designed to do. When a measuring
instrument was employed to provide an account of the size of the thing under
analysis, the measuring object was used to measure and by doing so it already
qualified the thing in terms of size. The initial quality of the object as open to
observation has now been transformed by the employment of the technical
object. In his words, ‘[t]he technical conditions determine the realm of possible
representations of an epistemic thing; and sufficiently stabilised epistemic things
turn into the technical repertoire of the experimental arrangement’
(Rheinberger 1997, 29).
The key for governance is to stabilise epistemic things. As understood here, an
epistemic object is already the result of the technical object having intervened in
the epistemic thing. The epistemic object at stake, i.e. the client, has already been
rendered observable through technical elements and processes that are deeply
involved in the insurantial logic of the insurer. Already framed as observable, as
a population of possibly insurable clients, individuals and collectives are then
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assessed in terms of the levels of risk they would present the company with if
insured. The assessment of the client will never be in the abstract, it will always
correspond to a specific event for which insurance is sought. Such event will not
be a general one either, it will relate directly to the client and his/her
particularities. What becomes generalizable later in the process is the treatment
the insurer will give to the client in term of the level of risk he/she represents.
Similar levels of risk will be grouped together in insurantial pools that will be
used to determine the price of the premium to be paid by the client.
The client, then, becomes an observable epistemic object with specific biological,
social, cultural and economic characteristics of relevance to the insurer. From
the insurer’s economic perspective the client represents a life-‐long business
opportunity since its life could be exposed to as many events as formulated. And
hereby comes the opportunity upon which insurance operates, the life course.
Within life course studies, a widely accepted way of defining the concept of life
course is as ‘a sequence of socially defined events and roles that the individual
enacts over time’ (Giele and Elder 1998, 22). How these events are defined,
however, is not only a social matter but are affected by the role of technologies
such as life insurance. The life cycle here transcends the traditional continuum of
birth-‐infancy-‐childhood-‐adolescence-‐adulthood-‐maturity-‐old age. Each one of
these stages can be understood in various ways and insurance qualifies them in
quite a particular fashion. How insurers render events such as birth and death, as
evident in chapter four, is not simply a matter of a new life having been born or
having ceased to exist. It becomes also a matter of expectations, of financial
expectations related to the new birth. Birth, as seen by life insurance, qualifies
the capability of the new baby to develop throughout the life course by having
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access to the goods and services such trajectory requires, as it qualifies the life of
the parents who are now expected to provide for the new life. The life of the
family breadwinners, their capable life, is now one that needs to provide forms of
protection for the new child in case things go wrong. Events such as infirmity,
premature death, accidental disability, unemployment and loss of income, all
become events against which insurance can provide a form of security. As the
child grows, ensuring his or her education and higher education become a
pressing matter. Protecting the family home so that in case of any of the events
mentioned before the child will still have an asset to provide for its upbringing is
presented as the responsibility of the parents. Insurance advertisement targets
clients’ emotions regarding parent’s responsibility to protect and to provide for
their children. They typically depict a happy family scene with the intention of
showing that what can be, can also cease to be, and protection must be bought to
compensate, financially, for the loss of the breadwinner. Although children and
families around many emerging economies and so-‐called developing countries
remain un-‐insured, and their way of life does not make insurance protection an
indispensable security, parents in emerging and advanced liberal economies are
targeted as subjects that, if responsible, should provide for their potential loss.
Old age is another example, as noted also in chapter four, where a stage of life
becomes an insurable event. With life expectancy continuously improving, the
costs of maintaining vitality are also increasing. Old age becomes for insurers an
opportunity for profit in as much as it becomes an insurable event. What
becomes insured in this case is not death but its deferral and the money claimed
for surviving a particular age is used for covering health and caring costs for
which the pension of the individual might not be enough. Alternative forms of
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financial provision for these cases, such as family capital derived from property
and assets, as well as help from family members who remain economically
active, could be sparred if responsible financial planning with health and life
insurance products is done on time. Presented in such ways, the rendering of the
life stage within the life-‐cycle is not solely a social matter. It becomes part of the
epistemic object upon which life insurance technologies operate in the process of
transforming life stages into events that can be insured against.
A central element involved in this insurantial rendering of capable life is the
temporality that results from framing life through events. Events are not simple
occurrences or accidents. Events for insurers have been thought of in a present
in relation to what could possibly happen in a future. In this respect, events are
potential materialisations of scenarios thought of in the present. The logic of
temporality here, as argued in chapter four, is not lineal, and is far from simple. It
involves what could be understood after Koselleck, the operation of multiple
simultaneous temporalities (Koselleck 2002; Jordheim 2012). What matters at
this stage is to highlight the role that insurers perform in what is analysed later
in that chapter as the strategic production of the time of the event. Rendering
birth or old age as events for which insurance protection can be provided
involves a plethora of techniques and practices involving modeling, the creation
and simulation of scenarios, and ultimately, the hedging of time. These are not
simple practices and involve an articulation with the financial and capital
markets which requires a great degree of creativity, imagination and the capacity
to strategise a business model, within a political context, and the voraciousness
of the financial and capital markets in their quest to financialise and securitise
any possible cash flow and asset base available in the markets. The simple
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natural and innocent birth of a child becomes an important contribution to the
creation of financial derivatives anchored on the expected responsibility of
parents to provide security for their children. The admirable protraction of
vitality that results from an ever-‐increasing old age becomes the basis for a
growing market in vitality bonds through which the potential of longer lives
becomes securitised in the capital markets.
The assumption that life insurers make in understanding capable life as an aging
course is therefore not an innocent one. It becomes the very condition of
possibility for a continuous extension of the margin of action of insurance
through the creation of insurantial markets. It is the possibility of an endless
generation of insurable events always in relation to the satisfaction or creation of
new expectations on how capable life can be promoted and protected. In doing
so insurers contribute to the creation of a liberal horizon of expectation, which,
as horizon, is ever deferred.
3. Capable life as capital An economy is understood here as an order of governance, one where activities
are strategically programmed (c.f. Foucault 2008, 223). Strategically does not
mean planned or prescribed in the detail. It refers to an artful combination of
heterogeneous elements with a purpose. An economy is not simply a process
where demands are matched with supplies and where ideas such as scarcity and
price are natural. It is instead a site for governance where consumption and
production are modulated in such way that scarcities and prices are part of the
outcome. The strategic programming of activities in an economy are expected to
generate specific outcomes. The result, however, will not satisfy expectation
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since the expression of capability and potential in life will exceed any
strategisation. Whereas a life can be subjectified in such way that the behaviour
of an individual appears to be predictable, life, as illustrated and analysed in
chapter three, will always exceed the subject.
The subjectification that life insurance effects can be observable in the cases
explored in this book through the ways in which life insurance, as technology,
renders capable life as capital. It has been mentioned that a rendering entails a
performative practice that represents the world. It should be added here that it
does so in ways that are amenable to understanding and to governance.
Rendering as capital entails an apriori conception of this concept which frames
the ways in which a life is understood as financially productive. Rendering as
capital understands life as capable of a liberal existence and dwelling, a life
which is assumed to be that of a consumer and of a producer of goods and
services, and one that is expressable in the form of livelihoods and lifestyles. Life
rendered as capital creates a form of subjectivity that makes life responsive to
particular forms of governance. It creates an economy of power characterised by
the expectation that behaviour can be governed with expected outcomes. Life
rendered as capital subjectifies individuals and collectives, it renders them docile
to the technologies of governance which employ the rules of formation of a logic
that seeks to strategically programme individual and collective behaviour in a
way conducive to an end, as elaborated in more detail in the next section.
By constituting economies of governance around apriori conceptions such as
capital it is possible to make observations about ‘the way life is’ which are not
objective in any form but are the result of a second order observation from a
conception of capital (c.f. Luhmann 2000, 54–101). Put differently, taking capital
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as the foundational stone for an understanding of value allows for observations
on how insurers render life as capital.
The first observation relates to the insurer’s concern with life as capability
rather than potential. As expressed in the case of the story of Nathalie narrated
in chapter one, the life object of insurance is a life that can be expressed in terms
of a current capacity to earn and consume, and a future capability to continue to
do so in a stable or incremental way. It is expected that an insurable subject will
improve its material conditions throughout the life course, be it through
increased productivity, accumulation of capital, the result of investments, or
enhanced knowledge and experience. This understanding of life as capability
assumes the client to be an element of human capital that can be invested in and
promoted as the basis for the future creation of economic value. The credit made
available to the client through the collateralisation of its own life by means of an
insurance product, is the manifestation of an understanding of life as capital
whose value is represented by a future capacity to earn.
Such rendering of life as capital implies of course a second element, namely, that
capable life is the result of the disclosure of truth. As discussed in chapters one,
two and five, the truth of the life object of insurance is a complex process of
veridiction where clients and insuring agents interact in stating facts around
insurable events. The client is expected to reveal to the insurer any information
relevant to ascertain its level of risk in relation to an insurable event. A history of
breast cancer in the family, for example, when applying for a life insurance
policy, is a case in point. To the insurer it would not be of much interest to know
that the grandmother of the applicant was a great poet whose illness inspired
profound reflections on the notion of being and beauty. What matters is the
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cause of her death, a cause considered to be relevant to the calculation of a
particular risk of premature death by their client. Failing to reveal knowledge of
this fact could be taken as cause for invalidating the policy. How truth in relation
to such event is sought, however, matters greatly. How a question in relation to a
client’s family history is phrased can change the meaning of the truth expected to
be contained in the answer. Insurer’s questionnaires, and particularly,
questionnaires sent to medical practitioners who have information on the
client’s medical history, are carefully worded to frame the truth-‐value to be
obtained from their answers. It is not a universally valid truth, it is a truth that
matters to the event object of insurance in relation to the insurable interest; that
is, the client’s need to collateralise its own life as a means to obtain credit to
purchase an asset. The ways in which insurers extract information from their
clients to reveal facts of interest to their business is a fundamental aspect for
rendering the life of the client as capital. An insured life is already life turned
capital, which as shown in chapter four, becomes the basis for further capital
accumulation and exchange, more recently, in the capital markets.
Allied to the disclosure of relevant truth is the element of traceability of life.
Insurers’ interest in the disclosure of facts from the side of the insured involves
also the capacity to trace the veracity of such information. Medical
questionnaires sent to medical practitioners are of course a means for this, but
what happens when the client has medical records that only cover recent years?
It would be expected that an individual that has migrated from another country
should be able to produce medical records from the place of origin. But such
country might not operate the same ethical principles on which the current
country’s health system works. It might also be that the client has been a
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continuous migrant with no stable domicile over a period of time. Insurers might
doubt the legitimacy of foreign medical records or demand clinical examinations
to verify them, if in doubt. However, a life without a verifiable history of
capability is one that raises doubts. The credibility of the individual’s revelation
of truth can be put into question if not backed up with authoritative evidence.
The rendering of the life of the client as capital relies intensely on the
authorisation of the truth from which facts, relevant to the object of insurance,
are established.
Finally, another element discussed in this book that contributes to the rendering
of life as capital is that of the stability of gender as a principle for insurantial
classification. When, as analysed in chapter six, insurers were challenged with
providing evidence that supported their practice of discriminating between men
and women in their underwriting of risks, it became clear that such evidence was
not sufficient to justify using sex as an underwriting category. As noted there, the
distinction between sex and gender in discourses during the debate that led to
the European Court of Justice ruling on the matter, was not clearly cut. What the
debates revealed, however, was how insurantial classifications related more to
gender as a cultural category than to sex as a biologically determined feature.
Whilst arguing that historically men and women have displayed certain
regularities that must be taken into account when underwriting risks, insurers
were not in a position to demonstrate how a categorisation by sex did not incur
in arbitrary discrimination. It also emerged how difficult it is for individuals that
do not fit within the male/female distinction to be classified as subjects of risks.
From an epistemological perspective, that insurance practices rely on the
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stability of genders for the assessment of risks reveals a story of the role of
culture in the process of rendering life as capital.
4. Capable life, moral economies and liberal political communities The idea of moral economies, a recurrent issue in this trilogy of books, is not
unequivocal. E.P. Thompson and his followers used the term when challenging
the logics and practices of capitalism. For Thompson morality was related to an
economy based on goodness, fairness and justice, where production and
consumption and the understanding of price were related to the needs, desires
and means of the people. When the price of goods was determined by wider
external markets and local people who required those locally-‐produced goods
could not afford them, the resulting economy was one which did not correspond
to criteria of goodness, fairness and justice (Thompson 2013; Thompson 1971).
In the work of these books, the lead of Lorraine Daston’s use of the term has
been taken to argue that a moral economy should not be understood normatively
but as an instantiation of a form of governance. An instantiation is a
representation of an abstraction. Governance is here taken to be the abstraction,
not a universal one but one that always corresponds to the effects of an exercise
of power. In this sense, governance assumes a concrete form depending on the
particular forms of power involved. Although not concerned with forms of power
per se, Daston’s article ‘The Moral Economy of Science’ shows how scientific
categories such as fact and evidence, operating as abstractions around which
modern understandings of science is organised, depict a very particular form of
governing experimentation and knowledge. In her analysis these categories
could not be dissociated from moral economies which she understood as a ‘web
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of affect-‐saturated values that stand and function in well-‐defined relationship to
one another’ (Daston 1995, 4). As illustration, she presented some facets of
quantification, empiricism and objectivity to indicate how features ‘deemed most
characteristic of science as a way of knowing’ require moral economies to be
possible (Daston 1995, 3). The governance of knowledge that results from
employing categories such as fact and evidence as guiding principles constitutes
an empirical site from which to interrogate the moral economies that make them
possible.
In Insuring Security the abstraction inspiring the book was that of risk
understood as fungible uncertainty, a kind of magical moment where something
that does not exist is turned into a security amenable to trade and exchange. The
vehicles employed in doing so varied from the third-‐party contracts of the
medieval renaissance all the way to parametric forms of insurance used for
creating weather derivatives in the 21st century. In Insuring War, the abstraction
was a form of insurantial sovereignty that resulted from the ways in which the
British state employed marine insurance to wage war in the modern period. The
vehicles ranged from gentlemen-‐like alliances between the Board of Admiralty
and Lloyd’s of London to war risks insurance schemes devised for the world
wars, elements of which are still in place. The abstraction, in this third volume is
the rendering of life as capital that results from insuring lives in the liberal
world. The vehicle through which this abstraction is represented are the
multifarious mechanisms through which life insurers transforms life events into
opportunities to develop insurance products.
As instantiations of forms of governance, moral economies can be observed on
the effects they have on their subjects. They do not relate directly to objects or
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institutions but to the subjectivities that result from them. To think of a moral
economy is therefore to think of the subject whose conduct is the result of the
stabilisation of epistemic things. Consequently, moral economies here relate not
to objects or institutions but to subjects. Observing moral economies helps make
evident the operation of the subjectivities at play that result from stabilising
epistemic things into epistemic objects. The behaviour of individuals ceases to be
unexpected and becomes part of the wider liberal horizon of expectation.
Principles of formation such as that which assumes individuals to be interested
subjects driven by a desire to maximise utility become quasi-‐laws that allow for
the expectation of a particular order within and amongst societies. It must not be
forgotten, however, that these subjectivities arise out of abstractions, and
abstractions need to be represented if they are to become the ground for any
form of governance. The questions for the analyst are therefore, how is the
abstraction made possible, and how is the abstraction represented? Answers to
those questions will make a moral economy visible to an observer concerned
with understanding how a discourse of power, expressed as moral, can be
stripped to reflect its assumptions. In the case of this book, the abstraction of
rendering life as capital is made possible through a technology of life insurance.
Little has been said until now about the technological character of this ensemble
of power-‐knowledge.
5. Capable life as technological effect
Insurance itself cannot be an abstraction. Paraphrasing Ewald (1991), there is no
such thing as insurance in the abstract, only insurance technologies and products
that create insurance effects. Ever since the 1774 Gambling Act in England,
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where the need to demonstrate an insurable interest became a legal condition
for writing an insurance contract (see chapter 2 of Insuring Security), the ways in
which insurers transform uncertainty into risk must be publicly represented and
demonstrated. The very transformation of uncertainty into risks, as shown
throughout the first two volumes of this trilogy, is the result of a technological
practice.
Technology within the study of society and governance remains a controversial
issue. In 1937, Read Bain offered a definition of technology in terms that remain
influential within the social and human sciences but that have nonetheless
sparked a heated debate. For him,
technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments,
housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills
by which we produce and use them. Social institutions and their so-‐called
non-‐material concomitants such as values, morals, manners, wishes,
hopes, fears and attitudes are directly and indirectly dependent upon
technology and are mediated by it (Bain 1937, 860).
If life is to be understood as dependent on technology, as Bain suggested, or if
technology is to be taken as supporting life as characterised by values, morals,
manners, wishes, hopes, fears and attitudes, is clearly a debate that relates to
understandings of human agency within society. Within such a debate, however,
it is important to explore how the human should not be taken as a
transcendental entity but one that can already be understood as a result of
technological agency and that is also capable of resisting it. Rather than
assuming the human in abstract terms, what is at stake here is the idea of an
individual who is subjected to a myriad processes that influence his/her
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behaviour and attitudes in specific ways. When observed as repetitive processes
it is possible to identify a technological agency at play, one with the clear
intentionality of shaping the subjectivity of the individual in specific ways.
Understanding technology in this way relates to the style in which Michel
Foucault spoke of what he called ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 2005).
Although Foucault did not offer an unequivocal understanding of technology
throughout his work, as described by Behrent, in the latter period of his life –
between 1980 and 1984-‐ he consistently explored the wider theme of
technologies of power as effecting the self and other entities (Behrent 2013, 90–
92). His aim was not to formulate a general theory of power and technology, but
instead to offer detailed histories of how subjects are created and governed
through very specific forms of power, power understood here as a productive
force (see Foucault 2012). As noted by Sawicki, Foucault ‘does not attempt to
provide a general account of the practices that compose the “essence” of modern
technology, but rather specific histories of technological practices that have been
overlooked in traditional accounts of modern forms of power’ (2003, 69).
Foucault’s understanding of technology as related to power was central to his
claim against a transcendental understanding of ‘man’ as the centre of
humanism. As Behrent argued, Foucault’s modern conception of ‘man’, ‘belonged
to the same epistemological stratum as most technological applications of power
(in say, in the modern prison or hospital), even enhancing their unwavering
effectiveness’ (2013, 65). Technology, ‘is thus both a form of power that
“produces” individuals in ways that integrate them into political and economic
structures by supervising, subjecting, and normalising them, and a term that
dispels the illusion of the “individual as abstract subject, defined by individual
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rights”’ (Behrent 2013, 82). An understanding of insurance as technological
refers to its role in transforming individuals into subjects, subject of power,
governance and rule. Insurance constitutes a technology of government.
Rose defined technologies of government as those ‘imbued with aspirations for
the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and
averting certain undesired events’ (Rose 1999, 52). ‘A technology of government
[…], is an assemblage of forms of practical knowledge, with modes of perception,
practices of calculation, vocabularies, types of authority, forms of judgment,
architectural forms, human capacities, non-‐human objects and devices,
inscription techniques and so forth’ (Rose 1999, 52). A technology of governance,
however, must not be understood in isolation from the logics from which it
arises. Whereas, as noted earlier, the epistemic object of insurance remains an
abstraction, rendering a population observable in insurantial terms, that is,
turning individuals and collectives into epistemic objects, is the role of insurance
as technology. Its job is to continue the process that a previous moment, that of a
logic, tasked with providing the rules for the stabilisation of epistemic things had
started. Ascribing individuals (clients) to populations, and making the
uncertainties of their capable lives fungible, is already an effect of this
technology. The role continues.
Expanding on chapter two, a technology is here understood as a set of practices
that are repeated, systematically with intended and expected effects. A
technology operates an order of repetition determined by a logic which dictates
the rules of formation of a system of governance. Whereas the technology of life
insurance draws on abstractions such as life, capability, risk, and uncertainty, its
role is material. The outcome, although systematic and based on the application
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of rules and protocols, is unique and tailored to each individual case. Every
insurance product relates to an assessment of vital capability in relation to
specific insurable events. In this respect, insurance is a tailored technology of
governance which creates as well as insurance policies, moral economies.
6. Transcendence and life insurance as epistemology Epistemologically, the significance of the technological character of life insurance
relates to the general problem presented in this book, that of the transcendence
of liberalism. In chapter two this problem was presented as one where the very
possibility of liberalism relies on its capacity to govern life. The effect of liberal
technologies of governance is to produce liberal life in such way that liberalism
becomes its own technological ontology. Such possibility to transcend relies on
the operational capacity of its technologies. If they fail, so will the endurance of
liberalism.
The technological transcendence of liberalism relates to the understanding of
value on which life insurance operates. While rendering life as capital, life
insurance governs through a successful problematisation of fear, through an
understanding of vital capability as a life course, and by the constitution of moral
economies. The effect of this form of governance is a very particular way of being
in the world that is neither sufficient or necessary and is thereby in continuous
need of reformulation. As a technological effect, liberalism needs to continuously
produce its own ways of rendering the world. The production of its orders of the
real is a creative ensemble of beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, and discourses that
brought together constitute the truths on which insurance operates. What
ultimately transcends in the transcendence of liberalism is an experience of
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governing. As experience, it relates to a way of knowing the world and relating to
it.