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    George Sotiropoulos – Ουδέν ελευθερίας κρείττον*: Biogenetics and the good society

    contestational biology by the Critical Art Ensemble

    What kind of humanity do we wish for? This has been posed as one of the possible sub-questions that may appear in conjunction to the broad theme of “transhumanism”. A challenging question, not the least because the symbol of “humanity” in itself is fraught with theoretical problems. It follows, even when delimited to the specific challenges brought about by the, so-called, “biotechnical revolution”, the question cannot be expected to receive a sufficient treatment within a short article. Still, I believe it is possible to offer certain substantial reflections that can lead, in turn, to a tentative answer.


    In a manner that resembles what ensued from the development of classical physics, the breakthroughs that took place in the field of genetics and biotechnology have been accompanied by the emergence of various narratives that celebrate techno-scientific advancement as the motor of humanity’s progressive march to the future. By drawing this parallel I do not wish to endorse an “evolutionary” understanding of scientific and technical development. Rather, the parallel was made in order to point to certain features in the rationality and rhetoric that attends biogenetics that bind them to the discourses that attended the earlier development of the positive sciences in such a way that we may speak of the persistence of a “line of meaning”. In fact, the structural similarities exceed the way historical development is experienced and the role that science is accorded. As Paul Rabinow observes, the biotechnical project, exemplified in the Human Genome Initiative, has a “thoroughly modern” dimension; “one could even say that it instantiates the definition of modern rationality. Representing and intervening, knowledge and power, understanding and reform, are built in from the start as simultaneous goals and means”.[1] What the “new genetics” has added or rather strengthened -posing a deep challenge to the Kantian ethics that appeared in response to the “new physics”- is scientific credence to the conviction that the being that masters through its intellective and technical capacities the external world will manage to understand and control even the secret abodes of its own “human nature”. To be sure, Lenny Moss may be right speaking about a “jargon of genetic programming holus-bolus”.[2] Yet, the media hype far from being unfounded is generated by discourses deriving from the techno-scientific and corporate domains, which confidently exclaim that science will not simply usher humanity to the “world of tomorrow” but it will even create the “man of tomorrow”.[3]


    This project to map out the human genetic code in an information network that will allow to intervene and, possibly, determine the life that is to spring from the “selfish” genes, has aroused as much horror and critique as exhilaration and support. One of the main lines of criticism is that biogenetics, in a repetition of old-fashioned scientism, reductively locate human existence on the physiochemical level and as a consequence objectify “man” as a raw material that can be manipulated, enhanced and perfected.[4] Herein by the way arises the specter of eugenics, but as we lack the space to address this controversial theme,[5] I will rather point two parameters that have been diagnosed as potentially perilous. First, as Hannah Arendt has already stressed, is the exclusion and even elimination of what is deemed as atypical and redundant, (cast as abnormal and pathological).[6] Second, is the reduction of sociopolitical problems to the genetic level, to be trusted consequently in the hands of medical-scientific experts; the good life and by extension the good society are gradually transformed from historical projects to technical issues.[7]


    Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose criticize such analyses on the grounds that the new genetics do not simply objectify –or subjectify oppressively- human beings but have a creative role in the fabrication of personhood. It is true that the effects of biogenetics on human identity are not as one-dimensional as the reductionist thesis seems to imply; in contrast, as has been also pointed out by other commentators, developments in this techno-scientific field spurred and are (or will be) implicated in the constitution of new forms of subjectivity.[8] Still, it is crucial to ponder whether there is any substantial challenging of the scientistic strain of biogenetics or whether for the most part these new forms of “somatic identity” accept, merge and reinforce the techno-scientific apparatuses whose focal assumption is that human life can be enhanced or engineered in vitro.


    Moreover, what I find difficult to follow in Novas’ and Rose’s argument is their identification of the contemporary self as “free yet responsible, enterprising, prudent, encouraging the conduct of life in a calculative manner by acts of choice with an eye to the future and to increasing self well-being and that of the family” (p. 490). That this is the ideal bourgeois as figured in dominant discourses may be correct, (although Novas and Rose understate the will to perfection that characterizes contemporary discursive practices).[9] Is it legitimate however to uphold the liberal cliché of subjective choice in face of the virtually omnipresent pressure exerted by a consumerist and normalizing culture?[10] Not that contemporary individuals passively digest the “ruling ideology”; nonetheless, I do think that the image of the autonomous individual, who will choose his genetic outlook as he chooses his cultural likes and clothing style, can be seriously misleading. In fact, one may also wonder whether it does not function eventually as an ideological tool that restricts autonomy and freedom strictly on the individual plain, veiling, and at the same time compensating for, the rapid loss of our capacity to participate and interfere in the events and processes that shape our present. Put paradigmatically, while the new Blue Ray Disc advertisement ascertains that the “choice is yours”, in France the government is thinking of placing economic sanctions to syndicalists so that the right to strike is not “abused”.[11]


    At this juncture let us also recall that for all the hype about the infinite possibilities that science and technology assure us, the moment these lines are being written there are millions who lose their jobs, who live in the slums and cannot even buy basic medication for their children. In a striking parallel Barbara Maria Stafford observes that “with more and more work being outsourced and people being unceremoniously sacked, the business world is mimicking the genetic world” (p. 105). For sure, the rationality and development of biogenetics are not commensurable to a supposedly all pervasive capitalist paradigm. Biogenetics, though, do not unfold in a cultural and sociopolitical vacuum but within a biopolitical and capitalist horizon, whose overlapping axes are productivity, competition, efficiency, performance, utility, commodification, health and normality. With this insight as their point of departure the collective of Critical Art Ensemble argue that biogenetics is part of an emerging “Flesh Machine”, i.e. a “heavily funded liquid network of scientific and medical institutions with knowledge specializations in genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, human reproduction, neurology, pharmacology etc. combined with nomadic technocracies of interior vision and surgical development…It has two primary mandates -to completely invade the flesh with vision and mapping technologies (initiating a program of total body control from its wholistic, exterior configuration to its microscopic constellations), and to develop the political and economic frontiers of flesh products and services”. Whatever one makes of the overall heuristic value of the term (and sadly it cannot be bypassed as leftist conspiracy theory), it manages to capture that biogenetics are part of a power-knowledge network which yields and presupposes concrete power relations, that is, relations of domination, exclusion and exploitation.


    So, what kind of humanity do we want? I don’t know how many “human” traits are being overcome or altered in the “trans-” of “transhumanism” and scholars like Moss may be right that the adoption of a rigid “essentialist” position does not help coming to terms with the challenges posed by biogenetics. And yet, once we brake free from the hegemony of contemporary ideological dictums, a central part of the answer cannot really be much different from any other period that it would be posed, that is, a just and free humanity. And the crux is here: is it possible to “manufacture” or “program” freedom and justice or instead, can they only be practiced? True enough, in spite of its reductionist outlook, biogenetics have fostered communal bonds and hence spaces of resistance and political mobilization. Yet, while it is definitely positive that the “Other speaks”, the problem is that such activation remains more often than not in the confines of identity-politics. This is of course not the place to dwell on the theme, but one should not ignore the weaknesses in this form of political engagement e.g. that it is based on victimization or that it takes the present order of things for granted.[12] At all events however, one thing is certain: whatever the promises and perils of the biotechnical revolution, critical reflection must move beyond an empty moralism –which largely characterizes “bioethics”- and interpret biogenetics as a socio-historical phenomenon emerging in and affecting a concrete reality. And within this reality justice, liberty, dignity and equality have become ever-pressing demands that call for political solutions, by which we mean, not expertise administration spiced with ethics but the praxis of the multitude. Between soteriological dreams and nightmarish visions concerning our “post” or “trans-human” future, there is urgent need to insist on the relevance of a bit of “classical” (but no less radical) politics.


    Notes

    *“Nothing is more valuable than freedom”. Inscription on a marble plaque in memoriam of Athenian soldiers dying on the battlefield, (around 322 B.C.)

    [1] P. Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’ στο J. X. Inda (ed.), Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), σ.182

    [2] L. Moss, ‘Contra Habermas and Towards a Critical Theory of Human Nature and the Question of Genetic Enhancement’, Eugenics Old and New: New Formations, a Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 60, (2007), p.139

    [3] See, for example, G. Whitney, ‘Man and Society in the New Millennium’, paper presented to the Galton Institute Conference, 16-17/9/1999; O. Morton, ‘Life, Reinvented’, Wired, Issue 13.01, January 2005. The last quoted phrase is the (suggestive) title of a BBC documentary dealing with the issue at hand.

    [4] A prominent critic of this tendency is Jacque Testart who seems though not to have attracted much attention in the English-speaking academia; see however John Marks’ informed commentary ‘The New Eugenics: Jacque Testart and French Bioethics’, Eugenics Old and New: New Formations, pp.124-38; cf. F. Turner, ‘Transcending Biological and Social Reductionism’, SubStance, 30:1/2:94/95 (2001), Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, pp. 220-235; S. A. Newman, ‘The Role of Genetic Reductionism in Biocolonialism’, Peace Review, 12:4 (2000), pp.517–524; J. A. Fuerst , ‘The Role of Reductionism in the Development of Molecular Biology: Peripheral or Central?’, Social Studies of Science, 12:2 (1982), pp.241-278

    [5] See C. Burdett, ‘Introduction: Eugenics Old and New’, H. Rose, ‘Eugenics and Genetics’: the Conjoint Twins?’, A. Petersen, ‘Is the New Genetics Eugenic?: Interpreting the Past, Envisioning the Future’, B. Armer, ‘Eugenetics: a Polemical View of Social Policy in the Genetic Age’, Eugenics Old and New; New Formations, pp.7-12, 13-26, 79-88, 89-101

    [6] H. Arendt, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism: an essay in understanding’, Essays in Understanding 1930-54: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. J. Cohn, (New York: Random House, 2005), pp.328-60; cf. H. Rose, op. cit.; K-S. Taussig, R. Rapp, D. Heath, ‘Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics’, Anthropologies of Modernity, pp.194-212; R. Carter, ‘Genes, Genomes and Genealogies: the Return of Scientific Racism?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30:4 (2007), pp.546-56

    [7] See R. C. Dreyfuss –D. Nelkin, ‘The jurisprudence of genetics’, Vanderbilt Law Review 45:2 (1992), pp. 313–48; E. Willis, ‘Public Health, private genes: the social context of genetic biotechnologies’, Critical Public Health, 8:2 (1998), pp.131-9; A. Lippman, ‘Led (astray) by genetic maps: the cartography of the human genome and health care’, Social Science and Medicine, 35:12 (1992), pp.1469-76; T. Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, (London: Routledge, 2003)

    [8] e.g. P. Rabinow, op. cit.; K-S. Taussig, R. Rapp, D. Heath, op. cit.; D. J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (London: Free Association Books, 1991

    [9] See B. M. Stafford, ‘Self-Eugenics: The Creeping Illusioning of Identity from Neurobiology to Newgenics’, Eugenics Old and New; New Formations, pp.102-11; K-S. Taussig, R. Rapp, D. Heath, op. cit.; C. Cogdell, ‘Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology’, Design Issues, 19:1 (2003), pp. 36-53

    [10] See C. Chambers, Sex, Culture and Justice: The Limits of Choice, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); C. Salmon, Storytelling: The machine that fabricates histories and forms spirits, trans. J. Kaukias, (Athens: Ekdoseis Polytropon, 2008); R. Sassatelli, ‘The Commercialization of Discipline: Keep-fit Culture and its Values’, trans. A. Collins, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5:3 (2000), pp.396-411. It would be also profitable for a longer study to insert here a serious reflection on René Girard’s mimetic model of desire; see R. Girard, Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, trans. C. Collet, (Athens: Ekdoseis Indiktos, 2001), p.11-70 (the English translation of the book is Deceit, Desire and the Novel)

    [11] See R. Branas’, ‘Dromoiξ’, TA NEA, 09/02/2009

    [12] See W. Brown, Politics out of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.18-61; E. Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, trans. A. Oikonomou, (Athens: Ekdoseis Stahy, 1998), pp.233-56


    Special issue: transhumanism
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    George Sotiropoulos / / webpage

    George Sotiropoulos is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the University of Kent, UK

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