Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

PART IV. LIFE TECHNOLOGIES

part iv Life Technologies • • • • • Science and technology are integral to the definition of reality and to the restructuring of power relations and bodily experience. In The Human Condition , Hannah Arendt argues that in the course of the twentieth century, political action has increasingly focused on the control of natural life and on the fabrication of automatons.1 The homo faber gave way to the homo laborans —that is, people became ever more involved in mass production and were most concerned with physiological existence. Scientific practices have been central to this transformation. Arendt argues that the experimental process that came to define the natural sciences—“the attempt to imitate under artificial conditions the process of ‘making’ by which a natural thing came into existence”— has acquired such significance that it now serves “as well or even better as the principle for doing in the realm of human affairs” (299). Michel Foucault pursued the historical complexities that emerged as science became a central component of the ways in which modern institutions and self-governance function. In his work on psychiatric power (1997), for example, he exposed the role of expertise in the constitution of mental illness , its spatialization and embodied forms, making it a phenomenon completely accessible to knowledge. Or, as Ian Hacking says,“Instead of knowledge being that which is true, the objects of knowledge become ourselves” (2002: 4). Jacques Lacan would also argue that we moderns are not without a relationship to changing forms of truth (1989: 13). Truth has become our labor. “The loss of human experience involved in this development is extraordinarily striking,” writes Arendt (1958: 321). New forms of knowledge are emerging around life itself, and complex technologies and regulations are being developed to put this knowledge into play. The essays in this section by Evelyn Fox Keller, Mary-Jo DelVecchio 343 344 / Life Technologies Good, Eric Krakauer, and João Biehl explore the forms a technically mediated subjectivity is taking in the life sciences, in experimental medicine, and in domestic spaces.2 The modernization of life, with its accompanying epistemological , medical, and political implications, is being problematized. Which possibilities does the “biological body” carry to cultural critique and human experience? And in the world of high-technology medicine, one might ask, How are the rights of patients and families and the duties of physicians being negotiated vis-à-vis life-extending technologies? How do we understand ourselves as affected by these new forms of knowledge,commerce , and care? The issue is not one of relativizing the content of science but of exploring the practices and worldviews embedded in scientific research, as well as the contingent forms that science empirically takes (see the works of Dumit, Fischer,Franklin,Lock,Petryna,Rabinow,and Rapp).These are not straightforward developments with predetermined outcomes. Life sciences and technologies are matters of intense negotiation; their local realizations are shaped by contingency, imagination, and uncertainty. Such realizations encode diverse economic and political interests as well as group and individual anxieties and desires; they also involve shifts from one form of bodily and medical knowledge to another. Pragmatic and embodied responses to science and technology shape concepts of personhood and degrees of political membership. As scientific and medical technologies materialize, so do new ethical questions and analytical questions: What kind of scientific literacy do we, the general public, need to participate responsibly in emergent therapeutic cultures? What is the perceived value of health, and what price do people pay to extend life? Which forms of governance and ideas of the social good and public health are at stake in the global flows of medical technologies? How do we as social scientists situate ourselves to study these experimental life regimes? The engagement with new biological knowledge unsettles some of our most critical assumptions about cultural malleability and difference in human nature, argues Evelyn Fox Keller in her essay, “Whole Bodies, Whole Persons?” Genomics certifies a distinct diversity—that of the species—and this new knowledge gives us the possibility of relating biology and subjectivity in new terms.The natural sciences have never known what to do about the problem of subjectivity, and numerous authors in cultural studies have argued that subjective experience is no more than a composite of multiple discursive and social constructs. Recent work in cognitive neu- Life Technologies / 345...