Pre-Political Topology Emerging from Biotechnology’s Secretions

From a genealogical point of view, biotechnologies may bring a new epistemological perspective on what can possibly emerge from the movement of scientific research itself. Nevertheless, before analyzing any scientific discourse, it seems more meaningful to come back first of all to the rough material of research in play in this specific area. That is, starting from the perspective of the scientist in the laboratory and being aware of her experimental choices, the negative and positive results but also the errors, and finally the real but potentially hidden outcome, that we call here “secretions.” Indeed, one problem according to Bachelard and Canguilhem, are science secretions, understood not as concrete productions but in terms of what they convey. These science secretions can lead to a scientific ideology to be considered mainly as an obstacle for the construction of ideas. As biotechnological terminology has both restricted and enlarged definitions, it is necessary to define what are the main biological modifications or transformations we will discuss here. Further, we chose not to arbitrarily study any subfield of biotechnologies, but rather (thanks to personal work and experience) to position our theoretical intervention into a known and polemically charged field: the field of cloning technology. In the cloning field, we observe that ideology displays two aspects: first, a seductive discourse as a social practice without any internal foundation, and second, an internal attitude of censoring the very creativity of biotechnical processes preventing them from any risk of exposure.

The question is, therefore, how to proceed in order to correctly target the emerging secretions and the associated local ideologies, as two but essentially different aspects of scientific but not concrete “productions.” Here we propose a methodology that is not imposed from the outside, but seems the more appropriate from the inside to avoid any loss of meaning. Such methodology is based on the non-separation of facts, interpretation and associated ideologies, and corresponds to what we call an empirical phenomenology. What is at stake here is to understand the status of such emerging secretions from this most ambiguous creative movement of research in biotechnologies that starts with life, goes through history while carrying its own ideology, and has to come back to life with the absolute prescription of being effective. In particular, we will study the impact of a scientific practice in which the discourse is not tearing itself away from scientific secretions but co-emerging with them. This will lead us to question the possibility of an emerging pre-political topology of production of biotechnological entities that would allow in some conditions the emergence of a new political assemblage between, on the one hand, a new way of being alive for engineered bioproductions, and on the other, the history of such technological and scientific practices. The final point will be then to identify the boundaries of this pre-political topology, the main reason being that scientific practices might not be reduced to social practices.

The cloning context: “between successes and doubts”

The cloning technique provides a mode of reproduction of a selected genome and allows the production of viable cloned animals expected to share a genetically identical genome. The ability to take an adult cell and use the nucleus to undertake a new development by transferring it into an oocyte previously enucleated has been considered a great technical-scientific success (Wilmut et al., 1997). Dolly the sheep was born in December 1996, and the number of clones has been increasing ever since. Yet, the success rate as a reproduction technique remains quite low. Less than 5% of the reconstructed embryos after nuclear transfer reach the birth stage in mammals, and both biological and health outcomes are at best partial, a fact illustrated as early as 2002 in the title of a review by Jean-Paul Renard, et al.: “Nuclear Transfer Technologies: Between Successes And Doubts.” Many scientific papers report that cloned animals frequently exhibit developmental abnormalities before birth. Those that survive to adulthood often display phenotypical variations in birth weight, size, coat, color, but also physiological differences and malformations (Wilmut, 2006; Chavatte-Palmer et al., 2002 and 2007). Such...