Rabinow, "Artificiality and Enlightenment" (1992)

 We began with questions:

P. 186, biosociality. – The sociality as new, as “truly new”. What makes it new & distinctive.

P. 186, biosociality – culture becoming natural – how do we understand this?

P. 185, new genetics – carrying its own promises – connect to 2 redefinitions of nature – how are dangers and promises of genetics connected to redefinitions

Biosociality – connections to identity, to risk, and to overcoming nat/cult – how do all of these fit together in one project or dispositif

Did the predictions in the piece bear out?

 

We then turned to discussion:

Discussion began with a connection to Foucault.

We considered the claim of Haraway’s (here quoted, p. 103 in the Essays on the Anthropology of Reason reprint) about “the death of the clinic”.

               Does genetics continue to individualize in the way that the clinic did?

               No, but it does individualize, but much more through a population.

Do organs and tissues disappear here?  Do they become possible traits for genetic detection?

Connection to genetics and medicine.  Why did genetics get so heavily incorporated into medicine?  Was medicine/health (the anatamo-clinical form) a kind of episteme into which genetics was delivered?

 What is biosociality?

Defined in opposition to sociobiology: an evolutionary explanation for the emergence of sociality (canonically E.O. Wilson).  [The dogging problem of this is melding the altruism and cooperation of sociality with the supposed selfishness of evolutionary theory.]  Rabinow: “modern social projects cast in biological metaphors.”

Biosociality as negative of sociobiology: trying to explain nature through the lens of culture.

How does nature become artificial?  How does it “finally” become artificial?

               Biology begins to implement a conception of changing biology.

               An assumption that genetics will open door to a new form of artificiality.

               Is the novelty of this at the level of the epistemological or the ontological?

Nature becomes what our social projects want to be.

At the same time, social becomes affiliated by, or around, the biological (e.g., chromose n, locus y, site z).