28 Jul Governmentalities of the micro (eugenics), pt. 1
We had a lovely chat last night with a colleague of Jason’s and his wife – a science education policy advocate. The question of eugenics arose – on the one hand, the long and difficult history of eugenics (, or as Jason put it, “Who gets to decide what is “good” “genes”?) and its potential future uses (stem cell research, for instance). I realized that i have a strong sensibility about genetic finagling, particularly around genetic counseling for parents, but am actually not quite capable of articulating what that difficulty is. (Granted, at the outset, it’s only fair to recognize that the conversation was clearly a purely western, northern, OECD population kind of conversation – it never really left the realm of genetic testing on pregnant women).
I think the difficulty with the discussion was that while i was arguing about the ethics of mobilizing enforced genetic counseling and testing, they were arguing for the science of genetic manipulation. There was a distinct unhinging of one from the other. As one of them put it, “What? So the answer is ‘ignorance is bliss’?” It’s a fascinating way to think – in pure black and white terms of This Is Science, Science is Neutral. I was reminded of the discussion held through Nikolas Rose‘s (2001) paper The politics of life itself and Bruce Braun‘s (2007) paper, Biopolitics and the molecularization of life. On the one hand, the micro-governmentalities (or ethopolitics, as Rose terms it) that emerge through a new politicization of the self at the genetic level is a peculiar shift in how to think about, for instance, the future sensibility of identity (i’m particularly interested in national identities, these days, as i work on a chapter on migration in my dissertation – how does a nation come to imagine itself in particular ways that then are translated into migration strictures? especially when viewed in light of it in the extreme of thanatopolitics) and political subjectivity. This, of course, following on the heels of the ruling in North Carolina to pay damages of $10 million to victims of forced sterilization which was carried out between 1929 and 1974. Who is a properly biological citizen?
On the other hand, as Braun points out, there are larger issues at stake, particularly “speculative biological futures.” While he is distinctly concerned with “future-invocative act[s] of biological pre-emption […] played out globally in a geopolitical register, in ways that extend forms of sovereign power,” i am curious about how these geopolitical frames will reach back down into the population. When does the geopolitical urge to public health refold on itself into a new national discourse of the somatic self? When does the care of self come rubbing up against the economic self? the properly-enacting biological self?
The fascinating end of this for me is two fold. How to avoid falling into a Chicken Little (or is it Henny Penny?) refrain – bound by a hysteria that is based in past abuses (and clearly not that long past – see North Carolina) while at once not giving into an uncritical trust of the medical sciences and public health, more generally? While genetics and genetic counseling, for instance, are tied with informed, individual, choice (*ahem*) – how much choice is there when there is not already an equal understanding of medical terminology, or when there is an imbalance of power in the relationship between provider and receiver (of genetic counseling, medical advice, tests, etc.?). There is a marked difference in “making choices” when one has an already-grounded sensibility of privilege over those for whom the imbalance of power in the doctor’s office may be overwhelming. What kind of “choice” is inherent in that relationship? How is it differently mobilized across race, class, gender, and even national origin?
And as Braun points out:
the philosophical status of the human is shaped today as much by the calculations of entrepreneurs as by the decisions of researchers, doctors or patients. Not only does this point out the bankruptcy of much of what travels as ‘bioethics’ — a professional field which always seems to arrive too late, after biomedicine, biotechnology and finance capital have ushered in the future, and thus can act only to incorporate new biotechnological realities within law — it also suggests limits for the sort of generalized governmentality, or ‘self-management’, that Rose assumes defines our biological existence today, for it becomes impossible to reduce the biopolitical field to the actions of citizens alternately empowered or ensnared in webs of pastoral power (13).
It’s silly to admit, but we’ve been playing Plague, Inc. – essentially, the player is a disease type (starting as bacterial, graduating to viral, etc..) whose only job is to kill off the entire global population. My partner actually plays it, i just watch the ticker running across the top of the screen – news alerts that, apparently, are now being fed in through the CDC. And so we return to the issue of what is “choice”? As we play (he plays, i watch and giggle, egging him on to “kill, kill, kill” – mind you, i wouldn’t be caught dead playing a war simulation video game… oh, never mind) – it occurs to me the ways in which we, as a population, become more normalized to notions of correct political behaviour of the self. When the ports shut down in our game, all i can think is how to make the bacteria, virus, etc find new ways to travel, without relying on human-to-human contact. Japan invariably ends up dropping a nuclear bomb on infected populations; entire bird or livestock populations are culled or wiped out; there are massive breakdowns of entire countries. Basically, the game follows the processes laid out by the 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza (which i’ve written about before), following a tried and true “outbreak narrative” of total and utter chaos. I bring up the game because, as many others have pointed to the ways in which war video games may normalize our youth to understanding how war works, i would venture to suggest that perhaps it will be the same with disease (one look at Zombie narratives will neatly unpack that one). But more than simply the issues of national and global health as a security issue, there is, embedded deep in the zombie / disease outbreak narratives an invitation to self-assessment, protection, risk, and responsibilization that undergird the very base for a national security of health.
…to be continued…
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