Aesthetic Biology, Biological Art Eugene Thacker
pdf (132 Kb)
[In response to Jeremy Rifkin's
article in The Guardian, 1/14/03,
at http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,874470,00.html]
1.
Reading over Jeremy Rifkin's article "Dazzled by the
Science," one is struck by a paradox. On the one hand there
is the litany of controversial examples pertaining to biotechnology
and art. You would expect a cohesive argument to emerge from this.
But it doesn't. There's a position, however, and it's
very clear: biotech is bad. Or, if we were to be more generous,
we would say that Rifkin's position is that biotech is an
infringement upon nature, and as such is morally reprehensible,
not least because it is driven by economic imperatives. But this,
to my mind, verges on being reactionary. Why does it matter? It
matters because Rifkin's article is exemplary of the
level of the current public discourse surrounding biotech.
This so-called
public discourse mostly consists of poll-like perspectives
on hot topics such as cloning, GM foods, and stem cells. Are
you for or
against human cloning? You can vote now on a corporate-owned
news media website near you.
The fault is of course not Rifkin's. Indeed, as a long-time
author and activist, Rifkin's work with the Foundation
on Economic Trends has done much to influence public policy
and to
increase public awareness of very real and pertinent issues
such as genetic patenting, cloning, and environmentalism.
So, in a sense,
it is disappointing to see someone who has authored several
books critical of biotech take such as reductive position.
But then again,
The Biotech Century followed a similar pattern: a litany
of controversial examples from the biotech industry, accompanied
by condemnations
of biotech's market-driven infringement upon nature.
The end of Rifkin's article in The Guardian states: "Now
that we can begin re-engineering ourselves, we mistakenly
think of the new technological manipulation as a creative
act, when in
reality it is merely a set of choices created in a laboratory
and purchased in the marketplace. The biotech revolution
is the ultimate
consumer playground… the new genetic technologies grant
us a godlike power to select the biological futures of the
many beings
who come after us."
Rifkin's "biotech-is-bad" position is actually
twofold. First, it is bad because it transgresses the sacred boundaries
between the natural and artificial worlds, between biology and
technology, between "godlike" creation and instrumental
artifact. Second, biotech is bad because it is motivated by predominantly
economic concerns (find a gene, make a pill, sell it to you). Now
the question: does one position necessarily imply the other? In
other words, can we develop a political-economic critique of biotechnology,
without having to adopt the moralizing of the first position? Again:
why does this matter? It matters because too often, in the public
discourse on biotech, political critique slides into moral conservatism.
Rifkin does not – or cannot – distinguish these two
positions. For him, saying that biotech is bad is also saying that
something mysterious called "nature" is good, and
that the latter should by all means be protected from the invasion
by
the former.
But we might ask – what is the "opposite" of
biotechnology? Indeed, what is biotechnology? Sure, there are definitions
in molecular genetics textbooks, as well as pop science books on
the genome, but definitions vary. Is the selective breeding of
animals or selection of seeds biotech? If so, biotech is a very
old practice indeed, extending back to antiquity. Or is it only
techniques developed after genetic engineering in the 1970s? If
so, then "technology" is equivalent to lab gadgets.
Historians like Robert Bud have adopted one approach often taken:
biotechnology is a set of practices, in which biological "life" is
appropriated for human use in a range of industries (chemical,
biomedical, agricultural). Recent work in science studies and sociology
has been more specific: biotechnology is a discourse in which what
is legitimately recognized as "life" is reformulated
alongside emerging scientific, cultural, and political paradigms
(molecular biology's genetic "code" – see
the work of Lily Kay, Richard Doyle, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Donna
Haraway, Vandana Shiva, Catherine Waldby). Critical Art Ensemble – one
of the groups condemned by Rifkin – have been more specific
on biotech. Biotechnology is first and foremost an industry, and
as such it functions as a "flesh machine," generating
new products and services, and thereby creating new niche markets,
in the process transforming public understandings of what counts
as nature, the body, and health.
None of this should be new or surprising to anyone who
has followed the news headlines concerning the genome
project, stem cell debates,
or the latest genetic chimeras. The point here is that,
when
positing a critique of biotech, we would do well to
assess our own position
as well. What are we protecting when we condemn biotechnology?
Is it a mythical, pre-technological state of nature?
Is it the last remnants of our faith in the uniqueness
of "the human"?
Is it theology (if not religion)? Is it the dream of a post-capitalist
society? In a sense, critiquing biotech is easy. Finding "bad
guys" to point at is easy. The hard part is figuring
out what the critique is defending.
Actually, finding the bad guy in biotech is not so
easy. Corporations are always easy targets, and,
in a sense,
convenient straw
men. (Literally.) Is the problem only economic? We
are mistaken if
we think that an extraction of the economic aspects
of biotech will
solve any problems. Supposing that we could somehow
separate economics from bioscience research, we would
still be
left with a series
of epistemological and ontological issues. But we
should also be clear. Yes, there have been and are now injustices
which
have occurred
in relation to the biotech industry, and which raise
issues concerning human rights, environmentalism,
bioterrorism,
and cross-cultural
negotiations concerning sustainability. And yes,
in such cases accountability should be an issue, no matter
how
monolithic a government agency or pharmaceutical
corporation may seem.
All of this is to suggest something quite simple: that
Rifkin's
article, exemplary of the public discourse on biotechnology,
is as reductive as the science and art he denounces.
2.
Now part two. Rifkin may be reductive, but saying
so is not a round-about way of defending the
scientists and artists
he critiques.
Rifkin
is mis-informed – or un-informed – about biotech
research and bioart. But his basic points are well worth considering,
if
in a more articulated manner.
In short, Rifkin is mostly right about bioart.
Much bioart is just bad art, "bio-" or no "bio-". But to lump
together scientist-entrepreneurs like Venter (of Celera), and artists
like Eduardo Kac into one group is ridiculous. Clearly Rifkin has
not done his homework (and no, visiting websites does not count).
And there are not only numerous exceptions to the rule, but differences
between artists. Critical Art Ensemble's work is very, very
different form the work of Kac. Different approaches, different
methods, different media, different positions (indeed, one may
guess that CAE would eschew the very notion of "bioart").
Anyone who has taken even a surface interest in the current intersections
of art and biology knows that there is a great deal of diverse
work out there, being produced in a range of contexts. Which, again,
doesn't mean it's all good art. But it is both
an emerging and a diverse field.
That being said, we can refine some of Rifkin's comments
concerning bioart:
- Bioart usually benefits the artists more
than the scientist collaborators While
there are a
great many
examples of
scientists collaborating
with artists on projects, there are a few
asymmetries worth noting. First, the work
itself is usually
shown in an art
context. Second,
if publication occurs, it is more likely
to be in an art journal than a scientific
one.
Third,
when
instances
of
professional recognition arise (e.g., tenure & promotion), the artist
gets recognition, while the scientist often does not. Fourth,
artists and scientists
work with very different funding budgets. Very different.
- The context for bioart is often the site
of the gallery. This may not be problematic
in itself,
but when bioart
claims to be
speaking about biotech in terms of education
and
public awareness, then we have to wonder
about the site of
this engagement.
The art gallery is itself a specialized
site, quite alienating for many
people. How can art claim to reach a
public about science, when it still has not resolved
its inability
to reach
a public about
art?
- In bioart, "gee-whiz" science often overwhelms critical
engagement. That is, bioart often eschews ethical considerations
in favor of technical ones. Anyone will admit that learning how
to work the automatic sequencing machine is cool, but it is worthwhile
to reflect on it a little. The old question "can I do this" versus "should
I do this" is worth reconsidering in the context of bioart
practices – as art practices.
- Bioart can sometimes become PR for
the biotech industry. In some cases
the aestheticization
in bioart can feed
into the "rhetoric
of wonder" abundant in popular discussions of the genetic
understanding of life. It is fascinating that your DNA stretched
out is five feet long (or whatever it is) And…?
- But not all bioart is formalist.
In fact, a number of artists enjoy
and cultivate
the "outsider-artist" persona,
which indicates that bioart may be attempting to fashion itself
as the new avant-garde (oh no, not again…). By pitching itself
as transgressive, bioart risks replaying the tired narrative of
mainstream recuperation. Except that recuperation will this time
be activated by government research institutions and biotech companies
with programs titled "a celebration of art and science." (Might
we someday see artists as spokespeople for pharmaceutical companies?)
It should be clear that an overall
attempt to carefully differentiate
the topics
under discussion
is needed.
Again, Rifkin's article
and position is symptomatic. While it may be tempting to demonize "biotech
industry" as a whole, we need to pay attention to the way
in which biotechnology is becoming more and more diversified. Take
genomics. It's not just "the" human genome project,
it's human genome projects, plural. It's also tied
to structural genomics, proteomics, pharmacogenomics, population
genomics, studies of polymorphisms, haplotypes, SNPs, and of
course all that junk DNA. Each of these are sub-industries
and sub-disciplines
in themselves. The more one learns about the rabid specialization
in biotech, the more it becomes difficult to say that the biotech
industry does this or that. Again, the question is not whether
this is good or bad (though diversification is always good
for revitalizing the flows of capital). The question is that
we have
not yet learned how to ask adequate questions.
The same can be said for the loose
grouping of art-science collaborations
called "bioart." The work of bioartists such as Critical
Art Ensemble, Joe Davis, Natalie Jeremijenko, Kac, SymbioticA,
and Adam Zaretsky is anything but a homogenous group of tech-geeks
doing it "just because." I won't say that
every bioart project is unproblematic, but I will say that
the issues
and methods employed are incredibly diverse, from performance,
to sculpture, to robotics, to tissue engineering, to activism.
The more one learns about the manifold intersections between
art and science (and their problematics), the more ridiculous
it seems
to imply an equivalence between bioart and entrepreneurial
biotech.
3.
This has already been too long
just to make a few points.
What to do.
Why not
be prescriptive?
First, we need to, once and
for all, dispense with the
easy opposition
between pro- and
anti-biotech positions. Again,
while there are
very serious issues regarding
biotech that need to be
directly addressed – biopiracy, patenting, globalized health care,
informatization – simply condemning a monolithic "thing" called
the biotech industry helps no one. To simply demonize biotech
is to miss the point. The problem is not just economics in
business,
not just reductionism in science, not just moralizing in the
humanities. It is all of these together. What is needed is
not a persecutional
search for the bad guy; what is needed is the ability to develop
a critical engagement with biotech. The theorists and artists
mentioned so far all support this basic position.
Second, there is a need to
reconsider our views of technology
in light
of the ongoing
advances
in biotechnology.
Over
30 years ago,
Marshall McLuhan famously
declared that the "medium is the
message" – and thirty years before that Walter Benjamin
warned against the "aestheticization of politics" he
saw in avant-garde art such as Futurism. Unlike computer technologies,
bio-technologies take life itself as the means and the medium.
Life becomes indissociable from technological instrumentalization.
A medium is no longer a "machine" (in the literal
sense of the term), be it a TV, VCR, or computer. A medium
is above all
a process, a transformation, and an objective. What do we see
with biotech? A process of steadily reiterating a new central
dogma:
genetics is code and code is both immaterial (in the computer,
in silico) and material (affecting a patient, in vivo). We
also see that process (encoding, recoding, decoding) affecting
transformations:
gene discovery, genetically-designed drugs, stem cell therapies,
GM foods, etc. Finally, that process and its resultant transformation
occur within a set of objectives (and this is where it gets
sticky): for the pharmaceutical industry, that objective is
making pills;
for the biotech industry, that objective is raising capital
and demonstrating effective clinical trials; for the IT industry,
that
objective is feeding high-tech into biotech; for the health
care sector, that objective is assessing whether or not genetic
medicine
will become a part of routine health care; and so on.
What do we have when biology
is a technology? What do
we have when
our notions of
technology are no
longer decisively
separate
from
our biologies? We have
something that can only be called "biomedia."
Third, as public discussions
over biotech continue,
those of us involved
need
to be aware of the
moment when political
activism
turns into moral conservatism.
Positioning oneself against
the patenting of
living beings is one
thing; but offering
a view
of
an untainted, pure nature
against invasive bio-technologies
is
quite another.
We do not need religious
or moral fundamentalism
in order
to counteract and intervene
in the biotech industry.
Rifkin's overall anxiety is strangely expressed - as if the
real threat is that publicly available biotechnologies will spawn
a new fashion movement (bioPrada?). While Rifkin cites a number
of controversial examples, it appears that the primary reason for
their being condemned is that they infringe upon nature (human
biology included). Rifkin's comments are noteworthy when
they raise the question of ethics. But it is not clear to me how,
in this day and age, we can still make an argument for a pure nature
beyond the reach of technology or artifice. According to Rifkin's
exceedingly broad terms, we've had human "bio-technologies" for
sometime. It's called the institution of marriage. Again
and again, the position being expressed by Rifkin appears to simply
be that biotech transgresses the sacred domain of nature. Crossing
genes, goat + sheep, fish + plant, human genes in mice, spider
genes in goats, genetically-engineered super-spiders?... The arithmetic
of this position is straightforward. And incredibly reductive.
And what is the true definition of art for Rifkin, in this context?
Art is an "expression of love." No comment. If art
has a definition, it certainly isn't as formulaic as that
(or so one would hope). Rifkin's understanding of art
is no more sophisticated than the scientists he criticizes.
All the same, Rifkin's point concerning non-scientists doing
science poses a thought experiment: will the PC happen to biotech?
Is the human genome project the equivalent of the ENIAC? In other
words, if the tools, techniques, and knowledge of molecular genetics
and biotechnology are opened to the public, will this be a moment
of liberation or of enslavement? Likely neither. But it does beg
the question: if we condemn renegade scientists and avant-garde
artists, different as they are, then who holds the privilege to
make decisions about who can have access, about how knowledge is
disseminated? Not so long ago the same question was posed in relation
to computers. But, you say, computers are just machines, just a
bunch of bits, totally different from the "real stuff" of
biology. Perhaps. But have computers not been as materially effective
in transforming our lives as any biotechnology? Recall the U.S.
government's ongoing paranoia surrounding hacking and
computer terrorism. Computers have also affected modes of production,
and
not only in Third World microchip factories. Work is no longer
an activity that takes place at an office; labor is immanent,
biopolitical.
The anxieties surrounding
biotechnology are
no different, and
certainly
not new. (Brave
New
World, yes. But
also Dr. Moreau,
Frankenstein,
The Golem, even
Ovid's Metamorphoses). The double-bind expressed
by Rifkin is the
following: on the one hand, there is a deep anxiety about and
mistrust of biotechnologies. But on the other hand, there
is an even deeper
anxiety about such technologies becoming accessible to the
general public ("let into the wild," as it were).
So the question
pertains to the policing of disciplines as much as policy decisions
or economics. And we police our own disciplines,
meaning that we
police our own set of knowledges as well, and the ways in which
those knowledges are instrumentalized. The solution
is clearly not
to just open the gates and give every citizen their own PCR
machine. We need to complexify our understanding of the
issues beyond the
ballot-mentality (are you for human cloning or against? Are
you for or against bioartists? How about that on the
next ballot?…).
Recognizing that
this stalemate
must be overcome
is an important
step.
Eugene Thacker, PhD
School of Literature,
Communication & Culture
Georgia Institute
of Technology
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~ethacker
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