Biotechnologies of the Self: The Human Genome Project and Modern Subjectivity

Abstract

Recent research in human genetics has sparked popular interest in genetic explanations for all human phenomena. In turn, bioethicists have been busy responding to their own call for stringent guidelines for the use of genetic information. But bioethicists in general fail to attend to deeper considerations of the nature of scientific knowledge and its role in the transformation of human subjectivity. For this reason, bioethicists are accessories after the fact to that transformation, and hence in order to study that change we must displace bioethical analyses of the Human Genome Project --that is, displace virtually all of the literature on the HGP. In this thesis, I offer a different and more radical interpretation of the role of scientific knowledge in altering our conception of what it is to be a human being. Physicians, genetic counsellors, and other experts in our gene culture offer fundamentally questionable and yet practically unquestioned genetic explanations of who and what we really are. These genetic experts, by virtue of their prestigious position in our economy of knowledge, impute needs only they can satisfy, impart a vocabulary only they are invited (and certified) to understand, and draw us into new networks of administration and control at the subcellular level. Drawing on the work of Duden, Foucault, Illich, and Poerksen, I argue that our attraction to technoscientific understandings of our "essence" is dangerous and disabling, and I sketch a strategy of resistance.