Re: LIFESCIENCE: organic political economic morality

[Eugene Thacker <maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Trevor wrote:

> If we are busy rethinking science and art -indeed, we should not forget the
> economy:
> 
> -Are there different types of economy?
> -Are we in an economy of pleanty or an economy of shortage?
> -Does "economy" generate wealth or does it simply distribute wealth?
> 

How about thinking of political economy? Without ignoring the centrality
of an increasingly global (and virtual) capitalist economic system, what
also seems to be at issue in the life sciences and their contexts is the
potential political resonances of the production of scientific
knowledge. In other words, the investment in the power of the sciences
to speak the "truth" about the body and the "natural" world. And a big
part of that knowledge-production seems to be about organizational
epistemologies - workable paradigms which serve to ground and give
meaning to the world as the object of scientific inquiry. "Paradigm" is
used intentionally here because as Kuhn mentions (and Foucault later
too), the construction of paradigms in no way makes them less "real" -
in fact it makes them more real, more efficacious, and also more political.

One thing that's always fascinated me is asking basic questions such as
"how does a science such as biology, or anatomy, come to view its object
(the natural world, the human body) as a problem that needs to be organized?

You get into very interesting scenarios, for example, during the early
modern period, when anatomical science was very much struggling for
legitimacy, and anatomists regularly debated and disagreed as to what
they saw in the cadavers they were dissecting. So all those tables,
charts, diagrams, taxonomies, and so forth suddenly become politically
charged as knowledge-elements which may or may not gain a certain degree
of legitimacy (e.g., in textbooks), which are implemented in practice
(e.g., in medicine or pathology), and which become cultural elements
circulated for general knowledge (e.g, in TV shows, horror films, or
educational programming).

Eugene

PS - Of course there is also Georges Bataille's counter-political
economy of excess, excrement, and expenditure...

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