Re: LIFESCIENCE: organic political economic morality

[Trevor <tebatt@dds.nl>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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On 19-May-99, Eugene Thacker wrote:

>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.

So replace "organizational epistomologies" by "ontologies" and "scientific
inquiry" by "artistic enquiry" and we appear to move easily accross "The Grand
Canyon" between logic and aesthetics.

>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?

Of course, I may be "digitally distorted" or "network nuked", but I don't
really see there is a choice: If one does not wish to die at any moment
through (random?) acts of god, nature, aliens, or power crazed
artists/dictators/scientists/politicians etc., then surely one must have  an
"operational model" of one type or another which appears to give some chance
of manipulating the chance of survival back in your favour.

>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).

This is surely why it is so important that artists participate in the
exploration, discussion and propagation of (scientific) ideas without
falling into simple cliche and prejudice.

Perhaps if we could understand that economy is about "energy" and not about
"money" (i.e. money is simply one of many (stored) forms of energy) -then it
might be easier to relate non-material things such as beauty, skill and
knowlege into the equation.

greetings,
trevor


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