LIFESCIENCE: product

[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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> if there is a genetic engineering revolution,, it will be ,, has been in
> the consumer goods area..  all sorts of "goods" will be foisted on us,, and
> who will be able to gauge the consequences?? and what will be done in the
> name of profit??

This is a good point - for all the media-hype and discussion concerning
the bioethical problems w/ embryonic cloning, cell line patenting, etc.,
one of the most direct effects of the biotech industry has been in
product development - pharmaceuticals, but also biological products such
as biomaterials (synthetic skin, vat-grown tissues, etc.) as well as the
more familiar tradition in organ-economies.

Especially w/ drugs, this is crucial because at no point do these
corporations claim that such products are "self" - biological products
marketed by the biotech industry remain at a safe distance as objects,
technologies, and therapeutic tools different from self, so that the
integrity of the autonomous organism (and by extension the individual
subject) remain unthreatened.

But we don't even need new developments in biotech to bring this up -
transplantation (blood, organs) also begs this question - the permeable
boundaries and dynamic heteogeneous quality of the biological human
body, at once (as we are still being told by immunology) a battle-zone
to be defended, and also a set of interchangable parts (transplantation,
custom-designed drugs).

So I wonder if the issue w/ biotech is less that it is simply producing
the body, than that it is generating object-products which are
fundamentally transforming the meaning of the biological body, all the
while presenting such object-products as non-threatening to the
boundaries of self...

Eugene

-- 
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