Somatechnics

Queering the Technologisation of Bodies

Samantha Murray, Nikki Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317052746
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Somatechnics highlights the reciprocal bond between the sôma and the techné of 'the body' and the techniques in which bodies are formed and transformed as crafted responses to the world around us. Structured around the themes of the governance of social bodies, the gendering of sexed bodies and the techniques associated with the formation of the self, Somatechnics presents a groundbreaking study of body modification. Its contributions to the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Deluze and Guattari make it a must read for scholars of sociology, cultural and queer studies and philosophy.

SECTION TWO
Somatechnologies of Sex/Gender

Chapter 5

Queering Spinoza’s Somatechnics: Stem Cells, Strategic Sacralisations and Fantasies of Care and Kind

Robin Mackenzie

Introduction: Non-Innocent Taxonomies as Inclusionary/Exclusionary Mechanisms

My queering the somatechnics of bodily taxonomies associated with the gendered harvests of stem cell technoscience begins by delineating salient mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. These technics rest upon naturalised categorisations purporting to be self-evident, such as the claim that natural kinds are groups of objects whose characteristics reflect real differences in nature (Dupre 2001). Such somatechnologies impact on research subjects in ways which matter. We tend to be kinder to those we accept as kin, or kind like us. Those we see as kind, or like us, will be expected to take part, or supply body parts, only after their consenting to do so. Those who are deemed not to be may be subjected to procedures up to and including death without consultation (Weinstein 2001). Yet the schema of who is kin or kind possesses only contingent validity: corporeal materiality as a basis for knowledge production is negotiated through culturally mediated classification systems (Dupre 2006). Naturalisation of taxonomies constituted by inclusionary/exclusionary mechanisms obstructs their recognition as pluralistic, non-innocent and contestable.

Bruno Latour has famously criticised contemporary intellectual culture as based upon such artificial constructed binaries, the arbitrary Great Divides between Us and Them: humans/non-humans, nature/culture and Western/non-Western societies (Latour 1993). Latour documents two ways in which these constructed binaries are maintained. Mechanisms of translation, or mediation, generate networks of techné. I will focus on his second conception, inclusionary/exclusionary mechanisms of purification, which function by decontextualising. I explain below how removing the vulnerable from their historic, socioeconomic and gendered contexts constitues a corporeal somatechnology which may render them excluded from moral consideration. Similarly, Agamben positions Western philosophical thought as founded upon what he calls, in a term borrowed from Furio Jesi, the anthropological machine, the contingent distinction between human and nonhuman animals (Agamben 2004, 26). While Latour expands his models in actor/network theory, Agamben focuses on the part played by invisibilised spaces constituted as anomalous in inclusionary/exclusionary mechanisms. One example of this is how those deemed to be disposable, outside the protection of law, might be contained in zones of exception which function to maintain sovereign rule. By being outside yet inside the law they support its power. Agamben develops the idea of bare life in this light, where those who are excluded from bios, or political life, yet are not simply zoe, or biological life, become treated as bare life, disposable people. These are the inhabitants of zones of exception: slaves, refugees in camps and the moribund (Agamben 1998, 2005). Theorists of neo-liberalism have traced how the citizenship of those lacking in market worth lapses, placing them within comparable zones of exception (Giroux 2006; Ong 2006).

Latour and Agamben have been criticised for excluding from in-depth consideration women, animals and vulnerable Others. Haraway, for example, characterises Latour’s networks as including men and machines but excluding women and other nonhumans (Haraway 1992, 331). Calarco considers Agamben’s interrogation of the ethico-political status of animals underdeveloped (Calarco 2006) and Plonowska Ziarek argues that Agamben fails to consider the question of resistance and the ‘negative differentiation of bare life along race, ethnic and gender lines’ (Plownowska Ziarek 2008, 92). Yet at the same time, the work of these theorists is perceived as providing promise for rereadings. Jones, for example, regards what she calls the andrological machine, which distinguishes between male and female, and Agamben’s anthropological machine as equally central (Jones 2007). Asking how Agamben’s portrayal of politicised life would be altered were ‘born of women’s bodies’ to be inserted, Deutscher reads abortion laws as providing an included space of exception (Deutscher 2008). In this light, I suggest that some of the inclusionary/exclusionary technics Latour and Agamben describe assist in the queering of the somatechnologies of stem cell technoscience.

Purification, functioning as an exclusionary mechanism, decontextualises the fact that stem cell technoscience impacts primarily upon female bodies, i.e. both human and nonhuman female animals, as will be elaborated upon below. Agamben’s anthropological machine is thus also of undoubted relevance, especially as finding stable differences between humans and nonhuman animals is proving increasingly difficult (Keneally 2008). To address this issue fully is the subject of another article, particularly the possibility of combining human and nonhuman tissue to create cytoplasmic hybrid embryos, or cybrids, as a source of stem cells. Instead, I use the term female bodies explicitly to denote both human and nonhuman female animals. This is partly in recognition of the tendency of exclusionary mechanisms to elide differences between excluded humans and animals as objects of use (Benjamin 2008; Colebrook 2008) and partly as a step towards what Deranty calls ‘a paradoxical posthumanist humanism that would fully acknowledge the nonhuman, yet avoid the mistake of simply erasing the difference between human and nonhuman’ (Deranty 2008, 166).

Part of my queering rhetorical figurations constituting the somatechnics of stem cell technoscience involves placing this within the context of neo-liberal tissue economies (Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Agamben’s zones of exception and disposable humans read as bare life provide a theoretical anchor for the importance of insurance and the appeal of fantasies of unceasing health, productive vigour and companies who care for neo-liberal citizens. Such understandings of bodies, based upon designations of Us and Them, are non-innocent mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion which constitute a somatechnics of corporeality. How, then, might a somatechnics of corporeality based upon inclusivity operate? In this light, I now pass to feminist and deep ecology environmental theorists’ readings of Spinoza and Deleuze as philosophers of immanence who offer promising all-embracing inclusion. Yet, as will be expanded upon below, an alternate reading of their philosophies evidences disquieting homologies with neo-liberal corporealities.

Spinoza, Deleuze and Ethical Difficulties Associated with Immanence

Part One of Spinoza’s Ethics begins with fifteen propositions to prove that all that is, is substance: Deus sive Natura, i.e. God or Nature, where God and Nature are two words for the same reality (Spinoza 1985). Substance is an entity with infinite attributes and modes; there is no place for transcendent principles or external cause for action or the world, so that life itself produces life. As Schmitter explains,

Spinoza interprets the ‘perfection’ for which we strive as a matter of ‘the power of action’. It is simply the force [vis] or individual conatus expressing itself. One of Spinoza’s most general principles is that we all strive to preserve our own being, or what comes to much the same thing, to increase our power of action (Schmitter 2006, 4).

Deleuze builds on Spinoza to read substance as perpetually differentiating. Our ‘conatus’, or impetus of being, is to become all we can be, without judging what that might be by restrictive transcendent criteria: ‘to bring into existence and not to judge … what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgement’ (Deleuze 1993, 135). Differentiation is difference in degrees of power, or, as Smith explains,

the ability to affect and be affected, to form assemblages or consistencies, that is, to form emergent unities that nonetheless respect the heterogeneity of their components … in an assemblage or consistency, the ‘becoming’ or relation of the terms attains its own independent ontological status (Smith 2008).

To become all that we can be involves counteractualisation, a movement to overcome the limit of current incarnation to the potential of the infinite possibilities of the virtual. Deleuze and Guattari describe this in terms of a body-without-organs, the BwO, ‘you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit … the BwO is what remains when you take everything away’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 149-50).

Hallward describes the philosophy of both Spinoza and Deleuze as animated by a presumption which is ‘quite literally, simplicity itself: there is only one reality, one substance (or God) and everything that is or rather acts is a modifying of this one substance’ (Hallward 2006, 10). This ontological univocity grounds a conception of being and the material as manifesting an infinite power to exist, differentiate, develop capacities and connect. Hence, although manifestations of multiplicity stem from unity, i.e. substance, inequalities of creativity exist. In the field of living things, more complex organisms experience and are capable of more affects, i.e. able to sustain more actions and interactions. In a sense, these inequalities, like all time-bound characteristics, are illusory, in that those manifesting them stem from the same immanent Source, substance. In Book 1, proposition 15, scholium 5 of his Ethics, Spinoza illustrates this in terms of water:

insofar as it is substance, it is neither separated nor divided. … water, insofar as it is water, is generated and corrupted, but insofar as it is substance, it is neither generated nor corrupted (Spinoza 1985).

Under immanence, then, given the illusory nature of the separation between ourselves and those who appear to be other, how we should construe ethical relations between ourselves and those apparent others is not self-evident. The Spinozan/Deleuzean imperative to become all that we might be does not necessarily imply other-regarding. Deleuze, drawing upon Spinoza’s view that distinct attributes are necessarily compatible since they are manifestations of substance (Deleuze 1990, 79-80), locates productive force in individuated differentiation rather than in relations between entities. He points out that organisms contain multitudes. ‘Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject’ We speak of our ‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says ‘me’ (Deleuze 1994, 75). Asserting with Guattari that we should ‘become-animal’, he conceives of the human subject not as a given but as formed through a process which should be unfixed and denaturalised in order that we might become all we can be via counteractualisation. This need not imply concern for others. It is in this sense that we should ‘become-animal’; like an embryo or a larva we should manifest potentials from within, denaturalising those imposed from without: ‘[t]he philosopher is a larval subject of his own system’ (Deleuze 1994, 119). Thus, where the imperative to become all we can be involves connections with others, this is not necessarily mutually advantageous.

Nonetheless, readings of Spinoza and Deleuze which interpret their assumption of immanence to portray embodiment in terms of connectedness, transformation and ever increasing capabilities have provided inspiration for many feminists (Colebrook 2000). A philosophical approach anchored in mobile physicality holds promise for the redressing of perspectives conflating women with material nature placed in opposition to male intellect, culture and transcendent values (Gatens 2000). Spinozan/Deleuzean neo-materialist relinquishing of species or gender specific transcendence for an acknowledgement of the material as inherently creative, powered by an inexhaustible élan vital, has an appealing optimism for ecological activists (Naess 1977). They may be read as providing a prospect of joyous exchange located in material bodies affording visions of metamorphosis (Braidotti 2006).

Braidotti has erected a programme of eco-feminist sustainability upon the assumption that our capabilities as immanent entities would flourish best in a context of generous mutual support for all life forms. A millennial evolutionary impetus underpins her reading of the emphasis upon connections and becomings to be found in the work of Spinoza and Deleuze as promoting inherently cooperative, altruistic and noble ways of being. Acceptance of immanence implies a recognition and respect of the other, and hence a rejection of all forms of exploitation and inequality. Animals, machines and earth others, as well as humans, can become equal partners in an ethical exchange (Braidotti 2006, 121).

In a similar vein, Gatens draws upon Spinoza and Deleuze as support for a feminist re-thinking of the possible which could open up alternative, more equitable, forms of sociability (Gatens 2000). Considering how Spinoza and Deleuze have influenced Australian corporeal feminism, Colebrook remarks that, ‘[i]dentity is defined positively, as the particular and finite expression of a dynamic substance, and as an expression that affirms becoming in general. This leads to an ethics of desire, affirming one’s own becoming is maximised in the becoming of others’ (Colebrook 2000, 88). Lloyd interprets Spinoza’s ethics of joy as a site where the affirmation of one’s becoming expresses one’s desire for self-preservation, and where the affirmation is made stronger by desire for and by others (Lloyd 1996).

Yet, I contend that for Spinoza and Deleuze the somatechnics of immanent corporeal embodiment is mediated by inclusionary/exclusionary mechanisms. Spinoza’s emphasis on harmonious relations with other humans is predicated upon their being reasonable men, presuming that reasonable men will always find consensus through agreement. In Ethics Book 4, proposition 18, scholium, he asserts that,

the reasonable man is always just, honest and honourable, and [wants] for others what they want for themselves. … Man, I say, can wish for nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree on all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body, that all should strive together, as far as they can, to preserve their being; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all (Spinoza 1985).

Spinoza’s model of community, then, excludes those who are not sui iuris, who lack the capacity to manage their own affairs. Chapter 11, section 3 of his Political Treatise, specifies that women, servants, foreigners and those who do not lead a decent life are not part of the reasonable community (Spinoza 1985). Nonhuman animals are also excluded, and may also be used for the benefit of humans. In his Ethics Part 4, proposition 37, note 1, Spinoza states,

Still I do not deny that beasts feel, what I do deny is that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in a way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours (Spinoza 1985).

Spinoza’s vision of equals striving to preserve their beings and seek the common advantage of all thus necessarily excludes those deemed to be non-equals (women, servants, foreigners, those leading indecent lives, nonhuman animals and presumably all entities aside from reasonable men). Thus, according to Spinoza, commonalities of substance do not entail the recognition of entities ‘whose nature is not like ours’ as equals. Hence, for him, while non-equal entities share the common ultimately constituting source of substance with reasonable men, their current contingent embodiments as inferiors renders their instrumentalisation by the latter ethically acceptable.

Similarly, Deleuze consistently privileges the virtual (the creating) over the actual (the created). He positions actualised organisms as obstacles which limit the creative becomings of the body-without-organs as a field of potentiality. Commonality of substance, in his theophanic vision, grounds ontological connection between entities, but need not imply reciprocity. Hallward contends that, ‘counteractualisation … requires the sacrifice of that most precious sacred cow of contemporary philosophy – the other … Nothing is more foreign to Deleuze than an unconditional concern for the other qua other’ (Hallward 2006, 92). I shall now explore the implications of these readings for the somatechnics of stem cell technoscience.

Sacralisation, the Symbolic Universe and Stem Cell Technoscience

Regenerative medicine centres around the potential of various means to replace defective organs or tissues, either by relatively straightforward substitution or by the stimulation of bodily processes of renewal. Hence it may be framed within a Spinozan/Deleuzean framework of bodies connected in networks of transferral, where capabilities are enhanced and incapacities potentially remedied. My focus is on the regenerative medicine of embryonic stem cells, where the associated risks and burdens fall largely upon female bodies of human or nonhuman animals. Establishing stem cell lines is a complex work in process requiring many embryos, created from sperm and ova. Fertilised ova may be enucleated to insert genetic material with specific disease characteristics in order to study how certain diseases develop and may potentially be cured. Both the impact, and the promise, of stem cell technoscience are highly significant and significantly uncerta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors' Preface Originary Somatechnicity
• Introduction
• Section One The somatechnics of the social body
• Section Two Somatechnologies of sex/gender
• Section Three Somatechniques of the self
• Index