Bioethics | Genomics, genetics, and the problem of the commodity form
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The invisible hand. Credit: kybernetick.free |
Bioethics and capitalism
NEW ‘GENETIC’
DISORDER LINKED TO POLITICAL ECONOMIC MYOPIA
Devon G.
Peña | Seattle, WA | June 16, 2014
This creative approach [seeks to] … capture the drama
of DNA in genomic narratives that can be imagined and shared to illuminate our
gaze on the people, the helices, and the future within.
Karen H.
Rothenberg and Lynn Wein Bush, The
Drama of DNA: Narrative Genomics (2014)
Of course I am using irony and hyperbole in the subhead for political economic myopia as a genetic disease. But that really is not much
different from the discursive strategies used to construct genomic narratives
over the past quarter century, with the presumption usually being that these “illuminate”
things like “the future within”.
There is little evidence to suggest that scientists may harbor a gene mutation that expresses as an inability to
understand capitalism as a social construct. There is no known genetic basis
that can explain what leads scientists to view capitalism – the ownership and
circulation of everything as a commodity – as natural and inevitable. This
gives us the end of history as a normative foundation of the alliance between
scientists and capitalists, whose very existential qualities actually thwart
the progress of scientific inquiry by enframing[1] knowledge and truth claims behind the cloak of corporate intrigue and
proprietary interests.
The view of capitalism as the evolutionary realization
of some glorious immutable universal natural law is entirely unscientific; it
is instead an ideological and political
choice open to, indeed badly in need of, further critical reflection. By
political, I simply mean a choice that has real-world consequences like
increased inequality, poverty, ecological degradation, etc. This alliance is
politics not science but it also involves science in the service of a
particular kind of class politics.
The science-class politics dyad is precisely why bioethics exists as a field of
discourse and deliberation. Unfortunately, much of this discourse fails to
critically confront the dominant trope of the Invisible Hand of the Market [sic] which is mystified as a mysterious force that drives capitalist enframing, and hence domination,
of the mobilization and application of science and technology.
The problem for today’s so-called ‘life sciences’ is
a tendency to view the operation of the ‘free market’ as if it were
actually analogous to the law of gravity and a force that analogously holds matter together. Actually
the ‘commodity form’ is the appropriate political economic concept and all this
view reaffirms is a marked tendency by conventional bioethicists to reify
(mystify) what is a human construct as if it were some natural occurrence lying
above and beyond human value statements, when indeed the problem of market
fundamentalism is that it knows the price of everything and the value of
nothing.
We need to confront the fuzzy neoclassical and
neoliberal economics most genomics narratives appear to have internalized, especially
those articulated by subjects who actually earn a direct living and profit from
an alliance with biotechnology capital. One way to think through this problem
is to determine if an alliance with capitalist values prejudices scientific
work and ‘market-steers’ technological applications. How does the profit motive
shape the subjectivity of the scientist? It’s an old question and I pose it
simply because it serves a rhetorical function and draws our attention to the possibility
that we have a deeper structural problem rather than a simplistic conflict of interest scenario.
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The invisible hand | Manu Cornet |
Most anthropologists – in a critical, skeptical, and
evidence-based manner – rightly view capitalism as a historical and cultural
construct rather than the expression of a deterministic natural law shaped by
evolution of a peculiar rationality based on an ideology of disconnection.
Capitalism is studied as a human project and social construct rather than some evolutionary endpoint in the forms of economic rationality. This formation has been
meticulously studied and the collective vision of the evidence reveals simply how a peculiar form of economic organization, which emerged from a specific kind of aggressive and imperial-minded set of cultures in
Europe, is nonetheless seeking to impose a narrowly construed yet generalized worldview on
everyone else. These ‘civilizing
projects’ [sic] have even used religion and racist ideologies to justify plunder, pillage, conquest, and
genocide.
I think this simply means it is time for all the
geneticists, genomics scientists and bioethicists alike, to read Marx – especially
all three volumes of Capital and the amazing
blueprint for it all in The Grundrisse;
for starters. It may also help for our life science colleagues to follow the
lead of an emerging generation of earth systems scientists (e.g., those focused
on climate change) and begin to question capitalist rationality. They should be
required to read during their undergraduate and graduate training the works of
decolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon
and Alberto Memmi.
Otherwise, we are left with myopic technicians suffering from a real malady – a
shameful deficit of well-rounded liberal education.
When I review the current discourses in bioethics centered
on the human body and private property, I can’t help but think about how Memmi’s
characterization of the colonizer as driven
by profit, privilege, and usurpation is also an appropriate description of
the state of bioethical discourse – a politics of knowledge and truth claims in
which scholars are reduced to apologetics defending capitalist enframing of the entire range of human genome industries.
Why should we be concerned? It does not take a Marxist to understand the second
contradiction of capitalism (see O’Connor 1991).
Capitalism is not only deeply flawed: Political economic and ecological studies
demonstrate it is absolutely lethal to life and planet.
Yet genomics and genetic scientists of all stripes,
in both the biomedical and agricultural biotechnology branches, and the bioethicists
that debate about their work, continue to frame the discourse of the ownership
of life as if the legal status of the body (or plant or animal or
microorganism) can be reduced to a ‘soulless’ collection of merchantable bits
and pieces to be probed and perhaps reassembled to serve some expert- and
market-driven agenda in biomedicine or transgenics.
But this requires, let us be clear, that scientists
harbor an ideological belief in some irreversible fait accompli to say nothing of the implications such an
unscientific attitude poses for issues related to privacy and structural discrimination.
I challenge scientists and bioethicists to confront the implications of this
basic fact of capitalism’s inherent lethality
to person/planet. It is as if, when it comes to assessing capitalism, educated
scientific elites suddenly suspend the criteria of proof they hold so sacrosanct
as the basis for establishing truth claims in their respective scientific
fields. Why not with economics? Is it because they know deep inside that the
“dismal science” is not (science)? It is ideology and they have blind faith in
it? Does that compromise and skew (narrow) the human interests actually served
by scientific discoveries and their patented technological applications?
Ever since Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis (ca. 1624) described science as an act focused on
imposing an objective gaze upon
nature – which he construed as akin to a woman unwilling to reveal ‘her’ secrets
unless forced to do so – Western scientists have been defined by two epistemological
tendencies: Reductionism; Arrogance. Combined, these two constitute the framework
for acts of violence deployed against the planet’s life-forms and other ways of
knowing and being in the world as the European capitalist empires ratcheted up
their colonial attacks (see Merchant 1980, 2006; Shiva 1989),
and which continue in the form of the patenting of life and the commodification
of the body (Shiva 1999).
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The invisible hand in the ships of empire. Credit: Wikipedia |
Reductionism comes from the mistaken idea that the
‘gaze’ is anything other than a human – qua
culturally defined and historically constrained – projection. For Bacon,
knowledge involves an act of violence in which the subject must be dissected to
force the unwilling natural world to render its secrets as the dissociated
object of the gaze. This separation between subject and object – the famous
Cartesian dichotomy – is the foundation of all subsequent developments in
reductionism. For indigenous epistemologies, this is a cowardly and ignorant
retreat from the inevitable human interconnection with the natural [sic] world
and thus an warped and incomplete form of knowledge.
The primary problem with reductionism is how it misrecognizes the fields of interrelations
that comprise our existence as coeval organisms inhabiting a shared biophysical
world. This principle – which resonates with ancient indigenous positions – is
now well established, for e.g., in the emergent field of epigenetics. Also: We are actually
never alone – and the trillions of bacterial organisms that inhabit our skin
and gut make us one with all our relations. Reductionism not only fails to
recognize this, it actually actively and aggressively devalues the life force
of our interconnectedness.
The problem of epistemological arrogance stems from the
inculcation of a particular habitus, spawning a delusional belief in the
virtues [sic] of co-optation via obedience
to the power of capital and the rules of its Republic of Property. Everything
is for sale; that is except for indigenous dignity as the Zapatistas have said.
Enough said. Sinvergüenzas.
Any given party with a market-steered interest in genomics
and genetics is forced to accommodate to and remain subservient before the
principle that establishes profits from the ownership of life through patents
and property rights as a legitimate form of human social and economic
organization. Therein lies the problem because not everyone is participating in
the legitimation game. All this, despite the fact that most of the world’s
cultures and societies, over the entire course of human history, have seemed
less than interested in elaborating the delusion of political economic concepts
like the “individual” or “private property” – both of which are actually historical
curiosities of fairly recent vintage.
The arrogance that underlies the frontiers of
bioethics, and which appears to privilege a narrow cultural curiosity
essentially of England, France, Germany,
Italy, and the Netherlands primarily, in the 16th and 17th
century and then exported to the various colonial frontiers like the Americas. The
cumulative effects of this arrogance is that – indeed starting with the Royal
Society – it has been largely an exclusive white male club. This is offensive
and a real threat to both human integrity and democracy’s prospects.
Reductionism and arrogance are both on full display
in a just released (2014) book on genetics, genomics, and bioethics from Oxford
University Press. The Drama of DNA: Narrative Genomics, edited by Karen
Rothenberg and Lynn Bush that includes the quote I used as my epigram. The idea
of the “gaze” is of course a preoccupation of anthropologists with a long and
troubled history but what strikes me as particularly problematic are the last
two words in the sentence, i.e., “future within”. This reeks of reductionism –
as if we can determine what every human being is and will be based on a reading
of her genome; and arrogance – as if genomics is the determining key to reading our
complex and intertwined bio-cultural existence. And that leads to the two key
questions at the point of conflict: Is biology destiny? And can biology be
owned for corporate profit?
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Exome sequencing illustrates reductionism. Credit: Wikipedia |
The Drama of
DNA goes far in explaining the
ambiguities posed by the ongoing sequencing and decoding of the human genome
(actually, exome sequencing
for the most part), but does little to address the second question. In part this
is a consequence of the hegemony of U.S. patent and property law as the
epistemological framework for the erection of the entire juridical order. The
forging of a ‘Republic of Property’ as it applies to genomics – to adopt a term
used by Hardt and Negri (2009)
– is what we need to understand and is
what I examine next to continue exploring the limits and contradictions of
bioethics in the critique of the current capitalist grip on the ‘life
sciences’.
[1] I am using the concept of ‘enframing’ as derived
from Heidegger’s Ge-Stell, or the quality
that is a problem with technology consisting of “the fact that it limits the mobility of what we usually
call thinking in the general sense. It limits it inasmuch as it imposes a
certain movement…” See Daniel Suarez 2011.
Genomic narratives are an example of such a form of enframing and a major
consequence is this political economic myopia and blindness to the
contradictions of capital.
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