| This dissertation explores the conditions of subjectivity in biotechnology by analyzing the way living entities are spoken of in various discourses of biotechnology. It examines the way biotechnology arises against the backdrop of an urgent need to manage the conditions that set upon human beings in their very livelihood, often called "biopolitics." "Interpellation" or "hailing" is the way the modern subject comes to understand herself as a biological entity, and biopolitics occurs through the interpellation of the subject---threatened as that subject is by the vicissitudes of biological existence. The dissertation explores the way the vitality of things is characterized in biotechnology and the debates about it, such that individuals come to understand themselves as the biological subjects they are. Part One identifies and examines three historical conditions of the biotechnological manner of interpreting how and what entities are: (i) that entities can be identified, named and reckoned with in the natural world, (ii) that these entities vary along a continuum rather than differ in any essential way, and (iii) that the variance among entities can be quantitatively measured. After a consideration of these preconditions, Part Two of the dissertation turns to look at three particular ways of speaking about beings in biotechnology that, in being spoken, call upon us to see ourselves and the beings of the world around us in its terms. These are (i) how human activity is thought of through the increasingly troublesome terms "natural" and "artificial," (ii) how the emergence of statistical analysis brings into being a way of apprehending truths about living beings as amalgams of classifiable properties, thereby allowing beings to be identified solely in terms of their relative place within a population that bears similar properties, and (iii) the way legal metaphors are used in both the scientific and ethical discourses of biotechnology to characterize the necessity with which entities exist, function, and are cognizable. By looking at the preconditions and rhetorical modes of biotechnology, the dissertation aims to understand how individuals are interpellated as biopolitical subjects in a world of biotechnology. |
