Technologies of inscription: Archival iterability and the semiotics of genomic language

This dissertation proposes to take the metaphorical description of DNA as language seriously to examine what this rhetoric can tell us about language, about the scientific investigation of DNA, and about the biopower they generate. It examines how DNA, scientific knowledge, and the social and legal subject are all produced through iterable processes of archivization analogous to those that produce language. These processes work as technologies of inscription that generate systems of difference whose stochastic accrual of pattern generates a distributed agency. Furthermore, this dissertation calls for revision of our understanding of justice to recognize the full consequences of this shift from the liberal humanist subject to a posthumanist subject with distributed agency, particularly in regard to questions of property.; Chapter 1 introduces the main concepts that will be engaged throughout the dissertation, particularly how the difficulties of translation impinge on this project as it seeks to juxtapose the discourses from many different disciplines. Chapter 2 focuses first on the type of knowledge scientific study produces by reviewing the work of historians and philosophers of science to illustrate the consequences that follow from recognition of the historicity of science, and second on negotiating a position from which to pursue investigations of the rhetoric mobilized by DNA and the institutions engaged in its socialization. Chapter 3 examines the role of linguistic metaphors in shaping DNA research and rhetorics and how these rhetorics engage the central problems in the study of language as it confronts the consequences of linguistic citationality. Chapter 4 focuses first on processes of genetic archivization in the socialization of DNA, and then on how the transgenic writing practices of global capital enable the Taylorist management of molecular life to provide a rationale for increased public involvement in the future course of biotechnology. Chapter 5 examines how biotechnology is confronting courts and legislatures with challenges to liberal humanist subjectivity and argues for a posthumanist construction of the subject that facilitates the possibility of a justice redefined to face the implications of archival iterability. Chapter 6 considers the implications of this redefinition of justice for a variety of social institutions.