In “The Metabolism of Philosophy, In Three Parts,” Hannah Landecker writes,
[U]nder what historical conditions did problems of kinds or ontology make the material findings of experimental science seem to transcend the direct questions of physiology and chemistry that they were designed to answer? In what historical crucible did arcane corners of molecular interaction seem to provide suitable resources for developing a philosophy of freedom in the wake of World War II?
This is one reason we are exploring the boundaries of the human in the age of the life sciences: why, after all, should the material findings of experimental science have implications for things like philosophies of freedom? And how can we best understand those implications?
As in Agustin Fuentes’ presentation, what seems to be at stake here is a rethinking of nature/culture in which both terms are destabilized– not just the one on the right. In “How the Genome Got a Life Span,” Landecker and Martine Lappé explore the implications of epigenetics, and remark that the division of epigenetics from genetics may work to downplay or deny the destabilization of the natural, where the “natural” remains permanent and unchanging, and resides in DNA:
[A]s ethnographers, we are constantly being admonished either not to believe the hype of epigenetics or to ignore the blustering “bulwark” of genomics. These admonitions are telling, as the political and social work they do is often to re-emphasize the difference between epigenetics and genetics, exogenous and endogenous, environmental and genetic risks, just at a time when these distinctions are increasingly troubled. As writers, even if we do not want to define epigenetics as “changes in gene expression without change to the underlying DNA sequence,” journal editors insist on it, and the mantra of separateness becomes entrenched as a pro forma obligatory distinction between changes to the epigenome and changes in the DNA sequences constituting the genome….
What we have come to understand is that this area of research simultaneously reinforces the mantra of the separation of the genetic and the epigenetic while increasingly producing data that contradict this very distinction…. Paradoxically, then, it is exactly the separating of the epigenome from the genome conceptually and experimentally that has opened the door through which time and experience have come to the genome itself. (169, 170-71)
Nearly twenty years ago, after publishing Life as We Know It, I wrote about the relations between genetics and social policy in what I hoped was a Gouldian vein:
For the past hundred years or so, it seems that every time politically powerful humans have tried to extrapolate to the social realm what they thought they understood of genetics, the impulse behind and the results of the extrapolation have been politically reactionary in the extreme. From Social Darwinism to falsified twin studies to The Bell Curve, the biochemical template has been misread time and again as the sanction for the naturalization of the social. Genetics has in this sense served as the vehicle for ideology as such, the mystification of contingent and historically bounded social formations as the expressions of “natural” constraints and “natural” forces. And every time we hear that infidelity is “in our genes,” every time we hear a Newt Gingrich declaim on how the menstrual cycle prevents women from serving in combat duty, we are right to defend the proposition that although humans may not be infinitely malleable, still, human variety and human plasticity can in principle and in practice exceed any specific form of human social organization. It should be no surprise, then, that contemporary left theorists are skeptical about every kind of genetic determinism, in however mild or mediated a form: when we hear the word “genome,” we reach for our social-constructionist guns.
In Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss had argued that there are no necessary social or political consequences when a phenomenon is relocated from the “natural” to the “cultural” register, because arguments against the “naturalness” of patriarchy (for example) don’t necessarily displace or subvert actual patriarchal practices. I might add that the history of our understanding of autism demonstrates that it is not necessarily politically reactionary to move a phenomenon from the “cultural” to the “natural” register; surely the day the “refrigerator mother” theory was finally discredited was a good day for mothers everywhere. (And, as an aside, it is remarkable what role autism plays in Landecker’s argument and also in that of Scott Gilbert: it seems to lie critically at the point at which epigenetics meets the social fabric, and whether this implies the possibility of pharmaceutical or environmental “cures” or “mitigations” of autism– and whether this might be a Good Thing– is not yet clear.)
In “The Metabolism of Philosophy,” Landecker drew on Gilbert: “as Scott Gilbert has argued, the dominant image of the persistence of life over time for the discipline of biochemistry was the whirlpool, constantly moving, while that of genetics was the crystal– a static structure whose form held the possibility of repetition.” No doubt many humanists are excited by the notion that static structures– structures held to be static by definition– might be more fluid than scientists have imagined. As I remarked to Landecker in our seminar, the idea that environmental pressures and influences might have consequences not only for gene expression but for the genome itself certainly troubles the idea of the genome as fixed and permanent; but it also raises the possibility that if the “natural” is more in flux than we suspected, the “cultural” is less susceptible to change than we had hoped– and, indeed, may have lasting, perhaps multigenerational effects on bodies and minds. Landecker replied that the hope is that if we can better understand the dietary, pharmaceutical, environmental, and/or social effects on bodies and minds (and not just human bodies and minds), we might be able to repair or ameliorate the damage we are now doing to those bodies and minds. It is impossible not to share that hope. But Landecker and Lappé do not fail to note that there are grounds for caution, as well: “observers of epigenetic research have criticized the focus on the maternal body, concerned that it is producing new forms of surveillance as women become individually responsible for the integrity of the fetus’s epigenome in utero.” They cite the work of Sarah Richardson, who will join us in April. Let us be sure to continue this conversation with her….