Ann Burlein, "The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular"
(page 7 of 7)

To understand the significance of this changing sick role, I want to return to Rose's model: Max Weber's analysis of early capitalism as entailing the emergence of a new spirit. The worldly asceticism that Weber thinks emerged at this time also hinged on a sexual politics. As Janet Jakobsen has written: "Luther and Calvin do not encourage those with a religious vocation to leave the monastery and convent and live alone as pure autonomous individuals. Luther and Calvin encourage them to get married, and this is because, as feminists have long pointed out, autonomous individuals do not actually exist autonomously."[92] It was sexuality disciplined through "marriage, devotion to a family, and to a calling" that freed the reformed individual "from greed, ambition, and other lusts of the flesh," putting the asceticism into this worldliness and making it as an ethic.[93] Jakobsen notes that while monks took vows of poverty and communal obedience as well as celibacy, when Calvin attacked monasticism he did not even mention the first two vows. In the re-working of material relations that was underway in the sixteenth century, "sex comes to stand in for right relation to the material world and right relation between God and community." This is the moment in the West when "undisciplined sex replaces gluttony as the sin extraordinaire."[94]

Today, sex still stands in for material relations. Its disciplines still provide support for lyrical forms of preaching and promise. In a world that dreams of rendering even waste productive, medicine's sexual sermons authorize specific expectations regarding what makes life worth living and dying for. "The problem, as I see it," remarks Veena Das, "is that once the idea of God as author of nature and time is displaced and the political body is seen as subject to death and decay, secular means have to be crafted to ensure that the sovereign receives life beyond the lifetime of individual members. Thus the state has to re-imagine its relation to the family in more complex ways than simply assigning the family to the realm of the private."[95] Contemporary molecular medicine is one site where sovereignty's relations to 'the family' are being re-imagined. Hence the importance of sexual sermons, which preach the pleasures and responsibilities of the family romance. Anthony Giddens argued this point long ago: romance is about controlling and speculating on the future.[96] Routing sexuality through 'the family' is a primary way in which Americans recognize themselves as free. Thus we see in recent political discourse the claim that Western 'tolerance' of homosexuality proves that Western civilization offers greater freedom than 'Islamic civilization.'[97] "Americans understand ourselves to be a free people," writes Jakobsen, "and part of the proof of that freedom lies in the way we pursue our sexuality."[98]

When medical science takes as its project the task of touching life itself through a touch whose intervention is so small it can become 'smart,' forms of sexualized personhood re-emerge as a privileged locus for the conduct of our conduct.[99] In an economy which aims to make everything productive—debt, waste, our capacity for future capacity—the scientific secular focuses relentlessly on the family as it engenders complex desires for ordinary life and thereby, for the pleasures and everyday intimacies of conventionality itself. Molecular medicine acts as (what Lauren Berlant calls) an intimate public: juxtaposed to the political without necessarily going there, medical discourses deploy 'sexuality' in ways that promise us freedom—especially vis-à-vis our bodily fate(s)—even as these same sexual sermons re-structure the conjunction of experiences that we call 'sexuality.' To call these discourses 'sexual sermons' is not to argue that that sexuality 'functions like' a religion.[100] It is, rather, to pinpoint particular practices through which secular expectations surrounding the body and its vitality draw force from long-standing religious sensibilities in which sexuality stands in for ethical relation to the material world. We respond to their force, believe in the body (as Nietzsche put it), whether or not we profess or practice Christianity. These historically specific forms of belief in the body constitute a crucial matrix of everyday life and experience that joins knowledge, normative actions, and technologies of self into an apparatus by which we are both governed and govern ourselves.

Endnotes

1. I want to thank Patricia Clough and Ed St Clair for their unstinting support. I also thank Angela Zito and Faye Ginsberg, directors of NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where this work first began. [Return to text]

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. One, tr. Robert Hurley (NY: Vintage, 1978): 7-9. [Return to text]

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, tr. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967): 271. [Return to text]

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (NY: Vintage, 1977): 30. [Return to text]

5. This privileging of the somatic does not mean that discourse is discounted. In her analysis of websites for anti-depressants, for example, Emily Martin shows that pharmaceutical companies, which clearly privilege molecular mechanisms, also advocate traditionally discursive practices like journaling. See: Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

6. Michel Foucault, Abnormal, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador. 2003): 177. [Return to text]

7. "Christian secularism" reference in: Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, "World Secularisms at the Millennium," Social Text 64 18:3 (2000): 1-27. See: T. Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2003): 25. [Return to text]

8. N. Rose, "Medicine, History, and the Present," in Re-Assessing Foucault, J. Jones and R. Porter (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1994): 54-55. [Return to text]

9. Foucault (1977): 10, 304. [Return to text]

10. As compared to: Foucault (1978), 154; See also: Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). [Return to text]

11. B.K. Rothman, The Book of Life (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1998, 2001): 18-19 and 13. [Return to text]

12. E.F. Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 100. [Return to text]

13. S. Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and L. Parisi, "Biotech: Life by Contagion," Theory, Culture, & Society 24:6 (2007): 29-52. [Return to text]

14. S. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 33. [Return to text]

15. Franklin, 43-44. [Return to text]

16. Cited in: Franklin, 32. [Return to text]

17. Oyama, 1. [Return to text]

18. M. Lock, "The Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination," Current Anthropology 46 (2005): 547-70. [Return to text]

19. Books analyzing the gene as cultural icon include: D. Nelkin and L. Tancredi, Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); J. van Dijck, Imagenation (New York: New York University Press, 1989); D. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium (New York: Routledge, 1997); and J. Roof, The Poetics of DNA (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). [Return to text]

20. Wilmut seems to be thinking predominantly of human control. For an analysis that theorizes matter as congealed agency and includes non-human bodies, see: K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke, 2007). [Return to text]

21. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973): 199. [Return to text]

22. Foucault (1973): 144 and 142. [Return to text]

23. Foucault (1973): 155. [Return to text]

24. Foucault (1973): 162. [Return to text]

25. Foucault (1973): 158. [Return to text]

26. Foucault (1973):162. Also, compare acupuncture, which does not see the body as bounded within the skin and does not extensively theorize death. See: J. Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): 300 and Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). I suspect this difference is not unrelated to the way that Chinese 'religion' does not narrate the 'birth of the world/life' as a creation narrative. [Return to text]

27. Foucault (1973): 165-66 and 144. [Return to text]

28. Quoted in Foucault (1973): 166. [Return to text]

29. B. Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991). [Return to text]

30. Medievalists concur. Katharine Park's work on saints' cults demonstrates the centrality of religious practices to the development of dissection. She, too, notes that "a long historiographic tradition" wrongly presents the Church as opposed to dissection. "Like the familiar story associated with Christopher Columbus, whose courageous voyage of 1492 purportedly proved to a doubting public that the earth was round, this story has been debunked repeatedly by medievalists to no avail"—for representing the Church as hostile to dissection performs important cultural work in segregating science from religion. See K. Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006): 21. [Return to text]

31. Foucault (1973): 126. [Return to text]

32. Foucault (1973): 163, 164 and 197. [Return to text]

33. M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970): 277. [Return to text]

34. Foucault (1970): 278. [Return to text]

35. Foucault (1973): 144. [Return to text]

36. T. Laqueur, "Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative," in The New Cultural History, L. Hunt, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 178. [Return to text]

37. I. Kant, What is Enlightenment?, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959): 85. [Return to text]

38. Foucault (2003): 177. [Return to text]

39. I am disputing a common reading of Foucault, which identifies his account of secularization with Weberian disenchantment. Despite the shared relation to Nietzsche that underlies the analysis of science in both thinkers, this reading misses too much. For the claim that Foucauldian history is best thought as intensification, see: J. Nealon Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007): 24-53. [Return to text]

40. M. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1997): 335. [Return to text]

41. Ibid. [Return to text]

42. Foucault (2007). [Return to text]

43. For more on the notion of the "Christian Secular," in addition to the piece by Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2000) that I already cited, see: B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Foucault (2007): 76-9; Asad (2003); and W. D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

44. Quoted in: M. Cooper, "Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age," Body and Society 12:1 (2006): 19. [Return to text]

45. Cooper, 17. [Return to text]

46. Cooper, 5. [Return to text]

47. Cooper, 11 and 13. [Return to text]

48. Donna Haraway has summarized this process as one in which natural types or kinds become brands (1997). Drawing on Haraway, Lisa Adkins argues that this branding process extends to workers. Things that were once perceived as simply what women (for example) did by nature are now increasingly perceived by employees and employers as services and stratagems to be flexibly deployed vis-à-vis specific audiences. See: L. Adkins, "The New Economy, Property, and Personhood," Theory, Culture & Society 22:1 (2005): 111-130. [Return to text]

49. L.E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000): 226. [Return to text]

50. While the gene is still invoked as 'the book of life,' I read such insistent recourse to biblical images as signifying discontinuity. Imagining the gene in scriptural terms reaches back "beyond" the modern way of understanding the body in terms of its depth in favor of taking up older, usually Renaissance [Haraway (1997): 166-61], forms of textualizing nature. Paradoxically, then, taking recourse in biblical images signals the 'newness' of genetic medicine by casting the gene within a different frame and a different promise than the austere authority of a 'great white eye' strong enough to see the invisible death governing the body's life from deep within. [Return to text]

51. A. Dreger, "Metaphors of Morality in the HGP," Controlling our Destinies, P.R. Sloan, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). [Return to text]

52. van Dijck (1989): 34. [Return to text]

53. M. Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008): 142. [Return to text]

54. Cooper (2006): 7. [Return to text]

55. Cooper (2008): 15-50. [Return to text]

56. Foucault (2007): 235-239. [Return to text]

57. Quoted in: C. Waldby and R. Mitchell, Tissue Economies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): 127. [Return to text]

58. Waldy and Mitchell, 123-5. [Return to text]

59. While what private cord banks promise is at present clinically dubious [Waldby and Mitchell (2006): 121-2], imagining molecular mechanisms as endlessly regenerative pressures existing technologies. Without enough citizens willing to donate tissues, "[s]pare kidneys thus join the other flows of living, profitable matter (genetically or agriculturally available materials, human ova) that move from South to North to feed the demand for new forms of vitality and biovalue created by new biotechnologies"[Waldby and Mitchell (2006): 180]. Epstein makes a similar argument regarding the transnationalization of clinical trials: S. Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 197-201. Cooper's work provides a theoretical basis for generalizing these claims [(2008): 15-50]. [Return to text]

60. N. Rose, "Neurochemical Selves," Society Nov/Dec (2003a): 54. [Return to text]

61. Ibid. [Return to text]

62. Keller (2000). [Return to text]

63. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1969). [Return to text]

64. Nash makes the same argument regarding direct access for genetic tests in genealogy: C. Nash, "Genetic Kinship," Cultural Studies 18:1 (2004): 11 and 20. [Return to text]

65. N. Zack, "Why BiDil is Not the Answer: The Real Disconnection between Race and Medicine," Paper presented at the Center for Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 19 March 2007. [Return to text]

66. For entree into medical profiling debates, see Epstein (2007): 203-32. [Return to text]

67. Carolyn Rouse's work on sickle cell questions whether "molecular compassion" actually reduces racial disparities in health care. In one hospital Rouse studied, the director of sickle cell care explicitly sought to help health care practitioners un-learn their bias through appealing to the molecular level. Yet practitioners still required sick people to 'be' the kind of patient that they could recognize as deserving of compassion. This meant that adolescent males still tended to be moved to an adult treatment program at a much earlier age than their white compatriots. See C.M. Rouse, "Paradigms and Politics: Shaping Health Care Access for Sickle Cell Patients," Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 28:3 (2004): 369-399; and "Suffering and Sickle Cell," Presentation at Center for Religion and Media, New York University, 14 October 2005. Briggs develops a similar analysis for infectious disease with the notion of sanitary citizenship. See C. Briggs and C. Mantini-Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [Return to text]

68. Quoted in Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995): 12-13. [Return to text]

69. J. van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 73. [Return to text]

70. K. Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000): 199-200. [Return to text]

71. Finkler (2000): 184-85 and 207. [Return to text]

72. N. Rose, "The Neurochemical Self and its Anomalies," in Risk and Morality, R. Ericson and A. Doyle, eds. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003b): 411-12. [Return to text]

73. While genetic counselors strive to be non-directional, we rarely test for conditions valued as 'normal.' See: A. Clarke, "Is Non-Directive Genetic Counseling Possible? The Lancet 338:8773 (1991): 998-1002. [Return to text]

74. Rose (2003b): 422, 431-32. [Return to text]

75. Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): 102). [Return to text]

76. N. Rose, "Neurochemical Selves," Society Nov/Dec (2003a): 54. [Return to text]

77. Foucault (1973): 172; David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California, Press, 1995). [Return to text]

78. Rose (2003b): 424. [Return to text]

79. Wrote Rabinow: "[I]t is not hard to imagine groups formed around chromosome 17, locus 16,256, site 654,376 allele variant with a guanine substitution. Such groups will have medical specialists, laboratories, narratives, traditions, and a whole panoply of pastoral keepers to help them experience, share, intervene in, and 'understand' their fate" [(1996): 102]. [Return to text]

80. Bledsoe analyzes maternity, not genetics. Her work indicates that these dynamics did not 'originate' in neurogenetics: C. Bledsoe and R. Scherer, "Professionalizing the Natural, Naturalizing the Professions: Paradoxes in American Obstetrics," Paper delivered at the Reproductions Disruptions Conference, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, May 2005. [Return to text]

81. Rabinow (1996): 102. [Return to text]

82. Foucault (2003): 313.

83. K. Franke, "The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas," Columbia Law Review 104:5 (2004): 1399-1426. [Return to text]

84. Cited in Franke (2004): 1408. [Return to text]

85. L. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). [Return to text]

86. S. Franklin and C. Roberts, Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006): 18. [Return to text]

87. Franklin and Roberts, 119. [Return to text]

88. Franklin and Roberts, 222-23. [Return to text]

89. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1958): 70 and 172. [Return to text]

90. N. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

91. Talcott Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition (NY: Free Press, 1978): chapters 1-3. [Return to text]

92. J. Jakobsen, "Sex + Freedom = Regulation: Why?" Social Text 84:85 (2005): 297. [Return to text]

93. Jakobsen, 290 and 295. [Return to text]

94. J. Jakobsen, "Sex, Secularism, and the 'War on Terrorism," in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, M. McGarry and G. Haggerty, eds. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007): 24. [Return to text]

95. V. Das, "Secularism and the Argument from Nature," in Powers of the Secular Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006): 94. [Return to text]

96. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1992): 57. [Return to text]

97. J. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

98. Jakobsen (2007): 19. [Return to text]

99. Foucault (2007). [Return to text]

100. In elaborating on Foucault's analysis of secularization as 'in-depth Christianization,' I am arguing against the usual way that medical anthropology attends to religion: as a Geertzian 'calculus of meaning.' For this approach, see the volume of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry devoted to exploring the reception of assisted reproductive technologies among various 'world religions' [R. Rapp, "Reason to Believe," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 30 (2006): 420]. While important, limiting the exploration of religion and biomedicine to an identification of religion with tradition misses much of religion's power in the modern world. What study of the body contributes to sociological accounts of secularization is an ability to see how religiosity and its lyricism inflect 'our bodies, ourselves': as a form of cultural memory, religion happens without anyone needing to believe, profess, or practice. [Return to text]

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