The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular

Section One
The Non-linearity of Molecular Biology: Shame and Death in the Body of the Clinic

To see how the body, sexuality and the ‘soul’ are being reconfigured in molecular medicine, it might help to recall an earlier moment when critics like Barbara Katz Rothman denounced the Human Genome Project (HGP) for claiming that: “Genetics is the single best explanation, the most comprehensive theory since God. Whatever the question is, genetics is the answer. Every possible issue of our time—race and racism, addictions, war, cancer, sexuality—all of it has been placed in the genetics frame.” ¹ While Rothman captured the lyrical excess surrounding the explanatory power of molecules, the successful sequencing of the human genome exploded any residual belief in DNA as a form of transcendent writing that could anchor “the Central Dogma” (according to which genetic information flows only one way, from DNA via RNA to a protein). As a result of this ‘new’ sequence information, the link between soul and body—between the sexuality ‘we’ moderns embrace as our deepest identity and its biological truth—can no longer be imagined through Rothman’s unidirectional image of the soul moving lock, stock, and cultural baggage into the genes.

Past the initial enthusiasm over genetic information, molecular biologists found that coding sequences for protein could be as low as 20,000 (between 100,000 and 300,000 genes had been expected). This made it clear that the ‘information’ necessary for genes to ‘build a body’ depends on more than the structure/code of DNA. The ‘secret of life’ cannot be written with building blocks alone. At the very least it requires plotlines: regulatory mechanisms which connect genes with other genes, and which determine when and where particular genes get expressed (in the sense of giving rise to a functional product like a protein). ² Incorporating these plotlines entails re-imagining causal relations as non-linear and non-deterministic. ³

The birth of Dolly, the first ‘cloned’ sheep, deconstructed another biological absolute. Dolly was made by using the cytoplasm of an egg (from one sheep) to re-program the DNA of specialized adult somatic cells (from another sheep), so that the latter ‘de-differentiated’ into reproductive cells. If the modernist view saw biology as “subject to conditions, which can be deciphered and understood,” the ‘Dolly technique’ makes biology itself conditional. “What the biological is has become inextricable from what the biological does or can be made to do.” ⁴ Capacities presumed lost can be re-activated. Genes can be re-programmed, their meaning determined flexibly by context. ⁵ As Ian Wilmut (one of Dolly’s creators/breeders) puts it, “Dolly has taken us into the age of biological control.” ⁶

So while the metaphor of the genome as transcendent writing can no longer be taken literally, problematizing genetics as a project of somatic (re)engineering still privileges relations of control. This control is situational: distributed across space (beginning with the cell) and time (re-capacitation). Causality and information are thought to emerge (rather than pre-existing the processes they ‘direct’ on the model of God in-forming matter). ⁷ Yet research still privileges molecular pathways. ⁸ The focus remains on heredity, even when social inequalities exert greater impact on biological processes. The reasons for such privileging are too complex to explore here. My point is simply that while the ‘new’ sequence information has demoted the gene from answer to tool, it has not cut off the head of this king. ‘The gene’ operates as an expansive cultural icon precisely because so much can be done to and with it. ⁹ As Sarah Franklin contends, ‘biological life’ and ‘control’ are increasingly being perceived as inextricable (2007). ¹⁰ It is this perception of inextricability that informs what (following Foucault) I will refer to as the ‘sexual sermons’ that today give meaning to people’s everyday lives.

I highlight the term ‘perception’ to echo Foucault’s analysis of the birth of modern clinical medicine. In that analysis Foucault traced the emergence of the anatomical body—how we came to imagine the interiors of our bodies through (and as) an anatomical atlas—as a shift in the medical gaze. This epistemic shift, which arose out of the practice of autopsy, was enabled in complex ways by the French Revolution. Revolutionary dreams of freedom infused modern medical science from its inception. ¹¹ If we want to understand the pull of the contemporary sermons that call us to steward sexuality in its somatic truth, it helps to turn to this earlier moment: there we see that clinical medicine helped shape modern secular society in no small part by virtue of enacting complex relations to religiosity.

Foucault’s account of the birth of modern clinical medicine zeroes in on its professed empiricism, its claim to have released disease “from the metaphysic of evil” in favor of locating it for the first time in the messy, three-dimensional space of individual bodies. Rather than seeing disease as a foreign substance, clinical medicine saw disease as an error inherent in life, the (normal) wear and tear in tissues that degenerate by nature. Death became relativized, distributed “throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths” in heart, lungs, brain. ¹² But death was also elevated into “the absolute point of view over life”; the “opening … on life’s truth.” ¹³ This opening was both technical (autopsy) and epistemological. Before the advent of pathological anatomy, doctors asked: “What is wrong with you?” Every symptom was a potential sign that spoke the nature of the disease; the physician’s task was to “read and interpret their text.” ¹⁴ In contrast, doctors in the clinic asked: “Where does it hurt?” Pathological anatomy defined the body by death as the “deeply buried point” that silently commands the existence of life and disease from below as their hidden truth. ¹⁵

This view of disease authorized experimental techniques “to question the body in its organic density, and to bring to the surface what was only given in deep layers.” ¹⁶ The deployment of death in autopsy as a technical instrument transformed the gaze of “these men who watch over men’s lives” by structuring their articulations around an invisible visibility: “it is no longer that of a living eye, but the gaze of an eye that has seen death—a great white eye that unties the knot of life.” ¹⁷ In the words of Bichat, the aim of anatomists “is attained when the opaque envelopes that cover our parts are no more for their practiced eyes than a transparent veil.”¹⁸

If under the old regime, doctors saw patients in their clothing and even treated by mail ¹⁹, the clinic increased closeness. Foucault argued, “For thousands of years, after all, doctors had tested patients’ urine. Later, they began to touch, tap, listen. Was this the result of the raising of moral prohibitions by the Enlightenment? To the contrary!” ²⁰ As evidence he pointed to the forty year gap between Morgagni’s development of dissection techniques and their deployment in clinical care by Bichat. Foucault contended that the “anatomical church militant and suffering” (whose superstitions physicians blamed for blocking dissection) was invented for the benefits it gave those speaking against religious taboos prohibiting the violation of a body which had been created (and was therefore ultimately owned) by God. ²¹ If it was immoral for a man to place his ear on a woman’s breast, but a doctor must, then invoking religious sensibilities regarding sexuality authorized a deeper penetration into the body: witness the stethoscope. “The moral screen, the need for which was recognized, was to become a technical mediation. The libido sciendi, strengthened by the prohibition that it had aroused and discovered, circumvents it by making it more imperious …. [T]he prohibition of physical contact makes it possible to fix the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area. For the hidden, the distance of shame is a projection screen. What one cannot see is shown in the distance from what one must not see.” ²² In this way, there developed a sense of bodily interiority: our ‘insides’ belong not to ourselves, but to our physician, who is there ‘by right.’

Foucault generalized these claims in The Order of Things. There he contended that the key characteristic of the modern episteme was its attempt to see through the visible into its depth: to know something was to comprehend its genesis in time. If natural history understood living beings taxonomically through genus and species, then modern biology became possible as scientists sought to understand living beings through organic function (gills are to respiration in water as lungs are to respiration in air). In contrast to the synchronic tables of natural history which took the plant as their central image, “when characters and structures are arranged in vertical steps towards life—that sovereign vanishing point, indefinitely distant but constituent—then it is the animal that becomes the privileged form.” ²³

Animalizing the tree of descent re-valued key values. Nature could no longer be good. Life could not be separated from murder, nor desires from anti-nature. In short, the world is not governed by divine providence. Hence Foucault repeatedly points to Sade as the contemporary of Cuvier: “for knowledge, the being of things is an illusion, a veil that must be torn aside in order to reveal the mute and invisible violence that is devouring them in the darkness.” ²⁴

1. B.K. Rothman, The Book of Life (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1998, 2001): 18-19 and 13.[↑]
2. E.F. Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000): 100.[↑]
3. 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.[↑]
4. S. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 33.[↑]
5. Franklin, 43-44.[↑]
6. Cited in: Franklin, 32.[↑]
7. Oyama, 1.[↑]
8. M. Lock, “The Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination,” Current Anthropology 46 (2005): 547-70.[↑]
9. 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).[↑]
10.  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).[↑]
11. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973): 199.[↑]
12. Foucault (1973): 144 and 142.[↑]
13. Foucault (1973): 155.[↑]
14. Foucault (1973): 162.[↑]
15. Foucault (1973): 158.[↑]
16.  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.[↑]
17. Foucault (1973): 165-66 and 144.[↑]
18. Quoted in Foucault (1973): 166.[↑]
19. B. Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991).[↑]
20. 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.[↑]
21. Foucault (1973): 126.[↑]
22. Foucault (1973): 163, 164 and 197.[↑]
23. M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970): 277.[↑]
24. Foucault (1970): 278.[↑]