The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular

Acquiring such a “great white eye” authorized interventions that were not only epistemic and technical, but also social. ¹ Historian Thomas Laqueur reads the scientific discourse of the clinic as one of several kinds of humanitarian narratives in circulation at this time: parliamentary committees inquiring into mining deaths; the novel; slave narratives; evangelical accounts of “hearts strangely warmed.” While diverse, these genres shared an affective strategy: all amassed concrete details of particular forms of physical suffering to construct a sense of shared bodily/organic nature which they then used to authorize both the professions and their social intervention. Laqueur writes:

In sharp contrast to tragedy, in which we feel for the suffering of the protagonist precisely because it is universal and beyond hope—there is no invitation, or possibility, to do anything to prevent Macbeth’s misdeeds or their consequences—the humanitarian narrative describes particular suffering and offers a model for precise social action. ²

However, the scientific rejection of religious resignation in favor of the salvation offered by empirical facts was not, in fact, born as an escape from authoritarian forms of religious “tutelage.” ³ Foucault presents the birth of modern empirical knowledge as part of a multi-layered set of historical processes of intensification, which he dubbed “Christianization in depth.” ^{4 5} Unique relations of pastoral power emerged in Catholicism (confession and spiritual direction), and later in Protestantism (testimony and autobiography). As ecclesiastical institutions declined, these religious technologies mutated and “spread out into the whole social body.” ⁶ Foucault analyzed their spread and intensification along two lines: first, as a technology of examination featuring an individualizing tactic common to medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers ⁷; and second as technologies of governmentality that became increasingly concerned with population. ⁸

Linking these two lines was a strategy of knowledge-power whose truth value—in the twinned sense of scientificity and social legitimation—entailed overtly rejecting religion while strengthening religious and moral sensibilities. Sometimes these sensibilities were explicitly evoked. Other times their evocation was indirect (as when religious sensibilities were strengthened to obtain the benefit of speaking against them). The human body was a privileged site for enacting this twofold gesture of rejecting, while reproducing, religious sensibilities. Thus the human body has become enrolled in producing ‘the secular’ as a Christian secularism. ⁹

The co-constitution of religion and the scientific secular goes well beyond logical indebtedness. It entangles us in a history that we have by no means left in the past; it continues to affect the reconfiguration of the body, sexuality, and soul that is currently at play in neo-liberal reforms of governance and economy. While the body in question for neoliberalism is no longer that of pathological anatomy, the human body nevertheless remains a privileged site for ‘secular’ re-workings of material relations. “[H]ealth has become a site of experimentation for the ‘new capitalism’ and its fascination with the promissory value that speculation generates” (according to pharmaceutical industry insider Philippe Pignarre). ¹⁰ As Melinda Cooper explains: “If we recall that the peculiarity of the welfare state was to guarantee both the productive life of the nation and its ‘unproductive’ phases (childhood and old age, the beginning and end of life), in an effort to underwrite the entire life cycle, it becomes clear that the neo-liberal state demarcates itself precisely by withdrawing from the extremes of childhood (education, child care, child protection) and old age.” ¹¹ The rationale for state withdrawal from these extremes of life is to render these non-productive stages of life productive by entrusting them to the free creativity of the private sphere—both private business and the private family. Consider how managed care opened up the non-profit sector of health care to private companies. Or consider how Reagan shifted old age insurance away from defined benefit plans to defined contribution, individual plans that speculated in the stock market. Writes Cooper:

The so-called new economic growth of the late 1990s—characterized by a spectacular rise of digital and life science technologies in the U.S.—would not have been possible without th[is] speculative investment …. It is no coincidence that these funds were attracted to the emerging field of regenerative medicine …. ¹²

The growth of biotech was also enabled by legal instruments that re-defined intellectual property to allow for the private ownership of natural entities (formerly excluded from patent law). While ‘the human person’ has remained uncommodifiable, and in that sense sacrosanct, biotech focuses on capturing the generative capacities of the body before they take on determinate form and thereby fall into the domain of the uncommodifiable potential person. In this way, ‘life itself’ became enterprised up as “a source of speculative surplus value.” ¹³ These legal reforms facilitated the opening of a new space of production, one that seeks to re-enliven that which had formerly been perceived as waste. Yet as biotech start-ups demonstrate, what matters most to this process of enlivening is less the tangible goods produced and more the speculative promise of future profit (based on present-day intellectual property rights to biological processes and methods that might one day generate actual goods and services). ¹⁴

In keeping with neoliberalism’s attempt to render productive life’s capacity for future capacity, the molecular body is no longer perceived in terms of the amoral violence of nature or the lyrical interiority of death and shame. Rather than being held together by linear logics of identity and history that foreground shame and death, new ways of bundling body/soul/fate into sexuality are being made and folded back into the biological body and the humanitarian narratives that proliferate around it. Memory is still key, but molecular memories are not backward looking but forward pulling. It is to these new ways of bundling body, soul, and fate that I will now turn.

1. Foucault (1973): 144.[↑]
2. T. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, L. Hunt, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 178.[↑]
3. I. Kant, What is Enlightenment?, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959): 85.[↑]
4. Foucault (2003): 177.[↑]
5. 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.[↑]
6. M. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1997): 335.[↑]
7. Ibid.[↑]
8. Foucault (2007).[↑]
9. 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).[↑]
10.  Quoted in: M. Cooper, “Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age,” Body and Society 12:1 (2006): 19.[↑]
11. Cooper, 17.[↑]
12. Cooper, 5.[↑]
13. Cooper, 11 and 13.[↑]
14. 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.[↑]