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JOURNAL OF BIOETHICAL INQUIRY

Foucault’s ‘Metabody’

Much has been written on the attractive philosophical analyses of modernity that

Michel Foucault has crafted under the rubric of his theory of biopower. The notion that

uniquely modern modes of power are to be found in new alliances of purportedly

apolitical administrative and institutional powers for the management of citizens as

living beings with practices for the production of knowledge, and with social forms of

becoming a subject of experience, has stimulated thought across an astonishing range

of fields. However, it has been too easy to reduce the rigorous questioning central to

Foucault’s philosophical style to an automatic skepticism or an habitual contrarianism,

as it has been too difficult to extract from his assiduously researched conceptual

readings of historical cases principles of a readily extensible generality. Bioethical

thinkers devoted to the formulation of such principles will close any one of Foucault’s

texts that treat subjects nominally pertinent to bioethical questions—the body, medical

history, psychiatric history, sexuality, penality, etc.—edified but disappointed. Attaining

to bioethical principles from those texts would require inferential leaps en manège. At

the least, it would necessitate a bracketing of one of Foucault’s most constant

philosophical starting points, a historiographical orientation that attempts to operate as

little as possible with the use of historical universals. The effort in this paper, then, is

not to extract Foucaultian warrant for one or more fundamental bioethical principles

but to follow in the path of his thought about a particular set of pratico-intellectual

moves in the history of psychiatric etiology, in hopes of preserving what momentum his

model of philosophical analysis might hold. The paper suggests that his reading of this

history of psychiatric etiology might still serve as a model for thinking about the

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dynamic relations of contemporary conceptual commitments that orient our current

understandings of genetic, instead of hereditary, illness.

Although Foucault does not define the terms ‘heredity’ or ‘genetics,’ he appears

to employ a common sense of both terms. It is usual for the science of ‘heredity’ to be

reserved for theoretical and empirical work on the transmission of characters through

generation that took place prior to the re-discovery of Mendel’s laws of the physiological

basis of that transmission. Mendel is the terminological turning point, as Jean Gayon

notes: “the Mendelian science of heredity (or, as it was called from 1905 onwards,

genetics).” Foucault refers to “modern genetics,” (Foucault 2008, 227-8) although this is

not a particularly technical use of the term tied to texts in biology, but a speculation on

genetics in the context of the notion of human capital in neo-liberal political economy.

For the purposes of the paper, then, ‘genetics’ will refer to the manifold developments in

the biology of generational transmission of the twentieth century. According to

numerous historians of the biology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the

emergence of a science of genetics required a complex synthesis of results in statistics,

biochemistry, embryology, and a host of other fields. Here, we mean only to follow this

now-standard periodizing terminology.1

The paper treats several ontological questions about certain nineteenth-century

and contemporary medical and scientific conceptualizations of hereditary relation. In

particular, it considers the account of mid-nineteenth century psychiatric thought given

by Foucault in Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-19742 and

Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975.3 There, Foucault argues that a

fantastical conceptual prop, the ‘metabody,’ as he terms it, was implicitly supposed by

that period’s psychiatric medicine as a putative ground for psychiatric pathology. After

presenting the heart of Foucault’s thought on the metabody, the paper investigates the

possibility that a contemporary version of a metabody may operate. It speculates that

we might identify a contemporary genetic version of a metabody in one particular

current conception of the gene as replicator, an item marked by an ambiguous temporal

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ontology. To do so, it indicates similarities on the conceptual level between the

nineteenth-century ‘metabody’ identified by Foucault and the replicator gene.

I. FOUCAULT’S NOTION OF SOMATIZATION

Foucault uses the notion of somatization at a number of places in his work. In

the context of his work on medicine, the term designates practices, including practices

of constituting medical knowledge, that permit bodies to be lived in ways determined by

those practices and that medical knowledge. One of his chief examples of somatization

is to be found in Abnormal in his discussion of the mid-nineteenth century

pathologization of masturbation in children. Here, Foucault distinguishes his approach

from one typical of his contemporaries,4 which would describe this historical

phenomenon as a “moralization,” as the emergence and imposition of a moralizing

discourse about childhood sexuality. What distinguishes Foucault’s approach from this

one is his emphasis not on the imposition by authorities of a moralizing medical

discourse where none had been, but on what he calls “the somatization of

masturbation.” (Foucault 2003, 240) It is a matter of the specifically medical prognosis

of an adult life “crippled by illness,” rather than the identification of a moral “fault”

(Foucault 2003, 240) condemning a child to a future of “debauchery and vice.” (Foucault

2003, 237) Through a “scientific fabulation firmly established in medical discourse and

practice” (Foucault 2003, 240), “masturbation . . . becomes the universal causality of

every illness.” (Foucault 2003, 241) Indeed, according to this medical discourse, in

masturbation, the child purportedly risks his or her life. Note that Foucault specifies

that this causality is a “different medical causality,” one that supplements the “organic

causality being identified by the great clinicians and pathological anatomists of the

nineteenth century.” (Foucault 2003, 241)5

Of importance here is Foucault’s claim that the medical and social campaign or

crusade against masturbation, which on his account emerges at the end of the

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eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, affects “even . . . the discourse

and experience of the subjects.” (Foucault 2003, 241)6 In the case of the campaign

against childhood masturbation, the patient can become responsible for his or her

illness; the patient’s responsibility for autoeroticism amounts to an

“autopathologization.” (Foucault 2003, 242) For Foucault, this is a clear case of the

institutional and administrative use, in schools and family policies, of medical discourse

based on “scientific fabulation,” producing effects for how bodies are actually

experienced; at the very least, childhood autoeroticism as etiology makes the child a

potential agent of his or her own disease, and does so quite outside of the “organic

causality” that is concurrently being identified in pathological anatomy. Although space

prevents a demonstration of this, Foucault’s account of both hereditary and genetic

science ultimately concerns experiences of bodies subjectivized in part through these

forms of knowledge. Through the structuring and meaning-bestowing application of the

conceptual and epistemic instruments that are these new medical discourses, a body can

come to experience itself as a subject in novel ways.

II. FOUCAULT’S NOTION OF METASOMATIZATION: THE HEREDITARY METABODY

A. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974

Although Foucault presents a number of forms of somatization in his work, the

connection between somatization and metasomatization is less clearly exposed. Close

attention to the text is necessary to draw out the connective elements. If somatization

is the medico-epistemological production of an individual body as an organic cause of

its behavioral symptoms, as in the case of the pathologization of childhood

masturbation, metasomatization will be the location of symptoms partially and

ambiguously in the individual patient body and, crucially, in a causal ‘metabody,’ the’

body’ of the patient’s ancestors. We can locate an important starting point for

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Foucault’s notion of metasomatization in Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1973-1974. (Foucault 2006) Here, the term ‘metasomatization’ is not yet

employed, but the idea of the “family and ancestors” as “collective support” for an

individual patient’s mental illness is presented. The conceptual context is Foucault’s

discussion of the psychiatrist’s means for establishing himself as a doctor through the

practice of psychiatric questioning. This questioning gathers a “medical history” from

the testimony of the mentally ill patient. There is a double aim, here, according to

Foucault: to establish the psychiatrist as a physician and to establish elements of the

individual’s life as symptoms. (Foucault 2006, 271) Foucault refers to the process of

making elements of a life show up as symptoms as the “realization of the illness,” using

the term realization with the sense of “to render real.” (Foucault 2006, 270)

On Foucault’s account, it was when organic medicine could not identify an

individual, organic pathology in a patient that psychiatric medicine gained a foothold.

But it required patient testimony to do so. Indeed, the individual confers medical

authority on the psychiatrist through recounting the medical history of his or her

ancestors. It is in this context that the effort to realize the psychiatric illness strays

from the body of the patient and resorts to a fantastical entity, the “huge fantastical

body of the family.” (Foucault 2006, 270-1)7 When no organic account can be found in

the individual’s body for conduct said to be symptomatic, the cause of the supposed

symptom is located in a new kind of body, the corpus of causes that is the unified body

made up of the collected symptoms of the patient’s ancestors’ individual organismic

bodies.

“Heredity is a way of giving body to the illness at the very moment that this illness cannot be

situated at the level of the individual body; so one invents, one cuts out a sort of huge fantastical

body of the family affected by a mass of illnesses: organic and non-organic diseases,

constitutional and accidental diseases . . ..” (Foucault 2006, 271)

Mimetically attaching itself to organic medicine, psychiatry invents a familial body

beyond and before the organic body of the individual patient. In this text, Foucault

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characterizes the relations between this ancestral body and the patient’s body in at least

four ways: the ancestral body is (i) a “meta-organic substratum” for the patient’s body;

(ii) the “reality” of the patient’s body or the “true body of the illness;” (iii) a substitute

for the “body of pathological anatomy;” (iv) the “meta-individual analogon of the

doctor’s organism.” (Foucault 2006, 271)8

Thus, while the ancestral body is the etiological source and the causal ground for

the illness of the sick individual body, that sick body is the diagnostic medium for the

psychiatrist’s access to knowledge of the meta-individual illnesses of the ancestral body.

Although the patient’s individual body is ill, its illness lies most really in its correlative

ancestral body. Does Foucault intend to affirm a total substitution of ancestral for

patient body? It seems more likely that he means to describe the playing off against

each other of three kinds of bodies in psychiatric discourse and practice: the sick,

individual patient body; that individual, sick body as treated by the doctor ( i.e. “the

doctor’s organism”) and pathologist, namely, an organic body of pathological anatomy;

and the ancestral metabody supposed to be the causal analog of, or causally analogous

to, the organic body. Foucault is identifying a certain corporeal multiplicity that

constitutes the historical establishment of the psychiatric discernability of mental

illness.

Madness can be somatized and realized through the hereditary body of the

family, that is, through the illnesses that reportedly afflicted the patient’s ancestors.

Foucault’s claim is that such psychiatric diagnosis operated in this period by identifying

a family precedent. However, what is to count as a disease precedent is not governed by

a strict similarity; nearly any irregularity in ancestral conduct could be considered an

explanatory cause of the malady of the sick body. In addition, although the substratum

that is the ancestral body is “meta-organic,” it legates its diseases on the basis of a

“material support.” Hence, hereditary tracing points to the existence of a material

substratum that is trans-individual, on the basis of the assumption that the symptoms

of the sick body arise because they have been transmitted by sick ancestors. On the

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assumption that mental illness is the effect of hereditarily transmitted organic disease,

the psychiatrist claims that there exists “an organic substratum that is not the

individual substratum of pathological anatomy.” (Foucault 2006, 271)

It seems that the reasoning proceeds as follows, including numerous terms of

doubtful synonymy: An individual body is mentally ill. That sick individual body

reports organic and non-organic illnesses of ancestors. Hence, its ancestral body is

organically and non-organically ill. Individual illness is inherited from the ancestral

body of the individual. This transmission must have a material support. Therefore, the

mental illness of the individual has an organic basis.

B. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975

The following year’s Collège de France lectures see the developed notion of

metasomatization. Here Foucault argues that the mid-nineteenth century field of

psychiatry abandoned therapeutic tasks for a pathology of the abnormal. 9 On this view,

the notion of the abnormal supplanted that of illness as the organizing principle of the

field, permitting this field to become the “science of the biological protection of the

species.” (Foucault 2003, 316 and Foucault 2003B) It thereby took on “a role of

generalized social defense.” (Foucault 2003, 316) By “social defense,” Foucault means

an explicit project of late nineteenth-century European societies to defend themselves

against “dangers that undermine” them “from within.” (Foucault 2003, 316; 321, n. 40)

A chief internal danger is the “abnormal individual” as identified by the field of

psychiatry. (Foucault 2003, 317) For Foucault, this function of social defense is

grounded in the notion of psychiatric heredity, a concept that in turn owes its broad

utility to its support in two other concepts. These are the concept of the condition (état)

and the concept of the metabody. ‘Condition’ is an explicit technical concept within

nineteenth-century medicine; ‘metabody’ is a term that Foucault offers in his account of

the emergence of a pathology of the abnormal.

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Foucault describes the condition, especially in the form of a fond psychique or

“mental background,” as neither an illness nor a state of health, but a “permanent

causal background.” (Foucault 2003, 312)10 A condition can be sought for any

behavioral or physical pathology, but is not itself a pathology and is a cause that is

distinct from its pathological effect. In addition to this causal “fecundity,” the condition

can only be found in individuals who are not normal. (Foucault 2003, 312)11 A

condition is a “general deficiency” (Foucault 2003, 312) in the body’s overall internal

coordination and dynamic integration. The invention of this background causal

principle for pathological effects is the starting point for the development of the more

full-blown version of a causal background, namely, the metabody and its accompanying

process, metasomatization.

The advent of this “privileged psychiatric object”--the condition (Foucault 2003,

311)--has two consequences. First, since anything deviant, whether psychological or

physiological, can be linked to the condition as its effect, the condition has a great

integrative power. It links anything deviant with itself, this permanent causal

background that is neither health nor illness but is the ground for any kind of deviance,

including physical and psychological illness. This integrative power is critical for

Foucault, as it is psychiatry’s principle for the extension of its practical ability to claim

the authority to intervene in human conduct. It essentially opens whole new areas of

human life to the operation of “psychiatric power” (Foucault 2003, 313), annexing

conduct to its medical territory through the medicalization of the abnormal. It is,

however, “clearly marvelous,” as Foucault puts it, essentially classing this medicine as a

magic. (Foucault 2003, 313) The abnormal is not synonymous with the pathological, the

ill, or the diseased. The condition is the beginning of the invention of a medicine of the

abnormal, that is, the invention of a paradoxical kind of medical treatment of those who

are not ill, but deviate from a norm.

Second, this divagation to a marvelous etiological level eventually returns to a

physiological level; the condition receives a physiological interpretation as the faulty

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overall structure of an individual who suffers from a developmental regression or stasis.

The condition in its physiological guise is a condition of the whole body of the deviant

individual. But here Foucault suggests that the notion of a condition is subject to a kind

of theoretical regress itself: certain psychiatrists take it to be not just the ground for the

emergence of abnormal effects in individuals, or that which accounts for those effects,

but they begin to construe it as an abnormality of a sort itself. When the condition for

abnormality becomes the abnormal condition, this transposition sets off an explanatory

regress that is ontologically productive: the abnormal condition now evidently requires

a cause and the search for one begins:

“What kind of body can produce a condition that definitively marks the whole of an individual’s

body? This gives rise to the need to discover the background-body, so to speak, that by its own

causality confirms and explains the appearance of an individual who is the victim, subject, and

bearer of this dysfunctional condition . . . . What is the background-body, this body behind the

abnormal body? It is the parents’ body, the ancestors’ body, the body of the family, the body of

heredity.

The study of heredity, or the attribution of the origin of the abnormal condition to

heredity, constitutes the “metasomatization” required by the whole theoretical construction. This

metasomatization and this study of heredity offer in turn a number of advantages to psychiatric

technology.” (Foucault 2003, 313) 12

Thus, Foucault’s position is that the hereditary metabody arises out of a version

of the condition that considers the condition as a causal background to be a feature of

the organism as a whole, a structural feature that is not localizable in parts or regions of

a body. In this version of a condition, then, the condition is ascribed to the body as a

whole and causes that body’s physical or behavioral pathologies. How is the ontological

and medical distance between the non-pathological condition of the whole organism, on

the one hand, and the pathological, somatic effect that is localized in the organism, on

the other hand, theoretically justified? Although Foucault does not raise the question in

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precisely these terms, it seems that this is the question for which the emerging science

of heredity served as an answer.

According to Foucault, it is here that a whole “background body” is posited, one

with “ultraliberal” causal powers, the “body of heredity.” (Foucault 2003, 313-315) He

writes: “Finding a deviant element at any point in the hereditary network will be

sufficient to explain the emergence of a condition in an individual descendant.”

(Foucault 2003, 314) Etiology establishes a branch in a fantastic realm. The body of

heredity is a “metabody:” it is a great, composite, transindividual “body” assembled of

many bodies genealogically related by descent, but linked equally and more importantly

by abnormal behaviors considered to be offspring of each other. (Foucault 2003, 315-

317) Abnormal elements of individual ancestral bodies become elements of the unified,

hereditary metabody of the patient. This composite background condition, the

metabody, is then the explanatory cause for pathological effects at the level of the

individual patient. The key point here is that: “heredity functions—at the level of this

metabody, this metasomatization—as the fantastic body of physical or functional or

behavioral abnormalities that is the origin of the appearance of the ‘condition.’”

(Foucault 2003, 314) This functioning then permits the psychiatry of the period to

focus in part on the quality of marriages in terms of their reproductive function.

Sexuality becomes an object of psychiatric attention not with respect to pleasure or

instinct but in terms of its potential to reproduce not only human beings but their

deviance or aberration. Here, Foucault does not hesitate to term this a “remoralization

at the level of this fantastical etiology.” (Foucault 2003, 315)

We may return to the question posed above about the distance between the non-

pathological condition and its pathological effect. With the introduction of the concept

of the metabody, this distance is the difference between the individual body of the

psychiatric patient and his or her hereditary metabody. Hereditary theories of

degeneration create and exploit this distance and employ the notion of hereditary

causality to forsake individual therapy for social defense in the name of preventing the

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realization of conditions. For Foucault, because “abnormal conditions” were considered

to be “fixed by heredity through an individual’s genealogy,” the curing or healing of

individual patients can no longer be a medical aim. (Foucault 2003, 316) It is for this

reason, Foucault holds, that hereditary psychiatry compelled itself to take as its finality

the biological protection of the species through eugenic measures instead of individual

healing or therapy.

In Foucault’s account, then, the metabody serves as an important step on the

way from a medicine of individuals to a medicine of populations. The group of

hereditary ancestors is the biological means for the expansion of a medicine of

individuals to a medicine of collectivities. The ancestral group is already strangely

present in the current abnormalities of an individual patient. From there, only a few

more steps are required for the vitality or health of a population, race, or species itself

to become the object of psychiatric care. Indeed, Foucault’s analysis then proceeds to

discuss the racism of the abnormal and the Nazi programs of eugenics.

In sum, the notion of the metabody permits “indefinite causal permissiveness,”

retrojection of moral responsibility for individual aberrations to reproductive functions

of ancestors, and the start of a medicine for the protection of populations based on

fears of degeneration and a racism of the abnormal.

III. IS THERE A GENETIC ‘METABODY’?

Might Foucault’s thought on the hereditary metabody be relevant to

contemporary matters of human genetics, and to the bioethical concerns and human

self-understandings informed by them?13 A reply to this question must take into

account at least two significant developments that have occurred in the move from the

era of heredity to that of genetics.14 First, genetic therapy becomes a possibility.

Development of the field of human genetics eliminates the supposed obstacle to cure

that was marshaled in Foucault’s account presented above; curative intervention on the

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genetic level is realizable. This presumably means that eugenic measures to prevent and

promote human reproduction can no longer repose on the idea of “abnormal

conditions” that are “fixed by heredity through an individual’s genealogy.” These are no

longer “fixed” in the sense of being immutable and incorrigible if genetic medicine can,

precisely, “fix” them in the sense of repair them or restore them to some faultless state.

Second, a genetic medicine of individuals emerges. Richard Lewontin mentions both of

these points in It Ain’t Necessarily So: “the eugenics movement, having been discredited

as a movement for social improvement, largely by the extreme racism of the Nazis, was

converted into human clinical genetics, whose object is not to better society as a

collective but to provide to individuals and families diagnosis, counseling, and therapies

to alleviate individual suffering.” (Lewontin 2000, 204) 15

Plainly, the terrain of knowledge about human heredity has changed enormously

since the late-nineteenth century. The science of heredity has been replaced by the

science of genetics, and rigorous identification of the constituents of the human genome

has changed this landscape in many ways. In the mid-nineteenth century period that

Foucault treats in the texts examined here, understanding of the physical basis for

heredity at the genetic level was importantly incomplete; the advent of biological

understanding of the mechanisms of heritability are generally identified with the 1900

spread or rediscovery of Georg Mendel’s 1866 inductive argument that there must be

some material particulate carrier or cause of the inheritance of physical traits. Further

developments include the emergence of molecular genetics and the current period of

genomic science and medicine.16 But ontological description of the results of these

discoveries is certainly still unresolved in the philosophy of biology.17

But what can be said more particularly about the potential relevance of

Foucault’s notion of the metabody to contemporary thought? Is there a contemporary

genetic version of a hereditary metabody? A negative reply to this question might

contend that the term ‘hereditary metabody’ simply describes a necessarily tentative

and exploratory period in medical science’s initial inquiries into the genetic level of

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human biology; on this view, the conceptual support provided by a hypothetical

hereditary metabody would simply have served as a placeholder for the confirmed

content of a mature science of genes to come. Were that the case, one might argue that

genetic science since the nineteenth century has in fact filled the suspended gap

between an actual body and a provisional and suppositional metabody with the detailed

content of contemporary human genetic science. On this view, molecular genetics

would finally have supplied rigorous identification of the once merely suppositional and

fantastical “material support” that permitted the operation of the hereditary metabody

in the nineteenth-century psychiatric multiplication of bodies. On this view, then,

nineteenth-century claims for an hereditary psychiatry, based on the clinical

transposition of autobiographical patient reports into etiological genealogies of

psychiatric symptoms, were eventually validated by a genetic psychiatry that establishes

an authentic science of the descent of the abnormals. There would thus be no

contemporary, genetic version of the old hereditary metabody for the reason that

molecular genetics veridically updated the old notion, making it in fact an

epistemologically useful and necessary theoretical expression of the reality of genetic

continuity and transmission.

Of course, the hereditary metabody did not simply serve as such a placeholder; it

conditioned the lived experience of great numbers of psychiatric patients whose

somatization was made possible by a metasomatizing theoretical commitment. But

leaving aside the matter of experiences, we need not find an absolute identity in order

to discern resonant, operative and illuminating contemporary remainders of the

nineteenth century version of the hereditary metabody. The questions should rather be

whether there are problematic discursive analogs of the hereditary metabody and

whether there is a risk that any such analogs permit new versions of the indefinite and

epistemologically weak etiological and diagnostic linkages that the hereditary metabody

purportedly once allowed.

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A. The Replicator Gene

In fact, there is reason to think that theoretical support for a contemporary

genetic version of Foucault’s hereditary metabody can be identified in some current

discourses of evolutionary biology.18 This new genetic metabody would be supported by

and obscured in the strange temporality and continuity of the replicating gene unit, at

least in one common and controversial construal of it, found in the evolutionary

thought of biologist and popularizer, Richard Dawkins and philosopher of biology,

David Hull. (Dawkins 1978; 1982; Hull 1980) This construal of the gene unit includes an

ambiguous replicational ontology of spatially distributed copies without originals. This

spatial distribution of copies without originals is what accounts for the strange

temporality, for it amounts to an important temporal disparity. That is, an odd

implication of this view is that organisms in a relation of descent are (at least partially)

successive in relation to each other, but the genes of these same organisms are ever

contemporaneous with each other.

This disparity is expressed in an ontologically ambiguous conception of a gene:

on the one hand, a gene is said to have continued itself in another organism, in

generation; in this sense, the span of its existence is not limited by that of the organism

it helps to constitute.19 On the other hand, a gene is this particular gene in this

particular organism, with its existence limited by the life span of the organism, among

other things. On this ambiguous conception of the gene, a gene is both this particular

gene identified by the organism in which it is located and the trans-organismic item that

has continued itself by replication and which thus exists in and across more than one

organism that are related by descent. We can express the ambiguity at issue in terms of

individuation, as well: the term ‘gene’ may refer to both (i) the kind of thing that is

individuated precisely by (individuated) organism and (ii) a trans-organismic item

distinguished by comparison to other trans-organismic items (or genes).

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In addition, the criterion for an organism’s possession of a gene is put into

question on this replicational ontology. On what basis should a gene be said to “belong”

to any one organism, if it is in fact simultaneously or successively distributed in

identical form and type of substance across several distinguishable organisms in a

relation of descent? These questions about the temporal scope, identity conditions and

individuation criteria demonstrate that important issues of the ontology of genetic

replication remain to be clarified.

Have we evidence that a specifically genetic version of the metabody reposes on

these ontological ambiguities found in a common notion of the gene? As an example of

the problematic ontology at issue, let us first consider the relevant portion of the

ontology of the gene found in the general position shared by Richard Dawkins and

David Hull.20 Here is a sketch of the relevant theoretical points of their position drawn

from the work of expert commentators. Kim Sterelny and Philip Kitcher provide the

pertinent basic elements of Dawkins’ story:

“Genes are replicators, and selection is the struggle among active germ-line replicators.

Replicators are entities that can be copied. Active replicators are those whose properties

influence their chances of being copied. Germ-line replicators are those with the potential to leave

infinitely many descendants. Early in the history of life, coalitions of replicators began to

construct vehicles through which they spread copies of themselves. Better replicators build better

vehicles, and hence are copied more often. Derivatively, the vehicles associated with them become

more common too. The orthodox story focuses on the successes of prominent vehicles—

individual organisms.” (Sterelny and Kitcher 1998, 153-154)

As is well known, Dawkins reverses a conventional construal of the organism-gene

dependency relation; instead of genes being carried by organisms, organisms are carried

by genes.

For present purposes, three points in Dawkins’ account are essential. The first

point concerns his view of the temporal scope of the gene or relevant genetic material.

The second point concerns the source of this scope, namely, trans-organismic

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persistence through replication. The third point follows on these two and concerns the

individuation of the gene.

With respect to the first point, Robert Brandon explains Dawkins’ understanding

of the temporal scope of the gene:

“The qualities that make for good replicators are longevity, fecundity, and fidelity. (Dawkins

1978). Here longevity means longevity in the form of copies. It is highly unlikely that any

particular DNA molecule will live longer than the organism in which it is housed. What is of

evolutionary importance is that it produce copies of itself so that it is potentially immortal in the

form of copies.” (Brandon 1998, 178, my emphases)

Elizabeth A. Lloyd likewise notes Dawkins’ stress on the possible endlessness of genetic

extension: “Genes are the only units that survive in the selection process. The gene

(replicator) is the real unit because it is an ‘indivisible fragment’; it is ‘potentially

immortal.’” (Lloyd 2007, 60) Ernst Mayr also puts the point in terms of the longevity of

the gene:

“One of the most important discoveries of molecular genetics was that some genes are very old.

This means that the same gene (essentially the same sequence of base pairs) is found in organisms

that are only distantly related, say in Drosophila and mammals.” (Mayr 2001, 113) 21

About the second point, the question of the source of the gene’s scope, Mayr

specifies that the rule is that genes transmit themselves from one organism to another

through faithful copying: “Although a gene is normally constant from generation to

generation, it has the capacity to ‘mutate’ occasionally into a different form. Such a

newly mutated gene (mutant) will again be constant, unless another mutation occurs.”

(Mayr 2001, 93, my emphases) Oddly, since in replication genes are not relinquished or

given away, Mayr even describes this in the language of bequeathing or legating: “The

genetic material is . . . handed unchanged from generation to generation, except for an

occasional mutation.” (Mayr 2001, 92, my emphasis)

With respect to the individuation of genes, how should this longevity by copying

be understood? Why is the gene said to be “the same” from one generation to the next?

17

Note above that Mayr says “”the same gene” and “the same sequence” when he refers to

genetic material in not only numerically distinct organisms but numerically distinct

species. He also writes that “a” gene is “constant from generation to generation.” The

infrequently noted problem with this view, or at least with this language, is one

articulated by Elizabeth A. Lloyd. About Dawkins’ ontology of replicators, she writes:

“Because organisms, groups, and even genomes are destroyed during selection and reproduction,

the answer to the survival question must be the replicator. Strictly speaking, this is false; it is

copies of the replicators that survive. He therefore must mean replicators in some sense of

information and not as biological entities.” (Lloyd 2007, 62)22

Strict speech is in order here to grasp the problem of simultaneously

individuating a gene in two ways: (i) by reference both to the individual organism it

constitutes and to other kinds of genes (the referent being “this particular gene in this

particular organism”) and (ii) by distinction from other types of genes, by chemical

composition and structure, and indifferently with respect to the organism(s) in which a

gene on definition (i) exists (the referent being a transorganismic gene). Lloyd takes the

particular (or numerical) materiality of the gene substance to matter for the

individuation of a gene; in his account of the individuation of genes as copied copiers,

Dawkins does not consider this to matter.

We can now address the question of the existence of a contemporary—

specifically genetic—metabody. More particularly, should this Dawkinsian replicator be

considered a contemporary version of the hereditary metabody? Does Dawkins’ notion

of a replicator share features or functions with the hereditary version of the metabody?

Or might it perhaps be a condition for the possibility of a new genetic conception of a

metabody? To answer these questions, let us recall the chief features and functions of

the hereditary metabody in Foucault’s account. Among other things, the hereditary

metabody was: (i) a “meta-organic substratum” for the patient’s body; (ii) the “reality” of

the patient’s body or the “true body of the illness;” (iii) a substitute for the “body of

pathological anatomy;” and (iv) the “meta-individual analogon of the doctor’s organism.

18

(i) Is the replicator a “meta-organic substratum” for the patient’s body? Since the

evolutionary theory of Dawkins and Hull is not a theory about clinical medicine, the

replicator cannot be said to play this particular role ascribed to the hereditary

metabody. But the meta-organicity of the hereditary metabody was in fact a moment or

stage in a conceptual dynamic that cycled though the meta-organic body in order to

return to the body of the deviant patient and provide deviant behavior with an organic

substratum, by inference, after all. This ambiguity or duplicity found in the notion of a

meta-organic substratum that provides a behavioral disorder with an organic

substratum, this detour or circulation through ontological levels, is relevantly similar to

an ambiguity identified above in Dawkins account of the ontology of the gene. The

hereditary metabody is ambiguously both beyond the sick body of the patient and

found in and through that body; likewise, the replicator gene is ambiguously both this

particular gene in this particular organism and genealogically before and after this

particular organism.

But can this spatio-temporal ambiguity of the replicator gene be said to be meta-

organic? Clearly, on one of its two component senses, it is transorganismic. But

whether it is meta-organic is a complex theoretical issue. To see this, we can compare

the informational interpretation of the gene noted by Lloyd with the hereditary

metabody as a “meta-organic substratum” for an organic body. The replicator is

ambiguously transorganismic and organismic. Claims for its transorganismic longevity

depend on ignoring or rejecting the strict speech of Lloyd’s observation that the copy is

not one and the same item as that of which it is a copy, even were they identical in type

of structure or chemical composition. In other words, Dawkinsian replication is

indifferent to materiality and to specific difference in organism; its criterion for

transorganismic identity is purely formal, or as Lloyd puts it, informational. Here, an

ontology of information arrives to save the otherwise troublesome ontological duplicity

and incompatibility of the copying copier, that is, to permit one to assert that a gene

unit whose lifespan is limited by that of the organism (this particular gene-token) and a

19

copy of that gene unit found in a descendant organism are in some sense the same: they

are informationally identical, though materio-chemically, numerically distinct. Hence,

the question of whether the transorganismic aspect of the replicator gene makes it

meta-organic depends on whether the ontology of biochemical genetic information must

include a centrally operative material (organic) basis. If it must, the replicator is not

meta-organic. This question cannot be given a general answer here, but it seems that

Dawkins’ ontology of information does assume that formal or informational aspects of

genetic material are the essential nature of the replicator. Otherwise, it is difficult to

see how he could assert that replicators have transorganismic continuity.

(ii) The hereditary metabody is also conceived to be the “reality” of the patient’s

body. Here, Dawkins’ account is similar: with respect to the mechanisms of natural

selection, the replicator is the reality of its vehicle, that is, the gene material is the real

motor of natural selection and the vehicle (i.e. the organism that carries and conveys the

gene material) is its product or epiphenomenon. This is so both in terms of the

existence of the vehicle and in terms of its “interests.” On Dawkins’ view, it is in fact the

replicator that determines which vehicles survive to the age of reproduction and

reproduce, and it is the interests of replicators that motivate evolutionary adaptation.

(iii) The hereditary metabody also functions as a substitute for the “body of

pathological anatomy.” But, as we have seen, this substitution is provisional, a stage in

the conceptual circulation that produces an organic substratum from a meta-organic

substratum. In order for the ambiguity between the transorganismic and the organismic

conception of a gene to count as a similar sort of circulation, the question to be

answered is whether or not the transorganismic replicator stands in a similar relation to

the vehicle as does the hereditary metabody to the body of the patient. Is there an

analogous conceptual circulation between the replicator and the vehicle such that one of

these gains by this circulation some property it first lacked? Indeed: at first glance it

would seem that based on its replication the gene gains from the organismic level the

capacity to have a genealogy, despite the fact that Dawkins would deny that organismic

20

lines of descent would be the source of replicator lineage. The replicator is taken to be

the cause of organisms having a lineage and a replicator gains a specific replicator-level

lineage through its creation of organismic lineage(s). Contra Dawkins, it would

nevertheless appear that the genealogy of an organism is simply miniaturized in a

genealogy of the replicators that direct its constitution and functioning, and that the

genealogy of an organism is then subordinated to that miniaturization. This is because

his commitment to the transorganismic version of the replicator ought conceptually to

prevent his description of the replicator as even having a lineage or genealogy. Whence

the claim that a replicator can have a lineage, then, if it is unsupported by the theory? It

seems it is simply unreflectively adopted from a picture of organisms as having

lineages.

For on the strict transorganismic sense of the replicator, a replicator should not

be said to create a lineage for itself but to be, in its transorganismic extension, a linear

genetic entity whose scope simply includes a number of dependent, successive

organisms whose existence it causes. On this view, the perfectly copied replicator does

not have an interrupted or intermittent existence; as itself, it is contemporaneous with

all of the successive organisms it produces. For this reason, Dawkins should not

characterize replicators as having “the potential to leave infinitely many descendents.”

That is, he should not assert this and the claim that a replicator may be immortal

through replication, or replicationally immortal. Either it is immortal or it has

descendents. If it is immortal, it does not have a lineage; rather, it is a linear continuity

grounding the organismic appendages it generates. It is a continuity across, and by

contrastive temporal relation to, the discontinuous organismic forms it constitutes.

That these two temporal ontological statuses are confused and marshaled together in

Dawkinsian rhetoric shows the elision of the materiality of the genetic material as well

as the assumption that the informationally identical replicator gene found in

numerically or specifically different organismic vehicles is theoretically impervious to

those differences. Replicators are unaffected by difference in vehicle. Even if selection

21

pressures on organisms indirectly affect the survival chances of replicators, ultimately,

it is the replicator level that is responsible for the survival chances of replicators, since

on this view replicators produce the phenotypical features of organisms that matter for

the natural selection of organisms, and hence of replicators, in the first place. What is

fascinating about the Dawkinsian account is the clarity with which we find exposed the

conceptual linkage between genetic continuity and the disavowal of the salience of

materiality; the replicator gains its immortality at the cost of a disavowal of its material

constitution. This is not a mere high-flown theoretical supposition, though, as will be

shown below; the levels of selection problem as elaborated in anthropological uses of

evolutionary theory and molecular genetics includes a moment of a similar sort of

disavowal.

(iv) The hereditary metabody serves as the “meta-individual analogon of the

doctor’s organism.” Clearly, the replicator is meta-individual, but, again, since Dawkins

is not treating medical matters, or at least not directly, there is no “doctor’s organism”

in the picture here. But is the replicator an analogon of any organism? Is the replicator

a “body” or an organism of a sort? The replicator does take on qualities previously

ascribed to whole organisms, as mentioned above. To the extent that the general human

genealogical question has traditionally been the question of the descent of organisms,

rather than of their genic components, the replicator attains to the status of an item

that can have a genealogy. Moreover, insofar as interest is typically ascribed to

organisms, and Dawkins ascribes “interests” to replicators, he grants them features that

near them to conceptions of organisms in evolutionary theories of organismic “interest”

and evolutionary success. The replicator’s relation to the vehicle is certainly not

explicitly one of analogy, but is one of direction or control; replicators control the

development and determine the survival of the organism that carries them. Neither is

the relation between replicating replicator and replicated replicator said to be one of

analogy, of course, since it is supposed, rather, to be one of generated identity. Thus,

the replicator has some features that are typically lent to an organism or a body.

22

A genetic medicine based on the Dawkinsian conception of a replicator would

raise the question of the relation between a genic continuity conceived on the formal,

discrete and informational basis of the replicator, on the one hand, and the individual,

lived body of the patient, on the other. Where the temporally limited reality of the

patient body is subordinated to the purportedly immortal reality of the replicator, based

on the conceptual elision or subordination of the very materiality of replicators

themselves, we have conditions for the medical activation of a new, genetic version of

the old hereditary metabody. At issue is not simply the question of genetic causation,

some versions of which I would not wish to deny. Rather, other matters, such as the

potential medical, scientific, legal, political or social prioritization of a genetic lineage

over its related constituent or potentially constituent organisms, may be important and

troubling legacies of the hereditary metabody in contemporary genetic form.

But conceptual suppression of the constitutive materiality of the genic replicator

itself is not the only potential problem of such approaches. There is another important

conceptual elision possible in a genetic medicine that would repose on a Dawkinsian

conception of human genetic relation. The hereditary metabody was the suppositional

collection of ancestral infirmities of all sorts into a causal corpus, an entity reached

retrospectively through patient report, and a moment in the psychiatric conceptual

dynamic that was beyond and before the patient’s organism. But the genetic metabody

whose conceptual rudiments this essay attempts to delineate replaces the ancestral

body portrayed on the basis of patient report with a transorganismic causal substance

identifiable by medico-scientific instrumentation.

B. The Anthropological Gene

To explain the potential conceptual problem with this, let me shift from the

Dawkinsian account of (human) genetic relation to a generalized version of a more

scientifically complex account found in the contemporary field of molecular

23

anthropology.23 From a beautifully rich essay by Marianne Sommer, “History in the

Gene: Negotiations Between Molecular and Organismal Anthropology” (Sommer 2008), I

extract a portion of her argument that exemplifies the potential problem I have in mind.

Sommer carefully chronicles the debates central to the emergence and development of

the field of molecular anthropology, the effort to reconstruct human evolutionary

history by means of molecular genetics. Since its inception in 1962, it has sought to

provide a narrative of human evolution based on the “epistemic object” Sommer terms

“the anthropological gene.” (Sommer 2008, 474) This is a notion of a gene as carrier or

“record of past events.” Sommer makes clear that although the simple and

deterministic notion of gene has been largely set aside because of the multiplication of

genetically relevant elements identified in recent decades, proponents of the

anthropological notion of a gene have tried to corner the market on reconstructions of

human evolutionary history in theoretically problematic ways.

According to Sommer, advocates of the anthropological gene argue that some of

the evolution that takes place at the molecular level is causally and temporally

independent from evolutionary development at higher levels.24 Biologists in the 1960s

developed the molecular evolutionary clock hypothesis, which used the assumed regular

evolution of proteins to derive a rate of evolution. The notion is that if mutations occur

at a regular rate in certain molecules, this temporal regularity can be used as a basic

metric with which to measure time spans between different types or species of

organisms that contain these same molecules, which nonetheless differ in parts due to

these predictably regular mutations. Using this basic molecular clock, that is, the

regularity of the events of mutation on the molecular level, researchers can locate

events in the evolutionary history of organisms, such as divergences in lineages.

Researchers often favored the molecular approach to reconstructing phylogenies

because evolutionary change at this level was thought to be “cleaner,” to contain less

distortion by comparison with the organismal and morphological level, where changes

in morphology do not necessarily imply mutations on the genetic level. The molecular

24

clock hypothesis was also joined to a theory of “neutral evolution at the molecular

level.” (Sommer 2008, 492) The point is that some levels of genetic material itself, in

addition to higher levels, can vary independently of each other; changes at lower levels

may not cause or require changes at higher levels. What this independently evolving

level of molecular change represented for researchers was “an unmediated ‘record’ of

evolutionary change” and “the kind of information that did not relate to the phenotype,

but was of a purely evolutionary, and as they called it, historical nature.” (Sommer 2008,

493) New recombinant DNA technologies that emerged in the 1970s (Sommer 2008,

479) could now directly expose “this evolutionary ‘history’ stored in the genes.”

(Sommer 2008, 493) What is meant here by “evolutionary ‘history’” are events that take

place on the level of populations or species, such as the divergence of species from a

common lineage, “human origin(s), population, migrations, encounters, and

differentiation.” (Sommer 2008, 518)

This point is important to bear in mind for Sommer’s critique of the

anthropological gene. This critique identifies what she terms a “paradox,” involving two

conflicting positions. On the one hand, molecules are held to be the “cleanest” level for

evolutionary reconstruction because they constitute an independent evolutionary

timeline. On the other hand, the gene was supposed to be a preserved record of events

that took place on a supra-molecular level, indeed, on a population or species level. She

expresses the contradiction so:

“If the molecular approach could measure units of time after lineage separation, it was therefore a

(nearly) metrical device, the function of which stood in opposition to the notion of the gene as a

repository of historical events on the population level. Indeed, the statistical nature of mutations

was often analogized to the Poisson distribution of radioactive decay. As it was, however, the

molecular anthropologists would have the cake and eat it. They would postulate the

independence of molecular from phenotypic evolution on the basis of the neutral theory of

molecular evolution and claim that DNA was the most important object in historical

reconstruction.” (Sommer 2008, 497)

25

And again:

“The anthropological gene and genome figured as stochastic clock for measuring the lapse of time

since the separation of lineages. At the same time, it was inscribed with historical meaning.”

(Sommer 2008, 479)

But Sommer explains that the postulation of the independence of molecular from

phenotypic evolution cannot be maintained when one realizes how this independence is

allegedly established to begin with. For no identification of a molecular timeline takes

place without its linkage to a temporal reference point in higher-level evolution through

the sciences of paleontology, geology or other higher-order inquiries. The researchers

who established human phylogenies based on the molecular clock hypothesis, Sommer

writes, “had depended on a date from paleontology to calculate the mutation rate.”

(Sommer 2008, 489) Even if the molecular level is causally de-coupled from the

phenotypical, population, or species evolutionary level, on which properly “historical”

events take place, on this view, the introduction of a date marker from those levels is

required for the researchers’ ability to reconstruct a narrative of historical evolution on

those levels.

For the purposes of this paper, I would describe this pattern of reasoning so: the

researchers at issue put an event in the molecular timeline into correspondence with the

known date of a species’ existence that has been established by a fossil record and then

failed to consider that temporal linkage as something that would contaminate the

“independence” of the molecular record. A pseudo-independent molecular chronometer

ultimately became the basis for the allegedly pure temporal measurement and serial

ordering of evolutionary events on the level of population and species. Its purportedly

independent continuity is supposed to lend it a reliable metric regularity; but that this

temporal regularity can have any application to the population and species level of

evolution has only been established in the forgotten moment of synchronization of two

different event time lines.

26

The relevance of this pattern to the topic at hand is that this operative oblivion

can be problematic. For what Sommer shows is that contemporary uses of the

anthropological gene, by ignoring the moments at which the alleged independence is

inscribed with properly “historical” events, incautiously and hastily attribute the

historicality to the molecular level, which would allegedly lend it greater authority and

veridicality. The current widespread commercialization of the new DNA technologies

sells the idea that family history, human evolutionary history, racial history and the

history of living beings per se all can be read directly from the molecular “record” of

evolutionary history. What are elided are those points at which vastly different levels of

epistemic object and temporal orders are matched up. For Sommer, it is indeed odd to

suppose that molecular evolution that is precisely de-coupled from phenotypic levels of

evolution should be best able to tell the historical tale of evolution on the higher level of

the organism. But one of her conclusions is that the alleged independence is incomplete

and hence there are numerous moments at which historical events are read into the

molecular “record.”

If this is correct, then evolutionary histories that purport to ground their

timelines uniquely in the molecular record must be scrutinized for these moments of

trans-level semantic interposition. But how does this relate to the previous concern

about the elision of materiality in the case of the replicator gene? Here, we might say

that in general terms what is shared by the three cases of the hereditary metabody, the

replicator gene and the molecular record as potential cases of a genetic metabody is a

conceptual cycling through a level of a transorganismic continuity of fantastical

independence. An entity is posited with a supposed radical independence from what is

to be explained, even though in all cases the posited entity lacks the supposed

independence. Any resulting explanation is achieved at the price of a disavowal of the

dependence of the transorganismic entity upon the materiality, temporality, or

experience of the body to be explained.

27

IV. CONCLUDING SPECULATIONS

The ontological ambiguities in the conception of the replicator and the

anthropological gene discussed above bear upon important matters in the bioethics of

genetic intervention. We can identify at least two matters in the bioethics of genetic

intervention that examination of these ambiguities illuminates. First, the problematic

ontological status of the gene in these accounts complicates the matter of identifying

the very object of therapeutic intervention. The trans-organismic conception of the gene

plays a particularly important role here. This notion of the trans-organismic gene as a

single item whose temporal scope persists across organisms is a critical element in the

new substance of the old notion of the background body, or the hereditary metabody. If

the object of the intervention itself is transorganismic, what is the temporal and

organismic scope of a genetic intervention? A host of related questions arises: Does the

picture of the transorganismic gene open onto a medicine of populations? Or does the

separation and autonomy of the private individual imply a voluntarist and libertarian

policy with respect to genetic intervention? How does an established medicine of

private organismic individuals mesh with a medicine of public transorganismic genetic

populations? This paper cannot address these questions but its topic would seem

prerequisite to doing so.

Second, the problematic ontological status of the gene is relevant to the role of

the concept of a norm in genetic medicine. For it concerns a question that is critical to

applications of the notion of norm: to what entity or entities may an abnormality be

attributed in the science of genetics? Certainly, the notion of genetic abnormality

requires the conjunction of an ontology of the gene with a philosophy of the norm.

Foucault argues that in nineteenth-century hereditary psychiatry statistical, political and

juridical imperatives were institutionally and conceptually linked to classify actions as

behavioral abnormalities. This is a clear case of criteria and aims from outside of the

nominal hereditary science of the times playing a constitutive role within it. The

28

continuation of Foucault’s inquiry today, then, would ask to what extent the notion of

norm employed in genetic sciences originates from the investigations of those sciences

and to what extent it enters from sources external to them, either from other sciences or

from outside the sciences altogether.

Of course, Georges Canguilhem argued in The Normal and the Pathological

(Canguilhem 1966) that there must be a source external to the descriptive sciences

themselves that determines what counts as a distinction between normal and abnormal

with respect to the determination of health.25 Only a cry or complaint, not to be

confused with a qualitative “assessment,” can establish the difference between patient

and non-patient; a statistical mean of itself could not establish a legitimate diagnostic or

therapeutic norm. It is clear that many novel hybrid scientific fields are emerging today

on the basis of the new contributions of genetic science in general. But for both of these

issues—the question of identifying the object of therapeutic intervention and the

question of the nature and source of norm of health in genetic medical science—the

problematic ontology of the gene discussed above is decisive.

One might think that the hereditary metabody was a failed attempt to

conceptualize the fact that genetic material unexpressed in parent organisms can be

transmitted and expressed in offspring (recessivity). But part of the notion of the

metabody is that it is a fantastical body and not merely a hypothetical or potential trait.

Foucault held the hereditary metabody to be fantastical because it envisioned the trans-

individual accumulation of hereditary pathological behavioral features as a “body,”

existing over and above the existence of any of its constitutive individual genealogically

related bodies, and because it causally linked any present and past abnormalities and

supposed this linkage to be explanatory. What is the relation between hypothesis and

fantasy? Could the hereditary metabody have been both explanatorily fantastical and

hypothetically useful? More importantly, it is clear that the claim about the immortality

of genetic replicators is not philosophically necessary. Is there then a fantastical

element in the focus on this notion of biological immortality? Perhaps the appeal of the

29

notion that elements of life are undying if lives are not provides the fantastical current

for the ambiguous replicational ontology discussed here.

Foucault contends that nineteenth century psychiatry had a problem of an

absent body; it had no real organic correlate to the physician’s body, the body of the ill

patient who seeks healing. Psychiatrists sought to establish their field as one of medical

science and themselves as doctors. They did this in part through the invention of the

fantastical body of hereditary psychiatric pathologies, the hereditary metabody. But

perhaps we should say, rather, that both nineteenth century psychiatry, with its

hereditary metabody, and contemporary genetic medicine have a problem of an absent

body, although the latter is a different kind of absent body.

For if genetic medicine posits the material genetic continuity--whether

replicationally identical or not--of a patient, it must confront the fact that the whole of

the materially related organisms to which its patient is genetically linked, and may

potentially be linked, is permanently absent; when future generations temporally

outstrip the physician’s life span, these generations can never present their symptoms.

This seems to imply that the problems and promises of genetic medicine open onto a

virtual field of therapeutic potential; present physicians cannot know the outcomes of

their therapies that may in treating present patients treat future generations of human

beings as well, and more directly than ever. Foucault frequently pointed out what he

took to be a particularly modern confusion of therapy and experimentation (or

research), especially in medicine. With the scope of genetic intervention radically

outstripping the physician’s and researcher’s generation we have reason for worry about

what will become of those who descend from genetic intervention; therapy will

necessarily be experimentation, Foucault might say. Of contemporary genetic

conceptions of human beings, we should ask whether instead of the nineteenth century

hereditary metasomatization of kin past we have crafted a futural genetic metabody

that extends the hereditary ancestral body into what we might call a genetic ‘postcestral’

body.

30

But what notion of experiment would so ignore the requirement of finitude, of a

final report, a deadline, a summation, conclusion? How could such open-ended medical

labor fit a model of experiment? And how can human beings begin to conceive of its

effects? There is a musical piece whose temporal scope might go some way toward

extending our sense of the alleged temporal reach of direct intervention in human

genetic constitution. It is a composition by UK composer, Jem Finer, called

“Longplayer.”26 Its performance began on December 31, 1999 and will end on the last

second of 2999.

1 For accounts of this terminological periodization, see, in order of specialization: Jacob 1974,

Chapter 4, “The Gene,” especially the sections entitled “The Birth of Genetics” and “The Dance of

the Chromosomes,” 201-226; Keller 2002, Chapter 4, “Genes, Gene Action, and Genetic Programs;”

Gayon, 1998, Section 8.2, “The effects of Mendelism on the theory of selection.”

2 See Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973-1974. Trans. Graham Burchell

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), “Chapter 9: Lecture of 16 January 1974,” 223. French

original: Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours aux Collège de France, 1973-1974 (Paris: Editions du

Seuil/Gallimard, 2003).

3 See Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador,

2003), “Chapter 11: Lecture of 19 March 1975,” pp. 291-321. French original: Les Anormaux:

Cours aux Collège de France, 1974-1975 (Paris: Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 1999).

4 Foucault distinguishes his view from that of Jos Van Ussel in Histoire de la répression sexuelle.

See Foucault 2003, 236ff.

5 For Foucault’s complete analysis of the case of the somatization of masturbation, see Foucault

2003, 237ff. Much of Foucault’s thought in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things is

relevant to the topics of this paper, although space limitations prevent their exploration here.

6 Foucault 2003, 240: “I would say not that masturbation was transferred to or placed on the

moral level of fault. Rather, I would say that we see in this campaign a somatization of

31

masturbation that is, on the order of the doctors, directly linked to the body (or at any rate whose

effects are directly linked to the body) even in the discourse and experience of the subjects.”

Commentators often overlook that Foucault is interested in experience, most probably for the

reason that Foucault consistently refuses specifically phenomenological accounts of experience;

this does not prevent him from using the term, and from developing alternative accounts of

experience at many points in his work.

7 Foucault 2006, 270-1: “What basically was involved when a mental patient was asked about the

illnesses in his family, and when it was carefully noted down if his father has died of apoplexy, if

his mother suffered from rheumatism, if his uncle had been an idiot child, and so on? . . . Of

course, it extended the search for certain signs, prodromes, etcetera, to a multi-individual scale,

but I think it was above all and essentially a way of making up for the lack of pathological

anatomy . . .”

8 Foucault 2006, 271: “It is a sort of meta-organic substratum, but one which constitutes the true

body of the illness. The sick body in the questioning of madness, the sick body one palpates,

touches, percusses, sounds and in which one wants to try to find pathological signs, is in reality

the body of the entire family; it is, rather, the body constituted by the family and family heredity.

Trying to trace heredity therefore means substituting a different body and correlative material for

the body of pathological anatomy; it constitutes a meta-individual analogon of the doctor’s

organism.” See also, Foucault 2006, 275: “psychiatric questioning constitutes a body through the

system of ascriptions of heredity, it gives body to an illness which did not have one;” A reviewer

points out the resemblance between this meta-organic substratum and the quasi-transcendental

status of ‘life’ in Foucault 1970. Space prevented a discussion of this resemblance. Although

there are also significant differences between them, it seems that the notion of an invisible

function, as an element of the new understanding of ‘life’ introduced with the advent of the

modern empiricities, according to Foucault, shares some features with the logic described here.

See especially, the discussion of the organ in general in Foucault 1970, 264-5: “It matters little,

after all, that gills and lungs may have a few variables of form, magnitude, or number in common:

they resemble one another because they are two varieties of that non-existent, abstract, unreal,

unassignable organ, absent from all describable species, yet present in the animal kingdom in its

entirety, which serves for respiration in general.”

32

9 For more on the concept of the abnormal, see Canguilhem, 1999; Goldstein, 1995; Mills, 2007;

Mader, 2007.

10 Foucault 2003, 311, 312, 320. Citing Jean-Pierre Falret’s Des maladies mentales et des asiles

d’aliénés. Leçons cliniques et considerations générales, (Paris, 1864), Foucault notes: “the curious

notion of ‘condition’ (état) introduced by Falret around 1860-1870 and which is then reformulated

a thousand times, mainly in the term mental background (fond psychique).”

11 Translation adapted. Foucault 1999, 295 has: “sa fécondité étiologique est totale . . . .”

Foucault 2003, 312 gives: “an absolute, total etiological value.”

12 Foucault 2003, 313. Translation adapted.

13 For Foucault’s thought on more recent developments in genetic science, see Foucault 2008, 227-

8. These pages envision, in the admitted vein of a kind of “science fiction,” the role that the

science of modern genetics could play when joined to a neo-liberal economic theory of human

capital. For important work on this topic, see Rose, 2006

14 Periods in the history of biological knowledge are often identified, chronologically, as those of

heredity, genetics, genomics and post-genomics. Although the finer distinctions between the last

three terms are not employed in this essay, this does not mean that they are here contested.

15 Lewontin 2000, 204. This is a concise statement of the historical claim expressed in many more

elaborate and technical versions, including in the work reviewed in this passage by R. Lewontin:

Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York:

Knopf, 1985).

16 For a concise history of the development of the field of modern genetics, see Francisco J. Ayala,

“Human Evolution: The Three Grand Challenges of Human Biology,” The Cambridge Companion to

the Philosophy of Biology Eds. David L. Hull and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2007), 233-254.

17 For these debates see, Paul E. Griffiths and Karola Stotz, “Gene,” and Godfrey-Smith,

“Information in Biology,” in Hull and Ruse, 2007; Pigliucci and Kaplan, 2006; Sober, 1994/2001.

18 The relations of these discourses to contemporary psychiatric medicine and to reproductive

medicine are not established in this paper, although they clearly are relevant to its general

33

argument. For a comprehensive introduction to evolutionary medicine in general, see Stearns

1999. For recent works in evolutionary psychiatry, see Brune 2008 and McGuire and Troisi 1998.

19 Keller 2002 and many other histories of the gene concept discuss the hypothetical nature of the

term ‘gene’ from its start, as well as its ambiguous oscillation between “gene as atom” and “gene

as organism,” tied to its multifarious role in the study of both hereditary transmission and

embryonic development. Although she discusses the disadvantages of this theoretical ambiguity,

she also argues that this incoherence was scientifically productive.

20 I do not assume that either Dawkins’ or Hull’s views are currently the most important for or

representative of evolutionary biology, philosophy of biology or other genetic discourses, only

that they have been central and influential, though controversial, in the philosophy of biology in

recent decades.

21 Mayr might have begun to improve matters by writing “the same kind of gene” and “the same

kind of sequence,” although this would not be the end of the question. Identical replication

essentially eliminates generations, on his view; hence, the gene defeats the limited lifespan of the

organism through replication—but only where replication is construed as the absolute continuity

of the replicating gene. Formal or informational sameness is sufficient for persistence on this

view.

22 I do not address the informational theory of the gene in any detail in this essay. For an

illuminating account of the role of the sciences of information in the development of

informational conceptions of the gene and genetic science, see Kay, 2000. See also the influential

Oyama, 1985.

23 Dawkins and Hull explicitly attempt to avoid some of the unresolved scientific debates in the

rapidly changing field of molecular genetics and its interactions with evolutionary analyses that

target higher orders of evolutionary change.

24 To quote Sommer, who quotes Zuckerlandl, levels include “’molecular, supra-molecular, cellular,

tissular, organic, systemic, individual and further the ecological, sociological and psychological

levels . . .’” (Sommer 2008, 489)

25 Elizabeth A. Lloyd makes this point well in “Normality and Variation: The Human Genome

Project and the Ideal Human Type,” originally published in 1994, although without reference to

Canguilhem’s work, first published in 1943.

34

26 See http://longplayer.org/what/overview.php

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