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occurred during the 19th and the last century. In very general terms,
these shifts can be described, pace Foucault, as a set of new
"deployments of power... directly connected to the body—to bodies,
functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures... bound
together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the
development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their
objective"(HistoryofSexuality73,151-52).
The process of subjecting the biology of human life to the
descriptive and disciplining power of the biomedical sciences was of
coursenotaslinearandunchallengedasFoucaultseemstosuggest.One
factor which worked in favor of this shift was the popularization of
mechanicalorenergeticalmodelsofthehumanbodyinthelaterdecades
of the 19thcentury. To the degree that the body was conceived in
analogy to machines (one might think here of Henry Adams),
controlling these machines like all the others used in Fordist industrial
production seemed the most feasible thing to do. Accordingly, a wide
rangeofnarrativeshasemergedinrecentyearswhichregistersboththe
excitement and the anxieties, but also the ethical conundrums that
accompany the new achievements of biotechnologies such as
biomedicine and biotechnology, genetic sequencing, and body design.
Some aspects of this new molecular-biological understanding of human
life and the human body will be discussed in more detail below in the
chapter"SomaticsandSemantics."
At this point, it is important to note that the dawning of "the golden
ageofbiotechnology"(Kass9)hasalsomadepossibletheemergenceof
new discourse formations pertaining to the phenomenology of "age,"
discourses in which individual and social perspectives are foreclosed in
favor of a universalist approach which connects physiology and
temporality in new ways, this time not in broadly empirical terms ("we
must all die") but on the cellular level, where molecular markers
represent a congeries of chronic malfunctions and risks (Estes and
Binney587-89).
The technological feasibility of producing recombinant DNA, a.k.a.
molecular cloning, which had begun with plant and animal species, has
since the 1980s reached the human body. This is making available new
technologies of or rather on the body that go far beyond the areas of
organ transplants and body replacement parts–hips, hearts, kidneys—
and move instead towards producing new "technological forms of life"