338 RüdigerKunow
becomepartofthenationalpoliticalvocabularyintheU.S.Iwanttoadd
here the observation that while all this proceeds in the context of
perceived national, religious, and cultural imaginaries, the
precariousness of the economic situation of growing numbers of U.S.-
Americans is significantly left out of the picture (M. Cooper,Life as
Surplus153-55).
This brings my argument back one more time to the political
economy issue mentioned above. We are used to usually taking the
biology of the human body as something given, something very much
our own. Laurent Berlant and Sunder Rajan have from different
perspectivesdelineatedthe"increasinglyinhumanrelation"ofcorporate
capitalism to individual bodies which is a strategic arena in making
human life a crucial target for the overall corporatization of the United
States(Berlant,CruelOptimism105;Rajan6-8,27).
From a specifically American Cultural Studies point of view,
moments such as these of a politico-symbolic fusion of the somatic and
the semiotic may be interrogated for their relevance toward the
formulation of yet another exceptionalist understanding of "America,"
an exceptionalist version of life which might well be calleda political
poeticsofthehumanbody.In this context, it is an interesting but little-
noticedfactthatsuchvisionsofre-engineeringhumanlifeseemtohave
moved over the course of the 20th century from tbe political Left
(Haussmann'sIron Hindenburgcollage or Fritz Lang'sMetropolis) to
theRight.^20
Such a poetics is of course not exhausted by the pro-life vs. pro-
choice debate. Rather, this debate is gaining additional significance
againstthebackgroundofnewtechnologicalpossibilitiesforintervening
into human life, especially in its pre-natal stage. This time, the issue is
notabortionbutdesign.
(^20) Fordetailscf.Biro,esp.76-81.