Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 15
that "a materialist cultural critique does not simply open up textual and
culturalfissuresinordertoquestiontherelationoflanguagetorealityor
itsownstatusasananalyticalwork;moreimportant,thiscritiqueteases
out the material cause of these fissures, namely the fundamental
contradictionsinthesocialrelationsthatproduceitandthesubjectofits
inquiry"(Task41).
In recent years, materialist cultural critique has received new
attention and some new impulses from the emergence of the New
Materialism which, interestingly enough, has often made appeals to
matters biological to argue for the necessity of a new materialist turn,
away from the textualist preoccupations of post-structuralism.This new
materialism,itsproponentsargue,speaksto
our contemporary situation in which the prefix 'bio-' proliferates.
Molecular biology and its cognates are achieving the sort of privileged
statuspreviouslyreservedfortheoreticalphysics,fuelledbyarevolution
in biomedicine and biotechnology. This is in turn propelling an
unprecedentedrangeofissuesconcerningthenatureandstatusofliving
matter... what we see as a second major strand of anewmaterialism
[withaprogrammatic]newfocusonthebodyanditsroleinpolitics...
(CooleandFrost15;cf.22).In this context, and partly reviving older materialist traditions,
important new work has emerged about, e.g. the "Culture of Life"
movement spearheaded by President George W. Bush or the agency of
"dead" matter, or the possible dawn of a post-humanistic age. These
form an important context for the present inquiry, especially when it
dealswiththesomaticsandsemanticsofhumanbodies.
Evenso,itneedstobeacknowledgedrightawaythatitisextremely
difficult to "discipline" the prolific and highly diverse discursive
production generated by biological (subject) matter. Cultural critique
here has a lot of catching-up to do, in view of what is already going on
inthenaturalsciencesandespeciallythelifesciences.Ifsuchanattempt
is nonetheless made here, it is undertaken with a view to offer an
accountofhow,where,andtowhatdegreemattersbiologicalcanmatter
inandfortheHumanities.
The present volume comes to the intersection of biologies and
culturesdialectically.Dialectics, as they will be understood here, does