344 RüdigerKunow
ok, then improving people's lives by modifying their bodies (through
bio-technical devices) must also be ok—if not, inversely, both are seen
as equally reprehensible. Taking a cue from environmentalism clearly
helpsshapethedebateinwaysthatareintervention-friendly.
For cultural critique, the emerging technologies of human re-design
openupavastanalyticspacewhichisdemarcatedontheonesidebythe
age-old quarrel between body and culture, existence and meaning, and
the clash between individual life and collective norms on the other.
Thus, rather than cheering on the increasing hold of biotechnology on
human life, the task of the present cultural-critical argument is to point
totheblindspotsoftheexciteddebateaboutnewformsoflife.
The object of such a critique is a historically new poetics, more
precisely atechno-p oetics of the body looming at the horizon. Even
though these poetics depend on the arcana of techno-science, they are
social and cultural in nature: social because they involve questions of
access and resource distribution and thus will impact on the relations
between people; cultural because the new techno-poetics will produce a
wholenew semantics of human lifeand thus change the relationship
human beings have with their bodies (once again including those of
others).AsVirginiaBlumhasremarkedinaslightlydifferent,gendered
context:"Whatwasoncetherelationshipbetweenthemalegazeandthe
female bodyis now experiencedastherelationshipbetweentechnology
andanybodyatall"(33).^31
Thegenomeholdsaspecialplaceinthesecontexts.As"thematerial
substructure of living bodies today" (Myers xi), the nucleotide
sequences in the chromosomes of an organism mark yet another,
possibly the most radical, step imaginable in the semioticization of the
body: always a locus of meanings, a hermeneutic site, the new genome
body is no longer simply the site of life but a site of coded
information—duly to be decoded, ordered, and, where necessary,
corrected.Inthisnewmodel,humanembodimentisregardedasthesum
totalofgeneticinformationinheritedfromthepreviousandpassedonto
(^31) This has enormous relevance for the Humanities. For example, earlier
determinations aggregating around race and gender are now amplified by the
techno-determinismofgenetics.