Introduction:BiologizingCulture/CulturingBiology 17
The opposite perspective is of course also possible, namely one
which tracesthe presence of the biological in the cultural—which
happens to be the overall interest running through this volume. As I
hope to show, the biosphere can serve as a lens onto broader cultural
concerns and practices, with a special focus on their material effects.
Already in the past but with the ascendency of genetics and
biotechnology increasingly often also in the present has the cultural
domainbecomeinfluencedby,eveninfusedwith,arguments,models,or
rationales taken over from the domain of biology—so much so, in fact,
that as knowledge and structure biology has become a privileged idiom
to express and debate key issues of identity and collectivity. This idiom
can and occasionally does take forms that we would identify as literary
all the while that literary texts themselves increasingly often engage
biological themes and problems—all the way from more popcultural
formats such as Robin Cook'sVector(1999) to aesthetically ambitious
texts such as Richard Powers'sGain(1998) orGenerosity(2009). And
so, my account will time and again make references to past and present
readings of literary texts without, however, restricting itself to the
formatofaliterarytypologyormotif-study.
Thegrowingpresenceofthebiologicalintheculturalcanbemapped
onto an unfolding process which I will call in this book (somewhat
awkwardly) the increasingbiologizationofthesignifierAmerica.^12 Such
a biologization can of course take widely different routes or take on
myriaddifferentforms.Iwilltraceindetailthecontoursofthisprocess
in a number of focus areas, ranging from the securitization of the
biosphere in the biological defense programs all the way to biological
enhancement as a new venue for the self-made man and woman. What
these focus areas have in common is that they are "reconstructing [the
conditionsfor]asustainablelife,ratherthanexposingpoliticaloutrages"
(Culler 228) in U.S. culture and society. How this is or can be done is
thesubjectofthisbook.
(^12) Thesuffix"ization"ishereashorthandforcomplexprocessesinthecourseof
which the biosector becomes increasingly important in "realms which have not
been considered [so] before." Regula V. Burri and Joseph Dumit make this
argument with regard to a process they call "medicalization" (4) which, they
insist,resultsin"contemporarybiomedicine[becoming]aculturalpractice"(5).