CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 369
options,personswithacompromisedhealthstatusmaythenbeinstances
"wheredemocracyhaslostitsclaims"(A.Davis122,124).
Angela Davis's remark (made in a different but related context)
reminds us of the essentially political dimension of molecular biology
and the enhancement option which it is generating. In the dawning age
of genomics and biotechnology, the personal is becoming political in a
new and coercive way. In the context of neoliberalism and severely
curtailed public services, biotech enhancement, even while yet
remaining an incomplete project, is likely to impact the way Americans
live their lives, even in the immediate future. It is, I think, plausible to
expect that they make use of available options to control the
contingenciesofembodiment,suchasillnessorimpairment.Thisispart
of a larger social as well as cultural trend, namely to make individuals
authors of their own destiny—or to make it seem that they are. In the
past,thebiologyofhumanlifehasoftenbeenconceptualizedaroundthe
ideology of race, today, in the times of the genomic revolutions, it is
being underwritten by concepts of risk—which may be just as
ideological. Already now, pressures are mounting to actually put to use
the available biomedical and especially genetic tool kit and thus
minimizetheirbiologicalrisks.
Geneticsoffersatemplateforlivingone'slifeinanewway,andalso
for new stories about such a life. Enhancement authorizes narratives of
development, of life as a progressive improvement on the status quo.
Thefutureisakeymarker,insuchnarrativesaselsewhereinthepublic
presence of genomics: "The promise of genetic information...
necessarily creates for itself a present in which that future might have
potential" (Holloway 83). There is a shared logic, even a shared
ideology, in such narratives of development. As Gayatri Spivak, among
others, has noted, "development" is a deeply ideological script of
temporality, one designed to facilitate exploitation (374), in the present
context,theself-exploitationoftheindividualsothatheorshemightbe
able to answer to the increasing demands of a neoliberal economy.
Aside from the obvious economic calculus, enhancement also contains
an appeal to a very American optimism that the future will have
wonderfulthingsinstore.
Biologyisthusoneofthemostpowerfuldriverstodayofcontinuous
self-improvement. In the peddling of promises, many of them
unsubstantiated,thediscoursesofgeneticsarenolongersimplyformsof