4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
optimization. In typical Foucaultian vein, Rose is out to stress the productive functions
of biomedicine – even though the manipulation of basic life processes at the level of
cells, molecules and genes is oftentimes rendered as constraining, and oftentimes
oppressive. But this is rushing ahead. Rose’s opening argument is that biomedicine
and biotechnology is transforming our social landscapes, recasting the core of our
identities and our cultural relations. He writes (2007: 17), for example:
Once one has witnessed the effects of psychiatric drugs in
reconfiguring the thresholds, norms, volatilities of the affects,
of cognition, of the will, it is difficult to imagine a self that is not
open to modification in this way. Once one has seen the norms of
female reproduction reshaped by assisted conception, the nature
and limits of procreation and the space of hopes and fears around
it are irrevocably changed. Once one has seen the norms of
female aging reshaped by hormone replacement therapy, or the
norms of aging male sexuality reshaped by Viagra, the “normal”
process of growing old seems only one possibility in a field of
choices, at least for those in the wealthy West.There is also the question of the domain or field on which life itself is grasped. The
traditionalist argument in the social sciences has been that life is the property of the
individual agent, subjectively mediated and experienced from beginning to end. On
this view, the well-regulated nature of Western living goes hand-in-hand with its
individualist ethos. But Rose is rightly suspicious of individualist ideologies, arguing
that the age of biomedicine and biotechnology shifts the whole terrain of subjectivity
and of life itself. Such shifts in the fabric of life are not necessarily easily discernible,
however. Self-understanding in the West, as elsewhere, has been deeply conditioned
by traditionalist ‘molar’ thinking. This is a kind of thinking in and through which
women and men picture the human body in molar terms – as a mix of limbs, organs,
blood, hormones and so on and so forth. But when it comes to the body, there is
today another level of discourse which is increasingly dominant – that of the
‘molecular’. There is, to be sure, a new way of conceptualizing life – its possibilities
and extensions – as a result of the ‘molecular gaze’. Such biomedical visualization,
says Rose, encompasses coding sequences of nucleotide bases, molecular
mechanisms, the functional properties of proteins and intracellular transformations,
such as membrane potentials, enzyme activities, transporter genes and ion channels.
The arrival of molecular biopolitics brings us to the centre of Rose’s argument. The
medical gaze now constituted, understood and acted upon at the molecular level is