Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

Bosnian Serb forces buried Srebrenica’s victims in secondary mass graves, a “chaotic physical scene of commingled and partial human skeletons” which represented “a rupture not only of the materiality of the human body, but also of any prevailing sense of social, religious, or political order” (15). The technologies of genocide “required a counterpoint system of technology, one that could take the random and minute pieces of human genetic material and render order to the commingled bones of the mass graves” (15). Yet this technology could not confer order independent of a pre-constructed social order. DNA testing in Bosnia could not be carried out in isolation from the larger social context; it could be verified against family members own genetic material, but also required sampling from possessions – odds and ends in victims pockets, literal pieces of fabric that constitute the larger social fabric. Genetic identification thus required the subjective knowledge and memories of survivors. Even when matches could be determined, DNA technology could only serve to heal one rupture in Bosnian society.

In the same way, so-called objective markers of Native American identity are in fact determined by the social order they are meant to constitute. Some of this is a limitation of biology: mtDNA and chromosomal DNA provide different views of one’s ancestral lineage, and “do not adequately account for gene flow between populations or the high genetic variation present within human populations” (Tallbear, 70). Moreover, “DNA tests, aside from their use in very specific cases, compel us to conflate genetic ancestry with racial, ethnic, national, tribal, and kinship identity categories, but these categories are embedded in one another, and all have been shaped by colonialism” (71). Under the veneer of the scientific method, we view these “facts” to be an objective truth. In fact they are negotiable and constructed. More importantly, they are far from innocuous. Bardill writes of the Havasupai case, in which breaches of informed consent led to research on human migration and inbreeding, rather than on diabetes, as the study was originally designed to do. Tallbear and many others have worried that this will become a further market to delineate tribal affiliation and further social exclusion.

These readings more or less continued the themes we discussed last week in class. Each seems to beg the question of why we insist on ordering individuals in the first place. In Bosnia and in America, genetic testing is employed in order to locate an individual, to confer status within some group. Is this an innate human instinct? In its light form it gives rise to Buzz Feed tests identifying your Disney princess or the Myers-Briggs classifications. On an individual level, we want to be told who we are (I’m Belle, cause I read books). On the social level, we want to be told who the other person is (introvert/extrovert, thinking/feeler). But writ large this ordering is used to advance social projects of inclusion and exclusion, of life or death. I don’t believe (I think, but I could be swayed) that they are by nature malicious, at least in most of the ways employed today. I argued last week that the ability to establish population genetic differences could have a positive impact on the way we treat health (personalized medicine writ large). Indeed, in Bosnia it appears to have provided a measure of solace to victims. The prominence of 23 and me indicates that many of us will volunteer to be “classified.”

This is a thorny philosophical issue that isn’t going to be resolved through any objective test. Judith Butler writes in “Giving An Account of Oneself” that even in our modes of simple address, of recognizing and differentiating between a “you” and an “I” that “The ‘I’ cannot tell the story of its own emergence, and the conditions of its own possibility, without in some sense bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one could not have been present, prior to one’s own becoming, and so narrating that which one cannot know.”

I’d love to probe the intersections of Butler’s work further but I’ve already written too much. For now I’ll end with something positive.

“It follows that one can only give and take recognition on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a decentering and ‘fails’ to achieve self-identity…Can a new sense of ethics emerge from that inevitable ethical failure? I suggest that it can, and that it would be spawned from a certain willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgement itself, that when we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are, and that we cannot expect anything else from others.”