In the third and fourth chapters of Wagner's book, information about how technology was deployed and what was necessary for its effectiveness was detailed. The technology wasn't inherently productive/helpful, because the result would have simply been a series of numbers, not a person or full identification. In thinking about the social necessity of technologies, I was thinking about how media technology wouldn't be necessarily innovative if people weren't around to consume or utilize it. Is this social component simply varying in degree in the essence of tech? What I mean by that is, is sociality essential for the effective deployment of technology? Can technology be technology without other people around? If an electron was fired in a particle physics lab, and no one was around to critique the study, did the tech work 'effectively'? I don't know if that made sense, I probably got the science wrong.
Moving on, the piece spoke of how DNA identification technology as necessary in order to endow a body with political and social subjectivity, I thought that was interesting in how DNA as an "essence of life" can function in line with bio/necropolitics, and how its engaging in the 'revival' of political subjectivity in these bodies.
"She had accepted officially what emotionally and rationally she denied: her son's death." (118)
That piece sort of drove the necropolitics home for me, while the mother could not exactly conceptualize her son's death, she can see how the official decree carried power which validated (or invalidated?) his existence.
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