Claire Pentecost

Presentation given at the conference: BioArt and the Public Sphere
Irvine California, October 17, 2005

We often say that science and specifically biotechnology are remaking the world we live in, remaking our sense of self, the human body, and our relationship to the natural environment. But we know that when we talk about science today we are not just talking about science.   Where do we look to better understand what is shaping science? What other forces are remaking the world we think we know?

To get right to the heart of it, we do well to look at the principles and effects of neoliberalism, the most persuasive ideology and program changing the world in the last 3 decades.

Under neoliberalism, the individual liberties that define liberalism itself are highly prized, this is a large degree of what makes it so attractive to people with little to gain from it. But what distinguishes neoliberalism from other forms of liberal political philosophy is that here free enterprise and private ownership are considered the bedrock of all other freedoms. If these are guaranteed first and foremost, all other liberties will follow. This guarantee is the primary charge of -or, as some would have it, the only justification for-- government in a liberal democratic society.

Thatcher came to power in 1979 and Reagan in 1980, each representing a very organized move by the right to take control after the financial crashes of the early 70's. Since then neoliberalism has reshaped the world economy. In that time, in the epicenter of this shock therapy, the US, what has neoliberalism achieved? Productivity has actually gone down. Real wages for all but a very few have declined. However, wealth is being generated somewhere, [apparently through the aggressive financialization of more and more of the world's resources], and someone is accumulating it. In fact, the most significant single effect in terms of economic indicators has been the concentration of greater wealth--unprecedented wealth--in the hands of a dwindling number of individuals.
(This is all chronicled very precisely in David Harvey's most recent book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. )

To quickly frame the correspondence to biotechnology, let's look at the case of transgenic soy in Argentina.

Argentina is one of the globe's biggest agricultural commodity producers, and their feverish embrace of transgenic soy is unmatched anywhere. In the five years between 1997 and 2003 more than half the arable land in all of Argentina converted to soy cultivation, and 95% of this is planted in Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans. These seeds are 'genetically engineered' to express a trait for the resistance to glyphosate based herbicides, so that the farmer can spray for weeds in a blanket application without worrying about harming his product.

Farmers welcome Monsanto's system at first because it is simple and appears to require less herbicide. Exactly when and how much to spray are part of the instructions that come with a 'technology package' including seeds and the brand name herbicide RoundUp, Monsanto's best selling product worldwide . Only two passes through the growing cycle replace five or six applications of a variety of herbicides in previous systems. Farmers can control weeds without tilling and so reduce erosion and labor.

Within a couple of years, however, two sprayings per growing cycle doesn't seem to do it, and herbicide use escalates rapidly. Used sparingly and with care, glyphosate is not one of the worst agrochemicals; in small doses it can break down quickly. But since the deployment of RoundUp Ready GM seeds, use of glyphosate in Argentina has skyrocketed from an estimated 13.9 million litres in 1997 to 150 million litres in 2003. Agronomists are learning that in higher concentrations it is a different phenomenon altogether--disrupting the beneficial soil microbes that break down organic matter. [Sandpoint Idaho, Charles Benbrook.]

Maybe because of the over-application, several previously uncommon species of glyphosate-tolerant weed are documented in rising proliferation (many more than have been documented in a longer period of GM soy cultivation in the USA). Unwanted GM soy from stray seed is getting hard to control, and consequently farmers are using more venomous combinations of pesticides in higher concentrations. In some places competing multinational chemical companies like Syngenta and Dow post ads declaring that GM soy is a weed and offering combinations of deadly pesticides like atrazine, paraquat, metsulfaron and clopyralid to control it.

The U.S. soy crop is also mostly GM herbicide tolerant, but the Argentine context presents some significant differences in regard to the economic, social and environmental impacts.

In 1997 even though Argentina had not signed an international patent agreement for Roundup-Ready intellectual property, Monsanto decided to market the seeds there. Perhaps they based their gamble on the preferential treatment given foreign corporations in the past and presumed the patent would soon be legalized; certainly they wanted to avoid loosing the market to generic makers.   For farmers the package was incredibly cheap because there was no technology fee and no contract to sign. Today Monsanto still doesn't have a patent in Argentina and in 2004 they took their seeds off the Argentine market, but by then it didn't matter because RR seeds are freely reproduced and traded in the white bagging circuit. Since then Monsanto been harassing, cajoling and threatening the government to extort a technology fee from the producers, and has also tried extracting tribute from importing countries where the patent is law. The Argentine government already taxes exports of soy over 13% [CHECK] because it is desperate for the revenues, and it is not going to further burden its farmers or jeopardize one of its few sources of income.

Arable land devoted to other food crops has declined in direct relation to the rise in soy acreage (most Argentine soy is used for animal feed or export). In fact even as certain sectors celebrate the soy boom, hunger in Argentina has risen significantly in the last five years. While I am not aware of data pinning this directly to the GM soy revolution, it's a typical scenario in which the widespread conversion of land to monocropping of a commodity for export is accompanied by rising hunger. As of last year, over 150,000 small farmers have been driven out of the path of the new megafarms, and many fragile ecosystems of the north have been clear-cut for the "green gold." Argentina has little regulatory infrastructure compared to the subsidies and market controls that in fact do protect just enough American farmers from falling all the way through the floor. The law of commodities markets is predictable however, so as the rush to provide soy to the world catches up with the demand, prices will sink. Without subsidies or the muscle of a transnational cartel many farmers in Argentina will suffer. No doubt there will be more shuffles toward larger, fewer farms as producers can only weather price crashes by economies of scale. Nor does Argentina have the infrastructure for pesticide-use oversight, and related health problems are already being reported in villages exposed to chemical excesses. US regulations, grossly inadequate but more effective than that in most countries, slow the poisoning of our bodies and the environment to a less immediately perceptible level.

This is a case where the revenue streams deriving from the product have taken some different turns - there are no patent and technology fees or settlement for breach of contract going to Monsanto. A larger than average percent of the revenue is going to the government, and though Argentina expects and receives more social welfare than the US, much more is going to debt reservicing than toward redistribution.

But here is the fact that should interest us: even with Monsanto's profit mechanism thwarted, even in a scenario where the priority of privatized intellectual property has run off track, the effect of the introduction of this technology has been to concentrate wealth in the farming sector at an alarming rate. This is largely because the system for which this technology is designed to work is one favoring concentration of control over resources. In the case of industrial agriculture biotechnology is used as a powerful new bait to convert regions to a system whose logic depends on labor-cutting machinery, petroleum based inputs, environmental slow-death. Because the cost of the initial outlay is high, the scale of the operation is optimally large.   Larger farms. Fewer farms. Greater wealth. Fewer hands. More soy. Less food. Transgenic agriculture did not start that system and does not by itself accomplish pinpoint wealth concentration and widespread dispossession. But it is definitely the newest and potentially most powerful tool yet for proliferating that system to the exclusion of others.

Biotechnology as it has been developed in the agriculture sector only makes sense as a counterpart to neoliberal outcomes. Agriculture is only one of the areas of life being rearranged through biotechnology. To extend our understanding of the meaning of its scope I would like to make a brief review of biopower. At the end of The History of Sexuality Volume I , as well as in his lecture at the College de France on 17 March 1976 , Michel Foucault develops this concept. How useful for us that he should locate power and politics in biology just as the era of the life sciences was beginning to crest the horizon.

To arrive at the concept Foucault traces that claim of the sovereign to power over the subject historically thought of as the right over life and death. But even as Foucault re-articulates what was once an asymmetrical power to either "take life or let live," he asserts the reformulation of that right under the modern state as a power to "make live or let die." This power to make live or let die Foucault articulates as the realm of biopower. Overlapping and complementing the subjectivizing and disciplinary processes brought to bear on individuals, biopower manages the vitality and fertility of whole populations. It is a concert of rational, statistical and behavioral studies, models and incentives. It works through public health, health and life insurance, pension funds, retirement planning, vaccination programs and similar phenomena.

When Foucault died in 1983 the welfare state was still healthy in Europe though in the UK it was beginning to feel the assault on its right to manage these bureaucratized micro-sites of power's relay. It teases the synapses to imagine what kind of thoughts Foucault would have produced had he lived to see the flowering of biopower under the twin masters of neo liberalism and biotechnology.

What we have, even as the world's population grows and we are constantly told that we are facing catastrophic resource demands, what is happening is the not-so-gradual arrogation of the right to make live and let die to market forces . Under the neoliberal agenda, pension funds and retirement plans, proper diet and sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics, the managed fertility and extended longevity are transferred to the domain of the private under the primacy of the right to private property and individualized prospects. The rhetoric of the personal: personal responsibility, personal choice and personal opportunity delineate a norm that does not expect these functions from the state.

Foucault poses the norm as the element that circulates between the disciplinary and the regulatory, applicable to both the individual body and the multiple factor of the population at large. The promotional apparatus of biotech medicine and also of the market economy, promise access to the norm of a continually improved human, obtained at the level of the individual body. It is sold at the level of the mass media, and decisions for the whole population are made on the premise of its widespread availability, but it is only available in the end to those with the means. And it is clear there is no discussion about how to make these advantages equally attainable to all in the future.

In the discourses of both neoliberalism and biotech, the availability of the norm, whether it be a matter of health, beauty or performance, is sold through the device of the success story. We hear, above the hum of generalized inconsistency, carefully edited narratives like the rebirth of New York City through tough neoliberal policy after the manufactured fiscal crisis of the 70s, or a study in which a "breakthrough" genetic therapy appears to indicate desired results.  

The success story is not the only narrative available but it seems to trump contradictory information every time when it comes down to the direction of policy or research funding.

One wonders why the success story serves its purpose so well when there is so much evidence to its contraries.

In the March 17 lecture Foucault makes the case that the only way a modern state founded on liberal principles can claim the right over life and death in the biopower reformulation is through racism. Racism is a way of fragmenting the human biological continuum so that across a hypostasized divide of kinds of humans, differential relationships can be set up in regard to life and death. Through the operations of biopolitics one category will conceive of its life force as strengthened when those in another category find theirs diminished. Regardless of how this is understood it will be accepted on the basis of racism. And in a devil-take-the-hindmost ethos like neoliberalism, it is racism that will keep people in one category from believing that the exclusions or depredations that happen to another group could ever apply to them. They are categorically exempt.

The success story is staged against a soft focus backdrop in which the rest of the world is presumed to be telling the same story only at a greater distance in space or maybe just a matter of time. This soporific backdrop was rudely snatched when Katrina blew through New Orleans this year, revealing that neoliberal policies are a very effective way to redistribute risk and concentrate reward. The reward in this case is basic safety, inclusion in that population extended the right to live, not to be left die. I was particularly stunned by the story of African Americans stranded on their roofs in the flooded Ninth Ward, who, when the rescue helicopter came to pick them up, asked how much was the ticket, afraid they could not afford the price of rescue. I construe that these people have known for a long time that the managed survival of populations in America is a matter of financial solvency. Some populations have it; some don't.

One has to wonder in the age of biopower with such sophisticated tools for sustaining health and life, how the richest nation in the world can tolerate an infant mortality rate that is the 24th highest among developed countries. Why do the richest people in recorded history have such callous disdain toward the poor in their midst? How can the country that considers itself the apex of liberal values have 2225 juvenile offenders sentenced to a life in prison without parole, while in all of the rest of the democratic world at the same time there are only 12?

Such statistics and many like them only make sense in a worldview that divides the population into essentially different categories of people, some more deserving of life and liberty than others. Such a worldview is racist.

But let us move now to art. Our respite from all this. I don't want it to be too political, I often hear my students say about a project they are working on. I'm not a political artist. I don't want to be too didactic. I don't want to hit people over the head. I don't like things to be obvious.

Perhaps I should begin to catalogue all the forms of disavowal of the political I hear from practitioners in every field. I'm beginning to think what I really need to understand is how resistance to something called the political has been so well accomplished in a democratic society. Because democracy, the concept and structure which ostensibly does legitimate our government's power over life and death, is not a democracy if the people in it are allergic to all forms of political life.

What interests me is the fact that every discipline has a good reason not to be explicitly political. In the sciences, including the social sciences, to be perceived as having a politics is to suggest that you cannot step easily from yourself to the objective position of the scientist and back again, a move which is apparently the basis for the field's credibility. In almost any profession with an expectation of responsible decision-making, to have a politics is to jettison good judgment, to lose perspective. In the arts -- where expectations for the most part have not included responsible decision-making -being passionate, personal and opinionated are still assets, but being political is considered the end of creativity. It is having an opinion that might be collective, that might not be individual, that might not be private, and that might not be free .   Because freedom in our particular liberal democracy is connected to the private and one of the jobs of the artist in our society is to perform freedom in the terms which our society defines freedom.

The art of the avant-garde in the 20 th century, the canonical art of the late modern period in western democracies had a peculiar mandate: to be democratic and yet difficult, to be universally relevant to humans and yet unreadable, to be recognized as authentic but to offer semantic legibility only to the initiated. To be a non-discursive form of emancipatory communication in a highly diverse society. Its authenticity is founded on nonconformity and a Kantian disinterestedness. Which is very interesting since as much as art and science are played as opposite kinds of human endeavor they are both burdened with their own brand of disinterestedness. In science it goes by the idea of institutionalized objectivity. In art it goes by communication of obsessive subjectivity, a hypertrophied individualism or nonconformity.

We can go over the probable reasons for this: in such a rationally instrumentalized society, artists asserted the value of the irrational, the useless and the perverse; artists needed to distinguish themselves from the predatory message machines of marketing and mass media which were all about being readable; artists are caught up in the avant-gard game of offending the conventional values of the bourgeouise who prove their own nonconformity by validating the artists who are supported by the ensuing patronage of their works . These and many other accounts for the confounded mandate of the avant-garde are very plausible. There are also many, various and detailed accounts for the waves of reform historicized as movements: impressionism, dada, surrealism, expressionism, pop, situationism, conceptualism, minimalism, etc.

Most significantly it is from within the practice of artists themselves that the harmony between art and the institutions of its own validation has been challenged. In a recent examination of these movements, I have begun to focus on one feature that is often part of these effort, namely a radical reorientation of the mechanisms, sites, routes and inclusions of distribution .

When I speak of distribution I am referring to the varieties of institutional interface that constitute audiences for artists and or their product: museums, galleries, art press in the form of professional reviewers and specialized publications as well as the collectors whose subjectivities and imaginations are captivated by these distribution systems and whose dollars essentially sustain them. Again and again the innovations of artists throw curves into this reception device.

While most of the major discursive and practical interventions in standardized fine art practice that have been historicized as movements have implied or explicitly pursued new or altered strategies of distribution, what is retained at the level of the canon, what is retained at the level of permissible, transmissible DNA, is purged of this implication. The problem is not just that change in these arrangements destabilizes the investment of billions of dollars, but that change in these arrangements requires validation of other forms of art, artists and artistic practice. This in turn destabilizes the charge of the existing distribution system to produce a firm distinction between the professional artist and the amateur. In a democratic society this may be difficult to sustain. Since the invention of photography and the development of cheap handheld cameras with cheap available films; since the age of super8, since the invention of video and the proliferation of consumer video equipment, digital technology, home computers and printers, internet methods of exposure; since the availability of formal education (for those with money or credit) and the incessant visual education of the public by ubiquitous media presence, the forms claiming their inheritance of the historic lineage of the fine arts, need some pretty intricate support to maintain their distinction. If they also want to be relevant to "people's" daily lives they've got some extreme creative problem-solving to do.

Suppose we give up the requisite that art be "difficult," or semantically obdurate? What are other ways we might distinguish the product of the real artist, the professional artist, from the amateur, from the merely creative person?

Take this example: a graduate student in a prestigious art school makes work based on popular television shows. She is also very engaged with the fan world, an extensive realm of people who watch the shows, tape the shows, make their own websites, images, video, music and texts based on their favorite shows, characters and stars. These include remakes, remixes, rewrites, collages, etc., some acknowledging the roll of the fan, others not. They are not that different from the work of the graduate student. At a critique with a group of faculty at the art school the student is asked what makes her work different from the work of any other fan.   Specifically she is asked, "Where's the criticality?"

Is criticality the shibboleth that marks the ontological distinction between art and popular culture? This often appears to be the tacit consensus.   But if so, criticality of what? In the example given above: criticality of the relevant television show? Of the other fans? Of their products? Of the production value of their products? Of the fact that millions of Americans sit in their homes watching TV shows and using their creative energy and prosumer equipment to add to the television reality while other realities go unnoticed? Critical of the fact that even if they are all real artists, all brilliantly 'critical' of the television show, this would change very little about the world most humans live in?

Where does this leave the artist working with biotechnology under a global neoliberal hegemony in the age of biopower?

A while ago, aware of this context but without having fully articulated its details, I set out to formulate a criterion for so-called bio-art. I wanted to establishe some measures of evaluation that were not about trying to make a case for BioArt as art in the conventional, vexed, socially exhausted definition. The BioArt that I am interested in does not want to become propaganda-ware for the biotech industry, yet neither does it want to project the aesthetisized rhetoric of criticality as mere professional sophistication. I make the assumption that it wants to address a kind of problem in the world where most people live.

I imagined that the problem is that science in the service of capitalism alienates the nonspecialist whose life is actually affected by its commercial application. The mechanisms of alienation function to maintain or extend the status quo. They fall into three principle categories: abstraction and mystification; the ambiguous nature of funding, i.e., whether public or private, and hence the obscuring of interests involved; legal instruments designed to protect knowledge as trade secrets or private "intellectual property."

In my scheme, I presumed that the artist is a person who creates various forms of interruption of these barriers on behalf of the alienated public.

And here is an example of one of the schema I created as I worked out a set of criteria:

I organized possible methods of the artist into categories loosely corresponding to the categories of alienations: staging of scientific procedures in participatory theaters can provide experiences of the materiality of science; participation across specialized knowledge fields enfranchises nonspecialists to author new narratives with a perspective on the real stakes involved; playing the amateur, the artist takes pains to find collaborators within scientific fields and /or consents to become a "thief" of privatized knowledge to politicize this sequestering (see the case of Steve Kurtz for an example of an artist who built a relation of trust with a collaborating scientist only to be indicted by the U.S. Justice Department as a thief).

After some months' hiatus, when I returned to this scheme with a more developed analysis I saw the following image:

In my observation, artists have many of the same problems scientists have in relation to an alienated public. Blockbuster museum shows apart, contemporary "fine art" is a small, misunderstood subculture. Unless its practitioners are willing to radically change the nature of art itself and the apparatus of its distribution, it is hardly a good candidate to significantly redefine the public's relation to science.

This is not an argument for the largest audience or the forms of art and distribution that assure the largest audience. This is no call for artists to assume tired forms easily read as political or "democratic." Such forms are deadly and easily dismissed or rejected by every audience. I do want to point out that if the artist aims to make an impact on the conditions under which science and related biotechnologies are being used to concentrate resources in the hands of a very few, she must creatively remake access to biotechnology and artistic practice.

As artists we have to refuse performing a freedom increasingly defined by conditions that legitimate primacy of the private, private expression, private feelings, private experiments, private intellectual property, private losses, private giving, private destinies. Especially as it becomes undeniable that such a "private" guarantee of freedom is rank privilege accorded to fewer and fewer people, reserved for the people who are already enjoy the most security and aesthetic enhancement. In the overweening neoliberal psychology of public life, the rhetoric of privatization has falsely pitted the liberty and the functional diversity of individuals against all forms of collective endeavor.