ABSTRACT
Since the birth of clinical medicine in the eighteenth century, the forms through which individuals are constituted as patients, the means by which revenues are generated from the treatment of illness, and the values invested in the promotion of the health and well-being of individuals and populations has undergone many changes. Today, I believe we are witnessing a transformation in the relationships between patients, profi ts and values. Paul Rabinow’s (1996) essay, ‘Artifi ciality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’ provides a useful concept and some tools for investigating these transformations. In his essay, Rabinow was concerned with exploring the character of biopower today. One site where he chose to begin this investigation was the Human Genome Project (HGP) – a project that in 1992 was in its initial stages, and that has now been successfully completed. The HGP afforded Rabinow a site where he could begin to explore the ‘practices of life’ at ‘one of the most potent present sites of new knowledges and powers’. Central to his refl ections on biopower is its relation to modernity. By exploring biopower in relation to Foucault’s discussion of the emergence of the modern epistemes of life (biology), labour (political economy), and language (philology) which contributed to the emergence of the fi gure of Man, Rabinow took up a theme that was never developed by Foucault due to his untimely death. Interestingly, Rabinow engages in dialogue with one of Foucault’s contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze, to query whether the fi eld of fi nitude characteristic of modern social formations has given way to a play of forces and forms which Deleuze has labelled the ‘unlimited-fi nite’ (Deleuze, 1988). The ‘unlimited-fi nite’ is a state in which beings have neither a perfected form, nor an essential opacity. According to Rabinow, the prime exponent of this state is DNA – an infi nite number of beings have arisen from the four bases out of which DNA is constituted. In considering the possibilities created by the ability to know DNA in such a fashion that it is capable of being remade, Rabinow is concerned with interrogating novel practices emerging in the fi elds of life and labour which Deleuze claims could wash away the central fi gure of Man as the object and subject of knowledge characteristic of modernity. Rabinow is doubtful of some of Deleuze’s epochal claims: his concerns are more limited
and productive: he wants to investigate the signifi cance of these novel practices by using the terms life, labour, and language heuristically.
