ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1980s, the word gene has migrated from science into ordinary conversations. Gene talk has spread epidemically in political and professional arguments and ethical debates, but references to “genes” have also surreptitiously entered personal deliberations. “Genes” by now reshape not only political, social, or medical concepts, but also the very perception of the self. This intrusion of the term into common parlance, and particularly the drastic encroachment of “genes” into personal deliberation-where “genes” have come to impose themselves as the ultimate answer to such primordial questions as “Where do I come from, who am I, and what will happen to me in the future?”—stimulated our curiosity and led to the research project that we report on here. In this chapter, we will fi rst describe the outlines of our investigation and then attempt to make a hypothesis plausible: In the shadow of human genetics, the fi rst person singular, the “I” of the speaker, is subtly, profoundly, and quite probably irreversibly affected. This transformation is not carried through by a series of fi ndings emanating from human genetic research in biomedical laboratories or clinical practice but through the symbolic fallout of gene talk. At the core of this transformation of the embodied “ego” lies-so we observed-an exceptional transformative power of the term when it migrates into ordinary prose. “Genes” in ordinary speech have all that it takes to perform a blending together or superimposition of incompatible spheres of meaning: the word confl ates the concrete and abstract, visible and invisible, tangible and conjectured, individual and statistical, and past, present, and future. This alchemistic potency of the term when it appears in ordinary prose has endowed it with the capacity to exercise a crucial symbolic social function in the epochal transformation since the 1980s: The “gene” in ordinary prose imparts bodily substance to the nature of personhood that corresponds to the risk society, in which actuarial calculations and reasoning about the human have become pervasive. This is why parlance about human genetics offers
a privileged instance from which to study the uprooting of commonsense perception in the present moment of history.
