Code Dependency: Biotechnology and the Vocation of Politics

Bradley Bryan, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

The book offers a discursive analysis of the conditions of subjectivity in biotechnology. It examines the way biotechnology “hails” the subject against the backdrop of an urgent need to manage the conditions of human livelihood, or “biopolitics.” Part One explores three historical conditions of the “biotechnological fact”: that entities (i) are “named,” (ii) vary rather than differ, and (iii) that varying entities can be measured. Part Two of the book looks at three ways of speaking in biotechnology that orient us to the beings of the world around us in its terms. These are the metaphors of (i) nature and artificiality, (ii) normality and measure, and (iii) legality. By looking at the preconditions and rhetorical modes of biotechnology, the book elucidates how individuals are interpellated as biopolitical subjects in a world of biotechnology.

Publisher Statement

Introduction (c) Bradley Bryan, 2006