I’m reading Foucalt’s History of Madness and finding his methods useful in thinking about emerging technologies.
Foucalt begins by mapping artworks and historical events that demonstrate the structure of the experience of madness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through painting, he speaks of somewhat hilarious chimera creatures as expressions of madness in the dreams and fantasies of mankind. This madness is thrust into oneiratic (dream) realms, but the threat (and reality) of madness is a ubiquitous feature of the life of the mind and spirit in the late Middle Ages. The apocalypse with its chimeric beasts was thought inevitable, and all knowledge bittersweet folly. From Bosch in painting to Erasmus to Montaigne in letters, thoughtful people emphasized the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of knowledge (VUCA), a fallen metaphysical condition with direct implications for adapted structures of social control established by mercantilist and bourgeois societies.
The creation of chimera creatures in artistic spheres is common to all societies; even early cave paintings experiment with hybrids. A variety of shapeshifting wizards and mad scientists can be identified throughout history taking these chimera fantasies out of the realm of dreams and the sacred and into the realm of the practical effects of the real.
In the 21st century, chimera microorganisms in synthetic biology are considered one of the most promising research trends for solving most of earth people’s distressing issues.
By splicing DNA from potentially hundreds of species, bioengineers hope to produce chimera creatures that can solve many of the basic issues of human social organization, especially energy production and environmental conservation.
For many reasons, I can appreciate how religious organizations and civil society groups are quick to attribute madness to these research programmes.
First off, there is the flamboyant VUCA nature of genetic experimentation (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity.) Organizations like the ETC Group point to the volatility of microorganisms that freely exchange genetic material with whatever they come into contact with as justification for putting a halt to synthetic biology innovation. Importantly, the ETC Group does not seek to halt experimentation with chimera microorganisms. Rather, they would like to confine experimentation to the laboratory.
Why is the issue of confinement important? Because, confinement is always the primary method for dealing with madness historically. In the transition to modernity in the early years of 17th century France, 1 percent of the population was confined to General Hospitals. The point was not to eradicate madness — after all, what could one do? — the goal was simply to confine it. Notice how the ETC Group does not want to eradicate synthetic biology, they want to confine it to its proper sphere, where its madness can be free. But under no circumstances can it be permitted beyond the confines of that General Hospital of Laboratory Science.
Combining partially-understood functional units of DNA into elaborate concatenations is less objectionable when the venue of experimentation is the dream-like laboratory. Laboratories are dream-like in the sense that experimentation takes place in a realm apart that does not disturb.
For religious groups, laboratories are not a realm apart. In fact, the reasonableinvestigations of science transgress long-standing structures of the ethical ordering of societies. Beyond that, cosmic metaphysical distinctions are being transgressed in laboratories. The sacred realm of creation is tinkered with in these most un-dream-like laboratories.
By implication, as Foucalt elaborates inHistory of Madness, the behaviors of eccentrics who transgress the moral order and its ethical boundaries invite the cosmic forces of God and nature to visit doom upon society.
In slightly different but familiar language, most bioengineers and commentators on synthetic biology agree with aspects of this assessment. Chimeras, for example, may lead to pathogenic substances that have never been seen before.
As a result, who can blame folks for declaring today’s science and technology as leading inexorably to the chimeric appearance of the legendary and apocryphal horseman of the apocalypse, super-disease?
Foucalt’s History of Madness dwells incessantly on the realization that ethical perceptions and morality function as a constitutive basis for the social organization of emergent forms of human consciousness.
The same applies to emergent technologies.
The ethical sensibilities of bioengineers are not likely to perceive chimeras as inherently demonic representatives of a natural underworld that requires continuous repression by moral education. Rather, expertise acquired through a rational/realist metaphysics and suitable epistemology provides a potent toolkit of risk assessment and experimental isolation that silences both the charge of madness and the inevitability of apocalypse.
But scientists are not the only people with power of the machinery of science.
All it takes is a high-profile accident, effective media campaign, or combination of synchronistic events to modify the chimeric experimentations of these ambiguously mad/reasonable research programs.
In fact, the mind reels with exotic fantasies of chimera microorganisms making a mark on human history.
Terrorist plots, natural disasters, interventions by an evil genius — these are distinct possibilities these days. Entire Bosch-like universes can be constructed, entirely within the realm of actual possibility and realist empirical imagination. I am particularly intrigued by the evil genius figure.
As Foucalt points out in History of Madness, Descartes in his Meditations simply cannot cope with the true potency of the evil demon thought experiment.
And neither can we.
If a skeptical treatment of sensory inputs allows one to consider the metaphysical possibility of an evil demon, it would seem that not even one’s own thoughts can be trusted in such a world. Reason could be entirely madness. Such, indeed, was the basic feeling of Erasmus and others. For Descartes, rather than face up to the implications of madness, the power of the Cogito dominates (and represses) any question of madness, delivering certitude where none would otherwise be granted. This foundational moment in the history of rationalism has its parallel in the confinement of 1% of the population in newly-formed General Hospitals in France and comparable institutions throughout Europe in the 17th century.
But again, what if an evil demon produced this hallucination of reason? While it may seem trivial, in the 17th century the question itself threatens the social order.
In the 17th century, Descartes himself could have placed anyone who persisted in this question in a General Hospital without a hint of irony. The skeptical path, like the familiar paths of Albert Camus in the 20th century, “could lead as well to prison as to innocent, untroubled sleep.”
In the 21st century, the opposition to bioengineering offered by religious organizations and civil society groups re-introduces a skeptical antagonism to the machinations of science and society. Do the experts really deserve the power to assess their own reasonability?
Perhaps the power of democratic forms of governance is that competing forms of rationality can organize to influence social structures and forms of consciousness.
But people with chimeric capacities will not stop dreaming. In fact, as the tools of innovation diffuse through societies, chimeric imagination will increase in potency.
The Hieronymous Bosch of the 21st century could very well depict landscapes full of DIY biohacker self-experimentations. In such a world as this, the evil genius as a figure representing the threat of madness for the social order has been democratized.
agilekeys 
Interesting thoughts. Bioengineering is a touchy subject not just because of it’s potential physical impacts from utopia to apocalypse, but because it blends the ontological states of Alive, Machine, Human, Natural, and Divine. As a society, I don’t think we really know what these terms deem, and opponents of bioengineering are terrified that what will shake down once the scientific techniques are commonplace will destroy their own ideological and political coherence. How can one preserve Nature when all of it is patented? How can we touch the divine when life comes out of a factory?
But once we move away from the hot button issue, I think there is a real link between STS and the Foucauldian project, and it is in the question “Have technologies made us free?” The conventional narrative is that science has liberated us from ignorance and technology has liberated us from labor. The counter-narrative is that science is a false understanding of reality and that technology is a system of enslavement (see http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unabombers-Pen-Pal/131892/ for a really great article on the subject.) Good scholarship explains how it depends in the specific instance. Great scholarship presents us with the actual relationship between truth and liberation.
Now, I might have been drinking too much of the CSPO kool-aid, but I think it’s all contingent, it’s all institutional contexts, and we’re all bastard cyborgs. Does that mean that we’re also crazy?
((And as an aside, have you read any Bruno Latour?))
Thanks for the link to the Kaczynski piece — quite a propos to the Foucaldian topic of madness in a technological age. For many, Kaczynski is crazy. For Kaczynski, technological systems induce this revolutionary reflex in the minds of freedom-loving individuals. Perhaps Ted even thinks, like RD Laing, that madness is actually the ubiquitous condition of the technologically mediated, neurotic mass of humanity. Foucalt’s point, I gather, is that distinct but interacting forms of “the consciousness of madness” (he lists 4: critical, practical, enunciatory, analytic) are at work historically, shaping social systems by operating even below the threshold of language to permit and establish specific experiences of madness. For Foucalt, this is an important topic to consider because new critical forms of consciousness have difficulty emerging in social systems established specifically to suppress and isolate eccentric thoughts and experiences.
Of course, there would be no Kaczynski if there weren’t these technological systems. Kaczynski’s form is constrained by these networks of ethical perception, economic dynamics, and techniques of social control. In that sense I think Ted is correct, “technology” has enslaved him: he is not quite free to reimagine the conditions of his life. However, Kaczynski could have left the country, trekked into a legitimately isolated wilderness, and lived a life quite apart from technology. In that context, perhaps he lives, perhaps he dies; only the ingenuity of his wits would mediate his experience with the natural environment. What is plainly ironic, for me, is that Kaczynski EQUIVOCATES. In a world with little or no technology, what technology there is improves quality of life. In terms of valuation, Kaczynski wants to err on the side of too little technology in the quest to find just the right amount. In contrast, contemporary societies are characterized not just by too much technology, but by a hyperbolic too-much-ness that metabolizes this too-much-ness for the purpose of producing more.
So, it’s a question of proportion, I think. Kaczynski is not entirely Luddite. It’s more an aeshtetics or metaphysics of proportion that implies a continuum of slavery to freedom.
I really enjoy this question “Has technology made us free?”
The 1-page biography of Foucalt at the beginning of the English edition of History of Madness mentions Foucalt’s free experimentation with LSD, his exploration of liberal sexuality: “he lived what he termed ‘limit experiences.'”
I would say the question shouldn’t be framed using that grammatical construction, “has made”. Is that present perfect? The grammar of it implies the possibility of a complete assessment, which I think cannot be accepted.
Latour begins to address this question by identifying the relationships that modernism intended to produce through changes in the social order. Essays like We Have Never Been Modern indicate that the professed aims of modernism to liberate humanity through conquest and stewardship of nature must act within a context of immense ecological and sociotechnical complexity. Conquering nature by using technology to manufacture chemicals, for example, does not demonstrate modernist ideals to the hilt. For that, a complex understanding of the impact of technology on environments and the human spirit is required.
Latour has recently argued that the story of Dr. Frankenstein encapsulates the issue. Rather than rebel against technological systems because of these chimeric monstrosities, the lesson for Latour is that our technologies need to be cared for. Dr. Frankenstein’s flaw was to abandon his creation, abrogating the responsibility to socialize and humanize technology.
That is what Kuczynski should be advocating. Instead we get a utilitarian assessment of harms: less harm will be done if we violently revolt now than if we allow technological systems to continue in their domination. For me, this is a sophomoric ethical stance, although one firmly rooted in a briliant and noble tradition. I just find it light on complexity and lacking in pragmatism.
Rather than consider myself a slave to technology, incapable of voicing opposition because of the threat of being outcast or having my hopes of achieving social status dashed, I would place myself in line with Latour’s sentiments about stewardship and responsibility. Perhaps Kuczynski and Skrbina view themselves as spokesmen for a tradition of self-reliance and freedom — even perhaps as anarchists. In that case, what about self-organizing some form of populist stewardship of technological systems? In the face of the complexity of that task, calling for a reduction in complexity through violent opposition strikes me as pitiful. In contrast, I find Latour’s critical use of liberal, modernist political writings a better stance toward technology, and one more likely to increase utilitarian outcomes (although I prefer alternative ethical frameworks, especially the Capabilities approaches of Sen and Nussbaum). Latour in effect mobilizes the ethical and moral framework of modernism against its social manifestations. I think this is a nice move, and one that has absorbed the Foucaldian analyses of History of Madness and other works. For Foucalt, ethical perceptions and moral systems constrain the possible structures of human consciousness. Latour is attempting to nudge governments, religious institutions, and citizens to modify the relationships between science and society through appeals to foundational ethical and moral commitments of modernism that have never been critiqued. This project of course requires critiquing the metaphysics/ontology of modernism with its separation of primary and secondary qualities, etc (which Latour adapts from Whitehead).
As for the relationship between truth and liberation…
Most people don’t know that Latour [with a PhD in theology] has claimed to consider himself a philosopher rather than anthropologist, social theorist, etc (“I am first of all a philosopher, although not a professional one.” http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/114-UNSELD-SSS-GB.pdf) His interests are not only in analysing the production of truth in science and technology, but also through religion, music, arthitecture, et cetera. Latour has claimed that his analysis of inscriptions in scientific venues was inspired primarily by his understanding of the activities of biblical exegesis. What brings theology together with science and technology? “Networks of translation” and “keys” or modes/regimes in which those translations spread to produce objectivities and subjectivities. For Latour, religion is designed to function in a different key than the claims of science and technology. Religious discourse is designed to transform subjectivities in specific ways, rather than establishing realistic relationships with the claims of science. To bulldoze the distinctions between these modes of truth production makes religion not function properly in the transformation of souls.
Thus, I would emphasize that religious institutions are not going anywhere, and would still be desirable in a world of complete scientific understanding.
Actually, I have read only a fraction of what Latour has written. There is a great deal of contemporary philosophy that I would like to absorb. I want to start next with Timothy Morton (http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/) because he practices Dzogchen Buddhism, which I am fascinated with.
Letting this one simmer! Lots to take in from an ‘interdisciplinary’ perspective. Intriguing, rigorous writing.