Bioethics in the Age of New Media

by Joanna Zylinska
The MIT Press Cambridge, MA, 2009
240 pp., Trade, $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-262-24056-7.

Reviewed by Jussi Parikka
Department of English, Communication, Film and Media
Anglia Ruskin University
UK

jussi.parikka@anglia.ac.uk

The same day as I started reading Joanna Zylinska’s Bioethics in the age of New Media, I saw a short news blurp on the web site of the Scientific American. According to the research summarized there, the brain interprets tools as part of itself without distinguishing the “self” from the “other.” For the brain, the tools we happen to use become part of the body-schema, which tells the tale of how we continuously adapt to and change with our environment. Environment becomes less an external conditioning than an internal milieu as well. Apparently some brain scientists had come to the same conclusions through empirical measuring that phenomenologists and body theorists had been saying for decades. The body does not end at the skin, and the assumption of a rational, self-controlled subject is a fantasy without a scientific grounding.

Such arguments are at the core of Zylinska’s book as well, which is a mapping of the ethical contexts, discussions and demands that new media imposes when rethinking life and embodiment. Her point of departure accepts the points made through cybernetics (to some extent at least), and theorists such as Bernard Stiegler that the human being is already technical. It is through such contexts that she wishes to challenge any “Edenic myth of originary nature, which still actively feeds into contemporary moral panics about genetically modified (GM) foods, aesthetic surgery, and cloning.” (47). In other words, any sustainable notion of agency in the age of biodigital manipulation or engagement with the complex assemblages of network culture and its different scales from computer mediated communication between humans to non-human bots needs a very carefully established rethinking of how the changing “I” is already constituted through relations of alterity – the other. Zylinska acknowledges that of course such points convening very fundamental notions are not and should not be left to the experts, but touch our daily discussions from gene manipulation to other hot topics of coffee tables.

Bioethics is not only conversation or contemplation for Zylinska, she is more interested in bioethics-in-action, being performed through projects and concrete contexts. The book looks at various practices, which actually extend the notion from normative and reflective takes on specifically biological or medical questions to a variety of other topics as well. This refers to a wider field of biopolitics – management of life – in new media culture from the biodigital to blogging. Her analysis on blogging approaches it interestingly from Foucault’s notion of the techniques of the self, and appropriating the notion of narcissism not as a negative solipsistic concern for the banality self, but as necessary for the building of the self. Blogs are for Zylinska more about “experiencing and enacting the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of relationality as a condition of being in the world” (91) than merely a genre of cultural production, such as citizen journalism. It would have been interesting to continue such ideas of biopolitics in directions that take directly into account such political economic factors of “care of the self” as post-Fordist labour, and the appropriation of life as the motor for production of value in social media networks.

Her extension of the notion of life makes the analyses of Bioethics in the Age of New Media interesting. The notion of bioethics becomes itself a vehicle with which to track the multiscalar contexts of “life” in current culture. Through discussing a number of recent key writers on such notions of bios and zoe as Agamben, Foucault and Braidotti, Zylinska tries to carve out her stance to such notions with the help of Derrida and interestingly Levinas. By taking into account the problems of Levinas as a too-human-orientated thinker, she argues with Derrida that the notion of alterity inherent in Levinas’ ethics should be read as an absolute ethical framing of such constitutive others as animals and non-humans as well: “[…] the secret of the alterity of the other (lives), of the fact that the other (life) does not yield itself to thematization, that there is always something that escapes my conceptual grasp.” (144) In other words, this is notion of ethics that reaches towards a futurity, or, “life-as-we-perhaps-do-not-know-it-yet” kind of ethics that she follows through Eduard Kac’s, Critical Art Ensemble’s and Natalie Jeremijenko’s projects.

What remains here as a bit unquestioned is the notion of difference and alterity as key drivers for contemporary capitalism and this leaves such post-structuralist accounts in need of further elaboration. What if capitalism also feeds on differences, and works to promote then, not just erasing alterity as Zylinska argues in her chapter on the make-up show The Swan? The chapter makes interesting parallels between the wider global biopolitical situation having to do for example with the “radical making over” of Iraq and current TV-genres relating to cleaning up too fat and dodgy bodies but it could have pushed its argument even further, as well as explicated more clearly the different Foucauldian notions between disciplinary power, biopolitical power and mechanisms of security to which Foucault turned in his later work and that could have provided further fresh insights into the contemporary biopolitical situation.

In any case, Zylinska’ way of reading politics of livability across scales is enjoyable and raises really important issues of the various contexts of biopolitics also outside the usual suspects of biotechnology. Her writing is very approachable and the book has clear course reading list potential. What Zylinska shows well is how new cultural studies is able to tackle the new challenges and contexts of race, gender and class outside their old representational contexts and engage with “welfare agencies, asylum and immigration centers, counterterrorism cells, DNA testing laboratories and so forth” (140) as the key sites where a cultural theorist should nowadays work her theories through.