Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
have yet to forge the tools to explore, provides a very exciting prospect.
It is a prospect for those practicing the life sciences as well as those con-
ducting inquiries that link life and diverse sciences, a prospect of a vast
domain opening up for scientific exploration as well as discontents and
consolations yet to be known or felt. “Open reading frames” and “sites
to map mutations” can be read first metaphorically and then metonymi-
cally as well by those of us in the other Wissenschaften as an encour-
agement to the pleasures of further inquiry. By forging a new relationship
to emergent objects of knowledge, and means of knowing, we once again
come across an older imperative that must today be understood differ-
ently, savored in its complex bittersweetness: “dare to know.”
Notes
1. The immense complexity of what God supposedly was capable of doing and
what humans could know of God's plans and actions is analyzed by Hans
Blumenberg in section 2 “Theological Absolution and Human Self Assertions”
in
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). On
the concept of
prophète de malheur
, see Francois Chateauraynaud and Didier
Torny
Les Sombres Precurseurs, Une sociologie pragmatique de l'alerte du
risque
(Paris: Editions de l'Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales, 1999),
379.
2. On this distinction, see Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in
The
Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32-50.
3. Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
4. Although one can establish this series (labor, life, language) as a historical
progression, such a move would be misleading if it did not take into account
that this is first and foremost an analytic frame, stemming from a value orien-
tation as Max Weber has taught us. It is only within such an analytic frame that
these domains can be so sharply and neatly delimited. Thus, for example, it is
self-evident that considerations of labor invariably contained considerations on
language and life, and so on. If one were to introduce the nondiscursive dimen-
sions of these practices into the narrative, then the story would become more
complicated and yet more interesting. For instance, social planning and its asso-
ciated social technologies aimed at increasing the docility and efficiency of labor,
yielded massive effects on human health and disease, demography, and so forth,
as well as on what we now call the environment. Therefore, in addition to a
primary diagnosis of the contemporary conjuncture, the further analytic work
to be done is to see how subsidiary couplings (language/labor, labor/life, lan-
guage/life) are refigured within it. How, we should inquire, do the historically
forged and figured domains of labor and language change when they are brought
into an encompassing frame of life understood as molecular?
