Care of the Self in Bioethics
Posted by Lan Xuan Le on November 9, 2009
This week’s readings explore the idea of bioethics, which Zylenska defines as an embrace of “life as a network of material and symbolic forces that are in operation in the world and that shape both our metaphysical and technological concepts and paradigms” (2009, 66). Whereas traditional bioethics concerns itself primarily with zoe, Zylenska’s bioethics encompasses both zoe and bios, the biological and political. Building upon Foucault’s work on cultivation of the self and the practices of self-care, Zylenska proposes blogging as a form of self-writing. But that writing, in Levinas’ reaching out to the alterity if the other, also reaches out to the social other in the digital network. This turn poses self-care as relational in its becoming, which evokes shades of Donna Haraway’s “becoming with” the companion species. Of interest to us is Foucault and Zylenska’s attempt to locate that which is productive and generative in a bioethics that operates in a biopolitical context. Just as self-surveillance can serve as a neoliberal project, these theorists posit that it may also offer a method of self-making.
For this week’s readings, we organized our reflections into four areas: bioethics, generativity, technicity, and measurement. Bioethics, obviously, concerns itself with questions of definition and conditions of an “ethics of life.” Generativity deals primarily with the question raised earlier in regards to what is productive in these technologies of the self. Technicity raises questions about our relation to the always already technological self that Zylenska proposes. And finally, a pet subject of ours — measurement, which is concerned with the idea of quantification and its role in continuous control versus discrete discipline.
Questions:
New Media “enacts” symptoms while simultaneously “looking at” diagnoses. Is the “live practice” of blogging (and other media) Diagnosis or Pathology? Is this just the same problem of measuring measurements?
What is good narcissism? Is it just resistance against control? In “Uncommon Life” Thacker quotes Deleuze “When power . . . takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power already puts itself on the side of life, and turns life against power.”(313) Is this different from “Sheer life” as extrapolated by Ong?
Where exactly is the “other” situated in Bioethics? What would a narcissism of the commons look like? Can we relate this back to Thacker’s conception of the commons, which is at once cellular and not?
How does Foucault’s self-surveillance differ from the surveillance of our previous readings? Where does he locate a possibility for resistance and self-making in this practice?
For a copy of our handout, it is being hosted HERE. (Please right-click and save.)
Graduate seminar: Life Itself 
Lindsay Thomas said
In response to the second question about good narcissism being a form of resistance to control, I think we need to be careful about connecting Zylinska’s ideas about good narcissism as a pole through which bioethics operates to Deleuze’s conception of resistance (173-4) for several reasons:
1) Deleuze’s conception of resistance seems to be tied to both a people as a creative minority and to art as resistance: “A people is always a creative minority” (173); “Artists can only invoke a people … it’s not their job to create one, and they can’t;” “When a people’s created, it’s through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art … or links up art to what it lacked” (174); and later, “We need both creativity and a people” (176).
2) I don’t think Deleuze would consider blogging a form of art or a becoming. Rather, I think he would be more apt to think of it as a “utterly trivial situation,” as an example of “too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of ‘jolly people’ gossiping” (172). (Haraway’s point about his snobbery seems relevant here.)
2) Good narcissism seems to be about the self: it is about the self’s inability to contain itself, yes, but it’s still about a self that cannot be contained and in that uncontainability reaches to an Other. Deleuze’s conception of resistance is tied up with ideas of art and a people. Thus, his resistance doesn’t seem to be an act of the self (note how Zylinska’s bioethics turns on “a need for a decision, to be taken, always anew, in a singular way, in an undecidable terrain” (96) – Schmitt?) but rather a becoming of a people, an invoking and a creating of a people.