[Synapse elist] on zoe, bios and queer biopolitics

[lotu5]

hello,

I'm an MFA student at UCSD who is very interested in "bioart", but 
hasn't done any yet, per se, and I've been very stimulated by the 
discussion here so far. I hope to add something interesting or at least 
useful.

There were an amazing series of talks in the visual arts department at 
UCSD this week that make me very happy to be a student there. 
Yesterday's talk was from Beatriz da Costa. Recently she's been 
exploring interspecies collaboration with a few projects, the main one 
being PigeonBlog. Maybe she's on this list...

In her talk, Beatriz discussed her reservations about the term bioart, 
saying that she doesn't think it is "the most generative term" that 
could be used, because it restricts the artist to a particular medium, 
that of biology. She asked why works using other mediums, but still 
concerned with issues of biology, should not be considered bioart. In 
addition she has worked on a new book which is about to come out 
entitled Tactical Biopolitics, where she apparently develops this 
argument more.[1]

Given the discussion so far of this distinction between zoe/bios, I was 
reminded of the beginning of Agamben's book, Homo Sacer, where he 
discusses this distinction. There he discusses how the greek term zoe 
has no plural, and that the concept of zoe, "simple natural life is 
excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined- as 
merely reproductive life- to the sphere of the oikos, 'home'"(2). In 
contrast, Agamben points out, Aristotle uses the phrase "bios politikos" 
for political life.(1)

So here we see the anthropocentrism arising from the original use of the 
words, where bios indicates a kind of human politics and zoe is "simple 
natural life" or "animal life, organic life" in the online eymology 
dictionary[2].

But maybe this is a useful distinction, in that it aligns bioart closely 
  with biopolitics, and not just biology. It seems to me that much of 
Beatriz da Costa's work and Critical Art Ensemble's work has been 
engaged with the social and the political and an effort to shift popular 
attitudes about biotech towards a more critical attitude.

My own interest in bioart and biotech arises from my interest in queer 
politics and queer biopolitics specifically, thinking about the ways in 
which gender, sex and sexuality are regulated and constructed through 
scientific distinctions based on social codes. In this respect, I find 
Shannon Bell's project with SymbioticA "Two Phalluses and Big Toe,"[3] 
to be very interesting in activating and exploring the concept of 
inbetweenness in the realm of sex, where she "construct[ed] and [grew] 
tissue engineered male and female phalluses as living art objects that 
show the internal and external female erection (the external clitoris, 
the internal urethral sponge, or what has been popularized as the 
g-spot) as a connective integrated whole comparable in size and stature 
to the male sex organ."

My own work with SharingIsSexy.org has been exploring practices of 
gender and sexuality outside of male and female, in queer spaces of 
inbetweenness, but not using biology. Though I wonder, in Body Art, as 
closely related to or as a synonym for performance art, the artist's or 
the audience's body is the medium for the art itself, is that not a kind 
of bioart? Or a precursor? Performance was also referred to as Live Art, 
so that is an interesting similarity, or parapraxis, there as well.

Which leads me back to the idea of Vitality and parapraxis or the 
unconscious. Near the end of The Order of Things, Foucault ties the 
existence of an idea of man to the unconscious, saying "from the moment 
when man first constituted himself as a positive figure in the field of 
knowledge... it became possible, by this very fact, for an objective 
form of thought to investigate man in his entirety- at the risk f 
discovering what could never be reached by his reflection or even by his 
consciousness... the unconscious." (326) In his call for us to move 
beyond, "man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its 
end," (387) Foucault sees psychoanalysis, as an investigator of the 
unconscious, or that is which beyond rational comprehension, as an 
important tool leading towards that epistemological space beyond man. 
This is part of hos I understand Vitalism, as that which is beyond our 
current understanding. As a trained computer scientist, I don't think 
that science claims to have a total description of the universe yet. I 
imagine we can all agree that there is still much to learn about 
biology, such as protein folding and how it unfolds, after genetic codes 
have been sequenced, based on various environmental factors, something 
Delanda discusses in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.

It seems that bioart is a continuation of long struggles for control 
over the body, over who defines the body and who controls, restricts or 
amplifies it with technology. So the drive for accessibility, the 
community research initiatives, biotech hobbyist kits and Body Hacking 
practices that Quinn Norton[4] talks about are, to me, a continuation of 
feminist struggles for bodily self-determination and queer struggles 
over the right to exist and the right to pleasure. For me, this is the 
essence of biopolitics, but it seems that in social movements in the US, 
the term biopolitics isn't used much. But perhaps the bio in bioart is 
useful in that it implies a social and political engagement from the 
very inception.

Something else I'd love to discuss is the discussion I had with Ricardo 
Dominguez, who is currently doing work regarding nanotech[5], about the 
empirical, experimental demands of contemporary art versus the need and 
desire to create and disrupt mythopoetic systems, and how this plays out 
in bioart.

thanks,

   dj lotu5


[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11473
[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bio-
[3] http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/residencies/residents2/shannon_bell
[4] http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/bodyhacking.html
[5] see http://pitmm.net and http://bang.calit2.net


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