Cultural Critique, Catachresis, and Coming to Care

• In Event: Anthropology and STS: Dis/Encounters and Potential South-North Exchanges II

Abstract

In this presentation I trace a genealogy of my theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of genomics, from history of science to STS to anthropology, trying to come to terms with the differences their differences have made. From a history of the Human Genome Project in the U.S. to an ethnography of the volatile territories of commercial genomics in Iceland and environs, this work has pursued cultural critique of genomic forms of life - a form of critique that has neither run out of steam, nor resolved into opposition. I use recent developments in asthma genomics to discuss how I've recently come to care about the qualities of "care" in genomics today: the love of data, the worry over its creation and analysis, the laborious investment in collective infrastructure, and the cultivation of scientific subjects appropriately anxious about genomic truths. I also use contemporary research in geneXenvironment interactions to elaborate the differences between care as conceived in recent STS scholarship, and "care" in the sciences understood as catachresis: to study care is to study an impossible and necessary naming of science's outside, its double-binding (Bateson) or aporetic (Derrida) structure that demands endurance and play. One important line of argument is thus about the promise of poststructuralism in STS.

Author

• Mike Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute