"racism justifies the death function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality" (Foucault 258).
How can this converse with the molecular magification that Reardon drew our attention to? Can we identify significant categories that power technologies will produce as they "pierce the ideological veil of the skin" (Reardon 52)? Does this just look like the movie Gattaca, or something else?
Also, Foucault shows us the significance of the state being represented as a body. It is interesting to wonder how this could change alongside advances in modern bio science. How might the state be represented as we further prioritize things like genomics and bio-engineering? Perhaps one route is the turn toward conceptualizations of network culture, and the crosstalk with computational biological models that become abstractions ripe for social theory.
If this is a viable route, could the "unitary living plurality" become replaced by something more decentralized?
Are there other ways to read our turn towards the molecular? What new kinds of power does this afford? What are the bounds of the discursive bodies currently doing this reading of genetics - how deeply intertwined are they with the state already?
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