Divisions Symposium, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 23/24th September 2016

Michele Masucci, Stockholm, September 2016

Plasticity as resistance

Editing the genome an era of new flaws?

The Human Genome Project ended in 2001 completing the full sequencing of the
human genome. This constituted a new era in biology and medicine. The same project
was recently extended to the Human Genome-Write1 project in June 2016 by ten years
to develop the capacity to produce synthetic human DNA. The possibility to
chemically fabricate humans in the lab and parts of human DNA has profound
consequences to the human kind. The conception that the human species is essentially
determined by its genome is no longer possible. What we are and most of all what we
want to become as self-conscious beings with the technical capacity to influence our
evolutionary development has surfaced as an acute challenge. As a scientific
endeavour which in large parts is framed by a techno-positivist discourse, whatever
the possible obstacles normative ethics might present, they seem to be overcome by
the enormous medical advantages that genetic enhancement brings. Apart from the
hope to erase cancer and the possibility to encode genetic immunity from deadly
viruses in the genome its expected that a fundamental aspect of human selfperception such as biological reproduction will become completely obsolete. This is a
modern form of eugenics that is promoted by biotech companies in collaboration with
research institutions. The goal is to enhance the human genome, to create a better
species, a better humanity. The main question is not necessarily whether this is good
nor bad in any normative sense, whether we want or can retreat to any kind of original
form of human being is perhaps a lost cause. Whatever could be imagined as
essentially human would turn into a conservative force. The question is rather which

1 Boeke J., et al., The Genome ProjectWrite, Science, 02 Jun 2016

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kind of beings we want to become, and more importantly if this super being existence,
deprived of disease, will be accessible to all.
The Wellness imperative
In January 2015 President Obama announced the precision medicine initiative 2, an
effort from USA to boost research on medicine based on the human genome. The lead
concept being that until now treatments have been based on a one size fits all
approach, that precision medicine can overcome by its capacity to account for
individual differences on the level of genes, environments and lifestyles.
Precision medicine operates with the help of comprehensive data collection and
analysis of the individual genome, medical history, environment and lifestyle
assessments conducted regularly over time. Generating large quantities of data that
produce a model of the physiological, pathological and phenotypic characteristics of
the individual is cross-referenced to identify mutations and known abnormalities that
cause disease. Based on the molecular characteristics of the individual categorisation
into statistically verified disease subgroups are matched with therapies that target the
specific mutations. This identification of significant data points is correlated with
medically relevant endpoints. This data cloud surrounding the patient is continuously
analysed and refined from biological noise forming the basis for precise predictions
over the risk to develop different diseases. The individual and the consulting medical
doctor are in this way provided with a biological key, prognostic indicators expressed
in scales and percentages telling the future of an otherwise healthy body. The remedy
is presented as a lifestyle program where the person is coached, and thus formed, to
eat, exercise and live in order to optimise her chances and proactively counteract
possible risk factors that have been identified. The end product of this is Wellness
defined through measurable biological markers, translated into complex datasets
facilitating distributed monitoring, control and subsequent valorisation increasing the
demands on citizens to be administer their health data and become entrepreneurs of
their own health. The proponents of wellness project that there is a gradual
development in health care to go from the objective to treat and cure diagnosed
individuals to act proactively to prevent the development of disease3.
2 President Obama press Conference, www.whitehouse.gov/precision-medicine
3 Leeroy Hood, p4 Medicine Institute, p4mi.org/4-ps-quantifying-wellness-and-demystifying-disease
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From evidence to commodity

Through recent scientific breakthroughs the understanding of the human biology
makes evident that each individual presents unique conditions on several levels of
complexity. Randomised clinical trials are thus often too crude of a method of
assessment although extremely difficult to overcome due to the historic role as
devices for scientific progress in medicine.
The development of precision medicine presents a promise to account for diversity on
a molecular level, but remains a technique of subjectivation. That precision medicine
is trending as a concept and healthcare policy due to its compatibility with neoliberal
principles for healthcare and research. The American historian of medicine Nathaniel
Comfort describes in his essay The Genetic Self how medicine based on the
genome is flourishing as a consequence of the commercial principles for health care
that are being applied, where an ideological need for medicine centred on the patient
as consumer has been created. The commercial and ideological need to position the
patient as a consumer in a nexus of products, services and contracts. Precision
medicine is the marketing strategy for the increasing commercialisation of the human
body by the exteriorisation of its biological information 4. Thus Wellness is a form of
life that depends on the existence of the excluded life.
With precision medicine vulnerability, weakness, disease becomes internalised as a
chronic state of individual imperfection that constantly needs to be overcome; the
manifestation of disease is viewed as a breach of contract, a failure by an
insubordinate prospective patient to follow protocol. Responsibility for health and
happiness remains with the individual. At the same time health and happiness is
marketed as a commodity that can be consumed. Contractual proceedings between the
individual and the caregiver, the legal and administrative organisation of health, are
the primary task that supersede cure. You are first a legal entity that can enter
contracts, this grants you the status of becoming patient, relating your body to the
medical procedures that can provide cure to your condition. With precision medicine
this becomes more apparent as participation in clinical trials, decisions on treatments
4 Savard J., Personalised Medicine: A Critique on the Future of Health Care, Bioethical Inquiry
(2013) 10:197203
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and costs are contracted with the owner of the million data points that are needed to
make computational medicine possible. The individual becomes the intersection for
the production of new ideal forms of algorithmic life, as the material life form is
consumed depriving it from power and autonomy, through the production of a specific
form of health.
Divisions through health
The human genome is not, as it has been understood since its discovery, a fixed code,
directly translated into the building blocks of the body expressed through different
tissues. The past twenty years of research has gradually revealed that we are not
simply determined by our heredity. Epigenetics is a scientific field that emerged with
the discovery that external factors such as environment, lifestyle, culture, have a
direct impact on which genes are activated and which are passivized in our DNA
though a number of processes. The way we live, during our lifetime, influence how
our genome is expressed, and moreover these alterations are passed on to future
generations. Epigenetic imprints on the human genome are part of human evolution.
When we are included in extensive wellness programs where our bodies are modelled
with a digital imprint with a million data points this entails the possibility to inscribe
in the code of an already plastic code. This means that the plastic character of our
genome is at stake. We can determine the plastic character of our genome. Different
forms of discipline, technological and material conditions have pushed the human
genome in different direction through history. The increased understanding of how the
human body is shaped through different environments and in symbiosis with a
multitude of organisms, environments, habits, metabolisms and material conditions is
key to understand its possible future, the power to form.
Marx understanding of human nature was influenced by Darwins evolutionary
biology combining a dialectical materialist critique of human nature. The human
being for Marx, as species being, is an inherently social being, and as such indivisible
from the material conditions its time. Under capitalism, our lives and biology are
subsumed through prevailing processes of value production. Capital develops though
its metabolic relation to nature, without any consideration to nature apart from it as a
means in the constant accumulation of capital. The demands and ideals that are put on
the human body are reflected by the specific labour capacities that are desired, which
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under present form of capitalism covers the totality of the human faculties,
fragmented through the isolation of singulars making exclusion and division of human
kind possible by the creation of those who have more from those who have less, to
those who have nothing.
The commodification of scientific discoveries, and the industrialisation of health,
results in expensive medicine, whatever treatment identified, if identified, requires
access to resources, infrastructures and capital. For the most expensive diseases such
as cancer, cure or prolonged life is simply inaccessible for most. Health it is both a
luxury and a minimum demand for employability. The imperative of health does not
entail a prolonged life for all, a life without disease for humanity. To maintain
divisions across population globally is a key mechanism in the control and circulation
of value. Access to health and the requirement of health is both imperative and
necessity.
Wellness as aesthetic ideal
To maximize wellness the perpetual patient is encouraged to engage fitness programs
and take individual responsibility for optimizing the body. This preventive
enhancement is designed to prolong life becomes a conservative force, binding the
individual into strict ideals, moulding bodies into given templates. The aesthetic
ideals that are reproduced within medicine and science communities in general reveal
the often-unreflective connections between aesthetic value judgements and their
political impact on the scientific discourse from the development of experiments to
the criteria used in the evaluation of results. Donna Haraway notes in a recent lecture
at the The Evergreen State College in June 20165 how the classicist humanist
aesthetics dominate within the scientific community, the Vitruvian man by Leonardo
Da Vinci being a the most recurring example. Maybe its not a coincidence that the
Vitruvian man is the official logo for the Human Genome-Write project that
mentioned above. There you find the idea of an ideal human form, a white-cis-male,
today envisioned as a statistically verifiable virtual reference. This tendency
exemplified in renaissance artists efforts to model human perfection resurfaces as lead
symbol for the institutions that manage the technology to mould humanity at a
5 Haraway D., Anthroposcene Consortium Series, The Evergreen State College, June 2016
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWQ2JYFwJWU)
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biological level. Whatever radical opportunity the capacity new biotechnologies bring
to rewrite humanity it seems to end up in a very boring aesthetics.
Apart from the apparent possibilities and risks that are generated by knowledge and
thus power over life, this biopower with increased precision, the question how we
understand the norm, how the digital body is generated, and what kind of bodies that
are moulded through this process lingers. Despite the technoscientific omptimism to
exploit new biotechnology and solve the riddle of disease, what health really is, for
whom and how it should be achieved remains? Its problematic that science is
reproducing aesthetic value judgements disguised as normative ideals. To go from an
it is so, to it should be so, entails a body moral and aesthetics, that stretches from the
pathological to the normative.
The living as norm establishing
Disease is no longer correlated to symptoms, the distinction between the normal and
the pathological has shifted from an observational assessment in dialogue, to the
molecular code, a biological law read by experts providing a truth that precedes the
manifestation of symptoms. Precision medicine enhances the idea that the normal is
outside the biological, a computational ideal, derived by the detection of statistical
difference in a complex albeit reduced model of the living. This leads to an a priori
assumption of pathology with the chronic pursuit of algorithmic health.
Georges Canguilhem describes in his most well know work The normal and the
pathological6 a norm establishing rather than norm-following normativity that can be
located in nature, and is shown with biology. He argues that the biological object as
such, can only be understood when described as norm establishing.
Canguilhem presents a number of descriptions of biological normativity through the
history of the relation between the physiological and the pathological, between the
healthy and the sick body. He developed the idea that the pathological cannot only be
defined by scientific descriptions. That which is pathological is not only what is
statistically extraordinary, what lies outside the norm, but should also be understood
as that which has negative value for the organism as such. But if we only can
determine the pathological by knowing what is not good for the organism the question
6 Canguilhem G., The Normal and the Pathological, NY: Zone Books, 1989
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how we can know, how we can determine what is good for the organism remains? For
Canguilhem the answer is clear, only the organism itself can be the authority
whereupon a biological norm can be established. Therefore the pathological should
not be understood as logically emerging after the physiological, the healthy, instead it
should be seen as that on which the normal function, the healthy, is expressed first
hand. The normal becomes distinct from the pathological only when the organisms
functions move towards an on-going negative condition to achieve a valorised other
condition. Pathology is thus that condition of non-normal organic function that has
normality as its objective. Life itself is a normative activity, the living fights that
which hinders its preservation and survival.
This activity, to establish value, is not completely spontaneous, but rather a reaction to
something, a tumour, an infection, a trauma, a fracture. It is the disease that spurs a
reaction and through that establishes the normative activity in the healthy condition
from which it starts. Disease is not only a process in where a specific physiological
order disappears, but also the emergence of a new vital order, the establishment of a
new norm. The organisms answer to disease is to establish this new norm. It is life
itself through its spontaneity and not by medical assessment that makes the biological
norm into an issue of value and not a statistical reality. The dependence of value in the
biological normativity is incorporated in the idea of the living. The biological sciences
can only study how the living as on object of study actualises its inherent normativity.
As a consequence of this Canguilhem claims that its not possible to trace any form of
original healthy condition that we return to after a time of sickness. The living does
not have the recreation of an original condition as its objective. Instead one should
understand recovery as the reparation of physiological innovations. There is no
disorder, but the exchange of an expected and valorised order with another order that
either is indifferent or that produces suffering. Therefore every organic function is a
question of ordering, and in this way the living is norm establishing. Life does not
understand reversibility, and can therefore not start with the objective to retrieve an
original state. The normal is not the old but the constant new form. This capacity is
what risks being appropriated and forced into an expected form, an external abstract
normativity.

How should we understand the politico-aesthetic project centred on the establishment

of wellness from this understanding of the living as itself norm-establishing? Life as
something that constantly develops new forms, and where an original form or and
ideal form is not possible to determine. To do this we need concepts that can help us
understand the relation of power to biology, and explore how parallel forms of
transformation intertwine at the level of the aesthetic, political and biological.
The potential of plasticity
In a paper from 2011 the American scholar Sebastian Rand argues that the
philosopher Catherine Malabous work on plasticity is a successful development of
Canguilhems conception of biological normativity7. Malabou points to an
understanding of the biological that can give room for a form of normativity and
politico-aesthetic paradigm that is missing within the biological and medical sciences
descriptions and conceptions. Malabou first identified the concept of plasticity in her
reading of Hegel. In her dissertation The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and
Dialectic she elaborates on Hegels conception of time and temporality 8. Catherine
Malabou contrasts Hegelian temporality with the interpretation given by Heidegger in
Being and Time9, by arguing that it is with the concept of plasticity that Hegel's theory
of temporality is best understood. The future is not only a moment in time, but also
rather something open to change and transformable thanks to our capacity for
interpretation. Plasticity remains a key concept in Malabous work, developing its
definition to entail the capacity both to give form, change form and to take form, she
also ads a fourth capacity that to explode form, something she names destructive
plasticity, and opens for the recycling of Heideggerian destruction. In her latest works
Malabou has explored how science and specifically neurobiology engages the concept
of plasticity. According to Malabou epigenetics and brain plasticity are discoveries
that bear implications on the understanding of human life that scientists fail to
appreciate due to the dominant conception within science to project the brain and the
body in mechanistic terms. Instead Malabou understand that epigenetics, the plastic
capacity our genes have to be influenced by the lived environments, opens for a
radical political understanding of the biological. With Malabou reading of the concept
7 Rand S., Organism, normativity, plasticity: Canguilhem, Kant, Malabou, Continental Philosophical
Review, 2011
8 Malabou C., The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, Routledge, 2004
9 Heiddegger M., Being and Time, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996
8

of plasticity, as with Canguilhem albeit in a different way, we can trace a noticeable

influence of Bergsonian vitalism10. An understanding of life as being more that the
physiological processes that can be observed scientifically through biology. Life is
more that the sum of its parts containing some sort of life force. A theory that has
generates strong opposition by leading geneticists and evolutionary biologist,
maintaining a materialist assumption of life as being nothing more than the chemical
and physical processes that constitute living matter.
A more common view by leading scientists such as Craig Venter, the entrepreneur
behind the Human Genome Project, and views the human as essentially governed by
its genome and determined by it, refuting the inherent potentials that come with
plasticity and epigenetics. Despite the biologism genetic determinism conveys, the
technical development towards the capacity to directly intervene in the genome and
alter the code, crosscuts epigenetics and thus challenges the organisms own normestablishing practice. Malabou asks, given the awareness that life always already is
plastic, what political agency this brings.
The symbolical and the biological
Catherine Malabou discusses in the text Will Soveregnity Ever be Deconstructed11 the
relation between biology and power through a critique of Foucaults biopolitics 12,
Derridas late seminars where he deconstructs Sovereignity through an elaboration of
the animal13, and Agambens benjaminian conception of the biopolitical subject, naked
life, in Homo Sacer14. Malabou sees a connection in how Foucault, Derrida and
Agamben in different ways present biology and life as being closely related to
sovereignty. These philosophers present the biological as an instrument for
normalisation and governance. How biology as science is transformed to a means for
the law to be inscribed in the organism. For Malabou these thinkers conceive two
separate forms of life, one scientific biological understanding of life and one nonbiological symbolical life. The symbolical life being the only form that can possibly
10 Bergson H., Creative Evolution, NY: Dover Publications, 1998
11 Malabou C., Will Soveregnity Ever be Deconstructed, Plastic Materialities, eds. Bahandar B.,
Goldberg-Hiller J., London: Duke University Press, 2015
12 Foucault M., History of Sexuality volume 1, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978
13 Derrida J., The Beast and the Sovereign, volume I&II, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2011
14 Agamben G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998
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contain a form of political resistance against the normative. This linkage between
three very distinct thinkers reveals a very traditional view on life that according to
Malabou is best exemplified in the work on medieval political theology by Ernst
Kantorowicz15 where the distinction of the body politic and the body natural can be
best summed up by the expression The King is dead, long live the King. The King
has two bodies, one natural mortal body and one non-material political body. The
biological body is different from the political body in its fragility and mortality. This
division remains despite Foucaults, Derridas and Agambens attempts to deconstruct
sovereignty through an analysis of life. All three locate the political implications of
sovereignty in the symbolical body, something irreducible to the biological body.
Malabou underlines that with plasticity the biological seems to have an inherent
political capacity. A strict separation between the biological and the symbolical is not
possible. With epigenetics, life, the human genome and the brain are in constant
change, and develop through plastic differentiation. Since environmental factors
influence how the genome is expressed and thus the phenotype, these facts open for
the possibility to overcome established divisions between the political body and the
biological body, the inherently political dimension of the biological needs to be
accounted for. The material organism is open for change and influence. The interplay
between the biological and the symbolical is inscribed in the biological as such.
Culture, language, norms, law are transformed into habits, behaviour have a direct
influence on the organism. However the material is not dependent on this external
symbolical order, biological life is capable to form its own symbolisation. History, the
political, is found inscribed and expressed in the material biological life. For Malabou
epigenetics reveals that nature and culture divisions are obsolete, culture is an
inherent aspect of the biological and thus we cannot reduce the biological to a mere
means for power. Epigenetics and plasticity entails that the biological and the
symbolical are intertwined without the need to overcome the biological. This does not
mean that a critique of power through a symbolical understanding of life is less
useful. Quite the opposite this demands a more careful critique of power that
considers how life with its own transformative capacity is formed or resists different
apparatuses of power both immediately biological and external to the body.

15 Kantorowicz E., The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton
University Press, 1958
10

Therefore to return to Canguilhem it is through the organism own norm establishing

practices that new positive forms can be created. This creates an understanding of the
body as something other than a determined machine. That is why it is in the interest of
the sovereign to lead the effort to achieve control over the understanding of health.
The norm within the biological constitutes a starting point for control. A possible
access for the symbolical and thus power into the norm-establishing practices of life
itself.
Foucault follows Canguilhem in that primarily some other outside force does not
govern you, yourself control you. For Foucault there is no clear exteriority for power.
It is you who produce the idea of transgression. But Foucault does not see
transgression. Instead resistance is something futile; resistance is productive, and
gains meaning only in relation to the normative. This designates a definite split
between degenerative life and optimised life, the tendency to reinstate the old
distinction between the symbolical and the biological. I have to control myself as I
search for the norm. Continuously trapped in the discourse of normativity. I produce
my own enslavement by establishing the dichotomy between the symbolical and the
biological within myself. Even if Capital subsumes life in different ways, such as the
computational modelling of biological plasticity, the institutional norms and habitforming practices that constitute everyday existence seem to be the most immanent
forms of submission; the microbiological seems inaccessible, separate. In this
scenario Malabous promise for radical resistance through the inherently political of
the biological becomes difficult to conceive of as concrete political strategy. The
surfaces of conflict external to the microbiological level remain central to consider for
a critique of power.
The infrastructures of Health politicizing sickness
Judith Butler described during a recent lecture, Vulnerability and Resistance, given in
2015 at CalArts16, how the conditions for political action are determined by the access
to infrastructures that entails everything from the street one walks while
demonstrating, to the access to health care, transport, electricity, water and
communications. Demonstrations, riots, strikes are spreading over the world, they
16 Butler J., Voulnerability and Resistance, CalArts, March 4 2015 (www.youtube.com/watch?
v=fbYOzbfGPmo)
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emerge and dissemble, continuity seems difficult. Butler asks if our vulnerability is
shown in our dependency of infrastructures to assemble and organise. The struggles
exist in the establishment and seizure of infrastructures that can be maintained and
that secure our existence and reproduction. A clear example of our dependence to
infrastructures is shown in who has access to political action. Following Judith Butler
the artist and activist Johanna Hedva proposes in Sick Woman Theory 17 that the
common understanding of political action as proposed by Hanna Arendt in the Human
condition18, that assumes participation in the public discourse, signifies that the sick,
tired body, that can no longer make the effort to go to the streets, is per default
excluded from the political according to Arends model. However the private, the
discarded and hidden is also political, and disease, weakness, vulnerability has a
political dimension in itself.
We can see how the systematization of our lives into wellness programs, intruding in
the biological norm establishing processes of the individual, still remains a marginal
issue for most. Why do we need advanced computation of healthy bodies to have a
proactive relation to the pathological when the access to infrastructures, water, shelter,
heath, and electricity is threatened or non-existent? Health explained as the control of
the population through the production of internalised habits is related to the control
exerted on territories and infrastructures, through institutions, political administration
and by military force. Accessing health is both a resource and a means of control.
Health brings surveillance and registration, support and care, and the internalised
desire for the norm. Health is communicated as imperative and demand, by lifestyle
choice or requirement for employment.
To be well, to have health is a value, and aesthetics, but also a sensation an affect that
cannot be captured or verified by statistical norm. This opens for new understanding
and uses of the technologies used for the enhancement of human life. Through
internalises aspect of power, despite the futility of resistance to the norm, the direct
relation to the body provides a political opportunity. With the access to our own body,
as abnormal and vulnerable it I may be comes the possibility to reveal our dependence
17 Hedva J., Sick Woman Theory, MaskMagazine, Not again Issue, January 2016,
(MaskMagazine.com)
18 Arendt H., The Human Condition, Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1958
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with other bodies and overcome singularizing divisions distributed by computational

norms. How can we articulate a resistance, derived from our biology and direct
relation to the body, which provides the forms of struggle that relate to the collective
body across the infrastructural and the molecular?
Perhaps it is here in the sphere of the politico-aesthetic battlefield of our own normestablishing organism that we can find answers. This is our fresh pause, the healthy
battle, against the dominant forms of subjectivation. Perhaps by the affirmation and
invention of different forms of life, opening up for a critical understanding of health
and wellness, we can complicate forms and reduce their commensurability, to the
point where the virtual human model, the computations are incalculable, and the
digital cast moulds start leaking.
We need an affirmative and accelerated radical health practice to understand the
present condition, the biopower we are being subjected to. Perhaps it will not give us
a decisive brake with this same power. Here we need a healthy realism, where we
understand that the body, the human body, has increasingly become redundant for
Capital accumulation and thus plays a marginal role for value production as
circulation has overcome production. At the same time this poses a possibility as
Mario Tronti somewhat cynically projects in Operai e Capitale19, it is the alienated
worker, truly deprived of hope and possession, struggling for the organisms survival
that becomes revolutionary. The worker that is engaged in healthcare programs is
subsumed as consumer and producer of value, to merely stay alive under present
conditions is to contribute to circulation and thus value production
Riots, strikes, revolutions, occupations, migrations, demonstrations are in different
modes despite their success or failure expressions of bodies coming together, utilizing
the shared experience of forced divisions and distributed precarity, to form another
social body.
Marx made us aware of our own possibility to create history. We are accountable for
the production of our own nature, our species-being. The capitalist nation-state is
occupied with determining the evolution of the human organism as a function adapted
to modes of production that harmonize with the global logistics of value production.
19 Tronti M., Operai e Capitale, Rom: Derive Approdi, 2013
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Perhaps the consciousness of our inherent biological plasticity can turn into political
resistance at a molecular level. The fact that we can become whatever, challenges us
to define our struggles and objectives also on the biological level. Acknowledging our
multispecies existence, our dependence to a multitude of life forms, braking with the
illusion of autonomous singularity, makes it possible to distribute our crude biomass,
our potentials, and dissolve the ideal forms hidden in the bio-algorithms.

Michele Masucci is an activist, artist and writer living in Stockholm, Sweden. S/he
has an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art, translates Italian political theory into
Swedish, contributes regularly to political and art theory magazines, and is currently
employed as doctoral student at the medical university Karolinska Institutet.

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