IcelandXWorld

There's a lot going on in chapter 12, IcelandXWorld. At first glance it can seem a bit jumbled: fishing for fish, fishing for genes, and a self-conscious policeman. What does it all mean?

The key to answering this question, I think, lies in taking account of the chapter's position relative to the preceding chapters. In other words, in can be more fruitful to "pull back" and view the whole of the text, rather than concentrating on the minute details of chapter 12.

In the preceding chapters, Fortun has explored his complex relationship to his object of study; he admits to distanceXcomplicity, a chiasmic relationship that involves the blurring of boundaries between subject and object. Fortun is enfolded into the very events he studies.

But if the preceding chapters blur the line between Fortun and his object, how does IcelandXWorld take this further?

Chapter 11 ends with a question: "So just where is the boundary to mark the differences between Iceland and the rest of the world?" (158) This is precisely the question that chapter 12 seeks to illuminate, with all its talk of policemen and fishing. As the chapter title -- and the sprawling style -- indicates, Fortun is arguing for another chiasmic blurring of boundaries. In this instance, it is not the blurring of subjectXobject, but rather objectXnotobject ("notobject" representing everything that we use to distinguish the object as "set apart"). In other words, not only does Fortun recognize the extent to which he is entangled in his object of study, but he also recognizes the extent to which the very act of "picking out" an object is an artificial construction that runs afoul of the much more complex -- and scandalous -- IcelandXWorld.

This chapter, then, serves to illuminate another way in which Fortun is enfolded into his study: The very act of selecting an object of study constitutes the subjective creation of that object.

PromisesXPromises

Disclaimer: This is an exercise in what could very fairly be termed "bluffing" (or, promising?). I have not (yet!) read Derrida, Austin, or Felman, and therefore must draw my knowledge of these thinkers from superficial, textbook-style treatments (in the case of Derrida) and from Fortun's text itself (in the cases of Austin and Felman). Of course, as any goodXbad student knows, not having read the book does not prohibit one from writing about it; indeed, in light of this post's engagement with language and promising, it would seem impossible to do otherwise.

Near the beginning of Chapter X, Fortun notes that he has "preferred, throughout this text, to defer direct theorizing of promising, relying instead on the inferences that ethnographic empiricism offers, or at least promises." (104) Nevertheless, in this chapter Fortun finds a place for "some promise of theory" -- a move that, as I hope to show, occurs less by choice than by necessity (or rather, by choiceXnecessity), given Fortun's previous situation of his text in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida.

As early as chapter one, Derrida is invoked as the foundation of Fortun's investigation of promising. In this formulation, promising is not localized or tied to any specific object, event, or meaning. This allows Fortun to grasp the nebulous nature of promises, but it also significantly destabilizes Fortun's object of study. If promising is rooted in the Derridean conception of language as an infinite chain of signifiers, then it is impossible to speak (pardon the pun) of a promise as "fulfilled". Worse yet, it is impossible to know when and/or if a promise has been made.

But how then to study promises? If every attempt to "pin down" a promise merely results in displacement, isn't the attempt to study promises futile? Doesn't the infinite displacement of meaning render Fortun's text meaningless? In other words, the problem of nihilism: "However will we make judgements?!" (110)

Fortun's answer is a chiasmic nonXanswer. In Felman's terms, Fortun plays the devil. That is to say: Fortun is unwilling to "pin down" the status of his own text (and of his own "distanceXcomplicity") within the bounds of any normative logic. Rather, the text is rooted in a radical negativity (one that, I might add, sounds strikingly similar to Žižek's reading of Hegel, as rendered in his pop culture-tinged dialectic of "living, dead, and undead" -- i.e. "positive, negative, and the negation of the negative") that is fundamentally scandalous in that such a radical negativity "cannot be assimilated by historical or ethnographic understanding" and yet still "constitute[s] historical and ethnographic understanding." (111)

Thus, the use of Derrida drives Fortun to acknowledge that his text mirrors his object of study; just as promises are nebulous (scandalously so) and outside the bounds of normative logic, so is Fortun's endeavor. (This is why, sooner or later, Fortun must engage Derrida et al on a theoretical level.) Fortun's study is empirical -- rooted in facts. The phonograph needle is still there, somewhat. But the study is also fictional. The phonograph needle is playing back moreXless than it recorded. Empirical and fictional. The text is a nonXfiction.

(And a nonXfiction is precisely what Fortun provides at the end of the chapter. The final segment, accompanied by a drastic change in tone, can be seen as a microcosm of Fortun's theoretical commitments. But that would be a whole other blog post.)

KeikoXK.Co. ...and blogs

At the end of chapter five, Fortun relates a joke told by Kári: "Keiko is my offensive linesman [...] running interference for me. He's keeping me out of the papers for a while." (64) It's not until chapter eight that Keiko is examined in depth, but thoughout the chapter Fortun makes an increasingly strong case concerning the "KeikoXK.Co." chiasmus. The two are folded into each other.

What strikes me about the story of Keiko -- and by extension, the story of K.Co. -- is the technological state of the media during this particular period. I remember watching Free Willy and Free Willy 2 as a child, and I remember being vaguely aware of Keiko's trip "home". I do not, however, have a meaningful grasp of how the media that covered these events must have functioned -- i.e. without widespread camera phones, without blogs, and so on. It seems strange to me to think of turning to only a few sources for my daily news.

But the story of Keiko and K.Co. is placed before the widespread use of these news technologies, and this is evidenced with particular strength in Kári's joke about Keiko's "interference". The implication is, of course, that the media as a whole cannot focus on more than a single subject at a time; the news is (at least topically) hegemonic. This is a story from a time when the media was a whole -- not fractured.

I wonder, then, if the same kinds of promises and the same kinds of promissory rhetoric could be employed in the age of the blog. Now certainly, the media -- even grassroots media -- is fairly single minded, but it is hard to imagine a complete lack of critical Icelandic bloggers. It is hard to imagine no one sitting in front of a screen in a dark room, blogging away about the evils of deCode. If the media is fractured, surely some would keep their focus on Kári rather than Keiko?

This is, of course, all speculation; there is no way to know if a change in media configuration would have drastically altered the events documented in Promising Genomics. Still, I think it important to note that it is not only the rapidity of change in genomics that is relevant to its practice, but also the rapidity of change in the wider technological world that is relevant. New technologies, or the new use of technologies, may substantially change one of the "rings" of Model 2, which in turn may substantially change genomics.

I guess this means that to truly grasp genomics, our view must be very broad.

scienceXrhetoric

Over the last week and a half, much of our discussion has revolved around the difference between two models of scientific practice (depicted on the left). The movement from Model 1 to Model 2 is fundamentally one of destabilization, in that the rigid systems and hierarchies of Model 1 are replaced with the interrelated actors of Model 2, each of which contribute to the formation and movement of the others.

What I find most interesting about this shift -- this act of destabilization -- is that the second model includes an ethical critique and demand that is not present (or perhaps is present, but hidden) in the first model. Model 2 places research practices, academic disciplines, political institutions, and media outlets in mutually influential relation to one another. Thus, any change in one area effects a change in another. Or, to take it further, any perceived change in one area effects change in another. It is this element of perception (which is closely linked to the subjectivity of the promise) that includes the ethical critiqueXdemand: Scientists should not only be concerned with the ethics of their methological practice, but also with the ethics of their rhetorical practice. In other words, how they speak (whether amongst themselves, or to Congress, or to the public, etc.) is as important as what they do, precisely because it is the subjectivity of perception that drives the system, rather than the concrete accumulation of facts. It is for this reason that the truly important moment for the Human Genome Project was the press conference announcing the project's completion, rather than the actual completion of the project itself, which, in Collins' case, came somewhat later (Zwart, 370-371).

But what does this mean for the future of genomics? Any rhetorical move implies the existence of competing discourses. With this in mind, it seems safe to assert that the current state of affairs in genomics -- laden with rhetoric as it is -- is a myriad of competing discourses. But isn't the progression of science from complicated uncertainty to black-box, textbook-style facts itself dependent on the establishment of a hegemonic discourse in which (explicit) rhetorical moves play less and less of a role? If anything, the rapid progress of genomics research has only multiplied the range of discourses present at any one particular time, thus moving genomics even further from the hegemony necessary to pin down "facts" methodologically and rhetorically -- and consequently, further into territory in which the scientist is responsible not only for what he or she does, but what he or she says (and how he or she says it). The future is, of course, up for grabs, but if current trends continue it seems that the outcome may be an expression of science radically different than that of the traditional textbook-dissemination model.