Poster (Re)presentations

Descartes had an invisible hand of his own. I think it's always important to look what is left out/not discussed/addressed by an idea/ideology/world view etc. That's where the invisible currents lie that will sweep you off your feet.

The posters got me thinking about how GMO's are 'technologies of the body' because of their interaction and blending abilities in producing 'truth effects' on the level of bodies (Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body). We don't know what the all the effects are but we know they are working on many different levels and change many things with the body. I am using an extension of the notion of the 'techno-bodies' (Balsamo) and Foucault's 'biopower' (History of Sexuality Vol. 1) to enter in conversation with Latour, Descartes and other stuff we've read over the semester. Latour calls these 'techno-bodies', hybrids (We Have Never Been Modern). He gets rid of the focus on the body and focuses how the material body is completely intwined with the collective of nonhuman objects such as technology and also intwined with the mind. GMO's are not only 'technologies of the body' but technologies of the collective mind, body, environment etc. Foucault's 'biopower' is all about how humans have taken biological features of a species (he's particularly talking about humans) and making it into an object of a political strategy to achieve some sort of power. Foucault gets us somewhere but Balsamo talks about how if you investigate the interactions between material bodies and new technologies, one will uncover the workings of ideologies-in-progress. We've talked about the ideologies working through GMO's. An interaction between bodies and technologies that is interesting is mass production-->industrialism-->capitalism and underlying all of those interactions is the Cartesian world view (we can take an object, standardize it, normalize it, ascribe a number to it, and mass produce it).

I did not know this before the poster presentations but you can actually test if some organism has been genetically modified because it will have a marker on it and that the gene that has been selected and literally spliced in the genome stays there. So in a funny (Cartesian?) sense when we eat golden rice we are eating dandelions. I loved the biology diagram on the Just Say Know To GMO poster where you can see in strict Cartesian, molecularization, fashion how GMO's are made. Biology diagrams are probably my favorite diagrams. They work on me like no other description. Everything just makes sense after seeing them (seeing the whole assembly line of manufacture).  So where am I going with this? I think everything makes a whole lot more sense when one can see how this Latourian notion of the entire collective of nonhuman agents orchestrates and has agency over our world. The nonhuman agents have voices, social histories, and are socialized. My apologies to the Lorax, or maybe a cheers? But the trees now have voices, and do not need you here. (I hope you read that like you were reading Dr. Seuss) Of course this is not true, we need our Lorax's and our ELF's (right...? maybe not) but recall how Pollan and Latour give voices to their respective nonhuman objects that they talk about.