What the genome is for. posted by Richard Seymour

Leviticus:

Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world — both the imaginary and the real — in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death.

The 'ethical' worries about designer babies and cloned sheep (it's baa-a-a-ahd) mirror the hopes invested in the genome and its putative potential to allow human beings to escape the real. Zizek has expressed the thought somewhere that perhaps one day human beings will be able to download their personalities onto disks or computer programmes and play in virtual space for all eternity. This would certainly create a boom in the virus-protection industry, (imagine your meagre hyper-personality being confronted with a corporate mega-death virus). But behind the much-vaunted 'ethical' concerns are the threat of the dissolution of the real, the externalisation and alienation of the body which is only the logical of capital taken to its extreme. The body is already capitalised in the precise sense that it is 'owned' and one 'invests' in it to extract maximum profit: At every stage of life, the same gap recurs: children deemed good-looking by peers or adults have a 40 per cent greater chance of finishing their schooling without mishap, just as new employees judged good-looking by their colleagues at work and their professional milieu have a 40 per cent greater chance of regular promotions and an ascending career, and will be likely to meet the handsome young man or attractive young woman who will help them rise in life, etc.

Suppose the genome had any possible chance of living up to the terrifically inflated claims made for it. Suppose one could utterly redesign the body, using this map, and create spectacular new physical forms with precise muscular definition, optimum distribution of adipose tissue, elegant bone structure, eye colour, lip shape, hair quality and so on - every contemporary, accepted norm would be reproduced and reinforced, its assured virtue and superiority compounded with every new birth. It is obvious enough that this would quickly become a commodity itself, as rhinoplasty, liposuction and various kinds of maxillofacial surgery already have. The happenstance distribution of inherited predicates would be imbricated with the class-based distribution of inherited wealth. Steve Jones once remarked that though certain things were highly heritable in human biological development, the most heritable thing in life was a bank account, for which there was no gene. Suppose a couple of rich, doting parents can now ensure their baby boy has the 'best' body and mind money can buy, and what's more he can be genetically predisposed in various ways to internalise the cruelty, indifference, solipsism and class supremacism that distinquishes those who excel in capitalism. The rich would be even more assured of their desert, drawing on the 'meritocratic' pseudo-wisdom that has sustained political programmes from the Third Reich to the Third Way. The self-hatred, depression, anxiety and alienation that occurs massively and disproportionately among the poor would be even more intense.

I'm sure there must have been a science fiction story about this at some point...