Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards by Ruth A. Miller

Author:Ruth A. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Threat

Surprisingly, perhaps, the work that attacks rather than naturalizes cloning plays on these themes with even greater enthusiasm than its more neutral counterpart. Indeed, although an initial reading of this anticloning work suggests that it is deeply embedded in a conventional rhetoric of embodied, human, democratic subjects under constant attack from nondemocratic entities that might unethically support cloning—unscrupulous corporations or technology-obsessed scientists, among others—spending time with it allows for a more nuanced reading. While it is without question true, for example, that one of the key questions at stake in cloning remains the potential assault this mode of reproduction launches against rationality, psychology, and hence dignity, it also becomes clear—even as these alternative reproductive behaviors are denounced—that cloning likewise makes possible an alternatively productive interpretation of democratic engagement. Moreover, it is uncertain whether the anticloning writing itself is completely satisfied with taking the discrete, thinking, embodied organism as the most relevant being in discussions of reproduction. There are ongoing hints within it of a quite other, and once again unbounded, interpretation of both biological and political life.

Yes, that is to say, the work that condemns cloning makes clear that redefining reproduction as an environmental process—as a set of operations that continue throughout life, rather than as a platform for the growth of a specific person—undercuts conventional interpretations of democratic rights and dignity. But this work also poses, perhaps unintentionally, a key question concerning the value of dignity as a democratic concept. It drives its readers to wonder whether the loss of bodies and psychology, and hence dignity, is in fact a loss. When reading the anticloning literature that appeared after 1997 especially, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fear of clones is, very specifically, a fear of undignified reproductive activities that are more democratic than dignified reproductive acts. The fear of cloning in legal and policy literature, in short, seems in many ways to be a fear of thoughtful—if irrational—political life.

Before turning to this policy literature, though, it would be useful to address some of the more scholarly challenges to cloning that have emerged alongside of it. A number of feminist theorists, for example, have charted a middle way between, on the one hand, accepting the conventional bioethical policy that defines human cloning as an assault on dignity and, on the other, embracing cloning as, effectively, an ecofeministPage 112 → form of protest (or for that matter, as a form of radical democratic engagement). Scholars such as Victoria Davion and Luciana Parisi, to name two, have been rightly suspicious of the language of embodied subjectivity that appears in anticloning legislation and policy literature. But they have also identified other aspects of cloning that make it, nonetheless, still a politically and ethically damaging process. Exploring how scholars such as Davion and Parisi have criticized existing literature on cloning, how they have reconsidered the implications of cloning, and how they have—once more, against the claims of this chapter—found cloning to be a politically and ethically questionable mode of

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