Summing it all up

Well, no, not really.  If there is one lesson I am definitely taking away from Biopolitics then it is that it’s hard to actually ever really sum anything up.  At least not anything currently debated or up for debate or anything that involves any possible disagreement.  All we can do with the uncertainty of things in development and the promises associated with those things is attempt to keep up or to maintain a set of tools for keeping up.  But though we cannot be sure about what the shape of things will be tomorrow, I like the idea that that un-sureness—or as Fortun would put it: chiasma!—doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our due diligence; that we don’t have to wrestle with the various important issues involved in the life sciences.  Though now what we are dealing with seems to amount to promises built upon other promises—those promises necessitate planning and preparedness.  To plan means to discuss and to remain open to the possibilities of debate from every side of any issue that seems contingent upon these abundant promises and their abundant potential.  Potential that does not have positive implications for everyone involved.

The potential problems that seem to be necessary corollaries do have a fairly effective summation within the debate over consent.  The difficulties involved in attempting to ascertain what can actually be considered informed consent constitute a main source of contention in the current ethical debates revolving around research in the life sciences.  What does consent entail?  Can you be assumed to have consented?  Can an entire country?  Can we really account for all the potential uses our genetic material may be used for in the future?  In Iceland these issues ultimately resulted in the derailing of deCode’s initiative involving the database.  But before it even got that far there was a lot of discussion from a lot of different sources about Icelanders being guinea pigs and happy to be such.  it is more than a little disturbing that so few people questioned the implications of that belief.  When we presume that a group of people is fit for something without recourse to what they actually think and feel about the matter we are depriving them of their freedom of choice.  This has implications far beyond Iceland and we should be careful to pay attention to the goings on of the various actors within the various fields involved in issues of biopolitics.

Iceland and Isolation

Iceland is a part of the world.  If this seems like an incredibly obvious point of fact, well… that’s because it is.  But its obviousness is easily obscured and shunted aside if it doesn’t support the various implications of our actions.  Chapter twelve of Mike Fortun’s Promising Genomics discusses Iceland and the rest of the world and how they are connected and separate and how the connections and the separations are not as firm or as flimsy as one might like for the sake of consistency if for nothing else.  It is of a piece with the rest of the book in how it deals with what we know and what we think we know and how.  At this point I’ve grown used to Fortun’s chiasmic reasoning and its usefulness has been amply demonstrated. “IcelandXWorld” deals with where Iceland ends and the world begins—as usual, it isn’t as simple as that statement.

Fortun begins the chapter with an interesting and instructive bit of history and geopolitics regarding fishing rights and territorial waters.  Essentially to me it seemed to indicate that the idea of what Iceland was is not fixed.  Iceland is not just the land or the people it is also the fish and where those fish are located whether that is three miles off the coast or two hundred.  These expanding definitions are something that Iceland is willing to defend—the defenders in the Coast Guard even become national heroes in the defense of this new expanded definition of what constitutes Iceland.  So, through out , Iceland has established and defended carefully demarcated boundaries but the necessity of contestation and establishment implies a degree of interconnectivity that cannot be ignored.

Later on in the chapter Fortun makes this point clearer when he returns to a discussion of Icelandic music and where it can be said to come from: the music is not just a product of some strange interaction of the people with an “otherworldly” landscape—the idea of describing something that actually is a part of the earth as not belonging to it is just another attempt to exoticize—the oddness of which makes it somehow unique but an example of how influences cross every boundary.  Iceland is not isolated and otherworldly it is and has been part of a global community since before we used those two words to describe it.  Any argument predicated on implying otherwise is just trying to create fissures between perceptions of reality.