La «technomie» et le citoyen biochimique

Abstract

The advent of DNA profiling as a tool of criminal justice has marked a new stage in the use of the body as a regulatory resource. The traditional role of criminal justice - as a visible object of pain dispensation - has gradually been subsumed within more pervasive and invisible regulatory projects centred upon the body's bio-chemical structures. So pervasive has this transformation been that it has been argued that a new kind of judicial subject -the «biological citizen» has emerged. In this paper I argue that the «biological citizen» needs to be viewed as just one outcome of a more complete regulatory shift, one where bio-chemical technologies form part of a wider matrix of technological regulation. Within this new regulatory order of technology (what I call a «technomia») the function of traditional justice and its institutions are being re-articulated in ways we have only just begun to appreciate.