Technologically Produced Nature: Nature Beyond Schizophrenia and Paranoia

Abstract

Using the “schizoanalytic” framework of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter takes a closer look at radical posthumanism by focusing on how this approach analyzes assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and their implications for the concept of nature. In radical posthumanist readings, the “schizophrenic” tendency of assisted reproduction to deconstruct the concept of nature is seen as constantly coming up against and being captured by legislative and discursive strategies that “re-naturalize” nature. I argue that this re-naturalization, or reterritorialization, implies a new flexibility with which notions like “biogenetic relatedness”, “nature” and “parenthood” are being employed by users of these technologies. And furthermore, that this flexibility indicates new conceptualizations of fundamental categories that are not being adequately accounted for by radical posthumanist discourse, in which deconstructive and disciplining trends coexist and intermingle quite peacefully. The use of the schizoanalytic framework highlights the importance of radical posthumanism for understanding the shuffling around of foundational terms that is characteristic of emerging biotechnologies. But it also offers a means of pushing these analyses further: in the schizoanalytic framework, reterritorialization is never “just” the reconstitution of a system of meaning that has been unsettled by schizophrenic energies, but always the production of a new one in which deterritorialized elements connect in different ways. This conceptual framework can then complement the notion of technological mediation as developed in the end of the last chapter, i.e., within a context of an ethics of care of the self, to complete the basis of a mediated posthumanist perspective.