November 7, 2007
diagnostic of biopolitics note 2 - a collaborative note from Lyle and Anthony
So Lyle had a great insight relative to our conversation yesterday regarding the diagnostic and our argument relative to the reworking of the biopolitical. In October 2007, the Berkeley Human Practices Lab had a meeting at LBNL with scientists from the Keasling Lab and teleconferenced with the Endy Lab at MIT and the MIT Human Practices policy representative. In this discussion PR made a tripartite distinction between safety, security and preparedness. Some way through the presentation a certain nervousness (bizarrely) with precision in concepts was made apparent as one of the MIT folks, rehearsing a point made by a Swiss Science and Society policy wonk, suggested that there is no need to be precise about the distinction as in German safety and security are subsumed under the same term. This was echoed by others in the room wanting to know how these distinctions could be operationalized into first order deliverables. After the session, one of the postdocs came up to me and suggested that in biology, “precise” has technical meaning that is different from “accurate”. Precise means using the same method of measurement in all your experiments His point was to suggest that we need to be accurate, and not precise per se. I reply that statements about the world may turn out not to be accurate, but if your measurement methods (distinctions / metrics) are appropriate then you can remediate your statements about the world. By having an appropriate metric, you can mark distinctiveness as well as mark patterns.
The distinction between precision and accuracy can be usefully mapped onto our discussion about biopolitical equipment and the utility of the diagnostic. As we noted, the figure of biopolitical equipment in the diagnostic is not meant to be a claim about any actual object in the world. Rather, it is an ideal-type that enables the user to make distinctions and discover patterns with precision. By making this distinction, we can avoid the trap of endless debate about what biopolitics “really is” (and the proliferation of claims about this). Rather than arguing about whether the diagnostic represents biopolitics “in truth” or accurately, we can discuss whether it is appropriate to our materials. In this sense then we return to Jerome’s conundrum, how does one choose who gets put through the diagnostic machine? As he suggests, hopefully it is not just so as to make the diagnostic work, but rather that you can use the precision in distinctions in order to work over relations. The relations you are trying to describe do not exist within the diagnostic, as such this points us to the “outside” of the diagnsitic, where the distinctions made through the diagnostic can orient inquiry but cannot describe these relations as they exist outside of it.