| From Jean Baudrillard's bold critique of simulacra to the rapid expansion of intellectual property law and the subsequent proliferation of infringement lawsuits, virtual culture in the late 20th and early 21 st centuries has been characterized by a profound sense of anxiety about the implications of digital, genetic and other bio-informational technologies. In this project, I conceptualize virtuality as a cultural disposition towards people and things as mixtures of materiality and information. Understood in this way, virtuality constitutes today what John Durham Peters (1999) calls "extremities of communication" which generate concerns, anxieties and controversies about what counts as human.;Using a variety of methodological techniques, from "litmus tests" of humanness to online ethnography, I examine how cultural forms and practices mediate anxiety about reproduction, agency and the shrinking sphere of the uniquely human in controversies about unconscious plagiarism, transgenic organisms and digital music remixing. By increasing the scale and pace of human-nonhuman entanglement, bio-informational reproductivity challenges the notion of society and subjectivity as purely human. Anxieties about the shrinking zone of irreproducibility do not necessarily lead to the recuperation of purely human subjects and societies. Indeed, this study emphasizes the role of reproductive anxiety in the production of new figurations of the human subject whose autonomy, like that of nonhumans, emerges from entanglement.;My approach to questions about the "content" of reproductive anxiety (i.e., what they are about) has been influenced by cultural and intellectual histories of reproductive technologies, which suggest that reproductive anxiety is a manifestation of a broader crisis of agency, authenticity, tradition and paternal order. There is thus much more at stake in controversies about plagiarism, copyright infringement, gene patenting and unauthorized reproduction than who owns what. Drawing from theories of virtuality, feminist technoscience, and actor-network theory, I argue that the virtualization of reproductivity puts legal, scientific and popular assumptions about subjectivity and collectivity in question. |
