<nettime> The Sovereignty of the Code

[Nicholas Ruiz <nr03@fsu.edu>]

[reformatted @ nettime]



In light of Galloway and Thacker's post--a contribution.


The Sovereignty of the Code

(and The Sovereignty of the Code II):
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Enr03/The%20Sovereignty%20of%20the%20Code%20par=
t%20II.rm


"The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in
it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be
excluded, as an exception, within it.  Politics therefore appears as the
truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies
the threshold on which the relation between the living thing and the logos
is realized. In the politicization of bare lif--the metaphysical task 
par excellence--the humanity of living man is decided."[i]

Every biotic organism's inception is the inauguration of a new Code, that 
which has not been before it, and it's Code is in this sense, proof of its 
singularity; at least on one plateau of its being.  Deoxyribonucleic acid 
and its precursors and analogs are the substance of this Code; its 
expressions paradoxically are at once unique and universal.  Buying and 
selling of the Code is a bit like the buying and selling of God, except 
that God is immaterial, whereas the Code is essentially material, and its 
trade portends an inverse relationship between the owners of the Code, 
whom own and prefigure their possession, and the Code itself, that is 
elemental within us, that is being defined, recoded and utilized according 
to standards specifically not of our own device, but rather, the device of 
Capital.

The appropriation of the Code by the device of Capital is distinctively 
non-egalitarian, which is to say that, like the process of the 
distribution of general healthcare, the technology of the Code is being 
privatized and selectively anthropomorphosized and the subsequent 
information sequestered for the extreme benefit of the few via patenting 
and withholding. The appropriation of the Code is critically more 
problematic than the stratification and sequestering of healthcare 
services through the device of Capital because, what is being appropriated 
is in effect our bodies--our manifest physical sovereignty, albeit at the 
molecular level.  A determination as to whether or not there is an 
argument for the socialization of the genetic industry will not yield 
itself easily.  But in spite of this, perhaps, as Cahill has written, 
"the argument that commodification constitutes social injustice does 
not 
require showing that every instance of a certain type of commodification 
(e.g. gene patenting) constitutes violation of respect for persons or 
creates harm, or that no instance of it whatsoever could be 
justified."[ii]

Rather, the tooling of the Code is better theorized as a breach of 
sovereignty, and further, a breach that has taken place without our 
consent.  But in what manner could consent be given for such an activity? 
It would require an open public forum of discourse with regard to the 
broader meaning and ramifications with which the said activity in question 
was involved.  Corporate media cannot serve this purpose, because media, 
do not mediate discussions, they inform consumers; mostly, after the fact, 
after the larger decision has essentially already been made at the locus 
of decisive power.

If the Code itself, the material that codes for our lives, is not 
sovereign, how can an argument of sovereignty be made for any other 
entity?  If there is no concept of sovereignty for the Code, how can there 
be a substantial of sovereignty for anything else?  A sovereignty polity? 
What in effect, does a sovereign polity represent, if it's the very life 
material of its members has no sovereignty under its aegis?  If one has no 
operational stake in the determination of the very substance of one's 
material being, what stake has he in his own governance?  It would seem 
then, that we have lost our Basis, for polity, and for governance and 
self-determination, with one swift, technological blow.  The market-driven 
distribution of healthcare, while unjust, does not appropriate sovereign 
territory for the device of Capital; the appropriation of the Code, in 
contrast, is precisely an infiltration on the order of the cell, upon its 
sovereignty, and on the order of personal sovereignty, by the device of 
Capital. Foucault spoke of such a non-disciplinary control, as working in 
conjunction with the more transparent disciplinary control of power and 
punishment.  The disciplinary event of power is always concerned with the 
bodies it acts to control with its technology, while that non-disciplinary 
of power is somewhat more concerned with the appropriation of the living 
being--at the level of the species, if necessary.[iii] Where the 
disciplinary event rules a multiplicity of human beings to the extent that 
they may be trained under surveillance, used and punished, the 
non-disciplinary event elevates the stakes; this event of power addresses 
the multiplicity, and some might say, addresses the multitude that 
supposedly enables a new sovereign line of flight from the oppression of 
Empire.[iv] As Capital trespasses the sovereignty of the Code; it does so 
as the non-disciplinary event of power that addresses:

"...a global mass affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, 
death, production, illness, and so.  So after a first seizure of power 
over the body in an individualizing mode, we have second seizure of power 
that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed 
not at man-as-body but at man-as-species=85the emergence of something that 
is no longer an anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call 
a 'biopolitics' of the human race."[v]

The newest politicization of bare life, this inclusion of our technical 
bodies "in the political realm constitutes the original--if 
concealed--nucleus of sovereign power."[vi] Is this the sovereign 
sacrifice being asked of us on the altar of Capital?  If identity is 
already a mediated event, will the era of stratified economically, and 
hence class-based genetic profiles materialize, and soon enough, genetic 
advertisements for designer brands of Code, soon grace our media screens? 
Better genes (for better bodies for better people) for better lives of joy 
and affluence?  We already know how much we should weigh, what we should 
eat, how to worship (or not) how we should look, talk, feel, 
reproduce--perhaps we need guidance as to how we should be comprised at 
the molecular level, at the very level of the cell?  What are the 
aesthetic stakes of genetic fashion?  How current is your Code?  Will we 
speak of last year's Code? Leave the Code to the corporations and soon 
enough, we shall see.

It is already the case that healthcare, in America, is a commodity.  The 
interiority of good intentions are laid open to the globalizing world of 
accumulation and withholding, and in that polar schema, illness and 
capitalization reside on opposite poles.  Recognize, that in practice, the 
rule (as opposed to the exception) is that healthcare is distributed 
according to the ability to pay for the goods.  In essence, this 
distributive schema provides the best and the most healthcare to the 
highest bidder.  This process materializes a healthcare system wherein it 
is not the manner of a moral or ethical rationale that facilitates and 
distributes healthcare, but instead a moral and ethical illusion we purvey 
as an ideology that upholds the slogan of " to each according to need", 
while operationally we calculate and execute a rationale that manifests a 
policy where we operationalize a pragmatics of, "to each according to the 
ability to pay"[vii] With regard to genetic industry, what awaits us is an 
array of genetically manipulated profiles being held in higher esteem than 
others, and will not "their relative desirability be at least partially 
reflected in the specific amount of money people will pay to ensure that 
they (or their children) possess such profiles"?[viii] Further, will the 
biotechnology corporations not raise their prices in adjustment to 
increasing demand, as the metaphysical canon of technological supply and 
demand models command of market parishioners?  As it stands, is it 
inconceivable that we will begin to use the monetary value of possessing 
certain genes {or gene technologies} as a proxy for the value of persons 
who possess them"?[ix] Every other commodity renders an identity to its 
possessor, what will be different in the genetic profile?

What we are facing now, in our postmodern present, in contrast to our 
modern past, is representative of the kinds of occurrences we are 
increasingly faced with, that is, the burgeoning cultivation of the means 
to pair political economy intimately with bare cellular life. The 
culmination of this event renders the disappearance of the 
"intelligibility that still seems to us to characterize the 
juridicopolitical foundation of classical politics."[x] Nothing stands in 
front of the colonization, indeed the imperialization, of the Code, and 
the resultant biopolitics will include "forecasts, statistical estimates 
and overall measures=85in a word, security mechanisms (will) have to be 
installed around the random element inherent in a population of living 
beings so as to optimize a state of life."[xi] What is a genetic profile, 
if not simply data to be managed?  And what will be the sociopolitical 
risks of dubious or 'dicey' sequences of Code in one's profile?

In practice, today the Code is researched, taken apart, manipulated, 
defined, edited, reinserted--and in this sense, we may say that we are 
reassembling and redefining bare life, in the process of genetic 
engineering.  As we engage in this postmodern process, might there be a 
difference between the process being executed and patented by 
corporations, instead of being conducted, archived and managed solely by 
public institutions?  To begin with, is not bare life, de facto, already 
in the public domain?  Should it not remain so?  Does not each one of us 
have an ownership stake in the cells of our composition and the 
information contained within and derived therefrom?  Perhaps not.  Our 
current policy, allows for genetic engineering to be conducted and genetic 
patents to be held on gene products by corporations whose agenda is to 
execute a profit motivated strategy that is designed to excel at selling 
products to consumers, "rather than providing care for patients."[xii] 
Essentially, our policies arise out of a discourse that is governed by the 
rules of a language predicated upon the rationale of market logic, and 
that is to say, all is marketable, and what is favorable is seldom other 
than what is profitable, while capital loss of any kind is to be 
categorically shunned.

The violation of the sovereignty of the Code is principally a 
"supersession of reproduction by production even in the context of human 
reproduction" and is the "true measure of the ontological transformation 
humankind has effected."[xiii] It is also representative of the extent to 
which we exist in a state of that is somewhere beyond human, as Hayles has 
put it (though for Hayles, "the defining characteristics {of 
posthumanity}, involves the construction of subjectivity, not the presence 
of non-biological components").[xiv] This incursion of Capital upon the 
Code coexists with and acts as a direct function of the ability and desire 
of an amalgam of personalities; those appropriating the Code of everyone 
for the express purpose of private rights to, or control of the Code--of 
course, for the purpose of accumulation and withholding. What is the basis 
of criticism for this process?  Beauchamp and Childress construct a 
bioethical model based, in part, upon Aristotelian conceptions of 
morality, though they are careful to indicate that they: "=85do not claim 
to be presenting a distinctively Aristotelian theory, and are motivated by 
objectives that contemporary Aristotelians may or may not share."[xv] In 
light of their endnote caveat, it is interesting that Beauchamp and 
Childress essentially formulate their conception of moral excellence out 
of the Aristotelian canon: "Aristotelian ethical theory has long insisted 
that moral excellence is closely connected to virtues and moral ideals. 
We will draw on this Aristotelian tradition and on our prior analysis of 
moral ideals and supererogation for an account of moral excellence."[xvi] 
One might say there is a sense of reformative lamentation in their 
'supererogation' of Aristotelian ideals, in the sense that they posit a 
widespread loss of both "high ideals in the moral life" and "Aristotelian 
aspiration to an admirable life of moral achievement" in modern ethical 
theory; and their project is to reverse this trend.[xvii] The problem with 
this paradoxical position as a foundation for a biopolitical policy that 
purveys application to all citizens equally is the ill-informed call upon 
Aristotelian ethics to substantiate it, because Greek society and ethics 
were based upon a severely stratified society, where for example, women 
and slaves were not considered voting citizens, and only Greek men with 
property and means were considered worthy of Aristotelian notions of 
idyllic excellence.  Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is not an ethics of 
the 'people'; it showcases the idyllic ethics of a male upper class, in a 
Greek society that existed thousands of years in the past.  This 
discrepancy needs to be more adequately addressed in order for us to take 
seriously, the Aristotelian basis for a biopolitical policy.  Some may 
call this work that of the discipline of bioethics, but dismembered from 
policy implementation, bioethics is powerless to act.

In consideration of how all of this applies to our denunciation here of 
the violation of the sovereignty of the Code, we must note that the 
intrusion upon the sovereignty of the Code by a Capitalized class faction 
via the apparition of 'benevolent' dictatorship coalesced from the 
collusion of government and corporate entities is all very 
Aristotelian--and that is precisely the problem.  However, none of this is 
to say that we cannot learn from Aristotle's oeuvre--in fact, we can and 
do; it is imperative, however, that we know what to embrace and of what to 
be skeptical in his literary corpus and its contemporary renderings. 
Aristotelian ethics do not lead societies to an egalitarian form of 
governing, nor do they reflect an egalitarian distribution of technologies 
and their benefits, health-related or otherwise.  In fact, Aristotelian 
ethics revolve around "legislators {making} the citizens good by forming 
habits in them"--which it should be noted, translates into the benevolent 
dictatorship of the philosopher-king of Confucius and Mencius, Plato and 
Aristotle, etc., which in modernity virulently becomes the unconscious 
basis of Stalin and Hitler's superior 'intelligence' and 'wisdom' in the 
matters of the people, which then gives way in postmodernity to 
vertiginous delusions of Empire.  Aristotle's conceptions are quite clear, 
in regard to laws, distribution, justice, equity and the like:

"Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, 
evidently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down 
by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now 
the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage 
either of all or of the best or of those who hold power, or something of 
the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to 
produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political 
society=85 Since acting unjustly does not necessarily imply being unjust, 
we must ask what sort of unjust acts imply that the doer is unjust with 
respect to each type of injustice, e.g. a thief, an adulterer, or a 
brigand. Surely the answer does not turn on the difference between these 
types. For a man might even lie with a woman knowing who she was, but the 
origin of his might be not deliberate choice but passion. He acts 
unjustly, then, but is not unjust; e.g. a man is not a thief, yet he 
stole, nor an adulterer, yet he committed adultery; and similarly in all 
other cases." [xviii]

And this is how Aristotelian morality can lead to non-egalitarian polity, 
because when the unjust is committed--it is not necessarily a crime in his 
theoretical scaffolding, and hence can proceed and grow.  Further, in 
judging the acts as unjust or just, equitable or inequitable, who is 
qualified to judge?  Surely, egalitarian polity, in that it is purported 
to purvey fair and equitable representative relationships between members 
in society cannot be so, when laws can be thought just they the case where 
they serve only the interests "of those who hold power." A compelling 
conception of justice would have to include that judges should be 
representative of the broader population, as should Senators, and 
Representatives, that is, if they are to be 'representative' of the polis, 
in order to construct an egalitarian polity, no?  Beauchamp and Childress 
recognize this:

"Sometimes, persons who suppose that they speak with an authoritative 
moral voice operate under the false belief that they have the force of the 
common morality (that is, universal morality) behind them.  The particular 
moral viewpoints that such persons represent may be acceptable and even 
praiseworthy, but they also may not bind other persons or 
communities."[xix]

With regard to the genetic industry, who is speaking with 'moral 
authority' and making public policy?  To whose ethical standard is the 
protocol of the Code being held?  Who defines the parameters of the 
sovereignty of the Code?  The public?  The government?  Corporations? 
Bioethicists?  It is easy to ask the wrong questions in this regard.  The 
difficulty in calling upon Aristotle to formulate principles of justice 
lies in his lack of urgency for a convincing formulation of equity and 
representation, and while questions such as "=85how shall we define 
equality, and which differences are relevant in comparing individuals and 
groups?" [xx] are relevant, they are insufficient without solving for more 
cogent problems, such as the determination of who exactly is in a position 
to participate in the development and representation of equality.

Disparities are generally the result of some fashion of withholding, and 
via the emergence of biopolitical power, result in the accumulation of new 
violence, which we have been slow to identify.  Freud:

"In spite of every efforts, endeavors of civilization have not so far 
achieved very much.  It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of brutal 
violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against criminals, 
but law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined 
manifestations of human aggressiveness."[xxi]

Unfortunately, principled challenges come to be dealt with after 
technological discovery, and many times after dilemmas have already 
materialized, and that is because researchers and financiers are well 
versed in information derivation, validation, and operationalization, as 
well as the tacit sequestration and deployment of Capital, but little 
else.  Hanson admits that "the offense of market alienation implied by 
{genetic} patenting is that the market rights and profit interests are 
'added' to the traits that we pass down through reproduction as treasured 
parts of ourselves, thereby implying that sovereignty over traits can be 
established and separated from persons possessing those traits."[xxii] Yet 
Hanson also sidesteps this breach of genetic sovereignty by market forces 
and essentially contends: "Strictly speaking, a patent--as an intellectual 
property right that excludes others from commercial exploitation--does not 
equate to the buying and selling of genes or other patented biological 
material."[xxiii] But the contractual rights to an agent do not have to 
literally require the transfer of material ownership of material existents 
to an 'owner' in order to violate sovereignty.

Ownership of genetic material is already literally assumed by virtue of 
its longstanding location (inside of us), is it not a birthright to assume 
ownership claims to one's own bodily parts and information (e.g. one's 
organs, name, social security number, technical identity, etc.)?  It is 
irreconcilable with just and equitable theory (not Aristotelian, but 
egalitarian theory, and that is to say, one in which the communicative 
field of action is level)[xxiv] to allow for the privatization of genetic 
materials and the products derived therefrom that belong to everyone in 
the species class.  These effects already are public from their 
reproductive conception, and within the sovereign dominion of the person, 
and more broadly, of every human being.  That we allow this violation is a 
travesty, and further, it is not so much that we allow it, as much as we 
are subjected to it without due process.

Public participation in the direct governance of biopolitical concerns 
requires confrontation of the productive kind that only deliberative 
representation in polity can bring, which is adequately addressed by many 
theorists, as in when Leib[xxv] argues for a fourth, deliberative branch 
of government. The deliberative branch would be comprised of average 
American citizens, randomly chosen to serve in the way that juries are 
chosen, for specific term periods, in order to realistically balance the 
legislative, judicial and executive branches of government, where a 
branch, (e.g. the legislative branch), consists of a Senate and House that 
are comprised of an affluent minority percentage of the demographic of the 
broader U.S.; and many of which actively maintain and benefit from 
incestuous relationships with large corporations.

The question of us all maintaining sovereignty over the Code of our 
species, instead of solely an affluent segment of our species that have 
access to Capital and its most powerful devices (e.g. patents)--as is fast 
becoming the case and standard--is not a question of whether or not we 
equate ourselves with our genes, but rather a question of the usurpation 
of our personal and social property for private interests.  This is not to 
say that genetic industry should cease, but instead is to say that we as a 
collective society should argue for public ownership and access to the 
Code and its derivatives.  We should subsidize this endeavor as a whole, 
corporations included--but they should not hold all the cards in the game, 
the patents in the law field, nor the means to sequester the benefits and 
information derived from the Code for the benefit of the few, at the 
expense of the sovereignty of the whole species.  It is not a question of 
arguing for or against the commodification of genetic industry as it 
applies to human Code, because everything is in the sphere of commodity 
today--our milieu is commodious.  It is a question of sovereignty, and 
genetic material being colonialized like new virgin territory taken from 
the primal natives, and the project reeks of the colonial projects we 
should all be quite familiar with by now. The stakes are large in the 
industrialization and privatization of the Code.  In the past we spoke of 
alienation, but today it is dehumanization that is normalizing relations 
as a process of human exchange akin to the trade of Capital.

Foucault:

"The norm is not simply and not even a principle of intelligibility; it is 
an element on the basis of which a certain exercise of power is founded 
and legitimized.  Canguilhelm calls it a polemical concept.  Perhaps we 
could say it is a political concept.  In any case=85the norm brings with 
it a principle of both qualification and correction.  The norm's function 
is not to exclude and reject.  Rather, it is always linked to a positive 
technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative 
project."[xxvi]

If we were always and already just an instance of staging, of 
normalization, most recently that of becoming-Capital, then this is the 
finalization of that trend.  When the Code is fully commodious, human 
value will be fully exchangeable, floating like currency value, in trade, 
in electronic flux, with no basis and no future--the death of the species 
as previously understood.  This process will include, not exclusion and 
rejection, but an intervening stratification, of only a vaguely 
reminiscent class based dispersion:  Baudrillard: "Peut-on se batte contre 
l'A.D.N.?  Certainement pas =E0 coups de lutte de classes."[xxvii]

If the class struggle is powerless in the face of Capital, in the face of 
the currency of the Code, in the face of power, what will take its place? 
Foucault:

"Now that power is decreasingly the power of the right to take life, and 
increasingly the right to intervene to make live, or once power begins to 
intervene mainly at this level in order to improve life by eliminating 
accidents, the random element, and deficiencies, death becomes, insofar as 
it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power, too. 
Death is outside the power relationship.  Death is beyond the reach of 
power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical 
terms.  Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality. 
And to that extent, it is only natural that death should now be 
privatized, and should become the most private thing of all.  In the right 
of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most obvious and most 
spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign; death 
now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all 
power, falls back on himself and retreats, so as to speak, into his own 
privacy.  Power no longer recognizes death.  Power literally ignores 
death."[xxviii]

Deaths of American soldiers in Iraq remind us of how we were not permitted 
to see the flag-draped caskets of the dead; permission was not granted, 
and what was imposed by the State in this instance, was nothing short of 
our complicit ignorance of Death.  We see how the media does not let us 
see the dead; there is no time for mourning, because that would lie 
outside of power's purview.  If the dead are to be furnished, then a 
stand-in must be provided in lieu of the true remains, as in the recent 
case of Pyongyang.  North Korea returned the remains to Japan of the 
female abductee from 1977--only the remains were later proven by Japanese 
officials to be a simulation, in that they were composed of DNA from other 
sources and multiple bodies.  There is a call for sanctions in light of 
the circumstances.[xxix]

Death has been excluded by power, so there can only be triumph, 
paradoxically an illusion, like power itself--at the cost of Death that is 
real.  However, when Death is fully exterminated--this is the moment we 
all become truly expendable, the future illusion of becoming-Code.  When 
Death can no longer be lived with--exchanged--such an event lays the 
groundwork for an event that will make the Holocaust appear banal: 
Coulter reminds us of the difference of power in theory:

"(Baudrillard's) point of departure with Foucault, is that power, like the 
simulated spatial perspective of Renaissance painting, is never really 
there.  Power becomes a trap for Foucault similar to the way that many 
sociologists are trapped in their mistaking the ideology of consumption 
for consumption itself, or western Marxists are trapped within western 
Enlightenment rationality.  Baudrillard describes power for Foucault as 
"something that functions=85distributional=85it operates through relays 
and transmissions." Reversing Foucault, Baudrillard understands power as 
"something that is exchanged" and in this process the cycle of 
reversibility, seduction, and challenge are at play."[xxx]

In any event, current trends in the privatization of the Code appear to be 
mere extensions of the long-standing termination of the exchange of Death 
and that event's incidental demise. Without the ultimate reference of 
Death, we set the stage for the immortal Code we already long to be.

There is no need to reject the promises of biotechnology with regard to 
the human Code and its technological products.  What needs to be rejected 
is the sequestering of the Code via patents and corporate hegemony as part 
of genetic industry, because it violates the sovereignty of the human 
species.  There is a nostalgia for supremacy in control of the Code.  In 
line with historical trends, the illusory power of the Code, (like 
military power, economic power, technological power, etc.), is being 
concentrated in the hands of the few.  The effects of this concentration 
will however, be quite real.  History has shown us how problematic this 
concentration of power can be, regardless of its historiographic location.

Coors reminds us that Foucault, in his later work, approached ethics from 
the perspective of caring for the self as an ontological and necessarily a 
priori mode of being, wherein "care of the self as a practice of freedom 
enables the control and restraint of the abuse of power."[xxxi] It is this 
care of the self, including its constituent biological organs and genetic 
parts, that constitutes the basis for a deliberative outlook and shared 
control over those spheres of discourse that affect us all--and it should 
not be a discourse wherein only certain entities have operational agency 
and an audible voice that translates into public policy.  Unlike 
pharmaceuticals derived from plants or other biological matter, the agents 
derived from the Code are derived from our constituent selves, and because 
of this should remain within the purview of our collective selves, or 
socially public spheres.  We are well advised, not to allow the dominant 
discourse of a flawed market-driven healthcare system to actively fashion, 
in due course, a coercive, a top-down genetic monologue that passes for a 
dialogue which in its postmodern effect "operates in society to control 
the subject through the subject's own means"[xxxii]; by selves acquiescing 
to this dominant discourse.

What is argued for here is a reappropriation of the Code, whose 
sovereignty is under the purview of the whole of mankind at the outset of 
life, from market forces that deem the sovereignty of the Code 
exchangeable under the logic of bid and ask dynamics, marketing and 
promotion strategies, and the metaphysics of Capital.  Buchanan et al. 
"believe that the needed counterweight to the market is the state, acting 
both to regulate and, through taxation, to provide services=85and indicate 
a significant role for the state in genetic policy=85and that a just 
society will need this kind of government intervention."[xxxiii] This is 
recommended with no small caveat, and that is that the state be comprised 
of a self-cultivating coalescence of human singularities, acting 
consensually in the most egalitarian way achievable, and that is to say, 
all should be equally represented, in contrast to the reality of today, 
where the most economically affluent twenty percent of the population are 
disproportionately represented in government while the remaining eighty 
percent majority demographic receives a minority representation in the 
state discourse, despite the rhetoric constantly circulating about the 
work being done in the name of 'the people'.  The Code should be managed 
by and for the community, because it belongs to each and every one of us, 
personally and collectively.  We must reclaim the sovereignty of the Code.





Notes


[i] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford; Stanford UP (1998), p8

[ii] Lisa Sowle Cahill, "Genetics, Commodification, and Social Justice in 
the Globalization Era", Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 11.3 (2001), 
p221-238, (p222)

[iii] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, New York; Picador (2003), 
p246

[iv] See Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Multitude, New York; Penguin Press 
(2004)

[v] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, New York; Picador (2003), 
p243

[vi] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford; Stanford UP (1998), p6

[vii] M. Cathleen Kaveny, "Commodifying the Good of Healthcare", The 
Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1999, Vol. 24, No. 3, p207-223, 
(p216-217)

[viii] Ibid, p218

[ix] Ibid

[x] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford; Stanford UP (1998), p120

[xi] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, New York; Picador (2003), 
p246

[xii] Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, Los Angeles; University of 
California Press (2003), p162

[xiii] Keekok Lee, Philosophy and Revolutions in Genetics, New York; 
Palgrave (2003), p201-202

[xiv] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago; University of 
Chicago Press (1999), p4

[xv] Tom L. Beauchamp, and James F.Childress, Principles of Biomedical 
Ethics, New York; Oxford University Press (2001), p55 (endnote 40)

[xvi] Ibid, p43-44

[xvii] Ibid

[xviii] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 
online--http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.5.v.html, Book V 
(parts 1, 6)

[xix] , Tom L. Beauchamp and James F.Childress, Principles of Biomedical 
Ethics, New York; Oxford University Press (2001), p4

[xx] Ibid, p227

[xxi] Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents" in Peter Gay (ed), 
The Freud Reader, New York; Norton (1989), p750

[xxii] Mark Hanson, "Biotechnology and Commodification Within Healthcare", 
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1999, Vol. 24, no 3, p267-287 
(p286--note 4)

[xxiii] Ibid, p274

[xxiv] See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, New York; 
Beacon Press (1995)

[xxv] Ethan J. Leib, Deliberative Democracy in America, University Park; 
Pennsylvania State University Press (2004)

[xxvi] Michel Foucault, Abnormal, New York; Picador (2004), p50

[xxvii] Jean Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mort, Paris ; 
Gallimard (1976), p10

[xxviii] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, New York; Picador 
(2003), p248

[xxix] David Pilling, "Call for Tokyo sanctions over 'false' remains,= " 
Financial Times, December 9, 2004, p6

[xxx] Gerry Coulter, "Reversibility: Baudrillard's 'One Great Thought'," 
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, July 
2004, p8, 
<http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/>http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrilla= 
rdstudies/

[xxxi] Marilyn E. Coors,, "A Foucauldian Foray Into The New Genetics" 
Journal of Medical Humanities, Vol. 24, nos. 3 and 4, Winter 2003, p287

[xxxii] Ibid, p284

[xxxiii] Allen Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice, New York; Cambridge 
UP (2000), p339






Nicholas Ruiz III
GTA/Doctoral candidate
Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities
Florida State University
205P Dodd Hall, CPO (#1560), Tallahassee, FL 32306
Email: nr03@fsu.edu
Editor, Kritikos
<http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Enr03>http<http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/%7Enr03>=
://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~nr03


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