Technoscience and Schizophrenia: The Technological Production of Nature and Biology under Control.

In line with Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of paranoia and schizophrenia as the effects of the fundamental organising principles of capitalist society, Rosi Braidotti identifies what she calls a 'schizoid double pull,' the co-occurrence of contradictory or incompatible trends, as one of the distinctive traits of our age. This chapter presents a reading of contemporary technoscience as a manifestation of this double pull through the examples of assisted reproductive technologies, genetically modified organisms, contemporary genetics and biological psychiatry. In this framework, the potentially innovative, liberatory and deterritorialising impact of new technologies, technoscience's 'schizophrenic' or 'postmodern' tendencies that might indicate a shift towards a posthuman and post-anthropocentric paradigm, come up against 'paranoid' or 'modernist' tendencies that seem to appropriate this transgressive or subversive potential. Focusing on the notions of 'technologically produced nature' and 'biology under control' as symbols of the technoscientific schizoid double pull, I will argue that what we are witnessing in reproductive and genetic technologies is a reworking of foundational categories such as nature and self in novel ways. This is to say that the schizoid double pull, though it most easily lends itself to a dialectic framework, does not harbour a contradiction, and that the schizoid/postmodern and paranoid/modern tendencies inherent in technoscience are not fixed in a relation of strict binary opposition. Rather, they interact and co-evolve, indicating that contemporary technoscience is neither explicitly modern nor postmodern but itself calls into question the distinction between these two, while perhaps indicating the emergence of a new configuration of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]