I’ve been reading the edited collection by Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger called Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics and Culture, 1500-1870. It has been tremendously suggestive, particularly in terms of adding the axis of heredity to the project of historicizing the reproduction/production juncture. In my own research on the process , which I am call the “economization of life,” I’ve been looking at how economic value begins to substitute for “race” as the primary axis for calibrating differential human worth in the era of eugenics, coming to culmination in the era of population control. The multiple genealogies of heredity in Heredity Produced (particularly the introduction) suggest a re-opening of questions about heredity and capital formations, questions which are importantly varied from that of commodified life and biomedical sex reassemblies.
If only the collection included more critical attention to sex and race as constitutive elements.
The volume defines “heredity,” as “the transmission of characters and disposition in the process of organic reproduction” – and like the term “reproduction” – locates its emergence in mid-18th century Europe. Before that time, living beings were not reproduced but “generated.” This pre-modern form of generation was understood as isolated and singular events, rather like the production of a work of art—an original act. At the same time, pre-modern generation did not separate heredity transmission from the circumstantial contingences of conception, pregnancy, lactation, environment, up bringing, diet, etc, .. This resonates with the capacious uses of “sex,” which did not separate out biological sex as a specific domain from the spiritual, mental or relational, or cosmic milieus, within the same timeframe. Generation was arrived at through such activities as concocting and fermenting.
Yet, in the legal sphere, heredity was synonymous with inheritance and succession, corresponding to the latin hereditas, referring in this sense to the regulations concerning the passing on of properties and positions. To be heritable, then was related to the transmission of property and standing. To the transmission of a role or a station, as well as things like land. The authors argue that is was not until the 18th century that ways of thinking about heredity as a legal form (of succession and distributing property across generations) moved to ways of understanding living being.
In the 18th century, then, the appearance of legal forms of heredity in thinking of organic life was entangled with making organic life recognizable as a domain governed by laws of its own. To quote from the book, “conceptualizing organic reproduction as “heredity,” one might say, presupposes that the generation of organisms is regarded as a domain regulated by structures or forces extending beyond the momentous act of generating individual being” Another way of phrasing this, perhaps, is that in the 18th century, biological heredity comes into being, not as a thing, but as a process, or a domain. Thus, Rheinberger and Muller-Wille argue that “in contrast to other subjects of biological research, which can be addressed as “epistemic things” within the narrow confines of an experimental setting, [modern biological] heredity can be called an “epistemic space” – a domain of research to be mapped out by taxonomies and regularities, rather than an individual object of research to be identified by determining its properties and functions.”
Methodologically, the book claims to be researching the emergence of a “knowledge regime” constituting an “epistemic space” rather than a concept or theory or discipline, thereby not assuming that heredity has any definite meaning. In this way, the research excavates different knowledge regimes of heredity.
This way of understanding heredity, as an epistemic space within a knowledge regime, resonates with Foucault’s claim that around 1800 “organization” became a constitutive concept in the new science of biology. Heredity becomes a organization of interindividual and intraspecific relations. To quote Buffon, “ The history [of the species] ought to treat only relations, which the things of nature have among themselves and with us. The history of an animal ought to be not only the history of the individual, but that of the entire species.” For Kant, reproduction was the production of an organized being through another organized being. For Blumenbach, heredity was a “vital force” acting at a distance, analogous to Newtonian gravitation. For Buffon, heredity resided in organized matter that was transmitted—organic molecules. Heredity, comes to be situated between the life of the individual and the life of the species.
At the end of the introduction, these changes in heredity are connected by analogy to alienation and circulation in capitalist economic formations. Alienation, in the moving of heredity diachronically is analogous to a form of germ or egg independent from its parentage, and circulation is analogous to the horizontal dimension of intraspecies relations.
At many moments the book creates a teleology with two end points, towards 19th century evolutionary thinking and genetics. In general, the thesis is that heredity crystallizes as a concern in the mid 19th century.
This volume is tremendously suggestive as much for what it offers as for what it does not, provoking a set of questions:
- How does heredity as an epistemic space compare to reproduction as a distributed ontology? or a process akin to production? Both are attempting to describe a phenomena(?) that is extended temporally not an object.
- Did heredity crystallize in the mid-19th century? I’m not willing to accept this claim. If we shift from heredity to reproduction, there is a case to make about a continuing multiplicity of domains materializing reproduction in non-coherent modes.
- If heredity as a term has its origin in the early modern legal regulation of property and standing in inheritance law, how does the figure of property recur in the later figurations of heredity and reproduction?
- How would this genealogy shift if it looked at the legal regulation of sex and race in terms of kinds, exchange, and property?
