Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Bioscience

by Susan Merrill Squier
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
368 pp., illus. 41 b/w. Trade, $84.95; paper, $23.95
ISBN 0-8223-3381-3; ISBN: 0-8223-3366-X.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta, GA. 30332-0165

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu

"Biotechnology" is a strange term. Does it denote a set of scientific practices (e.g. cloning, genetic engineering), an array of new technologies (e.g. gene sequencing machines, artificial wombs), a research field that produces particular kinds of knowledge (e.g. including genomics, proteomics), a discipline linked to institutions and industry, or is it simply something that is, in the most relativistic way (e.g. farming, breeding, fermentation), isomorphic with human civilization itself? Today, in an era in which "twice dead" human beings kept alive by medical technologies make news headlines, an era in which individual cells with the capacity for regeneration polemicize political elections——biotechnology seems to be at once the most visible and yet the least legible aspects of technologically-advanced cultures. We "see" biotechnology everywhere, even in science fiction, cartoons, and TV commercials, and yet its pervasive visibility always seems to point to its inherent illegibility as a specialised discourse. In a nutshell: You, the average consumer, are free to try Celebrex, but this is always on the condition that you first "ask your doctor" for more information.

Susan Merrill Squier’s book Liminal Lives is a welcome intervention in this cultural landscape. Her book takes a look at the inescapably biocultural aspects of new medical technologies, from stem cell research, to new reproductive technologies, to regenerative medicine. But, Squier does not simply take these scientific fields as self-evident; her method is to consider how a multiplicity of narratives, metaphors, and imagery are an inseparable part of how "life itself" is recontextualized and redefined. Squier’s book combines approaches from literary studies, feminist science studies, the history of medicine, and cultural analyses of gender, age, and the practice of science fiction. Her analyses are not simply the scientific fields in themselves, but the variable lenses through which science co-emergence with culture. Thus biotechnology cartoons, poem-writing scientists, science fiction from Amazing Stories, anatomical art, and a storytelling seminar for those living with Alzheimer’s are all part of her "biomedical imaginary." The focus of Liminal Lives is, as Squier notes, "in the ways literature and science collaborate on, and contest, a new vision of human life" (p. 3). Squier’s approach is welcome because it asks us to carefully not distinguish between "narrative" as a practice exclusive to literature or film. Liminal Lives prompts us to consider the ways in which "science fiction" is a verb, and not simply a literary or film genre. "Science fictioning" would therefore be a way of understanding a practice in which the very relation between medicine and culture, science and fiction is constantly expressed, reflected, distorted, and worked through. This science fictioning is, by turns, melodramatic, ironic, critical, playful, and above all performative.

The concept Squier develops to describe this negotiated zone is the "liminal life": "those beings marginal to human life who hold rich potential for our ongoing biomedical negotiations with, and interventions in, the paradigmatic life crises: birth, growth, aging, and death" (p. 9). The liminal life is the life that is at once biological and more-than-biological (legal, ethical, cultural, economic), the life that is at once unmoored from the determinism of age and death and yet redetermined via a host of medical interventions, the life that hovers between being unbelievable and yet everyday. Squier’s chapters consider a kind of "liminal life span," ranging from stem cells, to tissue cultures, to hybrid embryos, to organ transplantation, to the ‘rejuvenate’ and finally to the idea of "regenerative medicine" and renewable life. Above all, the concept of the liminal life points to the way in which we are all liminal lives, and this is indeed one of the broader effects of Squier’s book. Certainly there is a sense in which "biotechnology" is inevitably abstract, surreal, and "science fictional." Yet, at the same time, biotechnology is also narrated in many different ways outside of the so-called specialist discourses, and popular culture is one domain in which this is especially true. Furthermore, each of us is also a "virtual" patient, a medical subject in potentiality, and we exist in some relation to the everyday, even banal, reality of health insurance, diet, fitness, visits to the doctor, reproduction, aging, prescription drugs, "medical" TV shows, and a broader "care of the self" contextualized by this intersection between medicine and culture.