Critical Bioart and Postcapitalist Ethics

Abstract

Bioart, even in its most material definition, entails

a critical discourse on the use of technologies. The

aim is to produce an experience, an image or a discourse

that is able to decenter the viewers’ perception and, if

possible, bring them to question their own practice. As

Deborah Dixon’s framing of the critical stakes of bioart

with Jacques Rancière’s philosophy, aesthetics, by virtue

of their ability to «redistribute the visible and the sensible

», are inherently political. As far as biotechnologies

are concerned, their use, meaning and ethical limits are

drawn by the companies who use them and patent them.

Their participation in the capitalist economy can be questioned

from the point of view of recent postcapitalist theories,

that displace the Marxian concept of infrastructure

from capital to technics, following Jacques Ellul’s understanding

of the «technician system». Bioart’s claims for

paradigmatic changes and perceptual redefinitions are an

attempt at drafting a new ethics, one that is adapted to the

omnipresence of technics within our capitalist society.

Using a few significant examples, this paper examinates

how bioart relates to the current situation, and how the

«criticality» or modality of critique of bioart works both

undermines hegemonic discourses and offers alternative

visions for the individual and her or his relations with the

others and the world in a postcapitalist future.