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Paper short abstract

This paper will attempt an explanation of how/why the biosocial turn did not succeed in burying biological determinism through an account of 'data' and 'computation' as historical emergence. I ask how 'the real' has been operationalised towards a new style of totalitarian science.

Paper long abstract

In 2013 Nikolas Rose said: “We need no reminder of the dispiriting and often murderous ways in which genetic explanations have entered human history. But things have changed.”

In this paper, I humbly suggest Rose might have been righter than he knew. Whilst genetic science was changing, so too were the techniques that render scientific discourse real in society. Rose remarked that determinist genetics was scuppered by ‘the real itself’, and that a new style of thought was emerging that turned away from determinism and embraced the complex, emergent and productive paradox of eteology.

But why should determinism not return? The production of visibility is a social achievement and I wonder whether we did not place too much faith in ‘the real’ to intervene on our behalf? Calls to reality no longer seem to unsettle reactionary accounts of life, increasingly they reaffirm old inductive components of the deterministic universe: race, sex, genetic intelligence, &c. It is no accident that the gender-critical movement calls to ‘the reality of biological sex’, that artificial intelligence relies on reductive accounts of ‘real’ intelligence.

Thus, the argument presented in this paper is that biology, and more importantly the real itself, has been mobilised towards a new scientism. Whilst scientists (social, biological, and otherwise) may find epistemic agreement vis-à-vis the fleshy reality of life, a new science of data has found novel ways to operationalise the ‘nature’ of things. To understand contemporary deterministic fascism, I suggest we start by asking what kind of things are data?