A Rhetorical Matter of Life and Law: The Speculative Futures of (Bio)political Reproduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay argues that the ‘materiality’ of life and law are today technological artefacts of a biopolitical project, and that sexual-reproductive and legislative boundaries are the boundaries around which power coheres and materializes—making life law’s matter, an effect that is slyly taken up as legal ‘cause’. I offer as case studies readings of two incommensurable texts: Milan Kundera’s political fiction, The Joke, and the contemporary fertility industry, an instantiation of biopolitical techno-science. Bringing into tension the ‘materiality’ of life and law across these two sites, I hope to surface some of the vernaculars of (bio)political power—rhetorical matters of historical, political, socioeconomic, and technological concern that nevertheless claim the objectivity of ‘matter’. Both texts also concern reproduction—sexual, artificial, cultural, political—and how it is used to promote a certain ideology of citizenship and to regulate political ‘freedoms’. While Kundera’s novel, written in the 1960s, represents a critique of ‘old’ materialism as the reproduction of Communist State power, here, in juxtaposition, Kundera’s fiction occasions my critique of (legal) ‘new’ materialism—as neoliberal and biopolitical investment in the speculative futures proffered by the fertility industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.059 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".