tasks (Paulus 1989, Fuller 1992b). How do people, especially pro- fessional knowledge producers, display their disciplined training and thereby reveal that their behavior is “informed” by the appropriate forms of knowledge?
(ii) This standard can be studied by examining the construction and maintenance of such things as pure samples and ideal cases. Perhaps the most concrete study of standards in this sense can be made of the role reversal recently accomplished by computer and human rea- soners. Whereas computers used to perform “artificial” intelligence, nowadays humans are increasingly seen as “noisy” computers (cf.
Fuller 1993a, Collins 1990). Which is known sufficiently well so as to serve as the model for understanding and evaluating the other?
(iii) This standard may be best approached historically by following the vicissitudes that have accompanied the production, distribution, and consumption of, say, Newton’s book Principia Mathematica, which would be both more and less than an intellectual biography of Sir Isaac. It would be more in that it would also involve discussing many lesser figures whose labor contributed to Newton’s book becoming the medium through which a wide range of narrowly sci- entific and other social interests could be articulated (cf. Latour 1987). But it would be less in that no effort would be made to render Newton himself a coherent agent for whom the Principiarepresented the crowning achievement of his cosmological vision. Instead, the final result would be a history of science that looks more like the dif- fusion of a technological innovation than the logical development of an idea (cf. Elster 1983a). The relevant counterfactual question to ask of this historical analysis would be not whether someone else could have arrived at the content of Newton’s Principia, but rather whether someone (and her allies) could have mobilized sufficient resources so that her text became the central node in a network that had the same impact as the Newtonian network.
7. Epilogue: Alienating Knowledge from the
denizens of the knowledge society either possess or acquire. These three words have been listed in order of increasing alienability. By degree of “alienability” I mean the extent to which what one knows can be distinguished from who one is. From that standpoint, of the three highlighted words, “expertise” refers to the least alienated form of knowledge, since the knowledge embodied in my expertise inheres to me in ways that are not clearly distinguishable from other aspects of my personality.
There are two ways of thinking about what happens as knowledge is increasingly alienated from the person of the knower. The first way reflects the intuitions of philosophers and economists who are influ- enced by classical epistemology. The idea is that the objective content of expert knowledge comes to be abstracted from its various subjec- tive expert containers. The social processes behind this abstraction typically include the codification of the supposedly tacit elements of expertise, which then enables the flow of knowledge to be regulated in ways that can either maintain the status of knowledge as a “public good” or reduce it to just another commodity traded as “intellectual capital” (Stewart 1997). There are several grains of truth in this way of seeing things, which suggests that knowledge production may be capitalism’s final frontier (Fuller 1997, Chapter 4; Fuller 2000a).
However, the image obscures as much as it illuminates. The second way captures what is so obscured, namely, that many features of the emerging knowledge society, especially those surrounding intellectual property and knowledge management more generally, display ele- ments of pre-capitalist, even feudal modes of production (Drahos 1995).
According to this second way, the successive processes of alien- ation pertain mainly to the context, not the content, of knowledge.
In other words, expertise is seen ultimately as being constituted by a form of social relations that normally centers on a human expert, but could just as easily center on an expert system or even a mere image or formula (presumably, as a fetishized tool). Instead of intellectual capital, the operative term here is social capital, which has been used by political scientists and economic sociologists to explain the dif- ference in the efficacy of similar items promoted by different people moving in different social worlds. If intellectual capital captures the knowledge embodied in an individual, social capital captures that which is embedded in a network of associations (Coleman 1990, Chapter 12). Robert Merton (1973, 439–59) had an eye for social
capital when he identified a principle of “cumulative advantage” in science, which enabled those with elite backgrounds and ensconced in the most far-flung networks to get the most out of the ideas they peddled. Indeed, Merton was so struck by the importance of social capital in science that he argued that the optimal overall strategy for promoting knowledge growth would have low-status scientists donate their best ideas to high-status scientists with the social capital to make something out of them. (Merton never seemed to consider that the unregulated accumulation of social capital does more harm than good to science—but that is another matter: see Fuller 2000a, Chapter 1.)
Social capital appeals to a peculiar character of the knowledge embodied in the expert: namely, that the same act may be counted as adept or incompetent, depending on the history that is presumed to have led up to the act; specifically whether the agent is presumed to have acquired the relevant knowledge by the appropriate means, typically “credentials” (but also sometimes “experience”). Conse- quently, what may count as an error when performed by a novice or a charlatan may pass as a bold initiative or a gnomic pronouncement when uttered by a recognized expert. This difference is manifested in the range of responses available to those exposed to the act: One adapts to the pronouncement of an expert, whereas one corrects the mistake of an incompetent and ignores the ramblings of a charlatan.
This point was promoted to a metaphysical conundrum at the dawn of the knowledge society in the form of the Turing Test, Alan Turing’s thought experiment that almost single-handedly launched the search for “artificial intelligence” in the 1950s. In terms of the present discussion, Turing may be understood as having hypothesized that without the markers of social capital, it would be impossible to tell whether an expert human or a mindless machine is behind a suitably wide repertoire of verbal behavior. The mere belief that a given sen- tence was uttered by a bona fide human rather than an artificially intelligent machine may be all that licenses one to confer virtually limitless semantic depth on the former utterance, while reducing the latter utterance to a superficial, programmed response.
Social capital offers an attractive explanation for the increasing alienation of knowledge from knowers, since the concept does not presuppose any controversial views about the convertibility of tacit to formal knowledge. Specifically, if computer and human perfor- mance are indistinguishable, does that mean that the computer is
“artificially” programmed with something that the human “natu- rally” possesses? By all counts, any answer to this question would be very difficult to demonstrate. However, social capital itself seems to presuppose that irreducibly magical dimension in social life that Max Weber originally called “charisma,” which ties the legitimacy of an act to the agent’s entitlement to perform it rather than anything terribly specific about the act itself (Turner 1998). From that stand- point, the recent turn to intellectual property may be seen as an at- tempt to commodify—as opposed to rationalize—these charismatic entitlements. Thus, in defining the scope of a patent, the courts have increasingly circumscribed a range of protected items in terms of a common set of responses that their users are entitled to make, rather than any substantive properties shared by those items. In Fuller (1996), I coined the term “phlogistemic,” named after that phantom remnant of the ancient fire element, “phlogiston,” to capture this emergent tendency to treat knowledge as a magical placeholder for entitlements.
Consider the recent landmark U.S. appeals court case State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group (1998). The bone of contention here was a computer-based procedure, patented by Signature, for pooling mutual funds from several different sources into a common investment portfolio. Once State Street failed to negotiate a license from Signature for using this procedure, which was vital to its own financial services, it sought to show that Signature’s patent was legally invalid and unenforceable. When this case was first tried in 1996, the Massachusetts federal court had ruled in favor of State Street, drawing the traditionally sharp distinction between a scien- tific or mathematical formula and its patentable applications. In this case, the procedure executed a series of well-known algorithms that enabled financial advisors to calculate and record share prices at a given point in time. Thus, the “application” in question amounted to little more than the implementation of these algorithms in a com- puter, the numerical outputs of which could then be given financially relevant interpretations.
However, since the 1980 Supreme Court case Diamond v.
Chakrabarty, U.S. courts have become increasingly liberal in what they count as a patentable application. Specifically, binaries such as nature/artifice and idea/use, traditional benchmarks for circumscrib- ing intellectual property rights, are no longer seen as capturing mutu- ally exclusive domains that roughly correspond to a public/private
goods distinction. A sign of the times is the allowance of patents on machines that translate a generally available idea or a naturally occurring phenomenon from one medium to another, such as an elec- trocardiograph’s waveform representation of a patient’s heartbeat. In these cases, the courts typically preface their rulings by observing that becauseallhuman endeavor involves abstract ideas and natural phe- nomena, the mere presence of such things cannot count against the granting of intellectual property rights.
Had these rulings been made two centuries earlier, in the heyday of the Enlightenment, the court’s observation would have probably issued in the opposite verdict—as grounds for denying said rights.
The judge would have reasoned that since these ideas and phenom- ena are already in reach of all rational beings, the best institutional setting for bringing them into the public domain is provided by the contest, whereby a one-shot prize is given to the person who first arrives at the invention, but the invention itself is then made freely available. In other words, befitting the elusive period of “civic repub- lican virtue” that transpired between the twilight of feudalism and the dawn of liberalism, the competitive spirit would be promoted quite independently of the acquisitive impulse, so that individuals could satisfy their own interests without sacrificing those of society (Hirschman 1976).
When those heirs to the Enlightenment, the U.S. Founding Fathers, installed the intellectual property provision in the heart of the Con- stitution, they were well aware that the pursuit of innovation is not necessarily the most efficient means to foster one’s self-interest: the obstruction of innovation might do the trick with much less effort.
But their main concern was the transmutation of private vices into public virtue. Thus, a patent’s promise of a temporary monopoly on the uses put to an invention was designed as a vehicle of economic liberalization that would encourage people to use their wits to desta- bilize existing markets and thereby increase the overall wealth and knowledge in society. However, as the Founding Fathers originally conceived it, an “invention” had to be more than simply a symbolic representation that licenses a pattern of action on a regular basis; it also had to be a novel application of abstract principles. They failed to anticipate that patents would be eventually granted for things already in existence, such as the genetic code of particular life forms, simply because they had not yet been codified—and more to the point, commodified.
In short, the legal promise of intellectual property has served as an open invitation to privatize public goods or, more evocatively, to convert the marketplace of ideas to a feudal regime of “virtual real estate.” An especially extreme case in point concerns bioprospecting, whereby rare genetic sequences possessed by relatively inbred indige- nous populations are codified and patented by transnational phar- maceutical firms. (Croskery 1989 was one of the first to locate bioprospecting in the conceptual universe of intellectual property.) Marginal differences in, say, the Papuan, Maori, or Icelandic genome are widely held responsible for protecting their possessors from ills that afflict the rest of Homo sapiens. Consequently, a financial incen- tive exists to manufacture drugs that enable these peoples’ biochem- ical advantages to be made more generally available—albeit at a price.
A striking feature of the philosophical discourse surrounding bio- prospecting is that, despite its grounding in utilitarian and broadly economic perspectives, it generally fails to acknowledge that bio- prospecting is, first and foremost, a profit-oriented enterprise that attempts to secure private gain from contingent outcomes of the genetic lottery. Although the ultimate effect of the enterprise is to redistribute any genetic advantages held by particular groups, it would be mistaken to regard bioprospectors as operants of distribu- tive justice in a welfare-state regime. Indeed, as the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report has made clear, bioprospect- ing largely exploits the absence of global intellectual property regu- lation that would otherwise force firms to confront the demands of distributive justice more directly. Philosophers simplify the life of bio- prospectors considerably by assuming that the treatment of economic and biological “inheritance” can be guided by the same moral intu- itions, such that the genetically wealthy Maoris should be levied the moral equivalent of a “tax” on their inheritance, just like an heir to a large fortune (Steiner 1998).
Lurking behind this analogy is the belief that an inheritance, be it economic or biological, is always unearned and hence best treated as something its possessor does not fully deserve. This belief is bolstered by the lottery-like character of genetic variation combined with the tendency of economically vulnerable yet genetically wealthy groups to respond to bioprospectors in much the same way as many 18th- and 19th-century rentiers did to developers who wanted to build factories on their land. As a result, indigenous peoples appear in an
especially unsympathetic light: They do not merely resist “progress,”
which by itself could be easily understood as a Western hegemonic project; but more significantly, they seem to be blocking a specific strategy for benefiting the bulk of humanity. The most obvious lesson to be drawn from this episode is that economistic conceptions of value are bound to support pernicious policies, if they are disem- bedded from the actual political economies to which they are meant to apply.
One way around this emerging public-relations problem would be for indigenous peoples to argue that the value contained in their genetic material should be interpreted as labor, not property. In other words, their genetic uniqueness should not be seen as akin to inher- ited wealth to which the current generation contributed nothing, but rather to the ongoing work it takes to keep a population relatively inbred. In the current geopolitical scene, such labor requires uphold- ing the value of cultural purity and continuity, in the face of capital- ism’s global tendency to hybridize or homogenize the differences between people. Moreover, a labor-based approach highlights the risk a community assumes in cultivating a distinctive genetic profile. After all, inbreeding is just as likely to result in harm to the inbred indi- viduals as good to members of other populations who receive treat- ments synthesized from the products of their inbreeding.
If bioprospecting appears to send our moral compass spinning, that is because it undermines the privileged status of Homo sapiens as a source of value, an assumption that unites Marxists and others (such as Hayek’s Austrian School) who closely adhere to Adam Smith in regarding political economy as the ultimate humanscience. To be sure, major differences separate the followers of Marx and Smith.
Marxists regard humans as unique contributors to the means of pro- duction (a.k.a. “labor”), whereas Smithians subsume human activity under the general category of property: i.e., if each person owns his body, then each person can dispose of it as he sees fit (if at all). But bioprospecting opens up the third possibility that human bodies are just obstacles to expediting the rate of wealth production as such, the human component of which ultimately must be mastered and super- seded by less costly means. In such a regime, claims to the unique- ness or inviolability of human beings no longer carry merit. In terms introduced in the previous chapter, bioprospecting’s challenge rests on its profit orientation toward human knowledge bearers, in con- trast to the rent orientation of the Smithians and the labor orienta- tion of the Marxists.
Consider, once again, the plight of our time-traveling Enlighten- ment judge. After bemoaning humanity’s regression since his day, he would probably recommend that we resort to the standard 18th- century tactic of fighting property claim with property claim: specif- ically, to assign copyright at birth to each individual for his or her unique genetic sequence. In that case, any attempt to patent such sequences as an innovative application of natural laws would auto- matically come into conflict with copyright claims on behalf of each individual as an original genetic product, thereby placing the prospec- tor and prospected of biological capital on a more equal legal footing for further negotiations as to the terms under which a “copy” of an individual’s genetic sequence may be taken. Of course, this strategy would leave unanswered questions about who exactly would hold the copyright at the time of birth: the child or the parents? If the parents are the holders, would the copyright then transfer to the child after a certain point? And what if the parents are unknown, perhaps because they abandoned the child? Whatever answers are given to these questions, taking them seriously would amount to yet another moment in the devolution of the welfare state, as individuals come to be seen as born stewards of their biological estate.
Of course, the idea of tying knowledge, in either its alienated or unalienated forms, to property is hardly new. Civic republicanism (more about which in Chapter 4) typically required that men own property before they were empowered to vote. The sense of stew- ardship associated with maintaining a piece of land implied a mea- sure of social responsibility that would be otherwise difficult to gauge, given the diverse and relatively hidden character of life expe- riences. This criterion was superseded only in the late 19th century by the state’s commitment to universal primary education, some version of which has come to underwrite the right to vote. John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty was a controversial but ulti- mately influential defense of this transition. Today it is easy to miss the disciplinary intent of Mill’s proposal, especially if one presumes that his famed defense of “minorities” was made on behalf of the powerless. On the contrary, for Mill, education would enable the masses to recognize and heed their betters, thereby providing a sort of uncoerced, self-applied form of social control in a democratic setting. Since Mill’s day, a highly differentiated system of academic requirements beyond basic schooling has rendered today’s knowledge society as stratified as any class-, caste-, or estate-based system of the past.