Body Shock: Unsettling the Biosciences through Postconventional Materialities

Abstract

The focus of this article is the problematic of data in the life sciences with regard to the supposedly singular event of heart transplantation. In mainstream discourse, organ transplantation is seen as a straightforward exchange of body parts in which fatally deteriorating biological elements are replaced by more competent and enduring components. Post-transplant a variety of biological, immunological, and pharmaceutical data are collected and evaluated, with the success of the operation gauged against the clinical recovery of the recipient as determined by those measures. That simple picture fails to attend, however, to issues such as the historico-cultural context of the biomedical procedure, temporality, the phenomenological sense of self, the psycho-social imaginary, and even disregarded biological dimensions such as cellular microchimerism, all of which can deeply unsettle biomedical certainty. Drawing on my own participation in collaborative research, I rethink what counts as data and demonstrate the need to interweave multiple forms of knowledge in a data assemblage that mobilises new insights into the significance of transplantation and concorporeality.

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