“Technomia” and the Biological Citizen

The advent of DNA profiling as a tool in criminal justice marked a new stage in the use of the body as a regulatory resource. The traditional role of criminal justice—as a visible object of pain dispensation—has gradually been subsumed within more pervasive and invisible regulatory projects centered on the body’s biochemical structures. So pervasive has this transformation been that some have argued that a new kind of judicial subject—the “biological citizen”–—has emerged. This paper argues that the “biological citizen” needs to be viewed as merely one outcome of a more complete regulatory shift, one where biochemical technologies are part of a wider matrix of technological regulation. Within this new regulatory order of technology (what the author calls “technomia”) the function of traditional justice and its institutions are being reshaped in ways that are just now beginning to be understood.