Ruth A. Miller. Flourishing Thought

This engaging monograph asks us to think more carefully about embryos, clones, and data hoards as productive constituents of democratic theory. Ruth A. Miller’s Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards opens with an unusual juxtaposition: amoeba-like slime and data surveillance, the book suggests, should be understood not as uncontrollable threats to liberal democracy, but as nonhuman entities that promote a different kind of politics, one that forces us to broaden our conception of democratic participation. Things that reproduce unboundedly can be said to think, and things that think are inherently political. Ultimately Miller argues that slime and data are “infinitely more beneficial” than detrimental to democracy (3). Put differently, she promotes a theory of “mass democracy as nonhuman thought,” which might be better able to respond to the apparent threat of data surveillance than is “classic, human-centered liberal democratic theory” (139). The center of the book is the examination of three case studies—embryos, clones, and reproductive trash—which provide the grounding for Miller’s claim that “it may be possible to reconfigure data mining as, itself, a democratic actor rather than a threat to political engagement” (170). Clones, for example, pose a threat to liberal democracy, but not primarily in the mundane sense that a person could clone herself, and then (after eighteen years or so) have essentially doubled “her” vote. Rather, the ability to clone oneself poses an “insidious threat” to democracy because it “mocks individualization” by revealing how “human dignity exists as a political artifact specifically to police the boundary between reproduction, on the one hand, and growth and thought on the other” (101–105). Miller draws on posthuman feminist theory to assert that cloning should instead be seen as “a radically democratic act” (134) precisely because it enables a democratic politics that downplays liberal human-centered ideals and identities in favor of a more vital version of democracy.

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