‘Biocapital’ is a concept used several times in the STS literature by different people, with overlapping but distinct meanings – which Helmreich (2008)
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looks into at length in his paper Species of Biocapital. One iteration comes from Franklin and Lock’s work (2003) and is defined as ‘reproductive
technologies generative of surplus value’ (Helmreich, 2008, p. 127). Franklin and Lock’s work is anthropological and feminist. In contrast, Sunder Rajan’s definition of biocapital encompasses both the (re)generative potential of biotechnologies and the market potential of bioproducts (idem). Building on the work of Foucault and Rose, he describes biocapital as infused with evaluations of speculative potential of visions, hype and promise (Rajan, 2006, p. 18). Similarly, Cooper identifies a common belief in the ability to overcome limits to growth, shared between neoliberal economic thought and biotechnological reformulations of living organisms (Cooper, 2008). Hence, the operative word for this strand is, clearly, potential. That this is the case is indicative of the future-orientation that permeates contemporary economies. I begin this section by describing the two different iterations of biocapital – which Helmreich names ‘Marxist-feminist’ and ‘Marxist-Foucauldian’ (Helmreich, 2008) – as a means to introduce the approaches that are
reviewed in the present section; all are perspectives that seek to illustrate the changing relationship between capitalism and the life sciences and could be said to study the ‘bioeconomy’25, but do so from different perspectives.
Scholars working in this field take as a starting point the view that economies are forms of social relationship, and the ways in which resources are
25 What is meant by ‘the bioeconomy’ is very much context-dependent. The
OECD’s definition in their project ‘The Bioeconomy to 2030’ (quoted by Hamilton (2008)],) is “the aggregate set of economic operations in a society that uses the latent value incumbent in biological products and processes to capture new growth and welfare benefits for citizens and nations”. Lemke notes that, for the OECD, the ‘bioeconomy’ means an extension of existing structures and markets so that it is possible to capitalise on the products and services that emerge from the biosciences. Yet for scholars who study the bioeconomy (whose work is discussed above), the definition means rather a ‘fundamental realignment of the economy’ (Lemke, 2011, p.: 112) enabled by the new biotechnological capabilities; that is, the new emergent economy that is made possible by biotechnology.
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exchanged are constitutive of the ‘social fabric’ (Titmuss, 1997; Waldby & Mitchell, 2006, p. 33).
Exponents of the Marxist-feminist strand whose exponents critique Marx for side-lining reproduction, or the replication of the labour force, while focusing on production: it is ‘wrongly marginalised in accounts of economic change and development’ (Franklin & Lock, 2003). These works have yielded important analyses of the ways biotechnologies have led to changes in the way we consider reproduction and kinship. However, the second, Marxist- Foucauldian strand of work is more directly relevant here. It is grounded in concepts from Marxian political economy, as expressed in concepts - like ‘biovalue’ (Waldby, 2000, 2002) and ‘biocapital’ ( Rajan, 2006) - that draw from the labour theory of value26. These suggest that biotechnology has
facilitated the extraction of surplus value from biological fragments, therefore in ways that go hand in hand with the contemporary arrangements of
capitalism; which is itself transformed into a new ‘biocapitalist’ phase. That is its central assumption: that there is a synergy between the life sciences and the economy to the point that the former herald a new form of capitalism. Sunder Rajan explains the substance of this link as follows:
‘One can trace the epistemic milieu in which both
economics/capitalism and the life sciences/biotechnology are undergoing radical transformation and dealing with
apparently similar types of problem-spaces (such as, for instance, the understanding and management of complex systems of risk) at similar moments in time, and often drawing on one another for metaphoric or epistemic sustenance’ (Rajan, 2012, p. 7).
26 There seems to be an open question over the kinds of labour that produce
biovalue. For instance, Mitchell (2011) emphasises the importance of what he calls clinical labour or ‘the regularised, embodied work that members of the national populations are expected to perform in their roles as biobank participants’ in the creation of biovalue (see also Waldby and Mitchell, 2010).
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So, this approach is considerably co-productive in nature. For a historical example, we turn to Cooper’s (2008) argument. She suggests that the 1980s were transformative for both the life sciences and various aspects of the social sphere - the ‘neoliberal revolution’. She argues that ‘the project of U.S. neoliberalism is ‘crucially concerned with the emergent possibilities of the life sciences and related disciplines’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 3). Hence, hers is an explicitly co-productive approach and she maintains that ‘now, more than ever, we need to be responsive to the intensive traffic between the biological and the economic spheres, without reducing one to the other or immobilizing one for the sake of the other’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 3).
Cooper argues that the biotech industry and neoliberalism ‘share a common ambition to overcome the ecological and economic limits to growth
associated with the end of industrial production, through a speculative
reinvention of the future’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 3). This attention to the creation of futures that are inexorably informed by technoscience as well as the
unfolding changes in the economic context (in the form of commercialisation or the infiltration of the ‘speculative logic of capital’ into the life sciences) is what makes Cooper’s work interesting in this case. For her, ‘neoliberalism installs speculation at the very core of production’ and therefore ‘profoundly reconfigures the relationship between debt and life (…) in productive
dialogue with the life sciences, where notions of biological regeneration are being similarly pushed to the limit’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 3).
She does agree with Foucault that neoliberalism ‘reworks the value of life as established in the welfare state and New Deal model of social reproduction’. Its difference lies in its intent to efface the boundaries between the spheres of production and reproduction, labor and life, the market and living tissues - the very boundaries that were constitutive of welfare state politics and human rights discourse’ (Cooper, 2008, p. 3). But she qualifies his argument, suggesting that the aim of neoliberalism is
‘not the commodification of daily life - the reduction of the extraeconomic to the demands of exchange value - as its financialisation. Its imperative is not so much the
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measurement of biological time as its incorporation into the nonmeasurable, achronological temporality of financial capital accumulation.’
Where Cooper’s work is concerned with the interrelation of neoliberalism and science, Waldby’s work is one of the early conceptualisations of the
interrelations between capitalism and the life sciences (Birch & Tyfield, 2013, p. 5). She uses the concept of biovalue (in Waldby, 2000), defined as ‘the yield of vitality produced by the biotechnical reformulation of living processes, in order to explain how biological material is transformed and revalorized in contemporary bioeconomies:
'Biovalue refers to the yield of vitality produced by the
biotechnical reformulation of living processes. Biotechnology tries to gain traction in living processes, to induce them to increase or change their productivity along specified lines, intensify their self-reproducing and self-maintaining
capacities. This intensification or leveraging of living process typically takes place not at the level of the body as a macro- anatomical system but at the level of the cellular or
molecular fragment, the mRNA, the bacterium, the oocyte, the stem cell. Moreover it takes place not in vivo but in vitro, a vitality engineered in the laboratory’ (Waldby, 2002, p. 310)
Some researchers have noted the parallels between the speculative nature of the contemporary bioeconomy (Cooper, 2008), so that it is the very ‘potentiality’ of these cells which is opened up for exploration (Hamilton, 2008): ‘the fact that much of the value that may be contained among the diversity of flora or fauna is unknown, or more appropriately seen as
incumbent, is what gives it, to give it its “promissory value”’ (Hamilton, 2008, p. 4). Yet, at the same time the extraction of ‘surplus value’ results from ‘setting up certain kinds of hierarchies in which the marginal forms of vitality – the foetal, cadaverous and extracted tissue, as well as bodies and body parts of the socially marginal – are transformed into technologies to aid the
intensification of vitality for other living beings’ (Waldby, 2000, p. 19).
The study of the organisation of what Waldby and Mitchell call ‘tissue
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biomedical tissues as a sort of political economy, in the sense that ‘the forms of circulation characteristic of any tissue economy both presuppose and constitute certain kinds of social relations, and indeed power relations’ (Waldby, 2000, p. 19). Their aim is to understand ‘what [it means] to give blood and human tissues today, and what [it means] to receive them [and] what values and what kinds of embodied power relations are constituted by the exchange of human tissues, and what kind of social space does their circulation describe’ (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006, p. 181). In so doing, they show that there is no clear distinction between a gift and a commodity economy, complicating the neat distinction made by Titmuss (1997) with respect to blood donation and his proscription of commodification as the source of the problem. For him, this clear separation between the market and social economies means that there is no possible overlap between values and economic value: a market system therefore chips away at the social ties that bind people together in a system where blood is donated.
They critique the conclusions of Richard Titmuss’s comparative work on blood banking in the UK and the US, where he concludes that the
commodification of blood in the US puts at risk the social relations/values that underpin the use of donated blood. They follow Appadurai (1986, p. 57) in suggesting that in the circulation of tissues too we see that there are multiple (and sometimes competing) values that can be ascribed to particular objects in this economy, and therefore it is social arrangements that define what constitutes a fair exchange or desirable outcome; and who is in the position to make demands. ‘All these values remain implicit and potential until they are ordered into an economy. Different forms of circulation (giving, lending, buying) constitute and hierarchize these values (…) in different ways, and produce different social, ethical and health outcomes’ (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006, p. 32).
So, if the circulation of tissues – especially in contemporary economies – cannot be considered ‘pure’ gift economies or commodity economies, Waldby and Mitchell (2006) seek to understand the ways in which modern tissue economies do, in fact, incorporate into their construction concerns
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about both economic value and social values; which shape and circulate within these. That insight is particularly relevant for the interpretation of the empirical work which follows: when considering the germplasm economy and the role that collections play in their organisation, we should bear in mind that this economy seeks to encapsulate both social ties and economic ones, and preserve in the genebank materials that have not only economic, but other values. Callon (1998) argues that in contemporary economies, gifts and commodities are increasingly mingling - as Waldby and Mitchell put it, they ‘cannot maintain mutually exclusive forms of social space or spheres of relationship’ (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006, p. 32). The circulation of such materials sometimes involves a change in status - for instance, in terms of ‘ownership’ from the individual who provided the tissue to other organisations (e.g. research institutes or hospitals), from ‘waste’ to precious research
tissue, and sometimes from ‘gift’ to commodity. So, the commodity ‘is not one kind of thing (…) but one phase in the life of some things’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 17).
Waldby and Mitchell argue – chiming with Parry – that technologies are transforming the capacity to extract, differentiate, and transform tissues so that they can pass through stages of being both gift and commodity. That is, tissues have different ‘technicities’ (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006, p. 182). This technicity is, according to them, a ‘key feature’: ‘their overall shape is
described at the intersection of material qualities of tissues (…) with the kinds of technology available to procure, potentiate, store, and distribute them (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006, p. 32). Consequently, technicity ‘mediates the value and relations associated with particular kinds of tissues’ (p.182). An example of varying technicity is the ability to ‘disentangle’ a tissue, in the sense of making it accessible, storable; standardised: or in other words, the ability for such tissue to mimic currency. Again, one might draw a link
between their work and that of McAffee, who argues that only the kinds of nature that are capable of entering/being visible in global markets (through their standardisation etc.) can be seen to be valuable (and therefore, her argument goes, worthy of protection in ‘green developmentalist’ terms) (McAfee, 1999).
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Yet, the Marxian-inspired STS concepts described above have been critiqued by other scholars who suggest that more attention is required to address the political economic aspects of these bioeconomies (Kean Birch, 2013, 2016; K. Birch & Tyfield, 2013; Tyfield, 2009). In their view, STS scholars have not yet fully engaged with the political economy theories from which they borrow certain terminology (especially Marxian terms, such as surplus value). As a result, they argue, there may be a ‘fetishisation’ of the ‘bio’ in current STS understandings of how specific biological entities come to be construed as valuable (K. Birch & Tyfield, 2013, p. 3). Their main message is that a deeper appreciation and engagement with the Marxian theories that STS bio-
concepts draw upon (and more recent developments in this area) is required, since ‘because of their particular technoscientific focus, these STS theorists have posited a transformation of modern capitalism without due attention to the transformation of economic and financial processes in modern capitalism’ (Birch & Tyfield, 2013, p. 3). Perhaps, a step in the direction of addressing this critique, would be to pay more attention to the interplay between the transformations in the economy and the materials themselves - a sort of co- production.
Hence, and taking this critique into account, understanding the political economy of gene banking itself must be part of the task of investigating how the practices and organisation of genebanks operate in terms of (e)valuative practices. This means engaging with the maintenance of genebank
collections as dependent also on the broader political-economic
environments of agricultural R&D, by being attentive to the social, normative and political context that these ‘economies’ operate in. One way of doing so is to take a more historical approach that can make visible its temporal dynamics and implications for germplasm conservation. Doing so certainly requires a methodology that can take into account the larger scale since, as Tyfield (2009) emphasises, the potential problems that make typical STS work less amenable to the study of political economies, namely, the ‘social interactionist ontology’ that tends to ignore structural factors, while the detailed empirical work at small scales means that more ‘macro’ scale
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spheres/events - such as (political) economic ones - can sometimes be absent from the analysis.