EL MUNDO ES UN PLANETA SIN VISA PARA LEÓN TROTSKY ( ANDRÉ BRETON )

As briefly described in my introduction, the economic becomes one of the key organising metaphors of my work: it directs attention to the flows, relationships and connections between elements that increasingly construct the category of voice; equally, it evokes the idea of political economy and a concern over the distributive and regulatory systems that condition the possibilities for voice.

Sarah Ahmed (2004) uses the conceptual frame of the ‘economic’ to trace the routes through which certain emotions are produced and accumulate value, allowing her to focus on how an emotion works and what it does rather than in what an emotion is per se. By following the movement of an emotion as it circulates between bodies, subjects and objects, and through different associations, Ahmed is able to understand how particular circuits and flows convert an emotion into a form of (surplus or negative) value. Ahmed also focuses on the ‘stickiness’ of emotions - the way they become attached to certain objects, bodies and values to accumulate particular affective qualities (130). In this way, she prizes open an analytical space to investigate their cultural production; shifting attention away from what

an emotion is or does to how emotions are produced through these affective attachments and flows. For Ahmed, it is in this circulation between, and attachment to, bodies, objects and signs that emotion resides, not in an object or sign itself (118). I take up the notion of the economic in this sense as a kind of orientation that helps me examine the emerging

connections and relationships between the elements of voice, and the way these connections are remade.

Taking as his starting point the observation that the economy is a particular social form that consists “not only in exchanging values but in the exchange of value”, Arjun Appadurai (1986: 4) investigates how “desire and demand, reciprocal sacrifice and power interact to create economic value in specific social situations”. He uses the term “regimes of value” to describe the “conditions under which economic objects circulate” in space and time according to differing systems of value. Appaduarai makes a distinction here between values and value (or systems of value); a distinction easily collapsed or overlooked, but one that must be teased out to understand new economies of voice. Appadurai follows the flow of commodities as they circulate and are exchanged within multiple structures to create value. As the relationships that connect speech, listening and recognition in social relation begin to break down, the components of voice are implicated in both exchanging values and in the exchange of value within prevailing cultural regimes.

The related conceptual frame of the bio-economy has been widely used within the social sciences since the 1990s and 2000s (Birch and Tyfield, 2013; Cooper, 2008; Rose, 2007), with the rise of biotechnology and genetics and the resultant spaces for the management of life that emerge through these transformations in knowledge. In considering new economies of voice, the bioeconomy is a useful critical frame to draw together a Foucauldian analysis of power and knowledge (biopolitics) together with Marxist approaches to labour and capital (political economy) (Cooper, 2008; Larsen, 2007). As such, this theoretical approach draws attention to the way that biopolitics and political economy are co-produced. As Cooper (2008) has persuasively argued, the rise of the bioeconomy is also inseparable from the rise of neoliberal orthodoxy and related ideologies of economic and biotechnological ‘growth’. This is particularly useful to help me think through how voice works under these conditions because it provides a way to connect concerns over the differential distribution of voice together with the regulatory effects of social power.

In his work, Nikolas Rose (2007: 6) directly connects biopolitics to the bioeconomy. He marks out the bioeconomy as a new economic space in which

[…] Old actors such as pharmaceutical corporations have been transformed in their relation with science on the one hand and stock markets on the other. New actors such as biotech start-ups and spin-outs have taken shape, often seeking to stress their corporate social responsibility and combining in various ways with the forms of citizenship and expertise. Life itself has been made amenable to these new economic relations, as vitality is decomposed into a series of distinct and discrete objects - that can be isolated, delimited, stored, accumulated, mobilized, and exchanged, accorded a discrete value, traded across time, space, species, contexts, enterprises - in the service of many distinct objectives. In the process, a novel geopolitical field has taken shape, and biopolitics has become inextricably intertwined with bioeconomics.

Rose (2007: 6) marks out this “new economic space” to map the changing

relationship between the possibilities of technology (biotechnologies and the new genetics in particular); the way that these technologies identify, categorise and extend the category of ‘life’; and their entanglement with power, knowledge and value. Rose uses ‘the

economic’ in the sociological sense, but also as it increasingly connects to the political economy of the market. As such, his sense of the term bioeconomy captures the

relationship between biopolitics and political economy; that is, the increasing ways in which ‘life’ is conducted, understood, managed, regulated and governed through particular

economic rationalities.

Rose understood these new spaces for the governing of life as being intimately entangled with new assemblages of technology and technoscientific developments. Yet we now have a whole range of technosocial phenomena that impinge upon the ‘bio’ that have

proliferated in the last five years since Rose’s book was first published. It is critical to note that the bioeconomy is fundamentally a technological one too. As such, I take up the bioeconomy specifically as a way to connect the ‘bio’ not just in the sense of the biological, but also the biographical. This connection allows me to trace the transformation of voice through its attachment to biographical ideas - narrative identity, autobiography, storytelling

etc. through various formations as they are further transformed by their attachment to bioinformatics, information and data to become a form of biodata.

In the following chapters, I pay attention to how speech as biodata is produced as a new form of biovalue (Chapter Three), as well as how listening practices can function to extract new forms of value based on such personal biodata (Chapter Four).For instance, the bioeconomy becomes a frame to critique a range of ways that the seeming expansion of voice (consumer-driven i-health, co-creative media practice, the rise of storytelling etc.) is contingent upon speaking, listening and recognition operating within these new economies that involve the governing of intimate aspects of life and its capitalisation. In this way, I move beyond the historical arrangement of voice and its connection to the ‘story of you’, to show how narrative identity becomes caught up in one’s personal biodata (that is, rendered bio-informatically) and that control over the value and production of that data – as well as its ultimate meaning – is the new frontier for the struggle for voice and a new site of contestation in this new bioeconomy.

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