Editorial
Lars Thorup Larsen: Speaking Truth to Biopower: On the Genealogy of Bioeconomy
Much of the biopolitical literature has been preoccupied with the relationship between biopolitics and economy, or bioeconomy as it is increasingly called. Although much has been said about the economical aspects of developments in biotechnology and biomedicine, the central concept of bioeconomy has been vastly under-theorized, a situation that leads to serious confusion over the novelty of the phenomenon. This article argues that Foucault's lectures on biopolitics clearly demonstrate how intimately its origin is bound up with political economy and liberalism. Instead of seeing biotechnology as creating an unholy alliance with contemporary capitalism, we should rather see today's developments against the backdrop of an initial relationship between biopolitics and political economy; this article seeks to elaborate the genealogy of this initial relationship. Two aspects are important in this alleged genealogy of bioeconomy: first, the concept of the population and its proper form of 'economical' self-regulation is essential. Second, the truth-telling mechanism (veridiction) of political economy plays a central role, because it potentially subjects any political rationality to a critical test.
Keywords: Bioeconomy; biopolitics; critique; Foucault; genealogy; political economy; truth regimes; veridiction.
Melinda Cooper: Life, Autopoiesis, Debt: Inventing the Bioeconomy
This article considers the genealogies of the 'bioeconomy' by investigating shifting conceptions of life, debt and regeneration across the disciplines of biology and political economy. Returning to the post-industrial literature of the seventies, it seeks to understand how the perception of economic and ecological crisis fed into the US's decision to promote life science innovation as the cutting edge of its new economic strategies. There is an intimate connection, it argues, between the world oil crisis, US debt and the speculative reinvention of life. In this context, a number of methodological and conceptual questions become imperative. When capital mobilizes the biological, how do we theorize the relationship between the creation of money (surplus from debt; futures from promise) and the technological recreation of life? When capitalism confronts the geochemical limits of the earth, where does it move? What is the space-time - the world - of late capitalism and where are its boundaries? What finally, becomes of the critique of political economy in an era in which biological, economic and ecological futures are so intimately entwined? And when the future itself is subject to all kinds of speculation?
Keywords: Bioeconomy; biopolitics; biotechnology; capital; ecology; Marx.
Sabine Höhler: The Law of Growth: How Ecology Accounted for World Population in the 20th Century
This paper addresses the conditions and implications of aggregating humans into 'populations' through statistical means. Engaging with statistical constructions of world population and population growth in the 20th century the paper discusses the 'biological law of population growth' which corroborated predictions of a 'population explosion' and demands for 'population control' after World War II. The biostatistical model and curve were developed in experimental animal population biology to describe the self-limiting growth of self-contained populations over time, and informed the human development studies of the 1960s and 1970s reckoning on a limited global ecological 'carrying capacity'. The paper explores the economies inherent in the 'law of growth', arguing that the law structured and insinuated a biopolitical system of classification and allocation of human lives. The paper analyses the scientific strategies of abstraction, reduction, formalization, and visualization effective in the growth law and traces its increasing power to account for growth phenomena in general. Population issues, so the claim, were assigned to the realm of the life sciences, to the effect that sociopolitical approaches were overruled by bioeconomical: statistical accountability constructed populations as assessable and either valuable or dispensable on a global scale.
Keywords: Carrying capacity; human ecology; overpopulation; population control; population ecology.
Ayo Wahlberg: Measuring Progress: Calculating the Life of Nations
In recent years, sociological examinations of genetics, therapeutic cloning, neuroscience and tissue engineering have suggested that 'life itself' is currently being transformed through technique with profound implications for the ways in which we understand and govern ourselves and others. In this paper, I argue that a growing focus on frontier technologies in the life sciences in discussions about bio-power today has come at the cost of empirical investigations into how, for example, 'quality of life' came to be a crucial object of bio-power in the 20th century. Just as Foucault outlined the emergence of a multiple body - the population - in the 18th century, I suggest, building on work by Rose, Rabinow and Hacking, that we can also discern the emergence of a multiple subjectivity - state of civilisation, public opinion, human capability, national attitudes, culture - as scientific and political problem. If bio-politics deals with the population as a biological and political problem, then what we might think of as an anthropo-politics deals with a collective subjectivity as a psychological, sociological and/or anthropological problem that can be measured, mapped out and intervened upon in much the same way that mortality rates, life expectancy or morbidity rates can. By analysing the concrete ways in which human progress has been globally measured and taxonomised in the past two centuries or so, I will show how global stratifications of countries according to their states of 'civilisation', 'development' and more recently 'human capability', have relied not just on the population as biological object, but also on a collective subjectivity. Using this analysis, I will go on to conclude that the politics of life is in no way limited to biological contestations and problems, but equally importantly includes psychological, sociological and anthropological problematisations about what a 'good', 'healthy' or 'quality' life is and how they might be measured.
Keywords: Bio-power; Foucault; human capability; human progress; life; population; quality of life; subjectivity.
Kean Birch: The Virtual Bioeconomy: The 'Failure' of Performativity and the Implications for Bioeconomics
This article considers how the bioeconomy - conceived as a market constituted by and constituting technologies derived from the biosciences - can be usefully considered as a virtual economy in that the representations and practices of economic activity differ significantly from one another. It does so through an analysis of the economic theories on spatial innovation processes (e.g. clusters) that have proved a popular approach in economic geography. The article contrasts the theory of performativity with that of virtualism in order to illustrate how the failure of economic performativity helps to explain economic practices rather than assuming that economic theories necessarily 'work' as implied by the theory of performativity. This has important implications for how we understand the bioeconomy because it means that we have to reconsider the production of biovalue.
Keywords: Bioeconomics; bioeconomy; biovalue; clusters; economic performativity; failed performativity; virtualism.
Steffen Dalsgaard: 'I Do It for the Chocolate': An Anthropological Study of Blood Donation in Denmark
In this article, blood donation in Denmark is analysed with the theoretical perspective on exchange developed by Pierre Bourdieu. In most western countries blood donation is based on free donations given by voluntary donors to an unknown recipient. However, this supposedly non-economic donation cannot be seen isolated from the wider web of bioeconomical relations in which it is embedded. In the blood bank donors are met with hospitality and small counter-prestations also highlighting it as part of a symbolic economy. Ethnographic data mainly consisting of interviews and observations collected at a blood bank can thus with Bourdieu be said to show the relationship between donor and bank as one that is maintained and characterized by strategies of reciprocity employed by blood bank personnel to ensure that donors keep coming back. These strategies are essential in the social construction of the ideas of altruism and the 'pure gift'. Finally the article elaborates on Bourdieu's contribution to the debate on the gift by discussing the importance of the acceptance and reception of the gift itself.
Keywords: Altruism; anthropology; blood donation; exchange; gift; Pierre Bourdieu; practice theory; reciprocity.