Notes on Biocapital, multiple sources, pt1
I have to write a four-to-five page summary and discussion leadin of the readings for this week, which include:
HELMREICH
This paper's hope is to give a classification of uses of the term biocapital while also narrativizing the evolution of the term and the subject. In my paper I will want to compare these usages to what Sunder Rajan does in the book.
The word itself "is becoming the prevailing coin in academic exchanges about contemporary unions of biological science with profit-oriented enterprise." (463) Species apparently can also refer to a type of coinage, which makes the title of the paper wordplay. There are four different species of capital according to Bourdieu [0] --- "economic, cultural, social, and symbolic."
Focus on stem cells and genomes (even though those are hardly the only types of biological materials that are productized; "bio" seems like the wrong term given that people eat meat, but anyway).
"Biocapital also extends Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, that practice of governance that brought ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 143)." (464) Well thanks for making that connection easy for me, Helmreich! So instead of being inhabited by individuals and populations as Foucault's biopolitics is, biocapital [also] includes "cells, molecules, genomes, and genes." (464) Sure; you can also compare this to Haraway's argument in "A Manifesto For Cyborgs" about the smallening of technology. Not sure if I want to, although Sunder Rajan apparently worked with Haraway so it might come up.
There's a review of Sunder Rajan in here. Uh, how helpful! One of the main arguments he makes is apparently that there are different motivations for this capitalization of biological material, particularly stem cells, in different countries; in the US, it is based on "salvation," while in India the goal is to make India into a "global player." (465) Thus biocapital is tied up in narrative, just like other forms of capital. (Is biocapital distinct from human capital in its inability to speak for itself? Human beings at the bottom of the feeding chain, while often disregarded, have the ability to speak for themselves, to enact change; stem cells and molecules do not. Is, then, walking way far away from the readings and into Rachel's head land, biocapitalization an effort by the systems of power to keep themselves empowered by drawing their source of power not from a lower class or a human bare life but from an actual non-sentient bare life that lacks the ability to take action? Can stem cells be a Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine???)
"Sunder Rajan here illustrates how new genres of biocapital also depend on older, often colonial, structures of subordi- nation. For example, he shows how unemployed textile workers in a marginal neighbour- hood in Bombay become enlisted as ‘volunteers’ for pharmaceutical clinical trials outsourced from the United States. What Sunder Rajan locates as the ‘upstream’ world of genomic science and the ‘downstream’ world of pharmaceuticals are connected not only through the idealized flowcharts of biotech companies, but are also realized through historically carved channels of inequality. In both the Indian and the US case, such realizations are often located in a promised future; the speculative character of biotechnology is foundational for what Sunder Rajan names as ‘the constitution of postgenomic life’." (465) I'd like to find the more detailed writeup of this in the book and cite from that; can I make something happen with diffusion maybe? Soft critique of Sunder Rajan as much more interested in -capital than in bio-, which Rose does more of.
Rose is also more interested in ethics, and more interested in a turn to the molecular, and I really can't help seeing that as D&G's molecularity.
467 and 468 have a giant chart of the origin of biocapital that has a definition of bioprospecting, finally: "The term, a compression of ‘biodiversity prospecting’ refers to scouting in ‘natural’ settings (e.g. rainforests) for biological material (e.g. from plants) or information (e.g. traditional or indigenous knowledge) that may provide leads for natural products that can be industrialized or commercialized." (467) I'd wondered what that was for like a year. Probably should have looked it up before now. ^^;;
"2003 Anthropologists Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as a kind of wealth that depends upon a ‘form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts, particularly cells, in a manner not dissimilar to that by which, as Marx described it, soil plays the “principal” role in agriculture’ (p. 8). Franklin and Lock understand this biocapital to be underwritten not only by production, but also by reproduction." (468) This whole thing is suuuuuuuuuuper Marxist.
(Sunder Rajan uses Bataille??????? OK I am looking forward to this book now holy crap)
OK so there are two major families of biocapital anaylsis, one Marxist-Feminist where production/reproduction and nature/culture are key questions, and the other Sunder Rajan's, interested in meaning, information management, and speculation. Both are super into Marx and Foucault, and use Haraway and Rabinow, although the first are more into them. (471) Haraway's 2007 When Species Meet bridges the gap and goddamnit I need to read everything she ever wrote huh. All of it. Like, her third-grade poetry.
Hah, academic-industrial hybridization in research. (On hybrids!)
On Sunder Rajan: "Though he offers clear analyses of molecular biology lab practices, he is less interested in the substances of the biological, calling attention instead to the constructedness of biological facts upon which speculative exchange-value is predicated." (472)
The chart on page 473 is boss. Also I need to read Marx. ;_; NOT FOR THIS PAPER.
"In recent work, I have suggested that the sentiment of many biotech boosters has them imagining B' already to be latent in B-to believe that biological process itself already constitutes a form of surplus value and profit production (Helmreich, 2007).4 This logic naturalizes biotech. Biological generativity is configured as accumulated labour power, the products of which can be harnessed to create productive futures. This belief is based, it bears emphasizing, on a metaphor: that organisms are labourers [an equivalence declared even by Marx, who saw the natural consumption of eating entailing production of the body (1857 - 58, p. 228)]. The negative image of biocapital then becomes necrocapital, dead matter, like fossil fuel, put to unregenerative, zombie-like work." (474) Whoah. OK, unpacking this! I think this _does_ line up with my crazy thought experiment earlier, at least sort of, and that's kinda troubling. Also, necrocapital/biocapital begs a comparison to necropolitics/biopolitics which, uh, do I have notes on the necropolitics article? No. That's frustrating. I would like to draw that comparison if I have time but it may have to be a Project For Later.
Aaaaand it ends on questioning capital, which is awesome, but I don't think where I am going to go with my paper except to note that it happened (since I also have to summarize; I think the idea is that you have these papers as notes even if you didn't take notes? Or something? I dunno).
Okay... FOUCAULT
I have read this a jillion times. Roman power over life and death was complete; then power over life and death was based on the protection of the sovereign; Hobbes blah blah blah; this power was over taking or allowing life, not anything productive; now this power "presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to minister, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." (259) Where the previous reading goes super-micro, Foucault says things are now super-macro, and that genocide is the flipside of survival in the atomic age? Death penalty is invoked less and less as we kill more and more people in war, the criminal has to be painted as a threat to the survival of society like an outside army in order to be put to death. Death becomes a private right, suicide goes from taking things away from the sovereign to an "astonishment." "Death is power's limit." (261)
Power of life evolved in two strains (Foucault uses the word "evolve" but not "strain" --- the biological metaphor here that I am complicit with is interesting): the body as a machine (anatamopolitics) and the species body, health and reproduction, biopolitics.
biopower: "numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations," (262), key to capitalism's development, arguably a standing-reserve of people if you want to be all Heideggerrian about it which I don't particularly but maybe it is useful. (OK while I am tired of being assigned this chapter, I have to admit I see different things in it with every reading so I cannot be too pissed off about it.) New techniques of power are also required. (Technique/technology, there is room to do something clever here in talking about words and in talking about how biocapital requires technologies of power that weren't present at the time of the evolution of capital; but this again comes to the point about capital not being a solid entity we can build understanding around to which I respond what is to which I respond nothing ahahahahaha good luck with that and Katie's steampunk post-structuralists are in a zeppelin laughing at me. THIS IS MY BRAIN.)
Argument that epidemics and famine having been pushed back opened the space for a politics of life rather than of death. "passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention" (265) Brief nod to the fact that famine is still an issue many places, but then this: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: A living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question." (265) So using that.
Norms gaining ground over law; law becoming one of many apparatuses of norm regulation. (266) This is an interesting way to look at body modification and the battles over who owns discarded organs, which I am pretty sure I was supposed to see last semester and missed? Or maybe I saw it and forgot? I dunno. Now it's written down.
And now he starts talking about sex, which is mostly not relevant to this analysis, except maybe as concerns reproduction? Does he talk about reproduction? Well, he does talk about discipline/regulation being enmeshed which might be useful, and about medicalization, which might in a sense lead into the possibility of biocapital. Sure, "health, progeny, race, the future of the species" (269) as things that power uses to talk about and to sexuality. Sanguinity->sexuality, Sade, eugenics, the sanguinity->sexuality thing is really cool but I don't think I want to write about it here. I only get five pages and I haven't started the main text yet and I already have five pages worth of notes here.
Oh here's the point here he talks about racism. Who's the scholar I read who jumped off from here in really interesting ways? Was that Stoler? The whole "racism took shape at this point" bit? Yeah that was Stoler. If you're angry that I am not saying more about this just go read Stoler, it's not useful for this paper, sorry.
How does Foucault manage to have so few citations???? Jeez.
Anyway...
BIOCAPITAL, the book
Notes will slow down because I do not have the time to spend an hour per ten pages on the book. That's sort of unfortunate but I believe it is the phenomenon called "graduate school." I have 150 pages; let's see if I can get decent notes and spend four hours on it? That should be doable.
In 1999, was studying genomics and its history as a PhD student. Believes that life sciences are "increasingly becoming information sciences" (3) and that capitalism is acknowledged as having effectively "won." Science and society coproduce each other (we needed that word in transsomatechnics last semester). "coproduction of life science with political economic regimes" (4) is focus of the book. Patenting of genetic sequences is one example. 1980 had Bayh-Dole act that allowed academy to get involved in industry,and Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which allowed patenting a microorganism. So maybe there's a kind of inflection point there.
p6 talks about overdetermination and capital using Althusser and Zizek. Capitalist processes as tendential? (7) Hrm. (God, the material in Geographies of Technology is way more political than the stuff in Transsomatechnics was. I think that's even good --- it is related directly to actual things that actually happened --- but it feels so weirdly grounded and opinion-having.) merchant:commercial capital::producer:commodity capital? That's direct from Marx. (9) Venture funding in biotech affects value in the US more than in India, where it's more directly tied to commodity capital (that is, what the molecules you can produce actually do).
Biocapital is not distinct from capital or capitalisms but is a different phase or stage? Page 10 has a bunch fo word-wrangling around this that sounds like an attempt to have it both ways, which I can appreciate. It does a good job of complexifying the relationships between different capitalisms although it makes it hard to situate, sometimes, what it is that we are actually talking about here. Arguably this is where Helmreich (or maybe reading the rest of the book) is helpful as an intervention. Lyotard: Postmodernism is a symptom of modernity. Sunder Rajan: Biocapital is a symptom of capitalism. (11)
Ooh, on the specificity: "Understanding the systems of production, circulation, and consumption of various 'biologicals,' including the ways in which these circulations insert into more general processes of capitalist circulation, is one side of the analytic challenge of studying biocapital as a system of exchange." (12) Specificity!
Very synthetic reading of fourcault for broad-scope arguments, I like it. Biopower operates through institutional, epistemic, and discursive mechanisms. A lot of focus on epistemology here. Using US and India as two locations in order to globalize. Oh look, a useful quote: "this book is a comparative investigation of postgenomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India." (14-15)
useful stuff on Marx/Hegel on page 15 but so not getting into it in a 4-5 page paper not even a little bit. Some day I need to really sink my teeth into dialectic. Page 17 has more on materiality/abstraction that explains dialectic a bit more... Some day. That day is not today. Moving on.
"genomics allows the metaphor of life-as-information to become material reality that can be commodified." (16) whoah
p21 has "THe Upstream-Downstream terrrain of Drug Development" which is really helpful in pointing out the the relationships that make up capitalism are themselves on shifting terrain; shifting strata? Geology of morals? Augh get out of my brain.
Genentech's IPO was also in 1980. Biotech companies liicense upstream discoveries to downstream pharmaceutical companies because they don't have the resources to work in that space; this is maybe the need to interact with actual humans being an issue? (23) Genomic companies would like to move downstream but mostly do not.
Earnings per share as a way that being downstream, or at least being pharmaceutical, actually hurts you in the US right now. (Is this still true right now right now?) (24) He uses this to explain how activists and pharmaceutical companies are talking past each other on page 25 in a really clever way although I suspect there is more to it.
India has process rather than product patents for drug manufacture. Oh but the WTO means that isn't the case as of 2005? So their industry has to adapt, "retooling themselves to become companies that can discover new chemical entities." (26) India is working on developing a downstream apparatus but doesn't super have one yet.
p28 starts a brief history of genomics.
"This is a book that studies a global poliical economic system and uses ethnographic methods to do so. This is already an incongruent attempt, which effectively sets out resources well equipped to study localiy and particularity in order to map a set of global systems, strucutures, and terrains." (30)
Oh huh this bit is interesting for the class where I have to talk about ethnography: "[Marcus and Fisher] have argued that multisited ethnography is a conceptual topology, a different way of thinking about field sites in relation to analytic and theoretical questions about the world we live in." (31) Looking for "windows into global capitalisms." I can get behind this. Hey Krinn, capitalism is a process and not a set of characteristics. :P
p32-33 has some good methods stuff. He did a lot of different work!
Chapter one will argue: "Much of the genomics 'revolution' is based on technological advances rather than on fundamental conceptual advances." (33) Chapter two: "the local political ecologies of indebtedness that are constituted by, and constitutive of, globalization" (34) Chapter five: "the promises of biocapital are undergirded by salvationary and nationalist rhetorics and discourses." (35)
OK so that's the introduction. And then my real life exploded I am coming back to this later. :(
[0] I ALWAYS SPELL IT BORDIEU ARGH
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/72964.html.
- Stefan Helmreich, "Species of Biocapital"
- Michel Foucault, "Right of Death and Power over Life"
- Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (chapters 0,1, 2, 5)
HELMREICH
This paper's hope is to give a classification of uses of the term biocapital while also narrativizing the evolution of the term and the subject. In my paper I will want to compare these usages to what Sunder Rajan does in the book.
The word itself "is becoming the prevailing coin in academic exchanges about contemporary unions of biological science with profit-oriented enterprise." (463) Species apparently can also refer to a type of coinage, which makes the title of the paper wordplay. There are four different species of capital according to Bourdieu [0] --- "economic, cultural, social, and symbolic."
Focus on stem cells and genomes (even though those are hardly the only types of biological materials that are productized; "bio" seems like the wrong term given that people eat meat, but anyway).
"Biocapital also extends Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, that practice of governance that brought ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 143)." (464) Well thanks for making that connection easy for me, Helmreich! So instead of being inhabited by individuals and populations as Foucault's biopolitics is, biocapital [also] includes "cells, molecules, genomes, and genes." (464) Sure; you can also compare this to Haraway's argument in "A Manifesto For Cyborgs" about the smallening of technology. Not sure if I want to, although Sunder Rajan apparently worked with Haraway so it might come up.
There's a review of Sunder Rajan in here. Uh, how helpful! One of the main arguments he makes is apparently that there are different motivations for this capitalization of biological material, particularly stem cells, in different countries; in the US, it is based on "salvation," while in India the goal is to make India into a "global player." (465) Thus biocapital is tied up in narrative, just like other forms of capital. (Is biocapital distinct from human capital in its inability to speak for itself? Human beings at the bottom of the feeding chain, while often disregarded, have the ability to speak for themselves, to enact change; stem cells and molecules do not. Is, then, walking way far away from the readings and into Rachel's head land, biocapitalization an effort by the systems of power to keep themselves empowered by drawing their source of power not from a lower class or a human bare life but from an actual non-sentient bare life that lacks the ability to take action? Can stem cells be a Deleuzo-Guattarian war machine???)
"Sunder Rajan here illustrates how new genres of biocapital also depend on older, often colonial, structures of subordi- nation. For example, he shows how unemployed textile workers in a marginal neighbour- hood in Bombay become enlisted as ‘volunteers’ for pharmaceutical clinical trials outsourced from the United States. What Sunder Rajan locates as the ‘upstream’ world of genomic science and the ‘downstream’ world of pharmaceuticals are connected not only through the idealized flowcharts of biotech companies, but are also realized through historically carved channels of inequality. In both the Indian and the US case, such realizations are often located in a promised future; the speculative character of biotechnology is foundational for what Sunder Rajan names as ‘the constitution of postgenomic life’." (465) I'd like to find the more detailed writeup of this in the book and cite from that; can I make something happen with diffusion maybe? Soft critique of Sunder Rajan as much more interested in -capital than in bio-, which Rose does more of.
Rose is also more interested in ethics, and more interested in a turn to the molecular, and I really can't help seeing that as D&G's molecularity.
467 and 468 have a giant chart of the origin of biocapital that has a definition of bioprospecting, finally: "The term, a compression of ‘biodiversity prospecting’ refers to scouting in ‘natural’ settings (e.g. rainforests) for biological material (e.g. from plants) or information (e.g. traditional or indigenous knowledge) that may provide leads for natural products that can be industrialized or commercialized." (467) I'd wondered what that was for like a year. Probably should have looked it up before now. ^^;;
"2003 Anthropologists Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock define biocapital as a kind of wealth that depends upon a ‘form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts, particularly cells, in a manner not dissimilar to that by which, as Marx described it, soil plays the “principal” role in agriculture’ (p. 8). Franklin and Lock understand this biocapital to be underwritten not only by production, but also by reproduction." (468) This whole thing is suuuuuuuuuuper Marxist.
(Sunder Rajan uses Bataille??????? OK I am looking forward to this book now holy crap)
OK so there are two major families of biocapital anaylsis, one Marxist-Feminist where production/reproduction and nature/culture are key questions, and the other Sunder Rajan's, interested in meaning, information management, and speculation. Both are super into Marx and Foucault, and use Haraway and Rabinow, although the first are more into them. (471) Haraway's 2007 When Species Meet bridges the gap and goddamnit I need to read everything she ever wrote huh. All of it. Like, her third-grade poetry.
Hah, academic-industrial hybridization in research. (On hybrids!)
On Sunder Rajan: "Though he offers clear analyses of molecular biology lab practices, he is less interested in the substances of the biological, calling attention instead to the constructedness of biological facts upon which speculative exchange-value is predicated." (472)
The chart on page 473 is boss. Also I need to read Marx. ;_; NOT FOR THIS PAPER.
"In recent work, I have suggested that the sentiment of many biotech boosters has them imagining B' already to be latent in B-to believe that biological process itself already constitutes a form of surplus value and profit production (Helmreich, 2007).4 This logic naturalizes biotech. Biological generativity is configured as accumulated labour power, the products of which can be harnessed to create productive futures. This belief is based, it bears emphasizing, on a metaphor: that organisms are labourers [an equivalence declared even by Marx, who saw the natural consumption of eating entailing production of the body (1857 - 58, p. 228)]. The negative image of biocapital then becomes necrocapital, dead matter, like fossil fuel, put to unregenerative, zombie-like work." (474) Whoah. OK, unpacking this! I think this _does_ line up with my crazy thought experiment earlier, at least sort of, and that's kinda troubling. Also, necrocapital/biocapital begs a comparison to necropolitics/biopolitics which, uh, do I have notes on the necropolitics article? No. That's frustrating. I would like to draw that comparison if I have time but it may have to be a Project For Later.
Aaaaand it ends on questioning capital, which is awesome, but I don't think where I am going to go with my paper except to note that it happened (since I also have to summarize; I think the idea is that you have these papers as notes even if you didn't take notes? Or something? I dunno).
Okay... FOUCAULT
I have read this a jillion times. Roman power over life and death was complete; then power over life and death was based on the protection of the sovereign; Hobbes blah blah blah; this power was over taking or allowing life, not anything productive; now this power "presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to minister, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." (259) Where the previous reading goes super-micro, Foucault says things are now super-macro, and that genocide is the flipside of survival in the atomic age? Death penalty is invoked less and less as we kill more and more people in war, the criminal has to be painted as a threat to the survival of society like an outside army in order to be put to death. Death becomes a private right, suicide goes from taking things away from the sovereign to an "astonishment." "Death is power's limit." (261)
Power of life evolved in two strains (Foucault uses the word "evolve" but not "strain" --- the biological metaphor here that I am complicit with is interesting): the body as a machine (anatamopolitics) and the species body, health and reproduction, biopolitics.
biopower: "numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations," (262), key to capitalism's development, arguably a standing-reserve of people if you want to be all Heideggerrian about it which I don't particularly but maybe it is useful. (OK while I am tired of being assigned this chapter, I have to admit I see different things in it with every reading so I cannot be too pissed off about it.) New techniques of power are also required. (Technique/technology, there is room to do something clever here in talking about words and in talking about how biocapital requires technologies of power that weren't present at the time of the evolution of capital; but this again comes to the point about capital not being a solid entity we can build understanding around to which I respond what is to which I respond nothing ahahahahaha good luck with that and Katie's steampunk post-structuralists are in a zeppelin laughing at me. THIS IS MY BRAIN.)
Argument that epidemics and famine having been pushed back opened the space for a politics of life rather than of death. "passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention" (265) Brief nod to the fact that famine is still an issue many places, but then this: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: A living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question." (265) So using that.
Norms gaining ground over law; law becoming one of many apparatuses of norm regulation. (266) This is an interesting way to look at body modification and the battles over who owns discarded organs, which I am pretty sure I was supposed to see last semester and missed? Or maybe I saw it and forgot? I dunno. Now it's written down.
And now he starts talking about sex, which is mostly not relevant to this analysis, except maybe as concerns reproduction? Does he talk about reproduction? Well, he does talk about discipline/regulation being enmeshed which might be useful, and about medicalization, which might in a sense lead into the possibility of biocapital. Sure, "health, progeny, race, the future of the species" (269) as things that power uses to talk about and to sexuality. Sanguinity->sexuality, Sade, eugenics, the sanguinity->sexuality thing is really cool but I don't think I want to write about it here. I only get five pages and I haven't started the main text yet and I already have five pages worth of notes here.
Oh here's the point here he talks about racism. Who's the scholar I read who jumped off from here in really interesting ways? Was that Stoler? The whole "racism took shape at this point" bit? Yeah that was Stoler. If you're angry that I am not saying more about this just go read Stoler, it's not useful for this paper, sorry.
How does Foucault manage to have so few citations???? Jeez.
Anyway...
BIOCAPITAL, the book
Notes will slow down because I do not have the time to spend an hour per ten pages on the book. That's sort of unfortunate but I believe it is the phenomenon called "graduate school." I have 150 pages; let's see if I can get decent notes and spend four hours on it? That should be doable.
In 1999, was studying genomics and its history as a PhD student. Believes that life sciences are "increasingly becoming information sciences" (3) and that capitalism is acknowledged as having effectively "won." Science and society coproduce each other (we needed that word in transsomatechnics last semester). "coproduction of life science with political economic regimes" (4) is focus of the book. Patenting of genetic sequences is one example. 1980 had Bayh-Dole act that allowed academy to get involved in industry,and Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which allowed patenting a microorganism. So maybe there's a kind of inflection point there.
p6 talks about overdetermination and capital using Althusser and Zizek. Capitalist processes as tendential? (7) Hrm. (God, the material in Geographies of Technology is way more political than the stuff in Transsomatechnics was. I think that's even good --- it is related directly to actual things that actually happened --- but it feels so weirdly grounded and opinion-having.) merchant:commercial capital::producer:commodity capital? That's direct from Marx. (9) Venture funding in biotech affects value in the US more than in India, where it's more directly tied to commodity capital (that is, what the molecules you can produce actually do).
Biocapital is not distinct from capital or capitalisms but is a different phase or stage? Page 10 has a bunch fo word-wrangling around this that sounds like an attempt to have it both ways, which I can appreciate. It does a good job of complexifying the relationships between different capitalisms although it makes it hard to situate, sometimes, what it is that we are actually talking about here. Arguably this is where Helmreich (or maybe reading the rest of the book) is helpful as an intervention. Lyotard: Postmodernism is a symptom of modernity. Sunder Rajan: Biocapital is a symptom of capitalism. (11)
Ooh, on the specificity: "Understanding the systems of production, circulation, and consumption of various 'biologicals,' including the ways in which these circulations insert into more general processes of capitalist circulation, is one side of the analytic challenge of studying biocapital as a system of exchange." (12) Specificity!
Very synthetic reading of fourcault for broad-scope arguments, I like it. Biopower operates through institutional, epistemic, and discursive mechanisms. A lot of focus on epistemology here. Using US and India as two locations in order to globalize. Oh look, a useful quote: "this book is a comparative investigation of postgenomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India." (14-15)
useful stuff on Marx/Hegel on page 15 but so not getting into it in a 4-5 page paper not even a little bit. Some day I need to really sink my teeth into dialectic. Page 17 has more on materiality/abstraction that explains dialectic a bit more... Some day. That day is not today. Moving on.
"genomics allows the metaphor of life-as-information to become material reality that can be commodified." (16) whoah
p21 has "THe Upstream-Downstream terrrain of Drug Development" which is really helpful in pointing out the the relationships that make up capitalism are themselves on shifting terrain; shifting strata? Geology of morals? Augh get out of my brain.
Genentech's IPO was also in 1980. Biotech companies liicense upstream discoveries to downstream pharmaceutical companies because they don't have the resources to work in that space; this is maybe the need to interact with actual humans being an issue? (23) Genomic companies would like to move downstream but mostly do not.
Earnings per share as a way that being downstream, or at least being pharmaceutical, actually hurts you in the US right now. (Is this still true right now right now?) (24) He uses this to explain how activists and pharmaceutical companies are talking past each other on page 25 in a really clever way although I suspect there is more to it.
India has process rather than product patents for drug manufacture. Oh but the WTO means that isn't the case as of 2005? So their industry has to adapt, "retooling themselves to become companies that can discover new chemical entities." (26) India is working on developing a downstream apparatus but doesn't super have one yet.
p28 starts a brief history of genomics.
"This is a book that studies a global poliical economic system and uses ethnographic methods to do so. This is already an incongruent attempt, which effectively sets out resources well equipped to study localiy and particularity in order to map a set of global systems, strucutures, and terrains." (30)
Oh huh this bit is interesting for the class where I have to talk about ethnography: "[Marcus and Fisher] have argued that multisited ethnography is a conceptual topology, a different way of thinking about field sites in relation to analytic and theoretical questions about the world we live in." (31) Looking for "windows into global capitalisms." I can get behind this. Hey Krinn, capitalism is a process and not a set of characteristics. :P
p32-33 has some good methods stuff. He did a lot of different work!
Chapter one will argue: "Much of the genomics 'revolution' is based on technological advances rather than on fundamental conceptual advances." (33) Chapter two: "the local political ecologies of indebtedness that are constituted by, and constitutive of, globalization" (34) Chapter five: "the promises of biocapital are undergirded by salvationary and nationalist rhetorics and discourses." (35)
OK so that's the introduction. And then my real life exploded I am coming back to this later. :(
[0] I ALWAYS SPELL IT BORDIEU ARGH
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/72964.html.