more biocapital notes
p41: value and ethics tied in with capital, "information is something that can be and is now owned"
"continuous relationship" between "biological material and biological information" (42)
p43 talks about speed as "a material-rhetorical fulcrum used to lever [people] into responding to 'hype' and thus further entangling themselves into biotech."
p45 has key point about specificity of this market: Upstream companies want to own information so they can license it to downstream companies, and this dynamic is key to the process; "drug development is such a capital-intensive process that very few companies have the muscle to actually take a drug to market." So owning bioinformation on its own doesn't do anything for you, you have to be part of a system that assigns value to that information because it can transmute the information into pills. (Or whatever.) ...capitalist alchemy?
p49 The HGP giving everything to the public domain meant that Venter's project to own and patent genes could piggyback off of it.
Trying to get an index of SNPs and create a public database was supported both by scientists and by pharmaceutical companies; breakdown by race in genetic samples is fascinating; trying to prevent the slowdown of information flow led to perhaps lower-quality work --- which the people doing the work had criticized Venter for. (51) So he was setting the pace. p52 ties this all into "new corporate activism" which wow. (Can we point to ways in which this shows up other places? Can I think of anything in software? Maybe) p54 points out that these forces aren't against "owning biologicals per se," just against owning SNPs, which they traditionally have to pay for.
Gifts as bolstering market economies, metaphorically and literally. Huh.
p59 The adaptibility of capitalism, following Zizek, "adaptive mechanisms... that question the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism themselves while at the same time upholding them"
p62 bioethics as a core part of the business model! Except... not how one might like
Discourse is framed around informed consent and not around whether or not it is reasonable to own this information at all (at least in part due to the Moore case) --- Bioethicists "structure which questions get asked as ethical" (65)
Complexification of ethics as tied to the encounter after Fortun
p68-9 --- intellectual property rights tied to genomes in India are shared with hospitals as places that information is gathered --- these are public institutions and it is a case of the state acting in a corporativzed way. Rep-X wouldn't share and so India wouldn't let their samples leave the country. "The Indian argument here is that Rep-X's taking samples from India and then patenting them is not colonial expropriation but industrial theft." (70)
p73 Coombe's way of looking at intellectual property is fascinating --- "a consitutive object in commercial and popular lifeworlds... a source and sink of social power."
CHAPTER 2:
"On the one hand, what forms of alienation, expropriation, and divestiture are necessary for a 'culture of biotechnology innovation' to take root? On the other hand, how are individual and collective subjectivities both shaped and conscripted by these technologies that concern 'life itself'?" (78)
Looking here at "how biotech enterprises shed light on emergent (and in some ways continuing) manifestations of capitalism, globalization, and biopolitics." (79) Uses the definition "life becomes the explicity center of political calculation" from Foucault, not talking about death as a contrast.
p80 "indebtedness operates as moral currency" going back to the gift thing from the last chapter
p82 World Bank's "moral reform" demands that India give up prudence in order to embrace "profligacy" and "exuberance" in the free market. _huh._
p82-83 comparison of India to US imaginary reminds me of Agamben's conception of bare life. I'd actually like to work in a paragraph about that.
p84 Government funds a startup that funds startups in a "hybrid state-corporate assemblage"
More speed in Indian political movements --- if I had more time I would want to take this book's conception of speed and put it next to Virilio's conception of speed (which I only sort of understand based on reading parts of Fast Feminism and something else that used Virilio --- I guess D&G use him, but that's not who I'm thinking of --- fiddlesticks). But while I want good notes I can come back to (hi!) I need to keep telling myself that my short-term goal is a four-page paper. I am not going to write digressions about speed theory. I am going to summarize the reading and ask a few questions. (p88 vision is strategic, speed is tactical, following Gramsci)
p89 this "venture capitalism" is "effectively a euphemism for subsidy for high-tech industry." Where in the US venture comes from private funds that demand crazy amounts of returns or they sell you to Nokia, here it's like a corn subsidy but for biotech services instead of corn. I don't think I can attach a moral value to it (we'll see if Sunder Rajan does) but it's interesting that you can do that, and that Hyderabad does. p91 talks about the problems with this in terms of what the funding isn't going to instead (dealing with high suicide rates, for example)
p93 OK he _is_ thinking Deleuze, and this "ethical plateaus" idea from Fischer is worth considering. "always already stratified" hee hee hee none of the CS/informatics people are going to understand what that means at all. (This, of course, presupposes that I do, which I mostly do, although this whole strata thing is still somewhat opaque to me.) But more importantly for the purpose of this paper, what is he _doing_ with these ideas? Wants to look at "clinical trials, which are techniques within which values, in all sense of the term, get incorporated." Talking about Genomed. Pharmaceutical companies want to be able to sell drugs that won't have adverse effects, or know in advance who will haev the adverse effects so they can avoid giving the drugs to them, and so they use pharmacogenomics. Big pharma companies can save a lot of money by doing this in the "Third World" and this is one of the ways Genomed makes money. "The resource in question that would make this attractive is not just the emergent pharmacogenomic capacities in India as a result of state investment in biotehnology, but the population." (95) Lots of unemployed millworkers available.
p99 would _really_ benefit from a necropolitical intervention
The focus of these chapters was: Circulation!
CHATPER 5:
p183 Corporate fraud as a moral problem and not a systemic one --- avoiding responsibility
p184 Savlationary discourse! This is _so cool_. "conversion" as both religious and between different types of value; and whoah, he's going to talk about gender?
"It is possible to speak of biocapital as salvationary in the United States but nationalist in India, but not because of some essential "cultural difference..." There are historical and material rasons..." (185) Salvation and nation as dialectic counterparts. Damn, does Sunder Rajan bring the theory.
"Religion is about national identity (in India), at the same itme as national consciousness becomes messianic (in the United States)" (186)
"sturcture of linear progress" (187) of medical miracles --- the previous miracle is no longer good enough and must be replaced
"A value-laden ideology such as innovation manages to be globalizing and apparently homogenizing in its application but in fact calls into account different registers of salvationary and nationalist discourse and consciousness depending on the sites of its manifestation." (189) That goes in the paper. That's a key point.
p191 conferences as sites of "speech and ritual." Hah. Yes.
p195 is important in terms of the relation between articulating and performing belief
"...the salvationary potential of biocapital has to do not just with the value accruing from 'bio' but also from the value accruing from 'capital'." (198)
On page 200, disagrees with Bataille's analysis of capitalism.
"A performance marked by excess is a ritual mode of inscription of a corporate presence in the lives of its workforce, where a question of branding is at stake." (204)
Citing Derrida that the "technical is the possibility of faith" (206)
"The therapeutic promise of genetics is always already haunted by its eugenic promise." (208) That is like the most Derridean sentence ever.
p209 So is this excess uniquely American? "regime of symbolic capital" in India is still the state.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/73443.html.
"continuous relationship" between "biological material and biological information" (42)
p43 talks about speed as "a material-rhetorical fulcrum used to lever [people] into responding to 'hype' and thus further entangling themselves into biotech."
p45 has key point about specificity of this market: Upstream companies want to own information so they can license it to downstream companies, and this dynamic is key to the process; "drug development is such a capital-intensive process that very few companies have the muscle to actually take a drug to market." So owning bioinformation on its own doesn't do anything for you, you have to be part of a system that assigns value to that information because it can transmute the information into pills. (Or whatever.) ...capitalist alchemy?
p49 The HGP giving everything to the public domain meant that Venter's project to own and patent genes could piggyback off of it.
Trying to get an index of SNPs and create a public database was supported both by scientists and by pharmaceutical companies; breakdown by race in genetic samples is fascinating; trying to prevent the slowdown of information flow led to perhaps lower-quality work --- which the people doing the work had criticized Venter for. (51) So he was setting the pace. p52 ties this all into "new corporate activism" which wow. (Can we point to ways in which this shows up other places? Can I think of anything in software? Maybe) p54 points out that these forces aren't against "owning biologicals per se," just against owning SNPs, which they traditionally have to pay for.
Gifts as bolstering market economies, metaphorically and literally. Huh.
p59 The adaptibility of capitalism, following Zizek, "adaptive mechanisms... that question the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism themselves while at the same time upholding them"
p62 bioethics as a core part of the business model! Except... not how one might like
Discourse is framed around informed consent and not around whether or not it is reasonable to own this information at all (at least in part due to the Moore case) --- Bioethicists "structure which questions get asked as ethical" (65)
Complexification of ethics as tied to the encounter after Fortun
p68-9 --- intellectual property rights tied to genomes in India are shared with hospitals as places that information is gathered --- these are public institutions and it is a case of the state acting in a corporativzed way. Rep-X wouldn't share and so India wouldn't let their samples leave the country. "The Indian argument here is that Rep-X's taking samples from India and then patenting them is not colonial expropriation but industrial theft." (70)
p73 Coombe's way of looking at intellectual property is fascinating --- "a consitutive object in commercial and popular lifeworlds... a source and sink of social power."
CHAPTER 2:
"On the one hand, what forms of alienation, expropriation, and divestiture are necessary for a 'culture of biotechnology innovation' to take root? On the other hand, how are individual and collective subjectivities both shaped and conscripted by these technologies that concern 'life itself'?" (78)
Looking here at "how biotech enterprises shed light on emergent (and in some ways continuing) manifestations of capitalism, globalization, and biopolitics." (79) Uses the definition "life becomes the explicity center of political calculation" from Foucault, not talking about death as a contrast.
p80 "indebtedness operates as moral currency" going back to the gift thing from the last chapter
p82 World Bank's "moral reform" demands that India give up prudence in order to embrace "profligacy" and "exuberance" in the free market. _huh._
p82-83 comparison of India to US imaginary reminds me of Agamben's conception of bare life. I'd actually like to work in a paragraph about that.
p84 Government funds a startup that funds startups in a "hybrid state-corporate assemblage"
More speed in Indian political movements --- if I had more time I would want to take this book's conception of speed and put it next to Virilio's conception of speed (which I only sort of understand based on reading parts of Fast Feminism and something else that used Virilio --- I guess D&G use him, but that's not who I'm thinking of --- fiddlesticks). But while I want good notes I can come back to (hi!) I need to keep telling myself that my short-term goal is a four-page paper. I am not going to write digressions about speed theory. I am going to summarize the reading and ask a few questions. (p88 vision is strategic, speed is tactical, following Gramsci)
p89 this "venture capitalism" is "effectively a euphemism for subsidy for high-tech industry." Where in the US venture comes from private funds that demand crazy amounts of returns or they sell you to Nokia, here it's like a corn subsidy but for biotech services instead of corn. I don't think I can attach a moral value to it (we'll see if Sunder Rajan does) but it's interesting that you can do that, and that Hyderabad does. p91 talks about the problems with this in terms of what the funding isn't going to instead (dealing with high suicide rates, for example)
p93 OK he _is_ thinking Deleuze, and this "ethical plateaus" idea from Fischer is worth considering. "always already stratified" hee hee hee none of the CS/informatics people are going to understand what that means at all. (This, of course, presupposes that I do, which I mostly do, although this whole strata thing is still somewhat opaque to me.) But more importantly for the purpose of this paper, what is he _doing_ with these ideas? Wants to look at "clinical trials, which are techniques within which values, in all sense of the term, get incorporated." Talking about Genomed. Pharmaceutical companies want to be able to sell drugs that won't have adverse effects, or know in advance who will haev the adverse effects so they can avoid giving the drugs to them, and so they use pharmacogenomics. Big pharma companies can save a lot of money by doing this in the "Third World" and this is one of the ways Genomed makes money. "The resource in question that would make this attractive is not just the emergent pharmacogenomic capacities in India as a result of state investment in biotehnology, but the population." (95) Lots of unemployed millworkers available.
p99 would _really_ benefit from a necropolitical intervention
The focus of these chapters was: Circulation!
CHATPER 5:
p183 Corporate fraud as a moral problem and not a systemic one --- avoiding responsibility
p184 Savlationary discourse! This is _so cool_. "conversion" as both religious and between different types of value; and whoah, he's going to talk about gender?
"It is possible to speak of biocapital as salvationary in the United States but nationalist in India, but not because of some essential "cultural difference..." There are historical and material rasons..." (185) Salvation and nation as dialectic counterparts. Damn, does Sunder Rajan bring the theory.
"Religion is about national identity (in India), at the same itme as national consciousness becomes messianic (in the United States)" (186)
"sturcture of linear progress" (187) of medical miracles --- the previous miracle is no longer good enough and must be replaced
"A value-laden ideology such as innovation manages to be globalizing and apparently homogenizing in its application but in fact calls into account different registers of salvationary and nationalist discourse and consciousness depending on the sites of its manifestation." (189) That goes in the paper. That's a key point.
p191 conferences as sites of "speech and ritual." Hah. Yes.
p195 is important in terms of the relation between articulating and performing belief
"...the salvationary potential of biocapital has to do not just with the value accruing from 'bio' but also from the value accruing from 'capital'." (198)
On page 200, disagrees with Bataille's analysis of capitalism.
"A performance marked by excess is a ritual mode of inscription of a corporate presence in the lives of its workforce, where a question of branding is at stake." (204)
Citing Derrida that the "technical is the possibility of faith" (206)
"The therapeutic promise of genetics is always already haunted by its eugenic promise." (208) That is like the most Derridean sentence ever.
p209 So is this excess uniquely American? "regime of symbolic capital" in India is still the state.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/73443.html.