Biocapital and the condition of posthumanity

NOTE: I have taken this opportunity to reflect on how the research I have conducted on the biotechnology industry over the last 20 years might be theorised in relation to the idea of the posthuman. In particular, I want to explore how the recent emergence of a series of powerful biotechnical platforms is reconstructing ideas of what it means to be human in the 21 Century. The starting point is therefore empirical rather than conceptual and I wish to use this to highlight a number of challenges for posthuman studies. However, it must be stressed that this short note is inevitably a gross simplification which requires much more detailed elaboration. Despite this serious limitation I hope these musings will provoke a useful discussion.

The starting point for this note is an observation that posthuman studies have paid far too little detailed empirical attention to major changes in the production of new biological knowledge and its commercialisation by powerful industrial actors. Instead, broad shifts in the relationship between humans and non-humans are outlined from an ecological perspective and new digital platforms and networks are attributed with redefining collective and individual identities. In contrast, in a move echoing David Harvey’s analysis of the rise of postmodernism (Harvey, 1990) I want to argue that the emergence of the posthuman as a cultural figure and the dominant tropes within posthumanist philosophy and aesthetics have to be located in the context of new forms of (bio)capitalism. These rest on the commodification of ‘life’ and the de/re-construction of living systems. In The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (ibid.) Harvey charts the ‘political-economic capitalist transformation’ of the 1970s and ‘80s as characterised by the rise of disorganised capitalism and flexible accumulation. Associated with this transition were important shifts in the experience of space and time compression as a result of new transport and information technologies and the economic disruption brought about by their widespread adoption. At the same time, these experiences found cultural expression in new aesthetic, cultural and political movements. From this perspective, although cultural dynamics are not crudely determined by economic transitions they are profoundly shaped by them; cultural change and economic shifts are loosely articulated through processes of co-production and mutual shaping. Can we therefore make any links between the economic changes occurring in the contemporary era and the rise of posthumanism?

Recent scholarship has analysed the emergence over the last 30 years of a new form of capitalism – Biocapital – based on the creation of new forms of value from living systems (Sunder Rajan, 2006). This builds on the notion of the bioeconomy which was developed as a policy concept in the later 1990s to help promote the emergence of this key element of the knowledge economy. Both ideas explore how the commodification of new knowledge of life and the creation of powerful tools to manipulate it have been exploited to form a major new industry which now has sales of over $500 billion a year. The biotechnology sector is largely focused on human health care but is also heavily involved in agriculture, environmental services and industrial production. It is a global industry dominated by US companies.

The biotechnology industry is complex and heterogeneous, but its activities have historically been divided between the creation of specific products and services (e.g. new drugs, crop varieties) and technology platforms (e.g. gene discovery) (Rothman & Kraft, 2006). In the last decade several of these platforms have started to reach maturity and critical mass, and now constitute key infrastructures that are powerfully reshaping other industries, most notably the pharmaceutical sector. These include:

● Genomic sequencing, data storage and analysis – the development of high-speed sequencing, massive data storage and powerful algorithms to interpret these data are enabling the analysis of the genetic make-up of populations and individuals from a wide range of organisms on an industrial scale. For example, in the next five years >1Million NHS patients will have their whole genome fully decoded;
● Genome editing – it is becoming increasingly possible to rapidly edit the genome of all organisms in a very specific fashion and with relative ease.

Already a number of genome edited crops are available, and the first genetically engineered children were controversially produced in China using CRISPR in 2018;

● Synthetic biology – large custom-made DNA sequences can now be manufactured to order using automated systems as a means of creating synthetic molecules, metabolic pathways and, ultimately, whole organisms;
● Cell and tissue engineering – the industrial-scale creation of tissue-based products has been enabled by the establishment of cell banks and adoption of advanced manufacturing techniques such as 3D bioprinting. Cell therapies are already in routine clinical use and novel products such as artificial meat are close to market.

The development of these new capabilities to analyse, manipulate and manufacture life is at the heart of biocapitalism and is driven by large industries searching for new forms of value. Rapid innovation and digital convergence are making many of these technologies cheap and ubiquitous, enabling their diffusion to non-specialists and across the globe. The platform character of these innovations and the infrastructures they are creating (vast reference sequence databases, extensive libraries of biological parts, highly standardised tissue banks) have not been given enough scholarly attention and show similarities to other sectors characterised by ‘platform capitalism’ (Smicek, 2016). Their widespread use is bringing about a series of important changes in how life, living systems and the human are understood.

These might be broadly summarised under the following headings:

● Blurring the boundaries between all living organisms – genomic knowledge poses a fundamental challenge to human uniqueness as it has revealed the extent of the shared evolutionary heritage of all species and the biological similarities between humans and non-human primates. What is specifically human is now hard to define;

● The routine genetic engineering of life – the manufacture of transgenic plants (e.g. GM crops) and animals (e.g. ‘knock out’ mice) on an industrial scale is creating new hybrid forms of life that blur the boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘synthetic’;

● Fragmentation and reconstruction of the (human) body – the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (e.g. somatic cell therapy), biological drugs (e.g. gene therapy), prosthetics and implants are enabling the routine substitution of a wide range of body parts and new forms of physical modification and cyborg enhancement;

● Increased surveillance of populations and groups – the explosion of detailed knowledge of the biometric characteristics of individuals (e.g. DNA ‘fingerprinting’) and the convergence of these data with digital databases and platforms has laid the foundation for the routine monitoring of whole populations, groups and individuals;

● Population stratification and individualisation – the search for the genetic origins of common diseases has mutated into moves to segment diseases into different sub-types, risk profiling and is increasingly leading to the identification of very small groups of patients suffering from rare genetic diseases. This is stimulating new business models based on very high cost therapies that increase inequality and threaten social solidarity.

Taken as a whole, this assemblage of knowledge and socio-technical practices decentres the human, blurs the boundaries between the natural and synthetic, deconstructs the body and enables new cyborg identities, provides the means for surveillance and control, and entrenches individualisation and inequality. Many of these features define discussions of the posthuman with the notable exception of inequality. However, a more extensive analysis that includes the other domains of science and technology that are shaping the present (e.g. digital platforms, cognitive and environmental sciences) would provide a more comprehensive picture of the condition of posthumanism.

Whilst the everyday experience of these biotechnical platforms and infrastructures is still limited to specific applications in mainly Western societies, the sociotechnical imaginaries associated with them are well established and pervasive in policy, media and the broader culture. One of the most important features of biocapitalism is its promissory nature (Sunder Rajan, 2006); that is the way in which certain visions of the future are performative in the present. For example, the UK Industrial Strategy promotes the widespread use of genomics in the NHS to provide the foundation for a new industry that will be key to national competitiveness. This vision is being actively used to justify a massive mobilising of resources, the shaping of research agendas, the design of permissive governance regimes and as a means to overcome professional opposition. Jens Bekert (2016) argues that this temporal ordering towards the future is a key feature of contemporary capitalism with utopian visions of the future driving technological innovation.

The creation of future visions is particularly important in fields such as biotechnology that are marked by ethical dilemmas, popular resistance and long development times. Here the construction of radical posthuman futures are critical to and enabling of the coproduction of new bioknowledge, bioeconomies and biocultures. The colonisation of the present by posthuman futures in sci-fi, art and philosophy both reflects and refracts the rise of biotechnology and biocapital and is an integral feature of the process of sociotechnical change.

The irony for critics of the human is that in highlighting the oppression caused in the name of humanism and the desire for new ontologies that decentre human uniqueness and celebrate emergent cyborg identities is that this helps lay the ground for the radical transformations unleashed by biocapital. However, the development of biotechnology rests on an entirely different foundation rooted in the instrumental engineering of life, the commodification and exploitation of all living organisms, and a rationalist and materialist logic that enshrines Man as sovereign. If we completely abandon the human and any form of humanism this makes resistance to the logic of biocapital all the more difficult.

References

Beckert. J. (2016) Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.

Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, Oxford.

Rothman, H. & Kraft, A. (2006) Downstream and into deep biology: Evolving business models in ‘top tier’ genomics companies. Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, 12(2) pp 86–98

Srnicek, N. (2016) Platform Capitalism (Theory Redux). Polity Press, London

Sunder Rajan, K. (2006) Biocapital: the Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Duke University Press, Durham NC.

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