Bio-X: Review

Biosecurity. Bioinsecurity. Biorisks. Bioavailability. Bioresources. Biovalue. Biocapital. Bioindustry. Bioeconomy. Bioprospecting. Biopiracy. Bioparanoia. Bioresponsibility. Bioprotection. Biostrategies. Biomapping. Biomedia. Biocollectivism. Biosociality. Biocommunity. Biosovereignty. Bionation.

In the social studies of science, as in the biomedical sector, which is one of the field’s current (pre)occupations, bio is viral. Working on life became a widespread pursuit at the end of the twentieth century. New biotechnologies and medical technologies (some actual, some anticipatory) surfaced through a conjuncture of economic and technical events, for example: legal incentives to academic-industry partnership (e.g. the Bayh-Doyle Act of 1980) and the corresponding proliferation of pharmaceuticals; the human genome project and the general establishment of bioinformatics, a subfield itself indebted to new computing and Internet technologies; and techniques for culturing stem cells and the promise of regenerative medicine. More broadly, the political-economic milieu of late liberalism has encouraged obsessive attention to individual embodiment, especially in the forms of self-surveillance and self-maximization. Whether the result of influence, confluence, or co-emergence, feminists and other critical theorists increasingly turned their focus from language to “the body” during those same years.

In the past decade, as Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein observe in a review of recent work on biopolitics (“Cracking Biopower”), Foucauldians have moved on from knowledge/power, genealogy, and discourse to the theory of biopolitics: “‘Biopower,’ a decade ago hardly on any scholar’s lips, is today on almost everyone’s. In part, this is because Foucault’s takeup, and take, on biopower only relatively recently came to general attention, and even more recently got translated into English. . . . The digestion of what he actually wrote on the subject has only just begun—with something of a rush” (2010, 109).

Although he did not coin the term, Michel Foucault defined “biopower” as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (2009, 1). This form of power emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period that witnessed the entrenchment of liberalism in Europe and the United States, as well as the “entry of life into history.” New fields of knowledge—biology and the human sciences—defined and characterized humans and other living things, and simultaneously participated in “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (1978, 140). Biopower, in the form of anatomopolitics, became essential to the development of capitalism, for instance abetting the “controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production” (141). In the form of biopolitics (a term often used synonymously with biopower by theorists today), it facilitated “the control of populations.” Foucault insisted that biopolitics, far from being centralized or totalitarian, operates through “techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions,” right down to self-governance by the individual.

Can Foucault’s biopolitics, rooted in an epistemic break around the eighteenth century, be applied to what is otherwise declared to be a new break—the very recent “biomedical revolution,” and the “biotech century” it has purportedly midwifed? Two anthologies published in 2010 by Duke University Press suggest that biopolitics continues to operate, on a grand scale, even though what counts as “bio” has changed. Moreover, certain aspects of the “politics” have intensified in the period of late liberalism: privatization, corporatization, governmentality, the commodification of all elements of life and communication.

Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., edited by Adele Clarke and her former sociology graduate students at the University of California–San Francisco (the “Gang of Five”—an exemplary pedagogical model), announces that “the very grounds of life itself are changing”—albeit in a piecemeal and contested manner—and an “epistemic shift of Foucauldian proportions” has occurred with the advent of “the molecular gaze” in twentieth-century biology...