Abstract
Many scholars in science studies have sought to theorize the conjunction of capitalism and biotechnology. A variety of terms have been forwarded to name how ‘life’ in the age of genomics, stem cell research, and reproductive technology has become enmeshed in market dynamics, and no term has become so prominent as biocapital. In this chapter, we classify articulations of this concept, arguing that definitions center on two transformations: in biotic substance and in economic speculation and sentiment. In experimenting with ways of representing diverse species of biocapital, we offer a timeline of intellectual history and a genealogy of scholarship. We conclude with an update on where biocapital conversations have headed since 2008, when the body of this chapter was originally composed.
This chapter is an updated version of an article originally published in Science as Culture 17, 463–478, online 17 December 2008. It is available open access under a CC BY license at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430802519256.
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Notes
- 1.
For Aristotle, generativity was such an essential property of nature that he saw the application of its logic to the artifice of exchange as an ethical problem. In Politics, he wrote, ‘Currency was intended to be a means of exchange, whereas interest represents an increase in the currency itself. Hence its name [Tokos (‘offspring’)] for each animal produces its like, and interest is currency born of currency. And so of all types of business this is the most contrary to nature’ (I x 1258a27) (1981). Martin Luther had a similar view: ‘I do not understand how a hundred guilders can make twenty profit in a single year, or even one guilder make another. Nothing like this takes place by cultivating the soil, or by raising cattle, where the increase does not depend on human wits, but on God’s blessing’ (1961 [1520], p. 482).
- 2.
The tree representation overlooks important mechanisms and vehicles for the travel of concepts. It leaves out the lateral transfections and endosymbiotic fusions consequent on classes taken, conference papers heard, drafts circulated, and readers’ reports rendered (Rabinow started giving a biosociality talk in 1990; Fortun was speaking on ‘Projecting Speed Genomics’ as early as 1994; Thompson’s notion of the promissory circulated at a 2000 conference; and Sunder Rajan’s dissertation, with the same title as his book, was finished in 2002, etc.). It also leaves out the fact that authors’ positions change over time.
Any model of the inheritance of properties would also map out a story of the transmission of what Bourdieu called academic capital (with credit and credibility not far behind—see Latour and Woolgar’s (1986, p. 201) circle diagram of cycles of conversion between types of capital, in which recognition →grant → money → equipment → data → arguments → articles → recognition → and so on…).
- 3.
Compare social theorists of finance as far back as Gabriel Tarde, who in 1902 looked to organic metaphors to think through capital as a relationship between potentialities of invention and accumulation. Tarde developed the metaphors of germ capital and cotyledon capital to account for the origin and maintenance of capital not exclusively in accumulated labor but in ratios of difference and repetition realized in reproduction and production imagined as contingent collaborations of human, machine, and nature (Lépinay 2007b). Complicating another biological metaphor in social studies of money, the work of Vincent-Antonin Lépinay (2007a) critiques the notion that financial formula packages such as Capital Guarantee Products are ‘parasitic’ on the industrial goods to which they putatively refer, arguing that such products circulate in the same sphere of valuation as the ‘organisms’ to which they are calibrated. Such a critique of how ‘parasitism’ is employed to describe derivative financial instruments could be extended to direct attention to the parasite metaphor’s anti-Semitic resonances in the history of finance in the West (particularly in characterizations of lending money at interest) (see Raffles 2007).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Samer Alatout, Kean Birch, Joseph Dumit, Sarah Franklin, Hannah Landecker, Vincent Lépinay, Bill Maurer, Heather Paxson, Ramya Rajagopalan, Sophia Roosth, and Michael Rossi for comments. Nicole Labruto and Stefan Helmreich thank Maurizio Meloni for soliciting this revision of the original ‘Species of Biocapital.’
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Helmreich, S., Labruto, N. (2018). Species of Biocapital, 2008, and Speciating Biocapital, 2017. In: Meloni, M., Cromby, J., Fitzgerald, D., Lloyd, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7_36
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