Book Review and Reflection on Bio Capital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life by Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Journal Title: International Journal of Research in Social Sciences - Year 2017, Vol 7, Issue 7
Abstract
The book is a well written piece, offering us a different take by bringing out the intricate relationships between several players ad factors involved in the development of bio technology, which are present in contemporary world not only at a horizontal plane but also a vertical plane. The author has convincingly tracked and theorized the co-production of an emergent technoscientific regime, which is that of bio technology in the context of drug development. He has theorized bio capital drawing primarily upon marxian and foucauldian understandings of life, labor and upon literature in science and technology studies, which has drawn attention to the constructed, contingent and politically consequent nature of techno scientific activity. He uses biocapital as an explanatory framework for contemporary capitalism in its emergent and shifting topological manifestations and conundrums of value generations and market logic that come out of the bio-informatics mergers of the genome sequencing revolution. He focuses on the changing aspects of words and their meanings in contemporary world, words which were part of our lexicon and are now loaded with several other connotations courtesy the change that has come about in this era of globalization. He talks about Genomics as one such change that reflects more general change in two broad domains; the first is in life sciences which is fast becoming information science and the second, capitalism, which has “defeated” all economic formations and hence considered to be the “natural” political economic formation. He then argues how Life Sciences represent a new face and a new phase of capitalism and consequently that biotechnology is a form of enterprise which is not distinct from contemporary capitalism. He quite distinctly focuses on how contextualization of science cannot simply be understood as a unidirectional attribution of causality; there is a mutual constitution of the “scientific” and “the social” as co-production and this co-production of life sciences and political, economic regimes is investigated by the author. He postulates that this co production can be best understood in terms of conjuncture of several events and factors: firstly, the interest of venture capitalists; second, investment and support given by USA federal government; third, several legislation that facilitates transfer of knowledge and information from academics world to the industrial world; and fourth supportive legal climate. He points out that how capitalism is not a single, static and unitary entity rather mutable and multiple and that it is not capitalism but capitalisms; wit this framework in mind he then argues that how bio capitalism is the vantage point from which we can view the complexities of capitalism(s) as it contains within it both its specificities as well as its diagnoses of more general structural features of capitalism. He uses the Marxian framework to understand the relationship between bio capitalism and capitalism at large to point out that bio capital does not signify a distinct epochal phase of capitalism rather it is a continuation of, a subset of and a form distinct from the former. He uses the foucauldian framework to point out that the articulations of life, labor and languages are themselves in formation and information that constitute bio capital and post genomic life and the analysis of these articulations that is a central attempt of the book. The book brings together Foucault‟s theorization of the bio political and Marxian attention to political economy, labor, value, commodity forms and processes of exchange as they get constitute alongside the epistemic and technical emergences of the life sciences and bio technologies.
Authors and Affiliations
Garima Yadav
Keywords
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