Writing in the Washington Post 55 years ago, in 2010, Kwame Anthony Appiah, then a Philosophy Professor at Princeton University, asked ‘What will future generations condemn us for? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092404113.html?sid=ST2010100105284. He wrote the at one time slavery and the lynching of people had been accepted, and homosexuality had been a hanging offence; child and wife beating was ‘normal’. In 2010, he wrote, these actions were viewed with horror. Appiah’s answer to his own question included that in future the following would horrify us: the USA prison system; industrial ‘meat’ production; the institutionalisation and isolation of the elderly; and the wasteful attitude toward the planet’s resources and ecocide. 55 years on, the Museum of Human Violence joins with the rest of the world in condemning all these violences, in reparation for all, and in asking along with Appiah, ‘What were people thinking?’ We are specifically focused currently on the second: ‘industrial meat production.’ Although we go far beyond this to condemn all the violence that existed pre-Rupture toward the farmed nonhuman. This paper is concerned especially with practices of biopower, biocapitalism and bio-engineering relating to the farmed nonhuman, in the early part of this century, that led directly to the Rupture.

Pre-Rupture the world was organised on Capitalist principles (accumulation and profit) and in the early 21st century capitalism was once again in crisis (Moore, 2015). This capitalist crisis in the first years of the 21st century lead directly to debt, loss of biodiversity, poverty, war, climate change, mass migration and starvation. Crop production was in decline while population size rose: For example, Lobell et al (2011) traced a decline in global maize production between 1980-2008 by 3.8% and global wheat production by 5.5%. This paper notes that bioengineering and biocapitalism were seen, at the time, as Capitalist ‘solutions’ to this crisis, and suggests that bioengineering of nonhuman life reflected the prevalent anthropocentric/human supremacist focus on ‘growth’, ‘development’, and ‘benefit’, while ignoring and amplifying the objectification, cruelty and violence to the nonhuman that had existed in pre-Rupture society for thousands of years. The paper traces the direct links between bioengineering experiments on the nonhuman and the Rupture in the mid-2030’s, leading to the death of 50% of the human population over two years (c.4 billion people). We start by briefly exploring how biocapitalism was seen as a solution to failing capitalism at that time. This is followed by a discussion of biopolitics and a brief survey of biotechnologies pre Rupture relating to the role that many species of non-humans were assigned within these.

Capitalism in trouble

50 years ago (Moore, 2015) suggested that in the early 21st century Capitalism was failing because the ‘cheaps’ it depending on were no longer so cheap nor so easily available. The principle ‘cheaps’ were cheap labour and ‘cheap Nature’. ‘Cheap Nature’ included cheap and readily available resources, cheap food and cheap energy. Moore identifies a pattern following every crisis of capitalism (p. 3):

‘….new technologies and new organisations of power and production emerged after great systemic crises, and resolved the older crises by putting nature to work in powerful new ways.’ (page 1. Our emphasis).

Moore (2015) suggested that many Marxist critiques of capitalism had stressed the exploitation of cheap (and quick) labour, and that the role of ‘Cheap Nature had been given insufficient attention in these ctitiques of capitalist organisation. He also pointed out that contemporary critiques of capitalism tended to view capitalism as starting with industrialisation in the 1800s in the UK (with a shift to manufacture). He argued, instead, that capitalist organisation of society, with a focus on accumulation began several centuries before this with the colonisation and appropriation of the South America’s in the 1450s. From our perspective today we accept that capitalism began much earlier than either of these dates: the word ‘Capital’ comes from the Latin for ‘head’, which is closely connected to the word ‘Cattle’ – Cattle was originally Catel from the Anglo-Norman, itself derived from Latin, Capitale: ‘Capital’ originated as a word to describe wealth based on the number of head of cattle a human had appropriated, and ‘Cattle’ at that time meant not only bovines, but all nonhumans that were moveable ‘livestock‘ (a speciesist term used right up to the Rupture).

In the early 21st century many people were waking up to the harm done to ecosystems by Capitalist modes of organisation, and some authors, including Moore (2015) recognised the ways in which capitalism depended on ‘putting Nature to work’. Several writers in the late 20th and early 21st C pointed out that life on earth was connected (Moore, 2015, Haraway, Braidotti, MOTH, 2024); these writers saw humans as part of the ecosystem and therefore part of ‘Nature’. Rivers, forests, land and sea were frequently mentioned as part of ‘Nature’. César Rodríguez-Garavito, (2024. MOTH – More Than Human Rights) wrote that: ‘human disconnection from nature is at the root of our individual and collective malaise’.

From our post-Rupture perspective, we perceive these writings about nature as lacking. The farmed nonhuman seems largely forgotten. The overwhelming contribution of the enforced work of the farmed and enslaved nonhuman in organising human society was rarely a focus for those focused on Capitalist damage to ecosystems pre Rupture – this is true too of those authors arguing for the ‘Rights of Nature’ (but not true for a growing group of writers who were identified with ‘Animal rights’). This seems to suggest a degree of anthropocentrism in these environmental concerns, even when authors writing about ecocide frequently themselves critiques anthropocentric views.

One chapter in MOTH ( 2024) stood out as an exception. Kymlicka (2024) pointed to a long tradition in environmental thought pre rupture of a divide between the ‘More than human rights’ and ‘Animal rights’ movements, which he put down to an all pervasive human supremacist ideology. He argued that change must be wrought in human attitudes toward humans, before they would change attitudes to nonhumans. He wrote (2024:75-76) that even though eco-writers valorised ‘wild animals’ and argued for their protection; domesticated animals were instrumentalist and consigned an ‘abject legal status’:

This implicit or explicit legitimation of the instrumentalization of domesticated animals can be found in a wide range of recent theorizing about “earth jurisprudence,” “the rights of nature,” or “wild law,” and this is increasingly noted as the central dividing line between MOTH theories and animal rights theories. I have argued elsewhere that there is no ethical or scientific justification for this double standard … this position is not only philosophically arbitrary but also counterproductive…Where and when did these ideologies of human supremacism and human entitlement arise? When did humans stop viewing relations with animals and nature as relations of kinship or reciprocity and start viewing animals and nature as resources and property?’ (Will Kymlicka, p. 75-76. MOTH)

The answer, Kymlicka provides, is that it was when humans started domesticating animals. At this point earlier relations of kinship and respect were replaced with ‘ideologies of use and extraction’. He went on to write that instrumentalization and commodification of domesticated animals was always the lynchpin of ideologies of human supremacism. Modern societies, cultures, and economies would continue to be defined and shaped by supremacist beliefs as long of this central ideology remained. This argument about supremacist beliefs is central to the biotechnological revolution and to biopower.

Human supremacism underpinned the human belief in the right to bioengineer the ‘farmed nonhuman’ in the interest of the human, but perhaps more obviously in the interests of Capitalism. In his 2015 book, Moore briefly considered biotechnology as the new technology to resolve the crisis of Cheap Nature (from our post-Rupture perspective we see AI as the new technology to resolve the crisis of Cheap Labour) . It seems that despite Moore’s understanding that new technologies had been found in the past to resolve systemic crises, the possibility of biotechnologies being adopted as the saviour of Capitalism in the early 21st century crisis was not taken sufficiently seriously. Moore argued that these technologies were not proving effective; using as example the development of genetically modified (GMO) ‘super’ crops. GMO crops had not increased yield. Although initially successful in producing bug-resistant and weed-resistant crops, ‘Nature’ had responded by producing ‘superweeds’ which impacted significantly on GMO crop yields.

In any case, from our perspective today, we see that the drivers of biocapitalism did not learn from these early GMO experimental failures, but pushed ahead with high hopes that biotechnologies and AI would prove effective in generating new accumulations and profits for them. ‘Biocapitalism’ along with AI was to be the new great revolution. This paper turns to biopower next to understand how power over life itself was a necessary pre-condition for biocapitalism, based on bioengineering, to flourish in the early 21st century.

Biopower

… the strategic coordination of power relations to extract a surplus of power from living beings (Lazzarato 2004). 

Foucault’s analyses of biopower offered useful insights and a critical perspective on emerging biocapitalism in late 20th/early 21st centuries. Foucault’s (2008, 138,) wrote of biopower as the power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”. Foucault’s analysis (1977, 2008b, 2009) was concerned with the subtle and diverse ways in which power functioned in society to impact all social interactions. His work  formed the basis of a body of empirical and theoretical scholarship that used, and modified this concept as an important tool for examining the complexities of power in contemporary society, in a variety of social spaces from colonial policies to slaughterhouses (Srinivasan, 2017). His main contribution was to theorize forms and mechanisms of power that were not obviously repressive, negative and harmful.

Foucault introduced the term ‘biopower’ in the first volume of History of Sexuality (2008b) where he described changes in mechanisms of state rule in 18th century Western Europe and developed an expanded understanding of the forms and functioning of power. Traditionally, power was associated with sovereignty – of a monarch, a political group, a class, a caste, a sex, maybe even a species – and therefore, with repression and dominion. This kind of sovereign power was focused on “deduction and death”, and founded on a “right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (Foucault 2008, 89, 136).

Foucault observed that until the end of the 16th century, state rule was largely based on the the monarch’s right to take the lives of subjects – or to let them live. The principal objective of rule was to protect the interests of the Sovereign. Such rule used mainly negative or deductive mechanisms of power such as rules, taxes, and punishments, and was often enacted by force. In this period, it was not uncommon to see public displays of violent punishment, especially directed at those who threatened the sovereign.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Foucault noted that texts on state rule indicate a shift in modes of rule. Instead of rule based on the threat of death and violence, this period saw a transition to non-repressive mechanisms of rule that were focused on regulating and fostering life. Foucault used the umbrella term ‘biopower’ – the “power over life” (2008b, 139) – to refer to these. From Foucault’s perspective, biopower is a positive form of power that is aimed at “generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than…impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them”(Foucault 2008b, 136). To Foucault, biopower does not replace sovereign power; but exists in tandem with sovereignty, and discipline in a triad of power that imbued social relations in the contemporary world.

Biopower, as theorized by Foucault, was exercised along two principal axes: an anatamopolitical axis that targeted individuals through mechanisms of discipline to make them well-functioning members of society; and a biopolitical axis that targeted the characteristics of populations and collectives in efforts to enhance overall welfare and security. These two axes came together as biopower which sought to regulate populations and reduce unpredictability in life processes in order to achieve a hypothetical optimal stability. Biopower was thus simultaneously individualising (through its disciplinary mechanisms) as well as totalising (through its biopolitical mechanisms).

Foucault further wrote that biopower was associated with pastoral goals and practices of care and flourishing which were aimed at managing life and life processes at the level of the population or some other kind of grouping. Biopolitical mechanisms tried to shape life for certain ends, and when life was not considered valuable or suitable, it was merely ‘let die’. The exercise of biopower involved decentralization (Gordon 1991). Biopower was not wielded by just one authority, but operated through multiple layers of society, at microscopic levels and through unexpected actors, including families, non-profit organisations, hospitals, private companies and the academia. This dispersion of power complicated the task of identifying individuals (or specific social groups) as sources or sites of power, or as heroes or villains.

Foucault developed these observations on biopower in the History of Sexuality lectures at the Collège de France (2009), and various interviews. While he didn’t use the exact term ‘biopower’ very often, his works on governmentality and pastoral power are recognized as building on and taking forward the conceptualisation of biopower and non-sovereign modalities of power more broadly (Dean 2010). In this extensive work, which was taken forward by scholars from a range of disciplines, four themes have been identified as central to the understanding of biopower: population, governmentality, the welfare-violence nexus, and subjectification (Srinivasan, 2017).

Population

Biopower was exercised in the name of the wellbeing of all, in the name of the “health, prosperity and happiness of the population” (Dean 2010, 27). Biopolitical interventions might work on and through individuals, but it was the population that was the main target. In the context of biopower, the population is not merely an collection of individuals; it is an entity in and of itself, which has meaning, value and significance beyond what can be attributed to the individuals that constitute it .  Biosocial collectivity has also been used by geographers to refer to groupings that include nonhuman life, whether nonhuman animals, or biodiversity as a whole (Holloway et al 2009; Srinivasan 2014).

Governmentality

In his work on governmentality and security, Foucault showed that in contrast to sovereign power mechanisms that lay down totalitarian laws or prohibitions and attempt to suppress or forbid undesirable activities, biopower worked alongside and made use of existing biological and socio-economic rhythms and patterns in the population that was the subject-object of power (Foucault 2009). Here, management was achieved by permitting certain levels of unwanted phenomena in a population but keeping them below what would adversely impact the population as a whole. It is this “ordering” of life forces (2008, 136) that Foucault referred to as governmentality. Governmentality enhanced the efficiency and subtlety of power by using the very subject-object of power and its rhythms as aids for its functioning.

The work of other scholars, such as Dean (2010), contributed to the elaboration of the meaning and scope of the idea of governmentality. Governmentality incorporated the belief that the regulation and management of the population and its various traits and processes “is not only necessary but also possible”(Dean 2010, 44). It was acknowledged that governmentality was seen in a range of social domains, whether colonialism, international development or environmentalism (Agrawal 2005; Li 2007). This literature explained that while government is a calculated, goal-directed activity, the norms and ends of regulation were taken for granted; the main concern of government was the how of regulation, which was understood as a matter for technical investigation rather than normative reflection. The governmentality literature suggested that any analysis of power must necessarily consider “how we govern…[and the] techniques and other means employed” in the process of government (Dean 2010, 18, 27).

Governmental processes were also enmeshed with the production of particular truths, norms, and knowledges which enabled power to be exercised without enforcement and threat. In particular, the production of statistics and the circumscription of the population to be intervened on was observed as being key to the exercise of governmental power (Agrawal 2005; Foucault 2009; Holloway et al. 2009;). Governmentality thus went alongside the emergence and deployment of ‘truths’- and ‘norms’- and the production of formal knowledge bodies which were indispensable for the efficient exercise of power (Gordon 1991). This attention to the specific technologies and rationalities of power was a particularly important and distinctive feature of the analytical toolkit offered by biopower.

Welfare and violence

Another vital characteristic of biopower was the entanglement of discourses and practices of harm and care, or as Gordon (1991, p.12) put it, in the exercise of biopower, “welfare is conjoined to exploitation.” Foucault explained that biopower’s focus on the good life, care and well-being did not mean that violence and killing were removed from the equation. What alters was the justification. In the context of state rule in 18th century Western Europe, Foucault observed that while the violent rule typical of sovereign power was validated in the name of the Sovereign, biopolitical technologies were explained as necessary for the well-being of the population, as on “behalf of the existence of everyone…in the name of life necessity” (2008, 136). In other words, the enmeshment of welfare and violence in biopower could be understood in terms of trade-offs between individuals and populations: biopower intervened harmfully on and governs individuals in the name of universal wellbeing. An example might be the harsh treatment of individuals who broke lockdown rules in many countries during the COVID pandemic (which changed categories from a high-consequence (ie high fatalities), to a low-consequence infectious disease on the UK government website 3 days before lockdown; and and enforced vaccination of caseworkers who lost jobs if they refused the vaccine.

In doing this, biopower treated individuals as not only expendable and of lesser importance but also as entities to be managed and intervened upon so that they contributed to collective development and wellbeing (Srinivasan 2014). This means that under biopolitical regimes, the ethical and political significance of individuals reduced; individuals instead become “the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population”(Foucault 2009, 42). In fact, biopower often functioned so that those who “resist the regulation of the population”, were excluded and subjected to techniques of repression such as “exile, death and punishment” (Foucault 2009, 44).

Subjectification

The notion of subjectification or self-governance was key to Foucauldian scholarship on biopolitical and governmental power. Subjectification underlied the functioning of biopolitical power, i.e., it was the motor of biopower. Subjectification referred to the process by which individuals internalized various truth discourses about individual and population/collective wellbeing, and self-governed, i.e., worked upon themselves, in accordance with these discourses. For instance, in History of Sexuality, Foucault described how norms on sexual behaviours worked so as to encourage a particular form of stable family life. These stable families in turn were necessary for the smooth functioning of society as a whole . Biopower therefore worked through the internalisation of norms, by inculcating subjectivities (or elements of subjectivities) rather than through the external imposition of rules that dictated dos and don’ts (Rabinow and Rose 2006).

The impacts of self-governance were not always positive for the individual, and could be detrimental to their wellbeing. However, subjectification, i.e., the internalisation of certain norms, had the effect that the outcomes and consequences of of self-governance for the individual were not explicitly evaluated. Subjectification thus enhances the efficiency of the operation of power by making acceptable and incontestable even negative impacts of self-governance, and by reducing the need for externally imposed interventions. Again this can be seen in individual compliance with lockdown rules, where the internalisation of norms led to not only individual compliance, but to communities ‘policing’ individuals within their community, so that state enforcement of rule breaking was far less necessary.

Whereas sovereign power was exercised through force and imposition, biopolitical power was exercised by means of norms and discourses of care and flourishing that make individuals self- governing subjects Therefore, techniques of biopower, being underpinned by subjectification, even if not strictly harmless in their impacts, were more subtle and less likely to invite resistance in comparison to techniques of sovereign power that depended upon external force and domination.

While Foucault noticed that governments seemed interested in making lives flourish, he also argued that biopolitical rationality shaped the way that violence was orchestrated: throughout the 20th century many governments used violence and coercion as a tool to secure the lives of particular populations. Foucault pointed out this was seen most clearly in the logic of state racism where one population would seek to target and potentially annihilate a minority population in the name of betterment of another population. His primary example was the Holocaust. Other writers argued that the theory of biopolitics didn’t do well in examining the history of colonisation (Morgensen, 2011), including racism, oppression and exclusionary violence (Agamben 1998) . Some scholars pointed out that Foucault’s paid little attention to describing the relationship of gender (King, 2004) or disability to biopolitics.

Biopolitics and the Nonhuman or More-than-human

The early 21st century saw the increasingly application of the biopolitical schema for more-than-human inquiry; i.e., the examination of human-environment and human-nonhuman relations. This literature included but was not limited to: Agamben, The Open; Boggs, Animalia Americana; Calarco, Zoographies; Chen, Animacies; Chrulew, “Animals in Biopolitical Theory”; Clark, “Ecological Biopower”; LaCapra, “History and its Limits”; Lemm, “Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy”; Pandian, “Pastoral Power in the Postcolony”; Shukin, “Animal Capital”; Smith, “Against Ecological Sovereignty”; Srinivasan, “The Biopolitics of Animal Welfare and Being”; Taylor, “Foucault and Critical Animal Studies”; Twine, “Animals as Biotechnology; Wadiwel “Cows and Sovereignty” and ” Biopolitics”; Wolfe, “Before the Law”.

This literature started with a biopolitical framework to analyse the ambiguities of efforts to foster and regulate both human and nonhuman life (Agrawal 2005; Demeritt 2001), and demonstrated its relevance to a variety of more-than-human domains, from spaces of care such as animal welfare (Srinivasan 2013) and biodiversity conservation (Srinivasan 2014; Chrulew 2011) to spaces of exploitation such as livestock agriculture (Holloway et al 2009). In much of this literature, the intertwining of harm and care in human interactions with nonhuman life-forms appeared as a central issue for critical reflection.

While this body of work offered crucial insights regarding the play of biopower in human-animal/environment interactions, Wadiwel (2015) and others raised questions about the limits of the biopolitical framework for understanding and analysing more-than- human spaces. This was particularly with respect to the processes of normalization, subject-formation and self-regulation that were understood as driving biopower in intra- human relations, but were less plausible in human-nonhuman relations (Demeritt 2001;). In addressing this problem, geographers put forward and elaborated the concepts of relational (Holloway et al 2009) and agential subjectification (Srinivasan 2013; 2014), wherein subjectification was seen in those humans who act on, or on behalf of, animals. Wadiwel argued that Biopolitical theory did not do so well in relation to thinking about the nonhuman in industrial agriculture. He pointed out that it’s hard to ignore the ways that a biopolitical rationality shaped treatment of the nonhuman in the 20th century. Wadiwel wrote that the factory farm involved the most ruthless controls over nutrition (what the nonhuman could eat), movement (often constraining in tiny spaces), relationality with other nonhumans, lighting, sexuality, reproduction – in fact control over all of these was essential in ‘animal’ agriculture to make a profit. These controls of the nonhuman life had of course existed long before agriculture on an industrial scale, but they intensified exponentially. When bioengineering techniques were also introduced control expanded to involve human interventions in the biological genomic sequencing of nonhumans – to interfere in what constituted life itself.

In ‘The war against animals’ Wadiwel (2015) argued that property in ‘animals’ represented a biopolitical conquest that aimed to secure animals as the ‘spoils of war’. He argued that mainstay relationships with billions of animals were essentially hostile – founded on nothing else but violence.Foucault’s (2008:138) remark that the logic of biopolitics was ‘the capacity to foster life and disallow it to the point of death’ led Wadiwel to ask: ‘isn ‘t this precisely what we do to animals in the 20th century? Didn’t we foster their lives up until the point at which they were no longer useful to us, and then killed them for our own benefit, for our own tastes and desires, for our own profits?’ Wadiwel nevertheless argued that, despite some shortcomings, Foucault’s focus on biopolitic remained a useful tool for understanding contemporary power relations between humans and nonhumans. (Wadiwel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5SviO8aVZ8)

Biopolitical theory, particularly as developed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, offered insights into the treatment of farmed animals, highlighting the ways in which power operated to control and exploit their lives. By examining the ways in which farmed animals were managed, disciplined, and killed, biopolitical theory revealed how they were reduced to mere commodities, their bodies subjected to intense surveillance, and their lives governed by regimes of efficiency, productivity, and profit. This perspective also drew attention to the zones of exception, such as factory farms and slaughterhouses, where farmed animals were stripped of rights and protections, and instead treated as bare life (Agamben, 1998), devoid of dignity, welfare, or consideration. By illuminating these dynamics, biopolitical theory encouraged us to rethink our relationship with farmed animals, to challenge the dominant logics of exploitation and control, and to imagine alternative, just, and compassionate forms of coexistence.

Bioengineering

Foucault contended that contemporary politics was inseparable from biology (Peters & Besley, 2008). The argument was not that biocapital constituted a new conception of the natural body, but that the growing biotech sector existed at a crucial nexus between government, power and ethics whereby biopolitical strategies, which led to the formation of the biotech industry, were leading to new “states of domination.” (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010).

Over 100 years ago, in 1953, when the structure of DNA was ‘discovered’ by James D. Watson and Francis Crick, humans began to manipulate their genetic inheritance, and the rest of biological life, in a self-conscious fashion. The deciphering of DNA unleashed a multitude of technologies that transformed organisms through manipulation of their cellular and subcellular structures, using techniques such as gene splicing, cell fusion, and cell culturing.

The biotech industry emerged in the 1970s based largely on a new recombinant DNA technique creating new therapies and vaccines. The industry included fields of nonhuman, agricultural, environmental, industrial biotech as well as DNA fingerprinting. Biotechnologies referred to the use of cellular and biomolecular processes to make products for the market and constituted a collection of technologies that exploited DNA as the basic cellular unit that unites the living world at all levels and provides a foundation for biology.

Synbio

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 by Craig Venter, who founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1992 which became part of the Craig Venter Institute (http://www.jcvi.org/) in 2006. Venter was the first scientist to sequence the human genome in 2001, and he published the first complete (six-billion-letter) genome of an individual in 2007 (his own). In May 2010, Craig Venter’s company Synthetic Genomics announced its creation of the world’s first organism with a completely synthetic genome. 

 Key to the foundation of biocapitalism, Dawson (2015) argued, was the process through which, over the second half of the twentieth century, communication was transformed cybernetically into information, and information was subsequently reduced electronically to digital bytes. In tandem with this process, biological life was parsed as a molecular code in the form of DNA’s strings of four basic nucleotides: cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T). Transformed into such a biological code, bios can potentially be circulated seamlessly as information, as commodity, and as material artifact. SynBio represents the fusion of these two technological transformations, with contemporary computer scientists increasingly talking about “DNA-based computation” and synthetic biologists speaking of “life circuit boards.” 

If SynBio inspires starry-eyed visions of immortality among advocates of Transhumanism, it simultaneously conjures dollar signs in the eyes of venture capitalists (Dawson, 2015).

Synthetic Biology allowed scientists to engage in novel and extreme forms of genetic engineering that departed from previous forms of modification: rather than recombining existing sequences of DNA from one species to another as in “traditional” genetic engineering, Synbio was capable of synthesizing wholly new genomes using complex algorithms involving millions of variants. Scientists could then write an entirely new genetic code on a computer, print it out using a 3D laser printer, and insert it into living organisms – or even create brand new forms of life. 

Proponents of SynBio such as the biochemist, Venter, promise to turn cells into living machines, re-engineering their DNA so that they pumped out whatever chemicals humans desired.  SynBio’s proponents promised new products, from algae that synthesized petroleum-like chemicals to the revival of extinct species like the wooly mammoth. Venter’s institute described its research as focusing on human genomic medicine, infectious disease, plant, microbial and environmental genomics, synthetic biology and biological energy, bioinformatics, and software engineering (Peters and Venkatesen , 2010). 

In the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture given on the BBC in December 2007 Venter spoke of ‘A DNA-driven World’ suggesting that the future of society depended upon an understanding of biology (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010). He went on to argue the future of life depended not only on human ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which was not forged by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence. In a 2008 TED video, Venter explained:

‘We are starting at a new point: we’ve been digitizing biology, and now we’re trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology, with designing and synthesizing life. .. Now we’re trying to ask, can we regenerate life, or can we create new life, out of this digital universe? http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge%20_of_creating_synthetic_life.htmlIn%20this%20video

In this talk, Venter described the processes of digitising life and outlined the benefits in terms of new energy sources and instant vaccines with the eventual prospect of ‘speeding up evolution’ with synthetic bacteria. 

Researchers such as molecular engineer Church (2012) were also enthusiastic about the dawning new order, saying, “Synthetic genomics has the potential to recapitulate the course of natural genomic evolution, with the difference that the course of synthetic genomics will be under our own conscious deliberation and control instead of being directed by blind and opportunistic processes of natural selection.” (quoted in Dawson, 2015).

In other words, SynBio gave humans unprecedented, ”God-like”, control over the genetic future, effectively ending evolution as it had previously been understood, and consolidating pre-existing supremacist human ideologies discussed at the start of this paper .

Other scientists expressed reservations, including Richard LeWontin (2000), Stephen Jay Gould (1996), and yet others adopted a rejectionist stance (e.g., Vandana Shiva, 1989). Possible benefits were aimed at human life. For more than human life and farmed nonhumans, the consequences were negative or deadly. Dawson (2015) argued that turning living organisms into biological machines and generating entirely unprecedented forms of life, raised fundamental ethical and political questions that should not be left to scientists and corporate executives to address, particularly since many scientists were also CEOs . Although cultural critics were. surprisingly mute in discussions of emerging biotechnologies (Dawson, 2015), artists and writers broached key questions about the SynBio revolution. Among these questions were the following: what ethical obligations does the creation of synthetic organisms entail? Would SynBio foster human liberation, as its boosters proclaim, or entrench existing forms of inequality and imperialism? Were there processes or institutions through which a global citizenry can challenge novel forms of biopower? (Dawson, 2015). We of course now know the answers to these questions.

Biocapitalism

While biopolitics was necessary for the emergence of biocapitalism, a true biocapitalist order emerged only in the second half of the 20th century. Helmreich (2008), argued that biocapital and biocapitalism, extended Foucault’s notion of ‘biopower’ to include the governance ‘no longer only of individuals and populations – the twin poles of Foucault’s biopower – but also cells, molecules, genomes, and genes. In the age of biotechnology, when biological materials, particularly stem cells and genomes, were increasingly inserted into projects of productmaking and profit-seeking, the world was witnessing the rise of a novel kind of capital: ‘biocapital’. Neoliberal economic growth and neoliberal governmentality served as lynchpins for biotech expansion. Penetration of the Biotech sector into society served in turn to promote the interests of free enterprise. The promise of biocapital related to neoliberalism in terms of governmentality of the state and governance of the self. (The free market was presumed to ensure individual freedoms. However, Foucault critiqued this neoliberal notion of freedom. Freedom, Foucault said, was constituted as “the power to deprive others”).

In 2015 Dawson wrote that the US government had spent $3.8 billion on the Human Genome Project, which in turn added $796 billion to the US economy, $244 billion of which was personal income. He suggested that the (then) imminent SynBio revolution promised to dwarf these substantial sums. The SynBio industry was already booming at the time of Dawson’s writing, with a projected market value of $11 billion in 2016 (Dawson, 2015).

We are, it seems, on the cusp of a fresh round of accumulation, in which molecular biology, venture capital, and neoliberal governance combine not simply to commodify life itself but to drive accumulation into the hitherto unimaginable realm of genetically novel life forms. It is this new mode of accumulation that I term biocapitalism. (Dawson, 2015)

Dawson (2015) defined biocapitalism as a regime of accumulation that was based on a shift from the production of money by means of the commodity  to the production of money by means of the commodification of bios (life).

The biotech sector was a rapidly-expanding sector in the early 21st century: a complex made up of biotech companies working on everything from therapeutic stem cells to DNA paternity testing, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of machinery, equipment, reagents, and much more (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010). The advent of patent laws to encourage biotech intellectual property, the risky financial investment into biotech companies in hopes of profit and productivity and private funding into biotech research, created the new scientist-entrepreneur, and culminated in the enormity of biocapital. According to Rose (2007), contemporary molecular bio-medicine required commitment of funds on a large scale over many years before achieving a return: the purchase of expensive equipment, the maintenance of well staffed laboratories, a multiplication of clinical trials, financial commitments to measures required to meet regulatory hurdles. Increasingly such investment came from venture capital provided by private corporations who raised funds on the stock market. Hence it was subject to all the exigencies of capitalizations, such as the obligations of profit, and the demands of shareholder value. The laboratory and factory were intrinsically interlinked (Rose, 2007: 17–18).The burgeoning genomics industry served as one example. Genomics – the pursuit of unraveling the mysteries of the DNA double- helix, the fundamental blueprint of life – transformed 21st century medical care, much as the automobile industry changed transportation. With Silicon Valley startups Complete Genomics and Pacific Biosciences at the forefront, the genomics industry was intent on racing toward a new era of delivering truly personalized medicine. PacBio received $68 million in new funding in the first decade of the 21st C. , including a strategic investment from the agricultural giant Monsanto, underscoring genomics’ potential impact on food production, bio-fuels and biodiversity (Harris 2009). The biotech industry in the USA was regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA). As of Dec. 31, 2006, there were 1,452 biotechnology companies in the United States, of which 336 were publicly held. Market capitalization, the total value of publicly traded biotech companies (U.S.) at market prices, was $360 billion as of late April 2008 (based on stocks tracked by Bio- World). Biotechnology was one of the most research-intensive industries in the world. U.S. publicly traded biotech companies spent $27.1 billion on research and development in 2006. In 1982, recombinant human insulin became the first biotech therapy to earn FDA approval. The product was developed by Genentech and Eli Lilly and Co. 

Technological revolutions were necessary but not sufficient to explain the emergence of biocapitalism. A whole array of new legal, institutional, social and cultural mechanisms and alignments were necessary in order to facilitate this new regime of accumulation. As Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2012) explained in ”Lively Capital’, the emergence of the biotech industry was a product of a confluence of developments in the 1970s and ‘80s. Some of the most important of these include: the development of recombinant DNA techniques by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in 1973, which allowed the life sciences to become technological; the 1980 US Supreme Court ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty that established patent rights on a genetically engineered microorganism; the Bayh-Dole Act, also of 1980, which promoted the transfer of technology between academia and industry, leading to the commercialization of basic scientific research; and, finally, the infusion of significant sums of capital from the US federal government’s National Institutes of Health and from venture capitalists.  Equally key to the corporatisation of the life sciences was the emergence of the entrepreneurial university and the attraction of federal research funding and venture capital to biotechnology.

Corporate partnering was critical to biotech success. According to BioWorld, in 2007 biotechnology companies struck 417 new partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and 473 deals with fellow biotech companies; attracted more than $24.8 billion in financing and raised more than $100 billion in the five-year span of 2003-2007. Most biotechnology companies were fairly young companies developing their first products and depended on investor capital for survival. The biosciences – including all life- sciences activities – employed 1.3 million people in the United States in 2006 and generated an additional 7.5 million related jobs. The average annual wage of U.S. bioscience workers was $71,000 in 2006, more than $29,000 greater than the average private-sector annual wage. U.S. publicly traded biotech companies alone spent $27.1 billion on research and development in 2006 (Growing the Nation’s Biotech Sector: State Bioscience Initiatives, 2006). The estimated figure for biotech industry globally was in the double digit trillions. However, this description did not adequately portray a vision of the life science industry borne out by an analysis of the bioeconomy. In fact, it was the promissory quality of biotech that was reflexively extending the industry rather than real gains in profit or productivity. The work of Sundar Rajan and Cooper (2008) highlights how this quality of promise gave life to the industry initially by allowing the capitalization on financial promise, which then became the backbone of its growth. The flight into financialization was the speculative response to crisis – a faith driven attempt to relaunch the accumulation of surplus value at a higher level of returns, in the hope that production would at some point follow. That is the prophetic, promissory moment of capitalist restructuring, the kind of utopia that was celebrated in neoliberal theories of growth. The creation of surplus population, of a life not worth the costs of its own reproduction, was strictly contemporaneous with the capitalist promise of more abundant life (Cooper, 2008: 60–61). 

Biocapitalism’s implications for questions of social justice and environmental sustainability were, Dawson (2015) argued, some of the gravest faced by society, yet there had been virtually no regulation of the industry and little adequate assessment of the potential risks associated with synthetic organisms. Nor were there plans for significant governance of the industry going forward in the USA. President Obama’s 2012 Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues concluded, in fact, that the SynBio industry should regulate itself. Paralleling and exacerbating these failures of oversight, there had been shockingly little engagement with biocapitalism on the part of cultural studies critics (Dawson, 2015).

It was just as showing to note, that the colossal growth of biotech over the last decade of the 20th c and the first decade of the 21st century was facilitated by and dependent upon the consolidation of US debt imperialism. In her book Life as Surplus,  Cooper (2008) linked capital’s expansion into a novel space of production – molecular biology – with a new regime of accumulation based on the financial liberalization and monetarist policies of the Reagan administration that inaugurated the neoliberal era. During this period, US Treasury’s interest rate policies funneled global financial flows into the dollar and US markets, allowing the US to run unlimited balance-of-payments deficits. According to Cooper, the debtor nation status of United States was unequivocally related to this illusion of growth and output in the biotech sector. “In this way capital’s dream of promissory self-regeneration finds its counterpart in a form of directly embodied debt peonage” (Cooper, 150). Cooper’s analysis made links between Reagan-era modifications in intellectual property laws, the deregulation of banking and financial markets, and the growth of the biotechnology sector. Equally significant was Cooper’s insistence that this new regime of accumulation was characterized by inextricable links between the economic and the ecological. As Cooper put it:

The debt form is also deeply materialist. It seeks to materialize its promise in the production of matter, forces, things. In the long run what it wants to do is return to the earth, recapturing the reproduction of life itself within the promissory accumulation of the debt form, so that the renewal of debt coincides with the regeneration of life on earth – and beyond. It dreams of reproducing the self-valorization of debt in the form of biological autopoesis.”Cooper, 2008

This autopoesis, or self-authoring drive, Cooper suggested, was evident in the new forms of biotechnology developed after the discovery of recombinant DNA technology (RDT). As described above, Biocapitalist production made use of horizontal gene transfer, and, with the recent development of Synthetic Biology, of the creation of wholly novel gene sequences. SynBio indeed seemed to confirm the contention of complexity theorists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers that, while industrial production depends on the finite material reserves available on Earth, contemporary debt production was infinitely self-generating (Dawson, 2015).

These theories of biological self-creation (autopoesis) and increasing complexity became a convenient justification for neoliberal policies of deregulation among economists influenced by developments in molecular biology. Biologists like Stuart Kauffman and his protégés at the Santa Fe Institute drew parallels between the relentless, if crisis-ridden, growth of biological complexity that characterizes evolutionary history and neoliberal theories of self-regulating economic growth. If the capitalist economy could be seen as a complex evolving system, then Santa Fe theorists, embellishing on the work of Joseph Schumpeter, argued that periodic catastrophic economic crises were an inherent part of the system’s tendency towards “creative destruction,” bouts of cataclysm leading towards heightened complexity. Yet if for Schumpeter the periodic crises that punctuate capitalism were a normal part of the business cycle, for Marx and Engels, capitalism’s “epidemics of overproduction” took an enormous toll, plunging bourgeois society back into a “state of momentary barbarism” as a result of the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces.” According to Marx and Engels, during these period bouts of crisis, “it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence.” (Dawson, 2015). While the state set the basic conditions for contemporary accumulation at that time, as we have seen it left regulation almost entirely up to biocapitalist corporations. The result was what medical anthropologists like Ann Anagnost, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Kalinda Vora describe as a transfer of corporeal surplus from global South to North, through organ markets, surrogate reproduction clinics, and the outsourcing of clinical trials to “bioavailable” subject populations in the global South (Dawson, 2015).

Examples of bioengineering in nonhumans

Pig-to-human xenotransplantation was developed from 1992, when a small biotech company in England announced the “creation” of Astrid, the world’s first transgenic pig. Early efforts at transplantation had , setbacks, most of them related to immunological problems, that continually pushed the promised era of “organ farms” into the future. The advent of Synthetic Biology gave xeno a new lease of life. Xeno pigs were transgenic creations, genetically engineered either so that their progeny lacked particular proteins that would generate a human immunological response or to ensure that future generations incorporated enough human genetic material that their organs were read as human when implanted in people. Such bio-fungibility truly troubled the borders between the animal and human, and raised issues of ethical recognition and reciprocity.

Sharp (date) explained in her overview of experimental xenotransplantation, that primates were the original species of choice for organ transplants. Simians were preferred for such work because of their perceived physical similarity and evolutionary proximity to humans. They were, in other words, more easy to image as vectors of interspecies hybridity and exchange. Yet it was ironically precisely such perceived kinship that eventually rendered them unfit for xeno work. Despite the fact that no simian organ transfer was ever successful precisely as a result of their immunological difference from humans, growing concern about primates’ similarity to human beings, about their rights among ethicists and activists as well as about the possibility of pathogen transfer given simians’ genetic similarity to humans, led to the abandonment of experiments with simian-to-human xenotransplantation. Pigs too their place as xenosubjects, favored for their status as farm rather than lab animals, for their prolific litters, and, perhaps most significantly, for the lack of public ethical concern about them.

Nonhuman animals and biotechnologies: who benefits?

To disrupt such forms of human-animal dichotomy is to challenge some of the fundamental cultural logics of modernity and empire, which render other beings killable, or at least exploitable, without the need for ethical reflection.This killing is facilitated, Derrida notes, by systematic forms of disavowal by human beings. Such disavowal suggests that it may be quite possible for people to have pig organs implanted in them without feeling any kinship or ethical responsibility for transgenic pigs themselves. Critical scholars must not repeat this act of disavowal by ignoring biopolitical power relations in their zeal to elaborate multispecies entanglement.Dawson, 2015

The last part of the paragraph above relates to Dawson’s suggestion that some critical scholars (Haraway is mentioned) appear to have a romanticised view of human-non-human animal entanglement – and appear not to question whether non-human animals, following their long experience of humans, would want any entanglement with them at all.

Dawson notes a romanticism in some talks of ‘entanglement between speicies in posthumansist writings e.g. Donna Haraway (2007):

‘Yet if the present moment is defined by what Donna Haraway calls “choreographic ontologies” that entangle animals, plants, machines, and humans, I think it’s important to note that these entanglements are not necessarily antithetical to the forms of representational and indeed physical violence noted by Derrida. ‘

The tradition of differentiation that Derrida tracked, extending backward to such philosophers as Heidegger and Descartes, was animated by an ontological and linguistic violence that reduces what he called “the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living” to a singular Other: the animal. Such efforts to demarcate the human had been central to a range of historical atrocities, from the legal, medical, political, and economic efforts to differentiate species that characterized slavery and colonialism to contemporary manifestations of racial and species hierarchy in industrial slaughterhouses in the rural US. To disrupt such forms of human-animal dichotomy was to challenge some of the fundamental cultural logics of modernity and empire, which rendered other beings killable, or at least exploitable, without the need for ethical reflection. (Dawson, 2015)

Dawson (2015) argued that turning living organisms into biological machines and generating entirely unprecedented forms of life, raised fundamental ethical questions.

In addition to cultivating a critical ethical sensitivity to the transgenic other, Dawson (2915) argued that we also needed to return to Marx’s foundational question: ‘who benefits, when species meet?’ While it may be true that contemporary genomics is kindling new forms of lively co- production, which in turn demand new forms of recognition and empathy, Dawson writes that we need to see such changes in relation to the history of capital’s appropriation of bios. Environmental historians have long been aware of the entanglement of various species. Alfred Crosby’s (1972) seminal The Columbian Exchange, for example, tracks the interwoven movements of humans, mammals – pigs, in particular -, and microbes during the age of European colonial expansion into the Americas 500 years ago. But Crosby’s work is notable precisely for his insertion of these multispecies histories into a broader political ecology of imperialism. We should not, Dawson states, ‘lose sight of the iron laws of today’s biocapitalist economy and the global inequalities that it helps to cement in our efforts to survey and trouble fixed taxonomies of plant/animal/human.’

Eben Kirksey (2014) and his collaborators in their volume The Multispecies Salon, wrote that “bioartists [such as Patricia Piccinini] offered  conceptual, technical, and ethical resources for thinking through our obligations to the emergent forms of life in the age of biotechnology. However, bioethics itself did little to challenge the belief that technology offered a solution to all the problems that confronted individuals in the early 21st c, with little thought given to questions of the common good, whether that collectivity was defined in terms of other human beings, future populations, or hybrid biobeings such as the transgenic pigs in Patricia Piccinini and Margaret Atwood’s fiction.

Dualism was a Western,,historical method of constructing difference and stabilizing identity. More specifically, dualism was a way of ‘construing difference in terms of the logic of hierarchy’ (Plumwood, 1992, p12) and conferring power in all modes of political struggle. Different dualisms formed an ‘interlocking structure’ (Plumwood, 1993, p43) that reinforced a notion of human exceptionalism from ‘nature’. Some of these key dualisms were oppositions between culture and nature, mind and body, human and animal, male and female, social and biological, and reason and emotion.  Dualisms were both externally and internally relational in that they narrate reiterations on a theme reinforcing particular shared sets of ontological and normative assumptions between each other, and internally to ascribe sharply demarcated essences (kier, 2011). Evidence for their generative power could be seen in reference to the traditional sociological nexus of concern over class, race and gender relations. 

Within this nexus, non human ainimals were invisible in sociology and, specifically, environmental sociology (Tovey, 2003). Tovey’s critique was especially directed at the invisibility of domesticated farmed animals in sociological work.

In Conclusion

Meeting in autumn 2014, delegates from 194 countries to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) voted to regulate synthetic biology. The decision came after ten days of tense negotiations between developing countries and a small group of wealthy nations with emerging SynBio industries. The United States was one of only three countries refusing to sign the treaty. During the negotiations, nations from the global South expressed strong concerns that SynBio products intended to replace agricultural commodities could devastate their economies and degrade biodiversity.

They also raised worries about biohazards resulting from SynBio. The CBD decision called for the establishment of an expert group which would identify whether existing governance mechanisms were adequate. In addition, the decision urged member countries to follow a precautionary approach to SynBio, to set up systems to regulate the environmental release of any SynBio organisms or products, and to support developing countries’ efforts to enhance their capacity to assess SynBio. The decision made it clear that SynBio threatens to further entrench the already yawning divide between developed and underdeveloped nations.

In the UK, popular discussions of SynBio were woefully uninformed of these dimensions of technoscience and imperialism. Indeed, as Dawson (2915) notes, cultural studies has yet to engage substantially with synthetic biology and the new biocapitalist regime of accumulation of which it was a linchpin. Public intellectuals did not weigh in critically concerning biocapitalism. Dawson argued that we lived in a historical watershed, a transitional period during which many of the unrealized dreams and nightmares of biocapitalism were on the cusp of realization. It was a key moment in the struggle to stake claims of social and environmental justice in relation to this emerging regime of accumulation. Indeed, Dawson believed that the nascent campaign to regulate SynBio should be seen as an essential component of the climate justice movement. Dawson suggested that artists could contribute to this struggle by using speculative figuration and fiction to foreground some of the grave ethical and political crises that biocapitalism was unleashing on a largely unsuspecting public. Dawson was one of only a few writers highlights the urgency of these claims. Too little and, as we know now, far too late.

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1. Kier claims that everybody is transsex. Kier further clarifies that his use of this term is not associated with human identity and economies of desire and consumption surrounding identity. He suggests that identity should be radically reconciled in ways that de-center the human. …Transgender is mostly used to describe individuals who do not fit neatly into normative notions of human re/production in which the category of sex has an imagined clear, distinctive, and essential male and female. The prefix trans – meaning to cross, go beyond, and to change – when combined with gender, means to go beyond, to change and to cross the anthropocentric category of socially constructed gender… Transgender as a category is just as much about queering the human as it is about queering sex and gender. Because of the human-centered paradox of the category of transgender, I prefer the term transsex…Both transgender and identity, as concepts in queer and feminist thought, are highly tied to classificatory knowledge infrastructures that favor cultural categories. Although the cultural is crucial, it is also human-centered and largely assumes the only way to understand the concepts of trans and identity is through the socio-cultural lens…The major classificatory infrastructures – sex/gender/sexuality, the human/animal, and nature/culture – cannot stand alone. They are all implicated through, within, and among each other. Both “transgender” fish and re/productively managed human populations weave in, out and amongst all these categories. “Transgender fish” are transgender only because we signify them as such culturally, and this signification disrupts clear distinctions and an imagined knowledge progression of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality. Their re/productive anomalies or adaptations within a vast glocal ecology are simplistically absorbed into the category of transgender when the categories of animal, “Nature,” human and culture should logically also be at play. We simply signify them culturally as transgende..while knowledge infrastructures are certainly made possible through social relations and social constructions, the social construction paradigm is inherently anthropocentric…anthropocentric, socially constructed, identity-rights-based categories of sex/gender/sexuality into a re/productive orientation that can account for multiple interrelations, interdependencies, and contingencies of belonging, with multiple beings, species, things, and entities, to make way for a re-imagination of identity..meaning is not just dependent upon the classificatory infrastructure of human/animal, but also sex/gender/sexuality, nature/culture and several other categories (race, species, ability, class, etc.) which are implicated amongst, within, and in contradiction to one another. The point in interrogating these classificatory infrastructures, in order to de-center the human, is not to put animals or other things on a pedestal or to include them, but to begin to map our interdependencies in larger systems of relational re/productions. ..The classificatory infrastructure of nature/culture is perhaps the broadest, most universal knowledge infrastructure, engrossing several other major classificatory infrastructures such as sex(nature)/gender(culture), and human(culture)/ animal(nature)..Kier’s of the term transsex seeks to point to the interdependent earthly needs of multiple species and things, and attempts to queer human-centered notions of economy. Perhaps the emerging bioeconomy, information economy, and service economies are heavily saturated and centered upon the human, but these economies would not be possible without the raw materials, resources, tools, energy, and labor of multiple species and things. Transsex intentionally queers economy, in order to illustrate that economies extend far and wide beyond capital and the human. The classificatory infrastructure of nature/culture is perhaps the broadest, most universal knowledge infrastructure, engrossing several other major classificatory infrastructures such as sex(nature)/gender(culture), and human(culture)/ animal(nature).

for writing on art and bioengineering see: Speculative Life: Art, Synthetic Biology and Blueprints for the Unknown

Speculative Life:
Art, Synthetic
Biology and Blueprints for the Unknown

Jennifer Johung