Essay: Biocapitalism

This essay examines biocapitalism, and bio politics in some detail. I start by defining biotechnologies, and later explore the particular role that many species of non-human animals have been allocated within these. The rationale for writing this, while a student on an MA Fine Art, is that I propose to focus on these issues in my next installation, and need to understand more about biotechnologies, their use of non-human animals, and how biocapitalism extracts profit from the commodification of life.

Biotechnologies, and Synbio

Since the “discovery” of the structure of DNA in 1953, by James D. Watson and Francis Crick, humans began to understand and to manipulate our genetic inheritance, and the rest of biological life, in a self-conscious fashion. The deciphering of DNA unleashed a multitude of technologies that transform organisms through manipulation of their cellular and subcellular structures, using techniques such as gene splicing, cell fusion, and cell culturing.

Biotechnologies refer to the use of cellular and biomolecular processes to make products for the market and constitutes a collection of technologies that exploit DNA as the basic cellular unit that unites the living world at all levels and provides a foundation for biology. The biotech industry emerged in the 1970s based largely on a new recombinant DNA technique creating hundreds of new therapies and vaccines, with many more in drug trials. The industry includes fields of animal, agricultural, environmental, industrial biotech as well as DNA fingerprinting

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 by Craig Venter, who founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1992 which is now part of the Craig Venter Institute (http://www.jcvi.org/) established in 2006 as a not- for-profit research organization. Venter is 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.

Synthetic Biology allows scientists to engage in novel and extreme forms of genetic engineering that depart from previous forms of modification: rather than recombining existing sequences of DNA from one species to another as in “traditional” genetic engineering, Synbio is capable of synthesizing wholly new genomes using complex algorithms involving millions of variants. Scientists can now 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 pump out whatever chemicals we desire. SynBio’s proponents promise new products, from algae that synthesize petroleum-like chemicals to the revival of extinct species like the wooly mammoth. Venter’s institute describes 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 our society depended upon an understanding of biology (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010). He went on to argue the future of life depends not only on our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence. In a 2008 TED video, Venter explains:

‘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. So, we’ve always been trying to ask big questions. “What is life?” is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. 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 his talk, Venter describes the processes of digitising life and true design software, and outlines 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) are also clear about the scope of these emerging technologies. In his book Regenesis, Church is 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 gives humanity unprecedented, ”God-like”, control over the genetic future, effectively ending evolution as we understood it.

Other scientists have expressed reservations, including Richard LeWontin (2000), Stephen Jay Gould (1996), and yet others have adopted a rejectionist stance (e.g., Vandana Shiva, 1989). It seems to me that any possible benefits are aimed solely at human life, and that for other life, particularly other animals, and specifically farmed animals , the consequences are all negative or deadly. Dawson (2015) argues that turning living organisms into biological machines and generating entirely unprecedented forms of life, raises fundamental ethical and political questions that should not be left to scientists and corporate executives to address, particularly since many scientists are now also CEOs . Although cultural critics have been surprisingly mute in discussions of emerging biotechnologies (Dawson, 2015), artists and writers have broached key questions about the SynBio revolution. Among these questions are the following: what ethical obligations does the creation of synthetic organisms entail? Will SynBio foster human liberation, as its boosters proclaim, or entrench existing forms of inequality and imperialism? Are there processes or institutions through which a global citizenry can challenge novel forms of biopower? (Dawson, 2015).

The new Biology and evolution

Woese (2004), an expert in the field of microbial taxonomy, argues that the old molecular biology has run its course and that the new biology in a reciprocal relationship with physics, can become a fundamental science that defines the nature of reality and teaches how to live in harmony with the rest of the living world. Woese (2004) argues for the displacement of a reductionistic molecular biology which conceptually cannot recognize or account for biocomplexity and he searches for a new synthetic vision that is holistic and no longer looks at the organism as a ‘molecular machine’.

The new “nonlinear,” emergent biology is concerned with understanding evolution and the nature of biological form as the primary, defining goals of a new biology. Writing with Nigel Goldenfield in the journal Nature (Goldenfield & Woese, 2007), Woese argues that just as ‘satellite-based astronomy has … overthrown our most cherished ideas of cosmology, especially those relating to the size, dynamics and composition of the Universe’ so too the convergence of fresh theoretical ideas in evolution and the coming avalanche of genomic data will profoundly alter our understanding of the biosphere – and is likely to lead to revision of concepts such as species, organism and evolution.’ Their argument is that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) indicates that ‘microbial behavior must be understood as predominantly cooperative’ rather than microbes seen as organisms characterized by individual or discrete genomic properties. (I understand the importance of cooperative microbial behaviour to also underpin the work of evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis, who was so inluential to the writing of Donna Haraway).

Other scientists like Dyson (2007), theoretical physicist, mathematician and professor emeritus at Princeton University, have remarked that the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Already ‘Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries’ and ‘Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.’ In ‘Our Biotech Future’ written for the New York Review of Books Dyson (2007) claims that the Darwinian paradigm is over because we have moved into a cultural era of new interdependence; and an open source exchange model of innovation that speeds up evolution and puts it directly under the control of human beings. After three billion years, the Darwinian evolutionary interlude, based on competition between species, is argued to be over . Likewise, Peters and Venkatesen (2010) argue that Darwinian evolutionary was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer : biological and cultural. Since Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance (Peters and Venkatesen 2010). According to the writers, cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticate the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species.

In the post-Darwinian era, species other than our own will possibly no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes (Peters and Venkatesen 2010). Gene splicing techniques and recombinant DNA technology (splicing genes from two different species together) are rapidly became the basis for human gene therapy. In 2008 the draft corn genome sequence was completed, only the third plant genome to be completed, after Arabidopsis and rice.

Many of the claims made in the name of the new biology such as the creation of synthetic life have occasioned a number of influential reports on the ethics of genetic engineering and bioethics more broadly, including the full range of issues concerning: cloning, sex predetermination and the legal and moral implications of reproductive technologies, designer babies, stem cell research, personalised medicine ( “personalised prescribing” relates to a new range of genetic tests that can be used to identify better drug treatments for individual patients) , gene therapy, and the creation of synthetic life (Singer & Viens, 2008).

Dyson (2007) predicts that the ‘domestication’ of biotechnology will dominate our lives in the next fifty years by which he means small, and user-friendly as opposed to being owned and controlled by large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto who have breached our trust by putting ‘genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops’. Domestication through small-scale domestic experiments will ‘give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer.’ In this optimistic scenario Dyson ignores the advance and control of biocapitalism.

Biocapitalism

Helmreich (2008) writes that in the age of biotechnology, when the substances and promises of biological materials, particularly stem cells and genomes, are increasingly inserted into projects of productmaking and profit-seeking, we are witnessing the rise of a novel kind of capital: ‘biocapital’.

‘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). The US government 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. The imminent SynBio revolution promises to dwarf these substantial sums. The SynBio industry is already booming, with a projected market value of $11 billion by 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) defines biocapitalism as a regime of accumulation that is 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). Key to the foundation of biocapitalism, he argues, is 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.”

Technological revolutions are 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) explains 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.

Biocapital has become a strong force in society. The biotech sector is rapidly-expanding in ways that encompass the notion of biocapital as the French historian-philosopher Michel Foucault (2008) conceived of it. The very emergence of the term ‘the bioeconomy’ brings into existence a new space for thought and action: 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, creating the new scientist-entrepreneur, have culminated in the enormity of biocapital. According to Rose (2007), contemporary molecular bio- medicine requires 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 comes from venture capital provided by private corporations who also seek to raise funds on the stock market. Hence it is subject to all the exigencies of capitalizations, such as the obligations of profit, and the demands of shareholder value. The laboratory and factory are intrinsically interlinked (Rose, 2007: 17–18).The burgeoning genomics industry serves as one example. Genomics – the pursuit of unraveling the mysteries of the DNA double- helix, the fundamental blueprint of life – may very well transform 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 is 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 is 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 is 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.

Corporate partnering has been 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 are fairly young companies developing their first products and depend 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 is in the double digit trillions. However, this description does not adequately portray a vision of the life science industry borne out by an analysis of the bioeconomy. In fact, it is the promissory quality of biotech that is 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 is 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 will at some point follow. This is the prophetic, promissory moment of capitalist restructuring, the kind of utopia that is celebrated in neoliberal theories of growth. The creation of surplus population, of a life not worth the costs of its own reproduction, is 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 are, Dawson (2015) argues, some of the gravest faced by our society, yet there has been virtually no regulation of the industry and little adequate assessment of the potential risks associated with synthetic organisms. Nor are there plans for significant governance of the industry going forward in the UAS. 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 has been shockingly little engagement with biocapitalism on the part of cultural studies critics (Dawson, 2015).

It is even more important to note, that the colossal growth of biotech over the last two decades was facilitated by and dependent upon the consolidation of US debt imperialism. In her book Life as Surplus, Cooper (2008) links 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 is 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 makes 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 is Cooper’s insistence that this new regime of accumulation is characterized by inextricable links between the economic and the ecological .As Cooper puts 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 suggests, is evident in the new forms of biotechnology developed after the discovery of recombinant DNA technology (RDT). As described above, Biocapitalist production makes use of horizontal gene transfer, and, with the recent development of Synthetic Biology, of the creation of wholly novel gene sequences. SynBio indeed seems 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, life ( like contemporary debt production) is 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 are 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 are a normal part of the business cycle, for Marx and Engels, capitalism’s “epidemics of overproduction” take 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 sets the basic conditions for contemporary accumulation today, as we have seen it currently leaves regulation almost entirely up to biocapitalist corporations. The result is 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).

Biopower

Helmreich (2008), argues that biocapital and biocapitalism, extends 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’.

Foucault’s analyses of biopower offers useful insights and a critical perspective on emerging biocapitalism. Biopower refers to the explosion of techniques through which the modern nation state learned to subjugate bodies and control populations beginning in the late eighteenth century. While biopolitics is necessary for the emergence of biocapitalism, a true biocapitalist order has emerged only relatively recently.

The promise of biocapital is related to neoliberalism in terms of governmentality of the state and governance of the self. This is can be transposed onto Foucault’s extrapolations on power and ethics, respectively. Among Foucault’s great insight in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the state.

In his study of governmentality, Foucault contends that politics were inseparable in its modern forms both from biology – biopower and the government of the living – and truth and subjectivity (Peters & Besley, 2008). The argument is not so much that bio- capital constitutes a new conception of the natural body, but that the growing biotech sector exists at a crucial nexus between government, power and ethics whereby biopolitical strategies, which led to the formation of the biotech industry, are leading to “states of domination.” (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010). Peters and Venkatesen (2010) track the Frieberg school of German ordo-liberalism that Foucault (2008) developed in ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ in terms of neoliberalism’s contribution to biocapital and then develop how this notion of biocapitalism fits in with biopolitical strategies of power. They point out that Foucault’s call to ethical action would allow for resistance against these strategies and conclude with biocapital’s potential to effect creativity rather than contribute to states of domination through the Foucauldian notion of “care of the self.”

Murray (2007) develops and applies Foucault’s late work on the “care of the self.” In this understanding of “care,” he suggests that we might work towards an ethical self that is more commensurable both with recent theoretical views on subjectivity and – more pressingly – with the challenges of emergent biotechnologies. [He shows] how this Foucaultian “care of the self” is incommensurate with the care that we find in the “self-care” paradigm. In other words, the model of selfhood that emerges in Foucault’s “care of the self” must be sharply distinguished from the more traditional self of “self-care” conceived under the aegis of liberal humanism. Only the [care of the self] can sustain an ethical politics; only [this] can help us once again to question the good life. The “care of the self,”… might be one way to begin to move… toward a different discourse on subjectivity – a novel form of subjectivity in its incorporation of technological posthuman strategies. In this incorporation, humanity finds sites of Foucauldian resistance and creativity that mobilize biocapital strategies of growth. The ethic of the “care of the self” founds itself on biocapital’s energies, energies that traverse the spectrum of the novel technologies it is producing.. Rose (2007) argues that the spirit of biocapital is directly related to a somatic ethics, in which our very corporeality is affected by the bioeconomy, creating biochemical (“neuronchemical”) selves. In her view, too, these states of domination are fluid and reversible and serve as a potential focal point whereby ethical action can transform these states into spaces of creativity, resistance and culture. Much like Foucault may have, we see the potential of genomics technologies in the form of biocapital creating sites of resistance among individuals in forming new notions of extra-corporeal subjectivity that displace notions of the transcendental Being and Cogito, leading to reversibility in the exercise of power. Murray (2007b) gives the example of genomic art as an example of this creative resistance.

Lazzarato (2004) in “From Biopower to Biopolitics” catalogs Foucauldian thought on the subjectivation of the subject in the context of power relations. In effect, Foucault interprets the introduction of “life into history” constructively because it presents the opportunity to propose a new ontology, one that begins with the body and its potential that regards the “political subject as an ethical one” against the prevailing tradition of Western thought which understands it as a “subject of law.” Historically, the socialization of the forces that political economy attempts to govern calls sovereign power into crises; these forces compel the biopolitical technologies of government into an “immanence” one that grows increasingly extensive with society. This socialization always forces power to unfold in dispositifs that are both complementary and incompatible that express an immanent transcendence in our actuality (Lazzarato 2004). The problem of neo- liberalism is knowledge of how to exercise global political power based on the principles of a market economy and he suggests that a major transformation occurred with the association between the principle of the market economy and the political principle of laissez- faire that presented itself through a theory of pure competition (Peters 2009). Foucault also examines the emergence in post-war Germany of what he calls “politique de societe” and the ordo-liberal critique of the welfare state where society is modeled on the enterprise society, and the good society and enterprise society are seen as one and the same. Neoliberal economic growth and neoliberal governmentality have served as lynchpins for biotech expansion. The penetrability of the biotech sector into society is one that serves in turn to promote the interests of free enterprise. The free market presumably ensures individual freedoms according to German ordo-liberalism, however, Foucault qualifies this notion of freedom in the context of neoliberalism. In the way of understanding power and social relations there really is a “freedom” (an autonomy and independence) of the forces in play, but it is rather a freedom that is constituted as “the power to deprive others.” Power is a mode of action upon “acting subjects” upon “free subjects, insofar as they are free” (Lazzarato 2004).“States of domination” are characterized by the institutional stabilization of strategic relations, by the fact that the mobility, the potential reversibility and instability of power relations, of actions upon actions is limited. Foucault places governmental technologies that is to say the set of practices that constitute, define, organize and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other between strategic relations and states of domination (Lazzarato 2004). For Foucault, governmental technologies play a central role in power relations, because it is through these technologies that the opening and closing of strategic games is possible; through their exercise strategic relations become either crystallized and fixed in asymmetric institutionalized relations (states of domination), or they open up to the creation of subjectivities that escape biopolitical power in fluid and reversible relations. The ethico-political struggle takes on its full meaning at the frontier between strategic relations and states of domination on the terrain of governmental technologies. Ethical action, then, is concentrated upon the crux of the relation between strategic relations and governmental technologies.

In summary, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of power relations to extract a surplus of power from living beings (Lazzarato 2004).
I briefly turn now to explore reproductive biotechnologies and eugenics in more detail, before finishing by examine how non human animals are being used in the biotechnology industry.

Eugenics and Reproductive Biotechnologies

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new biotechnologies including manipulation of cellular and subcellular structures, using techniques such as gene splicing, cell fusion, and cell culturing. New biotechnologies have the potential to produce ‘designer’ humans who are seen as ‘superior’ to other non-engineered humans both physically, and intellectually. As well, the generally presumed superiority of all humans vis a vis non -humans seems likely to be emphasised even more strongly.

During the 1970s human reproductive technology moved from in vitro fertilization to the storage of frozen human embryos and scientists also began cloning experiments with carrots, mice, cows, and sheep developing a set of industries based on genetically modified organisms (GMO). In 1993 Robert Stillman and Jerry Hall cloned human embryos (Peters and Venkatesen, 2010).

Kier (2011) argues that biotechnologies reorganise re(production) and raise questions about categories of sex/gender/sexuality; human /animal; nature/culture in postindustrail biocapitalism. The corporate transnational governing apparatus, that is biocapitalism increasingly manages human and animal life including basic needs for water, food , shelter, work, pleasure and reproduction; re/productive arrangements and relations that have been developed over thousands or millions of years, are being rearranged in a very short period of time (Kier 2011). As an example of one such rearrangement Kier points to the emergence of transgender fish in the Potomac river. While some fish have always had the ability to change sex, the transgender fish are a new phenomenon, with eggs being found inside male fish. Kier point out that this is happening alongside contraceptive and sterilisation interventions in humans. These are seemingly separate phenomena, but connected by hormones and hormone-mimicking substances such as EDCs (endocrine-disruptor chemicals). EDCs refers to a multitude of petrochemical, agricultural, and industrial products, processes and wastes, which interfere, mimic, and/or disrupt human and animal hormonal endocrine systems.

The history of the development of synthetic human-made reproductive and sex hormones through the twentieth century was connected to developments in industrialization, fossil-fuel economies, mono-mechanical factory and pesticide\herbicide agricultures, epoxy resins, dyes, plastics, computers, genetic engineering. What were called Endocrine Disrupting compounds (EDCs) affected the endocrine and hormone systems of animals and humans, and mimiked the effects of estrogen and other hormones and processes of metabolism that bodies produce. EDCs created marine “dead zones” in rivers, water tables, bays and estuaries that were used to hydrate and feed glocal populations.

Humans, other animals, and fish are caught up in the transformations of re/production that unfolded as a result of human-made EDCs circulating in the environment, water, and food chains. Although fish held EDCs in their bodies at higher concentrations than humans, humans share a habitat with plastics, pesticides, and factory farming, just at different scopes and varying degrees of intimacy depending on where one works, what one eats and drinks, and where one lives. EDCs are part of the food, productive and re/productive chain of non-human and human life. EDCs clearly do not cause everyone to transition gender in the same ways and capacities as transsexual humans using medically prescribed hormones.

Estrogens are of particular interest because of both the symbolic and material relationships between the control of animals, poor women, and the environment, for the maximization of profit in the social relations of human-centered re/production. Julie Sze’s work has documented the rise and fall of DES – one of the most promoted and distributed synthetic estrogens invented in the 1930s. It was promoted as both a pregnancy and livestock drug. Sze sees the historical rise of estrogen-mimicking DES as both “a symbol connecting women and animals, and as a technological process to control nature and maximize efficiency through technology.” Sze argues that female identity and the categories of sex and gender became defined socially and medically to a significant extent through DES, given to “categories of women who were considered insufficiently female, such as menopausal women and lesbians.” If Sze is right that DES and other synthetic hormones are a technology to control nature and to maximize efficiency and profit, then the increasing use and invention of multiple other hormones and hormone-mimicking substances must be considered a technology of social engineering. Although DES was banned for use in humans in the 1980s, many more synthetic sex and reproductive hormones and EDCs have been invented, promoted, and absorbed into the bodies of multiple species.

The works of Dorothy Roberts and Andrea Smith document the abuse of newer synthetic reproductive hormones approved by the FDA in the 1990s. In Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty, Roberts ties the social and racial history of an earlier United States slave economy, reliant upon controlling African American women’s reproductive bodies to re/produce the labor force, to the contemporary economic conditions of late capitalism, in which poor African American women’s bodies have shifted from being material economic commodities of reproductive profit, to an expendable managed population, imagined as draining the monetary resources of the US nation state. As part of welfare reform in the 1990s, many states required that women receiving welfare benefits have Norplant implanted into their bodies and after Norplant was considered dangerous, Depo-Provera injections.

Long-duration sex and reproductive hormones used to control reproduction can be injected or implanted into the body, and the newer research and experimentations involve immunological contraceptives, contraceptive vaccines, and possible recombinant DNA technology. These contraceptive vaccines can last for three months or for years, and many effects may even be irreversible. The first generation of contraceptive related vaccine to emerge was Depo-Provera. The FDA approved the use of Depo-Provera for human use in the United States in 1992, despite the fact that it produced breast cancer in beagles. By the late 1990s, more than 15 million women across 90 countries received injections of Depo-Provera – a highly concentrated amount of the hormone progestin, shutting down reproductive processes for 3 to 6 months.

The further research and development of contraceptive vaccines into the twenty-first century involves a wide range of techniques and strategies to manipulate cellular and biosystematic function of sexual hormonal reproductive networks and their related immunological systems and relationships. A 2005 report in the medical research journal Human reproduction illustrated developments and advancements in contraceptive medicine, where various “targets are being investigated in several laboratories for the development” of the contraceptive vaccine. What is meant by targets here are differing molecular and cellular process involved in manipulating hormonal functions and cycles and permanently terminating the ability to reproduce. This research implicates both “sexes” and includes sperm vaccines and anti-hCG hormone (human chorionic gonadotropin) blockers that prevent pregnancy. These vaccines use anti-sperm antibodies (ASA) to change the body’s hormonal immune responses to prevent reproduction. This 2005 report frames the “progress” of this research in terms of the overpopulation crisis.

In the introduction they write:

Population explosion and unintended pregnancies continue to pose major public health issues worldwide. The world population has exceeded 6.43 × 10³⁸ … Ninety-five percent of this growth is in the developing nations. In the USA, half of all pregnancies are unintended … This calls for a better method of contraception that is acceptable, effective and available both in the developed and developing nations … Since the developed and most of the developing nations have an infrastructure for mass immunization, the development of vaccines for contraception is an exciting proposition.

This report mentions nothing of the potential consequences and risks of manipulating antibodies, potentially triggering damaging immune responses such as autoimmune disorders and allergies, let alone the possible exacerbation of health problems such as AIDS. Nor does it consider that contraceptive vaccines will be used as an alternative to condoms, increasing the likelihood of HIV transmission. Equally problematic is the statement that “developed and developing nations have an infrastructure for mass immunization” and that these new possible contraceptive vaccines are therefore “an exciting proposition.” Exciting for whom? What would a possible “mass immunization” of human re/production of the populations of nations entail? If most humans don’t have much choice about the basic living conditions of everyday life including food, water, and shelter, then how will most humans contribute to the decision of who will qualify for possible mass re/productive immunizations. In this regard it is salutory to consider that involuntarily sterilisation of women has existed across the world (file:///Users/susanaskew/Downloads/against-her-will-20111003.pdf)

The ways we come to know and assume knowledge, through classificatory infrastructures and popular cultures of racism, US and Euro-centrism, environmentalism, speciesism, xenophobia, and self-righteousness, legitimize practices of collective human population management that are then promoted as socially progressive. Neoeugenics is not a thing of the past (Kier, 2011). Just as US environmental conservation efforts of the early twentieth century were linked to eugenics through what Charles Wohforth calls “population-control work” that simultaneously intended “to save nature and improve human existence,” contemporary discourses of eco-catastrophe including global warming, pandemic human disease, and shortages of food, water and energy, are also linked to human “population-control work.” For example, an essay originally from the conference “Connecting Environmental Ethics, Ecological Integrity, and Health in the New Millennium” (also a cooperative collaboration with the Earth Charter Initiative and the Global Ecological Integrity Project) estimates the carrying capacity of the Earth to be “two to three billion” individuals.” This estimate “is based on maintaining a European-style standard of living for everyone in the world associated with sustainable use of natural resources.” This reflects many of the assumptions of mainstream academic and media environmentalism, in that human over-population is the root of larger ecological crises and over-use of resources. The over-population and sustainable re/productive European lifestyle assumption, when framed within Noel Sturgeon’s findings that popular representations of environmentalism naturalize stories of (white middle class) re/production, militarism, and the race for space exploration and planetary security, illustrates that we are dealing with more than just benevolent environmentalism and progressive immunological reproductive medicine. We are also dealing with the politics of human re/production – a politics questioning who will decide what populations will qualify to live, die, and re/produce. Which populations will qualify for mass immunization of their re/productive capacities? Which populations qualify as naturalized re/production for militarism and planetary security? The “who” here is a tricky question and even though non human animals, and marginalised people – women of colour, prisoners, people with disabilities, queer and poor people have borne the brunt of medical re/productive experimentation, everyone potentially has the possibility of qualifying as one of the “managed” populations – it just depends what categories, characteristics, behaviors, and locations constitute qualification. And since we don’t yet know the conditions for qualification even though we might have accurate predictions, re/productive immunology is a possibility for most humans of reproductive age on the planet.

To reach a human population of two billion, either two thirds of humanity have to die or there will have to be dramatic interventions in human re/production across the planet, in which anyone potentially becomes re/productively managed. Perhaps a European lifestyle should not be the goal of sustainability and we need to begin asking questions about what other kind of lifestyles are possible, and the population carrying capacities those lifestyles entail.

Populations of humans are not the only things to be counted in sustainable carrying capacities. Other species and resources must also be considered in relation to balancing sustainable renewal. However, much of the language of sustainability is wed to sustaining or keeping economic and ecological conditions the same rather than looking for resilience in species, populations, and things, instead of or in addition to a fixed idea of sustainability.

Non human animals and biotechnologies

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

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. There is, I think, a palpable romanticism to some contemporary work in animal studies, which, in its efforts to decenter the human, focuses on processes of interspecies becoming in ways that elide the systematic forms of violence to which the great majority of nonhuman animals are currently subjected. For the vast majority of plant and animals species living today, entanglement with human culture comes either through reduction to the status of abject commodity or through obliteration as a result of capital accumulation. For example, as Adrian Parr argues in The Wrath of Capital, her devastating analysis of neoliberalism and environmental politics, the contemporary industrial food complex “represents the antithesis of cyborg dissent as it disciplines and regulates the creative impulse of material life and living labor, placing it in the service of capital accumulation. It plugs the bodies of animals into machines as a way to dominate them.” It is precisely because of their availability as pure embodiments of animal capital, for example, that pigs make convenient xeno-subjects. Ten billion animals are raised each year in the US for meat, milk, and eggs, every stage of their reproductive lives minutely managed through breeding management programs and artificial reproduction technologies. All of this biopolitical technology ends in slaughter, culminating what Derrida describes as animals’ “extermination by means of their continued existence.” 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

As Sharp (date) explains in her overview of experimental xenotransplantation, swine have recently become the prime targets of xeno research after nearly a century during which primates were the 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 has ever been 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 roughly a decade ago. Pigs have now taken simians’ 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 these animals.

Pig-to-human xenotransplantation has been in the works since 1992, when a small biotech company in England announced the “creation” of Astrid, the world’s first transgenic pig. Since then, setbacks, most of them related to immunological problems, have continually pushed the promised era of “organ farms” into the future. Nonetheless, the advent of Synthetic Biology has given xeno a new lease of life. Xeno pigs today are transgenic creations, genetically engineered either so that their progeny lack particular proteins that would generate a human immunological response or to ensure that future generations incorporate enough human genetic material that their organs are read as human when implanted in people. Such bio-fungibility truly troubles the borders between the animal and human, and raises issues of ethical recognition and reciprocity. As Eben Kirksey (2014) and his collaborators put it in their recently published volume The Multispecies Salon, “bioartists [such as Patricia Piccinini] are offering conceptual, technical, and ethical resources for thinking through our obligations to the emergent forms of life in the age of biotechnology. However, bioethics itself does little to challenge the belief that technology offers a solution to all the problems that confront individuals today, with little thought given to questions of the common good, whether that collectivity is defined in terms of other human beings, future populations, or hybrid biobeings such as the transgenic pigs in Patricia Piccinini and Margaret Atwood’s work.

It seems unlikely that because we have a pig’s heart the duality between human-animal will break down – after all I may wear pig shoes and have a stomach full of pig but to rationalise this the duality between human-animals must be strengthened. Dualism is a Western,,historical method of constructing difference and stabilizing identity. More specifically, dualism is 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 form an ‘interlocking structure’ (Plumwood, 1993, p43) that reinforces a notion of human exceptionalism from ‘nature’. Some of these key dualisms are oppositions between culture and nature, mind and body, human and animal, male and female, social and biological, and reason and emotion. Dualisms are 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 can be seen in reference to the traditional sociological nexus of concern over class, race and gender relations.

The tradition of differentiation that Derrida tracks, extending backward from his moment of prudency to philosophical progenitors such as Heidegger and Descartes, is animated by an ontological and linguistic violence that reduces what he calls “the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living” to a singular Other: the animal. Such efforts to demarcate the human have 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 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.
Dawson, 2015

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

Biotechnology illustrates how domestication is a processual relationship in which humans are trying to control animal breeding in various economically framed directions, but that such attempts have unforeseen consequences that may thwart notions of ultimate human control. Similarly, it would be difficult to begin to understand climate change without some notion of the nonhuman as agential, of producing unexpected twists to our assumptions of how we might assume relations to unfold. (Tovey, 2003:4)

In addition to cultivating a critical ethical sensitivity to the transgenic other, Dawson (2915) argues that we also need 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.’

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. As important as this vote was, the CBD’s regulatory efforts are at a very early stage. The CBD decision called for the establishment of an expert group which will establish a definition of synthetic biology and identify whether existing governance mechanisms are 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 are 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 is a linchpin. It is imperative that public intellectuals weigh in critically concerning biocapitalism. Dawson argues that we live in a historical watershed, a transitional period during which many of the unrealized dreams and nightmares of biocapitalism are on the cusp of realization. It is a key moment in the struggle to stake claims of social and environmental justice in relation to this emerging regime of accumulation. Indeed, Dawson believes that the nascent campaign to regulate SynBio should be seen as an essential component of the climate justice movement. Dawson suggests that artists can contribute to this struggle by using speculative figuration and fiction to foreground some of the grave ethical and political crises that biocapitalism is unleashing on a largely unsuspecting public.

One way that it seems humans validate their argument for manipulating genes and for horizontal gene transfer is to argue that interspecies gene transfer is a technology much older than humans and that biotechnologies such as the manipulation of metabolism and possible capabilities of horizontal gene transfer exist in other life forms in ways that we may never be able to completely comprehend or mimic . For Hird (2008), bacteria have “invented all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology (controlling molecules in ways that continue to elude scientists) and metallurgy,” Kier (2011) writes: ‘We are most certainly “endangering” wild native fish, but we also need to begin asking what technologies, processes, and relations fish are using to change sex. Is this changing of sex a response, an adaptation, or both? Is this change a sign of resilience or a degenerative “defect”? The suggestion that “bacteria do it so why shouldn’t humans” sits uncomfortably with me. Also, because other species may be able to adapt to the damages we are causing is also problematic. Both seem to me to suggest we avoid our ethical reponsibilities to take the path of least harm in all our endeavours.

In regard to my learning about biocapitalism, I have attempted to synthesise this in the booklet that I made for a small show in college two weeks ago. I have also identified xenotransplantation as a possible area for further study/making. I am most struck by these words from Dawson (2015):

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.

And this one:

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! I am wondering about taking Dawson’s words as the starting point for a performance at the research festival in two weeks. This performance might spark further ideas for how to develop the ideas underpinning it into an installation.

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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).