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Neoliberalism and Technoscience: Critical Assessments
This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the connection between processes of neoliberalization and the advancement and transformation of technoscience. Drawing on a range of theoretical insights, it explores a variety of issues including the digital revolution and the rise of immaterial culture, the rationale of psychiatric reforms and biotechnology regulation, discourses of social threats and human enhancement, and carbon markets and green energy policies. A rich exploration of the overall logic of technoscientific innovation within late capitalism, and the emergence of a novel view of human agency with regard to the social and natural world, this volume reveals the interdependence of technoscience and the neoliberalization of society. Presenting the latest research from a leading team of scholars, "Neoliberalism and Technoscience" will be of interest to scholars of sociology, politics, geography and science and technology studies.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2012
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March 12, 2017
I think the chapter by the two editors was brilliant and very enlightening, but I found that many of the other chapters were not very closely related to the main theme of the book and some of the arguments were not very clear to - but maybe I just lack to sociological background to get it. I didn't learn much from the sections on transhumanism and the environment that wasn't already in the main chapter (in terms of the basic idea). But since the editors fundamentally changed the way I see and understand the dynamics of the problems described below (among others) this is still a 4-star book for me.
The authors apply the concept of neoliberalism in a much broader way than I would have thought. The free market is seen as the ultimate standard in economic and social organisation. It is applied to areas that were outside of the reach of the market previously and it is particularly interesting how the authors combine this with a new worldview and rationality that came with neoliberalism:
"Liberalism was concerned with the material limits to growth. Neoliberalism is concerned with the growth of limits (Lemke 2013). The pressing search for new fields of expansion and acquisition finds an indispensable ally in technoscience: nature is no longer an ultimate barrier but a moveable threshold. The consequent expanded accumulation is then managed through the production and allocation of scarcity by means of property rights and markets (Harvey 2003)."
"If everything is intimately related, states the latter [post-structuralism], everything has to be treated carefully, respectfully, with prudence and restraint. If everything is crafted, the neoliberal reply goes, everything can be remoulded, commodified and appropriated. World-making does not mean a joint constitution of subject and object, but a purposeful manufacturing of the latter. Nature is pliant; will is unconstrained."
This view of human agency in nature, the remoulding of it and even humans themselves is at the frontiers of current biotechnological innovation. Interestingly, neoliberalism also shapes the way knowledge is managed in a very fundamental way. Knowledge is a non-rival good since it can be reproduced at very low cost. But if markets are the ultimate standard in economic organisation and knowledge as well, rivalry has to be constructed by patent systems, which "expand proprietary character of knowledge to the detriment of the intellectual commons (Jessop 2010)".
The authors also explain why neoliberalism is so difficult to criticise or oppose:
"Humans test ideas by acting: gathering contrasting evidence may lead to the questioning of objective thought forms. However, as we have seen, neoliberalism is a political project that seeks to create a social reality that it maintains already exists (Lemke 2003). It develops institutional practices and rewards in order to expand competitive entrepreneurship. Simultaneously, however, it claims to present 'not an ideal, but a reality; human nature' (Read 2009: 26). If competitive rationality constitutes the fundamental character of human nature, there is no empirical evidence able to confute it.
... The constructed character of entrepreneurial task environments is openly celebrated, while their natural character is simultaneously reasserted. It is this ontological oscillation, on which we have insisted throughout the chapter, that gives neoliberalism its special resistance to confutation and contestation."
"The neoliberal entrepreneurial agent resembles a god, since the full pliancy of materiality to human designs leads to the depiction of agency in terms of an ultimately unconstrained, expansive will. Moreover, the oscillation of neoliberal discourses between description and prescription makes it particularly difficult to develop a critique. We have seen that technoscience is profoundly affected by neoliberal governmentality, as both a source and object of regulation, and that biotechnology is an elective terrain on which the remoulding of nature and humanity takes place. "
The authors apply the concept of neoliberalism in a much broader way than I would have thought. The free market is seen as the ultimate standard in economic and social organisation. It is applied to areas that were outside of the reach of the market previously and it is particularly interesting how the authors combine this with a new worldview and rationality that came with neoliberalism:
"Liberalism was concerned with the material limits to growth. Neoliberalism is concerned with the growth of limits (Lemke 2013). The pressing search for new fields of expansion and acquisition finds an indispensable ally in technoscience: nature is no longer an ultimate barrier but a moveable threshold. The consequent expanded accumulation is then managed through the production and allocation of scarcity by means of property rights and markets (Harvey 2003)."
"If everything is intimately related, states the latter [post-structuralism], everything has to be treated carefully, respectfully, with prudence and restraint. If everything is crafted, the neoliberal reply goes, everything can be remoulded, commodified and appropriated. World-making does not mean a joint constitution of subject and object, but a purposeful manufacturing of the latter. Nature is pliant; will is unconstrained."
This view of human agency in nature, the remoulding of it and even humans themselves is at the frontiers of current biotechnological innovation. Interestingly, neoliberalism also shapes the way knowledge is managed in a very fundamental way. Knowledge is a non-rival good since it can be reproduced at very low cost. But if markets are the ultimate standard in economic organisation and knowledge as well, rivalry has to be constructed by patent systems, which "expand proprietary character of knowledge to the detriment of the intellectual commons (Jessop 2010)".
The authors also explain why neoliberalism is so difficult to criticise or oppose:
"Humans test ideas by acting: gathering contrasting evidence may lead to the questioning of objective thought forms. However, as we have seen, neoliberalism is a political project that seeks to create a social reality that it maintains already exists (Lemke 2003). It develops institutional practices and rewards in order to expand competitive entrepreneurship. Simultaneously, however, it claims to present 'not an ideal, but a reality; human nature' (Read 2009: 26). If competitive rationality constitutes the fundamental character of human nature, there is no empirical evidence able to confute it.
... The constructed character of entrepreneurial task environments is openly celebrated, while their natural character is simultaneously reasserted. It is this ontological oscillation, on which we have insisted throughout the chapter, that gives neoliberalism its special resistance to confutation and contestation."
"The neoliberal entrepreneurial agent resembles a god, since the full pliancy of materiality to human designs leads to the depiction of agency in terms of an ultimately unconstrained, expansive will. Moreover, the oscillation of neoliberal discourses between description and prescription makes it particularly difficult to develop a critique. We have seen that technoscience is profoundly affected by neoliberal governmentality, as both a source and object of regulation, and that biotechnology is an elective terrain on which the remoulding of nature and humanity takes place. "
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