What do you think?
Rate this book
Biyokapital: Genom-Sonrası Hayatın Kuruluşu
Hem bilimsel araştırmalar hem de siyasal iktisat alanına katkı yapan en önemli çalışmalardan biri Biyokapital. Kaushik Sunder Rajan bu çalışma bağlamında, 1999'dan 2004'e uzanan beş yıllık bir zaman dilimi boyunca, ABD ve Hindistan'daki biyoteknoloji laboratuarlarında ve yeni kurulan şirketlerde saha araştırmaları yapıyor. Daha sonra biliminsanları, girişimciler, risk sermayedarları ve ülke politikalarını belirleyen kişileri de dahil ettiği araştırmasını, iki ülkedeki ilaç geliştirme süreçlerini karşılaştırarak sürdürüyor ve farklı uygulamalar ile araştırma-geliştirmenin hedeflerini, finansal mekanizmaları, ilgili hükümet düzenlemelerini ve umut vaat eden bu yeni teknolojilerin reklam ve pazarlama stratejilerini inceliyor.
Rajan, genom araştırmaları gibi çağdaş biyoteknolojilerin ancak ortaya çıktıkları iktisadi pazarla ilişkili olarak anlaşılabileceğini savunuyor. Biyoteknoloji ile piyasa güçlerinin, yani "tekno-bilimsel kapitalizmin" çağdaş dünyayı nasıl şekillendirdiğine ilişkin, teorik açıdan son derece zengin bir araştırma sunuyor. Marxçı değer teorilerini Foucaultcu biyopolitik kavramlarıyla diyaloğa sokarak, 20. yüzyılın sonuyla 21. yüzyılın başlarında, yaşam bilimlerinin nasıl olup da hem ekonomik hem de epistemik değerin en önemli üreticilerinden biri haline geldiğini inceliyor.
Rajan, genom araştırmaları gibi çağdaş biyoteknolojilerin ancak ortaya çıktıkları iktisadi pazarla ilişkili olarak anlaşılabileceğini savunuyor. Biyoteknoloji ile piyasa güçlerinin, yani "tekno-bilimsel kapitalizmin" çağdaş dünyayı nasıl şekillendirdiğine ilişkin, teorik açıdan son derece zengin bir araştırma sunuyor. Marxçı değer teorilerini Foucaultcu biyopolitik kavramlarıyla diyaloğa sokarak, 20. yüzyılın sonuyla 21. yüzyılın başlarında, yaşam bilimlerinin nasıl olup da hem ekonomik hem de epistemik değerin en önemli üreticilerinden biri haline geldiğini inceliyor.
376 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2006
7 people are currently reading
192 people want to read
About the author
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
9 books4 followersKaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 1, 2016
We'll see how this goes, teaching it this summer in Bioethics.
There's a lot to like about the themes of the book and the method used in the research. It should be approachable because of the story-telling that goes on in ethnography. I will rely heavily on the stories, but unfortunately, I will have to rely heavily on the stories because the analytical portions of the text are not very useful.
My basic beef with this book is my beef with a great deal of academic writing that draws from deconstruction and poststructuralism. Writing this way obfuscates. There can be legitimate reasons for complexity, but I rarely see much of a payoff.
For instance, this book is guilty of what I regard with suspicion as unnecessary invention of phrases and lengthy attempts to invest these phrases with significance. The phrases displace, or replace, analysis; they stand in for analysis; sometimes they become repeated in lieu of analysis in others' texts. Reaching a point in a chapter that justifies its catchy but otherwise unclarifying title should not be a major achievement of a chapter.
There's a lot to like about the themes of the book and the method used in the research. It should be approachable because of the story-telling that goes on in ethnography. I will rely heavily on the stories, but unfortunately, I will have to rely heavily on the stories because the analytical portions of the text are not very useful.
My basic beef with this book is my beef with a great deal of academic writing that draws from deconstruction and poststructuralism. Writing this way obfuscates. There can be legitimate reasons for complexity, but I rarely see much of a payoff.
For instance, this book is guilty of what I regard with suspicion as unnecessary invention of phrases and lengthy attempts to invest these phrases with significance. The phrases displace, or replace, analysis; they stand in for analysis; sometimes they become repeated in lieu of analysis in others' texts. Reaching a point in a chapter that justifies its catchy but otherwise unclarifying title should not be a major achievement of a chapter.
June 21, 2023
4.5 stars.
A pretty enjoyable read for me. A text in the cast of Melinda Cooper’s work (and Michelle Murphy’s in some sense, though perhaps inversely so, Rajan's text precedes both their analogous works), to the extent that Marx and Foucault feature as central reference points theoretically throughout, particularly for analyzing the development of biomedical sciences. Lately, Gabriel Rockhill has been among the foremost purveyors of anti-poststructuralist Marxism, which I have no strong opinion on either way. However, I will confess that I do enjoy both Rajan’s and Cooper’s work, while at the same time feeling a lot more affinity for their reliance on Marx than Foucault. Marx has always felt more generative for me. One of the members of my comps committee was a postdoc under Rajan, but is more so a Foucauldian than a Marxist from my perspective.
This book starts by analyzing market logic (of both exchange and value) at play in both American and Indian genomic enterprises. Rajan argues that the genomic ‘revolution’ had more to do with improved technological capacities than scientific advances at the conceptual level, and it was market logic that was the driving factor for this technological development (Chapter 1). Next Rajan analyzes debt relations and globalization through fieldwork conducted both in the Bombay core and Hyderabad periphery. He does so by conceptualizing biocapital in two ways: (1) in a classic Marxian sense of circulating land, labour, and value through biotech and pharmaceutical innovation ecosystems, and (2) a Foucauldian sense of biopolitics operating within processes of global capitalism. He emphasizes a shift in First World-Third World asymmetries, from imperial core and colony into vendor and client (Chapter 2). [As an aside, I disagree on this point, by the time Lenin was writing, the vendor/client thing was already a part of the political economy Lenin was analyzing in terms of imperialism; the novelty here is not that apparent to me, and I think neo-colonialism is a sufficient way to understand these dynamics that Lenin was already theorizing on before the official post-WW2 decades of decolonization] Following this, Rajan focuses on the promissory hype cycles that occur within biocapitalism, which are central to both the biotech and drug development industry (Chapter 3)… Cooper discusses this theme well in terms of other forms of biotechnology in her book Life as Surplus. Following this, Rajan extends the theme of promise from the previous chapter into the domain of scientific facts themselves, and in a similar fashion to Haraway, discusses problems of “genomic fetishism” and the way its facts are produced on terrain where questions of ownership feature prominently, as well as risk discourse that seemingly renders capital-intensive processes necessary (Chapter 4). After this, we get a very interesting eschatological analysis of biotechnology as it intersects with both nationalism and religion (Chapter 5), before a final chapter on a San Francisco start-up called Gene Ed that offers e-leaning courses on drug development and biotech, which connects South Asian biotech with Silicon Valley in very interesting ways. Rajan wraps up the book with further commentary on biocapital and the theoretical relevance Marx holds for understanding the emerging life sciences.
Will finish with some excerpts from the book:
“To answer this question, Marx locates the generation of surplus value not in the labor that the worker exchanges for wages from the capitalist but in the potential of the worker to perform work in excess of that wage. It is this potential that Marx terms ‘‘labor power.’’ As creative potential, labor power is not predetermined value. Therefore the apparent act of equivalent exchange (worker’s labor for capitalist’s wages) has hidden within it an element of nonequivalence, because wages are fixed remuneration, but the labor, which is actually labor power, is the potential for creation of value over and above the
money expended in wages. The key here is that labor power is an entirely abstract concept, and yet it is in this abstract concept that the fundamental dynamics of the labor theory of value, as an explanation of political economy distinct from the bourgeois understanding of it, rest. Historical materialism depends entirely, then, on this fundamental abstraction, but it is an abstraction, in turn, that stems entirely from the structural, material relations of production, because it is an abstraction that can only be enabled by the fact that the capitalist controls the material means of production. Therefore, at the very heart of Marx’s analysis of capital is the dialectic relationship between forms of materiality and forms of abstraction.
This sort of relationship between materiality and abstraction runs through- out Marx’s work and is a central methodological lesson from Marx that I incorporate into this analysis. For instance, the very act of exchange is ani- mated by this dialectic. This could be the case whether the act of exchange in question is between capitalist and worker, or whether the exchange in question involves the circulation of money and commodities, the contours of which Marx describes at the start of Grundrisse and Capital. Biocapital, like any other form of circulation of capital, involves the circulation and exchange of money and commodities, whose analysis needs to remain central and at the forefront of analysis. But in addition, the circulations of new and particular forms of currency, such as biological material and information, emerge. One of the things that genomics fundamentally enables is a particular type of materialization of information, and its decoupling from its material biological source (such as tissue or cell line).”
“And yet, as Marx teaches us, one cannot be satisfied by simply tracing the circuits traveled by various forms of commodity, currency, or capital. Because again, at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the circulation of money and commodities is the mystical and magical nature of the commodity, the fact that it is, in his words, ‘‘full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 163). In other words, at the heart of the interaction between either worker and capitalist or money and commodity is an uncanny kernel of abstraction that eludes capture in purely materialist terms.≤≤ It is this uncanny kernel that enables the commodity, which as an object is a rather banal thing, to become the mediator of social bonds. Indeed, that Marx alludes to it doing so in a ‘‘theological’’ manner is particularly striking. If, twenty-two years previously (in The German Ideology), he dismissed religion as ideological and therefore superstructure, a form of false consciousness, then by the time he writes Capital, the ‘‘theological’’ character of the commodity becomes a central symptom of its fetish.≤≥ It is not surprising, then, that a moment of exchange is also referred to as a moment of conversion, conversion being a process whereby one type of object (money, for instance) gets converted for its holder into another (such as commodity), but also being, explicitly, a theological category.”
“It is not ownership itself but the modes and categories of ownership that constitute the terrain for hegemonic struggle in genomics. In other words, what is at stake is the rendering of the ‘‘raw material’’ of production ‘‘public’’—that is, not ‘‘owned’’—in order to give later ownership advantage to those who control the modes of production.
These disputes highlight issues of corporate agency. While unobstructed access and speedy progress of research remain the stated goals of all parties concerned, clearly for each party research progresses ‘‘speedily’’ only when they have unobstructed access, combined with the right, whenever they feel appropriate, to slow down and charge everyone else. The inherent logic of ownership, after all, is that the owner can decide what to do with the object (that has, by virtue of its objectification, become alienable) owned.”
“The other crucial aspect worth noting here is that there are two economies at stake that are themselves not seamless with respect to each other and that correspond to Marx’s ‘‘industrial’’ versus ‘‘commercial’’ capitalisms that I discussed while talking about the relationship of biocapital to systems of capital- ism writ large. On the one hand, there is the r & d, manufacturing, and marketing of drugs, the component of the drug development economy that has to do with the production, distribution, and sale of commodities (similar to Marx’s ‘‘industrial capitalism’’). On the other, there is the speculative mar- ket, which for pharmaceutical companies (almost all of which in the United States are publicly traded) translates into market valuation on Wall Street (similar to Marx’s ‘‘commercial capitalism’’).”
“The salvationary potential of biocapital resides in the very nature of the enterprise of drug development, being as it is in the business of making sick people better. And yet this alone is insufficient to make drug development a salvationary enterprise of the sort that it is in the United States. For that, the therapeutic potential of drug development has to be articulated with other belief systems, especially the neoliberal faith in free market innovation. In other words, the salvationary potential of biocapital has to do not just with the value accruing from ‘‘bio’’ but also from the value accruing from ‘‘capital.’’ This relationship of capital to the theological was recognized by Marx to exist even in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but it acquires different performative force when the magic, as in the case of high-tech innovation, involves pulling rabbits out of hats rather than just generating infinite surplus.
While capitalism, as Marx famously suggests in his analysis of commodity fetishism (Marx 1976 [1867]), has always been theological,≤≠ the explicit treatment of the relationship between capitalism and Protestant Christianity, of course, has been provided by Weber (2001 [1930]). If the ‘‘spirit’’ of capitalism could persuasively be said to have been animated by a Protestant ethic, then the spirit of biocapitalism, certainly in the United States, could be said to be animated by a ‘‘born-again’’ ethic.”
A pretty enjoyable read for me. A text in the cast of Melinda Cooper’s work (and Michelle Murphy’s in some sense, though perhaps inversely so, Rajan's text precedes both their analogous works), to the extent that Marx and Foucault feature as central reference points theoretically throughout, particularly for analyzing the development of biomedical sciences. Lately, Gabriel Rockhill has been among the foremost purveyors of anti-poststructuralist Marxism, which I have no strong opinion on either way. However, I will confess that I do enjoy both Rajan’s and Cooper’s work, while at the same time feeling a lot more affinity for their reliance on Marx than Foucault. Marx has always felt more generative for me. One of the members of my comps committee was a postdoc under Rajan, but is more so a Foucauldian than a Marxist from my perspective.
This book starts by analyzing market logic (of both exchange and value) at play in both American and Indian genomic enterprises. Rajan argues that the genomic ‘revolution’ had more to do with improved technological capacities than scientific advances at the conceptual level, and it was market logic that was the driving factor for this technological development (Chapter 1). Next Rajan analyzes debt relations and globalization through fieldwork conducted both in the Bombay core and Hyderabad periphery. He does so by conceptualizing biocapital in two ways: (1) in a classic Marxian sense of circulating land, labour, and value through biotech and pharmaceutical innovation ecosystems, and (2) a Foucauldian sense of biopolitics operating within processes of global capitalism. He emphasizes a shift in First World-Third World asymmetries, from imperial core and colony into vendor and client (Chapter 2). [As an aside, I disagree on this point, by the time Lenin was writing, the vendor/client thing was already a part of the political economy Lenin was analyzing in terms of imperialism; the novelty here is not that apparent to me, and I think neo-colonialism is a sufficient way to understand these dynamics that Lenin was already theorizing on before the official post-WW2 decades of decolonization] Following this, Rajan focuses on the promissory hype cycles that occur within biocapitalism, which are central to both the biotech and drug development industry (Chapter 3)… Cooper discusses this theme well in terms of other forms of biotechnology in her book Life as Surplus. Following this, Rajan extends the theme of promise from the previous chapter into the domain of scientific facts themselves, and in a similar fashion to Haraway, discusses problems of “genomic fetishism” and the way its facts are produced on terrain where questions of ownership feature prominently, as well as risk discourse that seemingly renders capital-intensive processes necessary (Chapter 4). After this, we get a very interesting eschatological analysis of biotechnology as it intersects with both nationalism and religion (Chapter 5), before a final chapter on a San Francisco start-up called Gene Ed that offers e-leaning courses on drug development and biotech, which connects South Asian biotech with Silicon Valley in very interesting ways. Rajan wraps up the book with further commentary on biocapital and the theoretical relevance Marx holds for understanding the emerging life sciences.
Will finish with some excerpts from the book:
“To answer this question, Marx locates the generation of surplus value not in the labor that the worker exchanges for wages from the capitalist but in the potential of the worker to perform work in excess of that wage. It is this potential that Marx terms ‘‘labor power.’’ As creative potential, labor power is not predetermined value. Therefore the apparent act of equivalent exchange (worker’s labor for capitalist’s wages) has hidden within it an element of nonequivalence, because wages are fixed remuneration, but the labor, which is actually labor power, is the potential for creation of value over and above the
money expended in wages. The key here is that labor power is an entirely abstract concept, and yet it is in this abstract concept that the fundamental dynamics of the labor theory of value, as an explanation of political economy distinct from the bourgeois understanding of it, rest. Historical materialism depends entirely, then, on this fundamental abstraction, but it is an abstraction, in turn, that stems entirely from the structural, material relations of production, because it is an abstraction that can only be enabled by the fact that the capitalist controls the material means of production. Therefore, at the very heart of Marx’s analysis of capital is the dialectic relationship between forms of materiality and forms of abstraction.
This sort of relationship between materiality and abstraction runs through- out Marx’s work and is a central methodological lesson from Marx that I incorporate into this analysis. For instance, the very act of exchange is ani- mated by this dialectic. This could be the case whether the act of exchange in question is between capitalist and worker, or whether the exchange in question involves the circulation of money and commodities, the contours of which Marx describes at the start of Grundrisse and Capital. Biocapital, like any other form of circulation of capital, involves the circulation and exchange of money and commodities, whose analysis needs to remain central and at the forefront of analysis. But in addition, the circulations of new and particular forms of currency, such as biological material and information, emerge. One of the things that genomics fundamentally enables is a particular type of materialization of information, and its decoupling from its material biological source (such as tissue or cell line).”
“And yet, as Marx teaches us, one cannot be satisfied by simply tracing the circuits traveled by various forms of commodity, currency, or capital. Because again, at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the circulation of money and commodities is the mystical and magical nature of the commodity, the fact that it is, in his words, ‘‘full of metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 163). In other words, at the heart of the interaction between either worker and capitalist or money and commodity is an uncanny kernel of abstraction that eludes capture in purely materialist terms.≤≤ It is this uncanny kernel that enables the commodity, which as an object is a rather banal thing, to become the mediator of social bonds. Indeed, that Marx alludes to it doing so in a ‘‘theological’’ manner is particularly striking. If, twenty-two years previously (in The German Ideology), he dismissed religion as ideological and therefore superstructure, a form of false consciousness, then by the time he writes Capital, the ‘‘theological’’ character of the commodity becomes a central symptom of its fetish.≤≥ It is not surprising, then, that a moment of exchange is also referred to as a moment of conversion, conversion being a process whereby one type of object (money, for instance) gets converted for its holder into another (such as commodity), but also being, explicitly, a theological category.”
“It is not ownership itself but the modes and categories of ownership that constitute the terrain for hegemonic struggle in genomics. In other words, what is at stake is the rendering of the ‘‘raw material’’ of production ‘‘public’’—that is, not ‘‘owned’’—in order to give later ownership advantage to those who control the modes of production.
These disputes highlight issues of corporate agency. While unobstructed access and speedy progress of research remain the stated goals of all parties concerned, clearly for each party research progresses ‘‘speedily’’ only when they have unobstructed access, combined with the right, whenever they feel appropriate, to slow down and charge everyone else. The inherent logic of ownership, after all, is that the owner can decide what to do with the object (that has, by virtue of its objectification, become alienable) owned.”
“The other crucial aspect worth noting here is that there are two economies at stake that are themselves not seamless with respect to each other and that correspond to Marx’s ‘‘industrial’’ versus ‘‘commercial’’ capitalisms that I discussed while talking about the relationship of biocapital to systems of capital- ism writ large. On the one hand, there is the r & d, manufacturing, and marketing of drugs, the component of the drug development economy that has to do with the production, distribution, and sale of commodities (similar to Marx’s ‘‘industrial capitalism’’). On the other, there is the speculative mar- ket, which for pharmaceutical companies (almost all of which in the United States are publicly traded) translates into market valuation on Wall Street (similar to Marx’s ‘‘commercial capitalism’’).”
“The salvationary potential of biocapital resides in the very nature of the enterprise of drug development, being as it is in the business of making sick people better. And yet this alone is insufficient to make drug development a salvationary enterprise of the sort that it is in the United States. For that, the therapeutic potential of drug development has to be articulated with other belief systems, especially the neoliberal faith in free market innovation. In other words, the salvationary potential of biocapital has to do not just with the value accruing from ‘‘bio’’ but also from the value accruing from ‘‘capital.’’ This relationship of capital to the theological was recognized by Marx to exist even in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but it acquires different performative force when the magic, as in the case of high-tech innovation, involves pulling rabbits out of hats rather than just generating infinite surplus.
While capitalism, as Marx famously suggests in his analysis of commodity fetishism (Marx 1976 [1867]), has always been theological,≤≠ the explicit treatment of the relationship between capitalism and Protestant Christianity, of course, has been provided by Weber (2001 [1930]). If the ‘‘spirit’’ of capitalism could persuasively be said to have been animated by a Protestant ethic, then the spirit of biocapitalism, certainly in the United States, could be said to be animated by a ‘‘born-again’’ ethic.”
June 5, 2007
Great exploration of the interplay and relationship between capital and the life-sciences. By far one of the best texts re-engaging Marx ... (did I mention he is on my committee.)
May 17, 2024
This book was assigned to me by Dr. Denise Albanese in her Cultural Study of Science and Technology course in the spring of 2024. In this work, Kaushik Sunder Rajan uses the concept of "biocapital" to explore a number of global phenomena taking place in the genomic and post-genomic era, with a particular emphasis on India and the United States of America. While some of Rajan's analysis of of religion (Christianity in particular) are less than stellar, Rajan's analysis of the pharmaceutical industry, global capitalism, science, technology, business, and medicine are rich, layered, and provocative. Recommended.
March 31, 2014
A densely theorized work of multi-sited ethnography, Sunder Rajan examines genomics in Silicon Valley and India from a Marxist perspective, developing a complex and deeply interwoven account of an implosion of science, truth, value, economics, and national and corporate agendas. I felt that the most interesting parts of the book centered on the role of hype in the biotech industry, and the implosion between statements of scientific fact and public relations untruth. That said, this book might be a little too much-flabby with jargon and too enamored of re-inscribing the exploitation of capitalism in general to reach an insightful point about this particular moment of exuberance and great wealth making implied by genomics, even in the absence of clear improvements in health or even actual products. An important book, to be sure, but one that sits uneasily.
December 30, 2015
Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets….
August 25, 2013
So. Necessary.
Read
April 30, 2018Fazlaca akademik bir çalışma olduğunu belirtmek lazım. İktisat altyapınız yoksa fazla teşebbüs etmeyin. Zira kullanılan terimler oldukça zorluyor. Çevirinin de çok fazla sade olmadığını söyleyebilirim.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews