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What Can Biotechnology Do?

Process-events vs the Bio-logic of Life: The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture by Eugene Thacker Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Goldsmiths College, University of London, L.Parisi{at}gold.ac.uk

This essay is an occasion to discuss the critical trajectories of a now common field of enquiry concerned with the impact of biomediatic technologies on politics and culture. Thacker's book The Global Genome importantly sits between debates about biopower as the governance of life and biopolitics as the transformation of what life can be. In particular, the book advances the hypothesis that as information produces `life itself', so it has become central to a political economy of excess and surplus value. In other words, information does not dematerialize biology. Bioinformatics and biotech informationalize the living and rematerialize biology. As biotech becomes central to biopower, the global genome comes to reigning profit, labour, racism, biocolonialism, biosecurity, and bioart. However, Thacker's reliance on a bio-ontology of life grounding all relations of power leaves no space for process-events to break the chain of life's perpetual reproduction.

Key Words: bioinformatics • bio-ontology • biopower

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 4, 155-163 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409104973


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