| Popis: |
The term “biocapitalism” commonly means “commodification of life”. As a critical tool, it is an important part of the rhetorical apparatus that denounces the “neoliberal (bio)economy” and relations of its elements: human bodies, cells and tissues, biotech companies and stock markets. However, sociologists K. Birch and D. Tyfield in a series of studies attempted to discover the mass practices denoted by this term – “biocapital” practices dealing with materiality of living objects, as well as the observed bio-economic processes. As a result, they failed to form a consistent idea of biocapitalism and related bio-concepts (bioeconomics and biovalue). This article makes an attempt to reveal this inconsistency through the conceptualization of contradictions of biocapitalism. These contradictions seem to have emerged most acutely in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, they are described as three types of desynchronization: between the public and the private, between capi-talism and the “free market”, and between “internal” and “external” biological threats. Desynchronization in the general sense is understood as a produced lack of simultaneity, a fabricated anachronism. For example, “private” life of people looks like anachronism in the background of the “public” dimension of the pandemic, etc. At the same time, within the framework of desynchronization, it is impossible to detect directly either “commodification of life” or what could be called the expectations of a capitalist society from the biotechnology. In this regard, we can say that biocapitalism is realized through the exclusion of both life itself (vitality) and a good human life. I am trying to demonstrate this by pointing out two cases that can be designated as the falling out of “bio-...” from “biocapitalism”. |
