Sakari Tamminen - Recoding Life: Information and the Biopolitical

The basic formula of the global bio-economy promises that a renewal of industrial society could become reality in the near future as a result of the new ways to make use of biomass as a basic material that replaces fossil fuels. Different terms are being used, sometimes it is called a knowledge-based bio-economy (the European Commission), a comprehensive bio-economy strategy (Germany), a biobased economy (the Netherlands), a bio-economy blueprint (the US), and biomass industrialization (Japan). Instead of biomass, a specific type of biological resources might be mentioned, or only certain sectors might be discussed. Regardless, technological change is presented as integral to a transition that affects all of us, includes all of us, and leads us to a sustainable society.

Particularly in the EU and its member states, there are numerous policy processes attempting to bring together stakeholders and engaged participants in a continuous interdisciplinary dialogue among industry, science (both natural sciences and humanities) and civil society. Various instruments are being explored, like sustainability criteria, certification, licencing, green deals, innovation contracts, partnerships, and the like. Invariably, the policy language invokes a demos, deriving strength from its ability to accommodate diverging and converging interests, diverse points of view, and multiple understandings of the transition to sustainability (Frow et al. 2009). Such inclusiveness, however, implies a politics of imagination that itself requires examination in so far as it re-establishes the principle of sovereignty for the age of biology that is being promised. Biology and sovereignty come together, as Foucault explains, by how the power of disciplinary knowledge that is exercised through the social body is shaped as a grid that cannot in any way be transcribed in right, even though the two necessarily go together (Foucault 2003, 37).

The first section that follows examines the coherence of the global bio-economy, as a concept, against the backdrop of the life sciences as a field that is built on fragmented facts, data, and artefacts. What this implies is that it is a resolutely political vision that shows a socio-political order that is being imagined as a unity of concrete, discrete, and consolidated innovations and policies. The second section echoes the quotations new right by discussing biohacking and open-source seeds. Each of these can be considered as counterexamples and challengers to the suggestion of a global bio-economy as an alternative. More precisely, the two topics are both related to the language of openness and access but are different in how they seek to re-configure and re-distribute forms of agency, subjectivity, and identity. Examining these three attempts at formulating alternatives in various ways will allow us to return to Foucaults argument that we cannot go on working like this forever; having recourse to sovereignty against discipline (ibid., 39). The aim of this chapter is therefore not just a critical examination of these fields, re-establishing a boundary between the reality of things and idealism; rather the notion of the alternative is key to understanding how the boundary between life and society is being re-imagined constantly. As theorised earlier in this book: what counts as an alternative should not be secondary to critique but an integral part of the analysis.