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Science as Culture
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A Surplus of Surplus?
David Tyfield
a
a
Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University , UK
Published online: 12 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: David Tyfield (2009) A Surplus of Surplus?, Science as Culture, 18:4, 497-500,
DOI: 10.1080/09505430902951334
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430902951334
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REVIEW
A Surplus of Surplus?
DAVID TYFIELD
Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, UK
Life as Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, by Melinda Cooper,
University of Washington Press, 2008, 222 pp., 18.99.
In recent years a number of STS researchers, including some of the elds most distin-
guished scholars such as Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, have sought to apply
their methods to understanding the economy, especially nance. This economic turn
has undoubtedly yielded important insights, highlighting the performativity of much
economic activity and the striking similarity between the sciences and economics in the
transformation of contingency into fact.
Even more recently, however, there has been a renewed interest in issues in political
economy and their mutual interaction with the development of science. This is particularly
apparent in the life sciences, with the blossoming of research exploring the concept of
biocapital (see Sunder Rajan, 2006; Helmreich, 2008). Arguably this shiftit is prob-
ably too grand as yet to call it a political economic turnis long overdue and opens
up important opportunities for STS to contribute in a much more meaningful way to pol-
itical debates; debates in which science and technology are increasingly central and hence
to the mutual benet of both political economy and science studies.
Yet the obstacles to such a shift are clear. The interactionist social ontology of much
STS, for instance, has not merely eschewed but renounced any reference to issues of pol-
itical economic structure, while the prevalent focus on detailed ethnographic research on
the production of scientic knowledge has, in any case, often meant such issues seem all
but irrelevant. The current global economic crisis, however, seems to demand even deeper
engagement with political economy as these issues will no longer form a relatively stable
context that can be taken for granted.
To support this trend is not to suggest it is straightforward, let alone that political
economy holds the key to STSs problems. There are, of course, numerous ways to go
about this reconnection to political economy so that it merely opens up a new arena for
Science as Culture
Vol. 18, No. 4, 497500, December 2009
Correspondence Address: David Tyeld, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.
Email: d.tyeld@lancaster.ac.uk
0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/09/040497-4 #2009 Process Press
DOI: 10.1080/09505430902951334
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contestation and argument. This is true even for the diverse projects that make use of
Marxian analysis and terminology, which need not have very much in common. As
such, anyone bold enough to accept the challenge of interdisciplinary merging of STS
and political economy leaves themselves open to numerous lines of attack: at the very
least regarding the perspective and methodology assumed in each case and the way in
which they are combined.
Melinda Coopers book Life as Surplus is one such Marxian-inspired project and one
which dives head rst into these shark-infested interdisciplinary waters. The book is a
bold synthesis exploring the intimate relations between the trajectory of the global capitalist
economy in the neoliberal period since the 1980s and the spectacular and contemporaneous
rise of biotechnology. It is a hugely ambitious book that embraces whole-heartedly the
opportunities for insights from interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation and from exploring
the interaction of big themes such as those that feature in its title: biotechnology,
capitalism and neoliberalism, life and surplus. And it is thus both a challenging
and insightful read and one that is often frustrating, breathless and overstated.
Coopers book is extremely wide-ranging, but there is a unifying thread that runs
through it. This central thesis, however, is not so easy to set out briey but is curiously
slippery and never stated explicitly. The overall theme is simply that the life sciences
are currently being employed for the creation of surplus value and being shaped (and dis-
torted?) by this goal. However, the argument goes much further than this by claiming that
the life sciences and biotechnology are a central element of the neoliberal project of nan-
cialised global capitalism.
This is not an economic argument regarding the centrality of biotechnologies to econ-
omic practice across the economy or its place as the dominant sector of the economy.
Rather, biotechnology is central in terms of the transformation in the understanding of
the economyparticularly that of the dominant agents of this processthat the interplay
of biological and nancial capitalist concepts affords. The crucial conceptual fusion here is
between (1) the self-regenerative nature of biological life and its autopoietic capacity to
transcend apparent limits to growth through mutation and emergent complexity, and
(2) the capacity for nance continually to transgress apparent limits of economic growth
in a self-propagating dynamic of speculative promise begetting speculative promise in
the production of surplus value.
The key concept of the book is thus self-(re)generation, Cooper then offering a series of
case studies across the life sciences that provide Foucauldian genealogies of how this con-
ceptual combination was accompanied by the (ongoing) attempt to fuse the regenerativity
of nance and of biological life in practice. She suggests that there is a perfect t between
the speculative and self-regenerative logic of surplus value under neoliberal nancialised
capitalism and the understanding of biological life that emerges with biotechnological
breakthroughs in the early 1980s. In this way, the life sciences have become increasingly
subjected to the logic, not merely of commodication, but of nancialisation and the
speculative self-regeneration of prot, our starting point above.
These case studies take the reader across a wide diversity of life science-related issues.
Chapter 1 introduces the overall argument and focuses in particular on the interaction of
the rise of the bioeconomy and the transformation in the global political economy
towards US-centric neoliberalism. It also incorporates discussion of the resonance
between the complex systems analysis of biospheres and microbial ecologies developing
at NASA, especially within its exobiology (i.e. life on other planets) programme, and the
498 D. Tyeld
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neoliberal backlash to the Meadows 1970s work on Limits to Growth. Chapter 2 discusses
Big Pharma, HIV/AIDS and access to drugs, the South African governments refusal to
admit a connection between HIV and AIDS and the militarisation of AIDS as a global
security threat. Chapter 3 discusses the biological turn in the war on terror (p. 74) and
the discourse of pre-emption regarding complex and unpredictable biological risks as
well as WMDs; Chapter 4, tissue engineering, developments in topological research and
the promise of renewable bodies; Chapter 5, (embryonic) stem cells and human reproduc-
tive labour; and Chapter 6, the American evangelical right, neo-conservatism and the
right to life movement. As this (inexhaustive) list shows, the book is thus not only
wide-ranging in the areas of life science research it incorporates, but exceptionally ambi-
tious in the range of broader social trends it seeks to illuminate.
There is much to admire in the book. It raises important macro questions regarding the
intimate interaction of the life sciences and the neoliberal transformation of the global
capitalist economy, under the aegis of the United States, in a way that is generally over-
looked in STS and is absolutely essentialin this reviewers opinion, at leastto under-
standing of the current trajectories of many sciences. It is also motivated by a laudable goal
of contributing to a counterpolitics (p. 99) that aims to open up the possible trajectories of
change and opportunities for preferable futures beyond the singular options presented by
dominant discourses (as per there is no alternative), even in the case where catastrophic
change can no longer be totally avoided.
Furthermore, it is promiscuous (p. 4) in the detailed illustrations it provides across the
life sciences. Not only is this a singularly impressive display regarding the diversity of
subjects mastered, but it also helps to illustrate the pervasive inuence of neoliberal
logics and, conversely, the diverse forces and loci in which these logics have themselves
been formed and developed. This promiscuity, however, comes at a cost and there is also
much that is problematic with the book. I focus here only on the most important weakness
given the thesis and title of the book as a whole, namely the (largely metaphorical) use of
the term of surplus.
I have discussed above how the central concept of the book is self-regenerativity, but
Cooper herself focuses rather on the concept of surplus. Every chapter ends with a dis-
cussion of how that particular development in the life sciences is related to the production
of surplus value and the transmutation of biological life into surplus life, a concept that is
pivotal but never really explained, hence the difculty of summarising the argument of the
book. But what work is surplus doing here? The answer is that it is through the terminol-
ogy of surplus that Cooper conceptualises the connection of the self-regenerativity of
biological life with the logic of nancial capital and the production of surplus value.
That is, the term surplus is taken from Marx and then its applicability for understanding
of the contemporary life sciences is used to show that the latter are dominated by the
speculative logic of nance capital.
This is a curious form of argument. In short, the ubiquitous use of the term surplus
through the book is at best unclear and, at worst, positively obfuscatory because it is used
both to insinuate a connection to nancial capitalism and as a synonym for autopoiesis;
yet this latter connotation is indirect and, even then, only in the specic context of
Marxs critique of political economy. According to Marx, there is a self-(re)generating
dynamic to capital and this involves the production of surplus value. But to use the term
surplus as synonymous with autopoiesis is entirely mistaken for at least two crucial
reasons, insofar as it is being used to suggest a connection to Marxian political economy.
A Surplus of Surplus? 499
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First, it is to conate two analytically distinct elements of Marxs theory, for it is value
that is self-valorising not surplus value, and while this self-valorisation by necessity
involves the production of surplus value, surplus value per se has no self-regenerating
character. Indeed, there is no inherent conceptual connection between surplus and self-
regeneration. This can be seen quite clearly by considering the lay meaning of the term
surplus, namely as more than is required for a given purpose or too much. In the
case of surplus value, surplus thus refers to the creation in an economic process of
more value than was needed to cover its costs of production. The creation of such
surplus is indeed an irreducible element of the self-valorising dynamic of capital, but it
has nothing directly to do with autopoiesis. Cooper, however, uses surplus in the
sense of being associated with matters of limitlessness and potentiality and hence self-
regenerativitya sense that is completely unrelated to its use in Marxian political
economywhile at the same time explicitly trading on the link to (Marxs analysis of)
capitalism that the terminology evokes.
This leads to the second reason that it is mistaken to conate surplus and autopoiesis,
namely that the theory that seems to provide some rationale for that conceptual identi-
cation also makes it quite clear that the apparently self-regenerative character of capital
is actually entirely fallacious. Rather, value can only revalorise itself through command
of human labour power. The culture of a nancialised economy, such as that of the past
30 years, is particularly prone to be taken in by this falsehood, for the dominant sector
of the economy (i.e. nance) appears to make prot ex nihilo in a way that industrial
capital, necessarily and daily mediated by an actual labour force, cannot. As such,
Coopers argument that there is a particular resonanceat a cultural levelbetween a
nancialised economy and (current understanding of) biological life, their apparent limit-
lessness and autopoiesis, is interesting and plausible. But if we actually conate the pro-
duction of surplus value and autopoiesis, and describe a nancialised capitalist economy in
terms of a surplus of potentiality, we thereby immediately negate any attempt to describe
the immanent limitations of such an economy and, indeed, the impossibility of its self-
propagation; i.e. in marked contrast to the autopoiesis of biological life. Furthermore,
in the context of the current global economic crisis, these immanent limits to nancialised
growth are now all too clear and can hardly be overlooked in a credible analysis.
In short, Coopers book presents a signicant challenge to STS, demanding that engage-
ment with issues of science and technology should also incorporate broader factors of pol-
itical economy in a much more concerted way than has been common to date. Yet her book
also suffers from this very ambition, seeking to explain much more than her argument can
support. Perhaps, however, these rst forays into new inter-disciplinary territory must of
necessity be so bold and contentious. In stimulating this debate for further research, at the
very least, Coopers book deserves to be widely read.
References
Helmreich, S. (2008) Species of biocapital, Science as Culture, 17(4), pp. 463478.
Sunder Rajan, K. (2006) Biocapital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
500 D. Tyeld
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