Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Luciana Parisi
Abstract
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
W
HEN, IN the late 1980s, popular culture and science fiction drew
attention to a new kind of biotechnological pervasiveness directly
investing matter in its molecular composition, from DNA to
proteins, it was like a dark and stormy precursor for an inevitable transfor-
mation of the biopolitical order. At the end of the 1970s, when the first
■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(4): 155–163
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409104973