Melinda Cooper’s forceful Life as surplus is a political economy of the exploitation of life in the biotech era that exposes the modes of re/production attuned to late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism. The book concentrates on the processes by which the ‘emergent possibilities’ in the life sciences became increasingly entangled with the ‘project of U.S. neoliberalism’. It traces convincingly the concrete mechanisms—political, legislative and regulatory—operating at the level of international relations by which post-welfare US bioeconomic trends extended globally, for instance through intellectual property laws. Cooper’s fascinating account offers a gripping analysis of the accelerated rush for the ‘untapped biovalue stored in life’ (BioSocieties, 2007: 287). What she firmly and vividly exposes, however, is that biovalue, the promissory surplus of life, has come to be perceived less as a stored resource than a permanent source of regeneration. Accordingly, the expectation of a return of investment in life itself has lost any sense of limits to growth. At the core of Life as surplus is the unveiling of an economic logic and a life culture that goes beyond the commodification of life to engage in a ‘delirious’ venture, ‘an excess of promise’—economic, scientific and even religious—that aims to capture the process of emergent life. At the same time, Cooper doesn’t mince her words about the global inequalities, violence, ecological destruction and reinstatements of oppressive moral orders involved in this course for limitless life: an ‘actual devastation’ of life in the present.
This book is not about an economic superstructure determining contemporary life sciences, its originality is rather to expose a dynamic tissue in which socio-political interests and scientific developments integrate, opening possibilities for ‘life itself’ to collaborate in its own reproduction as surplus. Studying sites of coalescence between biological and economic epistemologies, Life as surplus engages in its first section with developments in molecular biology, microbiology, infectious disease research and space biology. The second section approaches the emerging sciences of tissue engineering, contemporary assisted reproductive technologies and embryonic stem cell research. Drawing upon diverse sources (policy texts, theories of biology, political economy), this book offers different points of insertion which will appeal to different audiences across the disciplinary spectrum—those interested in contemporary life sciences (biology, environmental sciences, global public health policies, reproductive technologies) as well as in philosophy, cultural studies of biology and political economy. Finally, in spite of the technicality of its Marxian conceptual framework and biological scholarship, I believe the book remains accessible to non-specialists while simultaneously pushing forward contemporary theorizations of biocapitalism. This is a very rich book. In this review I highlight the threads of thinking that have impressed me most.
Life as surplus is divided into two sections, each containing three chapters. The introduction—which offers useful chapter overviews—grounds the book’s detection of neoliberal biopolitics in a continuation of Michel Foucault’s approach to the entanglements between modern political economy and the life sciences, taking this research line into the neoliberal post-welfare era. Cooper departs from Foucault, however, in shifting the target of analysis and critique. Instead of neoclassical economic theories, models of market equilibrium, welfare state policies, and the measurement and commodification of life, her targets are the non-equilibrium models, post-Fordist flexibilization and financialization of life that lie at the heart of the neoliberal project.
Chapter 1, ‘Life beyond the limits’, deploys Cooper’s theoretical framework for understanding the invention of the US bioeconomy between the late 1960s and mid 1970s and its onward developments. The historical grounds of the argument refer to the massive investments in the life sciences that were crucial to reorder US production into an innovation-based economy notably obsessed by overcoming earthly energetic limits. The response to economic and environmental breakdowns related to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in the 1970s recession was the refashioning of the economy into a post-Fordist regime—notably through the destandardization of production. These circumstances opened up new forms of production and accumulation, relying heavily on financial investment in future outcomes of knowledge and innovation. Importantly, this regime, opened to flexible transformation through innovation, integrating the promises of a ‘recombinant era’ fed by new biotechnologies. Its aim became to mobilize the productive capacities of life.
A crucial thread running through Cooper’s book is its analysis of the speculative temporality of this life culture: its ultimate specificity is not so much to make of life a product but to capture ‘production itself’ in its emergent possibilities. The corresponding economic epistemology is the financialization of life. This conception of life allowed investment in biotechnologies to become a major terrain of ‘delirious’ speculation. In order to understand the US dominance in the contemporary bioeconomy, Cooper refers to its ‘debt imperialism’, an empire of perpetually renewed debt. This economic logic, based on the ‘self-valorisation of debt’, is reproduced in the dream of a ‘biological autopoiesis’ beyond restrictions. Accordingly, the new life culture dwells in the absence of a present material reference to the actual outcome of investment, of the promise of emergent life that biotechnologies are meant to realize. Here, again, economic and biological epistemologies coalesce.
Another crucial line of argument of this book is to show the mixed intellectual resources of the neoliberal destandardization of life. For example, sophisticated theories that radically reconceptualized life as permanently in crisis became an unexpected ally. In these frameworks, exceptional phenomena are the universal law of life. Such theories cease focusing on rules and equilibriums to seek for the motor of life’s evolution in disturbance, extremes or disruptive organisms—such as the so-called ‘extremophiles’ (microbes that tolerate and flourish under extreme geochemical and physical conditions). Cooper shows also how some cosmologies of the biosphere (such as the Gaia hypothesis) and neoliberal energy policy texts coincide: life is permanently on the edge of catastrophe and is infinitely capable of regeneration. The consequences of these ideas are far from immaterial. The belief in life’s self-regeneration allows both the depletion of terrestrial resources and the excess of waste to be overlooked. Spatial limits are off-shored and temporal limits relocated in a speculative future. The correlative affective effects of belief in infinite regeneration after the looming catastrophe are fear and apprehension.
For Cooper, the bioeconomy re-enacts a classic inner contradiction of capitalism: the very idea of creation of value from life requires a ‘corresponding move to devalue life’. This argument is the high point of Cooper’s timely re-appropriation of Marx’s theoretical framework to rethink biopolitics. This contradiction entails a politics of scarcity and a re-imposition of oppressive limits. Thus the book is critical towards both the excess of promise and its corollary re-imposed limitations. One form of limitation is the property form, necessary for capturing the subtraction of surplus and regulating its rarity. In this account of neoliberal biopolitics, the property of the life that is yet to emerge was to be secured for profit by US imperialist property law. This concrete reconfiguration of property laws—through the TRIPS agreement—is explored in Chapter 2, ‘Pharmaceutical empire’. Here, Cooper shows an example of the dramatic consequences of the dark side of excessive promise in the limited future of profitable new medicines: ‘the production of an attendant scarcity of health’. Indeed, Cooper argues, ‘health for all’ would mark the end of the logic of value through scarcity. She reads this aspect of the self-reorganization of world trade to encompass ‘knowledge’ as a response to a new capacity of ‘Third World’ countries to develop generic drugs of their own. The restriction of access to cheap drugs is consistent with the refusal of liveable life for a ‘surplus population’, for ‘a life not worth the costs of its own reproduction’ (p. 61).
These arguments are developed in relation to discourses and policies instigated in the context of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, in particular the South African case. Here, however, Cooper exposes the difficulty of a clear-cut analysis regarding postcolonial states’ ambivalent resistances. South African President Mbeki’s strategies effectively denied and stigmatized people affected by AIDS, with consequences that were not very different from those achieved by the Reagan administration: orientation towards ‘moral regeneration’ and the escalating of military response. This is another major theme of this chapter; the militarization of humanitarian intervention, reinforced by the framing of AIDS as a global security threat—a ‘complex emergency’ presented as unmanageable. In this atmosphere, Cooper argues, danger to life doesn’t come from an outside (infectious disease); it is life itself that is reconceptualized as ‘always infused with danger’. This permanent security threat feeds affects of persistent fear that serve to justify oppressive limitations and to create paradigmatic enemies that should be kept out—in the case of AIDS in South Africa the migrant and the symbols of deviant sexual relations.
Chapter 3, ‘Preempting emergence’ pursues the analysis of the securitization of everyday life. It offers an illuminating discussion on the framework of thought based on ‘emergence’, which has become so pervasive. Here Cooper shows a convergence between theories of microbiology that constantly warn against the risks of microbial attack and biological catastrophe, and neoliberal and bio-warfare official discourses foregrounding unstable and unpredictable emergent threats. This context encourages simultaneously apprehensive vigilance and risk-taking decision-making. Preemptive action becomes the solution in the face of looming disasters at the heart of life itself: ‘preemption transforms our generalized alertedness into a really mobilizing force’ (p. 89). Foregrounding catastrophe—e.g. the threat of bioterrorism—creates an atmosphere where there seems to be no other choice than military intervention. In the meantime, the everyday devastation of life can continue. For instance, Cooper reminds how ‘institutional preparedness’ for actual health threats started declining during the war-mongering Reagan era through cutbacks in public health. The continuity of ‘war on terror’ logics in the life domain, ‘humanitarian warfare’, also ended up being played out inside US territory during the hurricane Katrina crisis.
The second section of Life as surplus shifts to quite different domains of the ‘Culture of Life’. Chapter 4, ‘Contortions’, analyses the differences introduced by the economic ontology of tissue engineering with respect to philosophies of biology supporting organ transplantation (with references to the thinking of E.J. Marey and G. Canguilhem). Tissue engineering (TE) biotechnologies move away from mechanistic understandings of the organism, from the ‘suspended animation’ temporality required by organ transplantation. The TE realm exploits the regenerative powers of the body and its self-modulation of fields in continuity rather than in parts to be assembled. Cooper elucidates a correspondence of this development with the passage to post-Fordist production forms: from standardization to flexibility of form, from living body parts to tissue sources of variable forms. The surplus promise translates here in a permanent embryogenesis. If the problem with transplantation was the scarcity and limited life span of medical implants, the specific danger of post-Fordist biomedical production is a surplus productivity. Its crisis might thus come from an overproduction that manifests, for instance, in the ‘excessive vitality of cancer’.
In Chapter 5, ‘Labors of regeneration’, assisted reproductive technologies, the global egg market and stem cell research interrelate in the temporal logic of capitalist financial investment in future surplus of emergent life. Indeed, fantasies of regeneration bump against temporal limits, i.e. life spans. This is a motivation to harness the reproductive capacities of life. Moreover, in research on human embryonic stem cell lines the economic value lies in the future possibilities of growth. Here, again, the cultural tendency Cooper spells out is not standardization, nor even eugenics, but the overcoming of limits to growth and the diversification of possible forms. But the ‘potential of cellular immortalization’ and the regeneration of life appear also as a ‘solution to the ailing growth prospective of the pharmaceutical sector’ (p. 143). In these contexts, the reconfiguration of the value associated with human biological life eschews fears of commodifying the potential person by targeting ‘the surplus life of the immortalized human stem cell’ that has entered ‘the circuits of patentable invention’ (p. 147). A question Cooper asks is: where will the material resources required to (re)produce ‘capital’s future embryonic body’ be found? And points at a possible ominous answer explored by feminist critiques: in a ‘self-regenerating, inexhaustible, quietly sacrificial source of reproductive labor—a kind of global feminine’ (p. 150).
Now, how are these logics of limitless regeneration of US neoliberal biopolitics compatible with a neoconservative re-foundation of moral orders aiming to bind life and reproduction? The last chapter, ‘The unborn born again’, explores this contradiction in the position of G.W. Bush: a partial alignment with private biomedical sectors enabling research on existing stem cell lines and support for pro-life politics. Cooper develops a historical reading of the political economies of evangelical Protestantism, in which rebirth becomes the driving force. The neofundamentalist move today, Cooper argues in an insightful reading of neoliberal and evangelical ideas, is projecting its questions into the future ‘as a horizon of prophetic restoration’. This is how the promise of surplus, thriving in a temporal expanse of infinite expectation, is consistent with the dreams of permanent hope of redemption invested in the rebirth of the ‘unborn’ person.
For Cooper ‘the right to life movement embodies the contrarian impulses of capitalism, bringing together the promissory futures of neoliberalism with a violent reimposition of limits, fundamentals and values’ (p. 102). Life as surplus comes full circle in this way. The US neoliberal project is an economics of faith, promise, belief and debt. In right-to-life politics, as in expectations of regenerative medicine, there is no immediate return expected, but a renewal of the promise through the rolling over of debt: permanent embryogenesis. Again this entails limitations. The ‘right to life’ focuses on the ‘potential of the unborn person’, a policy compatible with the depletion of health resources for those who are born. Also, living in a state of permanent expectation infuses anxiety and fear; the promise or return, of restoration, after all, might not be realized. The neoconservative response is to re-impose fundamentals: value, property, heterosexual family values. Also congruent with fear are the preemptive wars, or the ‘just wars’ without end, through which G. W. Bush intended to bring this culture of life to the rest of the world. Fear is both an effect and a driving force of this permanent instability of life.
Life as surplus is fascinating, illuminating and conceptually creative. It is also an enjoyable read. The world it depicts is relatively in suspension at the time of writing this review, given the global economic collapse and the end (at least provisionally) of the neoconservative dominance of the state in the US. The imperialistic delirium of self-generating debt has confirmed Cooper’s diagnosis and exploded. However, the culture it exposes is probably not dead when the prevalent recipe to get us out of this mess is presented as the reflation of economic growth. Since I read Life as surplus, I have adopted the optics of spotting the devastations and productions of scarcity that inevitably accompany delirious promises of wealth in a necessarily finite world.
The force of its theoretical argument has the potential to illuminate the terrain it explores. Though the book abounds in different themes and locales, it is clearly concerned with exposing common logics and tendencies that cohere. I found its overwhelming rationale sometimes alienating, in particular when the logic of surplus/devastation forces the material to fit into its theoretical framework, which is rarely questioned or disturbed by the specific sites observed. No interstices. The analysis has thus a totalizing potential to sweep over specificity, in spite of the author’s warnings against a linear reading. Yet, there is a positive side to this strongly affirmed theoretical positioning. I found it very thought-provoking, and it could provide a healthy shake-up for contemporary theories of biocapital that re-appropriate the Marxist framework while stripping it of its political anxiety. The problem with the totalizing force of Life as surplus’ macro-analysis of the bioeconomy is rather its potentially disempowering effect. Are there any possibilities of resisting this overwhelming logic? Cooper redirects the generalized critique of the logic of commodification of life for immediate profit to a more anxiety-provoking site of investment: the promise of future return. She thus rightfully situates the neoliberal vampirization of everyday life in its capture of the future. Against the dream of infinite futures, Cooper is not opting for a return to ‘reasonable’ spaces of management of growth (such as the welfare state and the logic of fixed value and common norms). My question is: are hope and promise, belief and faith, simply the hostages of neoliberal capitalism and neofundamentalism deliriums?
Cooper offers some glimpses for resistance. She concludes the first section of her book with a call for ‘undermining the nexus between military security, the politics of life, and new forms of speculative capitalization’ (p. 99). The aim is to undermine the ‘foregone conclusion’ that anticipates catastrophe with, for instance, a ‘creative sabotage of the future’ (p. 99) and, if that fails, to use eventual catastrophes as an occasion for ‘renewing and creating communities’ (p. 99). She also emphasizes the role of HIV/AIDS activists internationally in pushing global intellectual property to retreat from some of its deadly policies regarding antiretroviral drugs. These are cues of what are also life cultures, but also life cultures of resistance to macro-political frameworks. For this reason I found the book could be compatible with, and completed by, a search for alternative routes, that is through an approach to neoliberal devastation in the life domain from another standpoint: people’s attempts to ‘escape’ limitations (Papadopoulos et al., Reference Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos2008). In other words, can we seek other kinds of investment for our speculative drives? Yet this book also shows how oppositional thinking can be consistent with the overriding logics in which it evolves. We are engaged in our time and take part in its ideological unfolding, even when we are theorizing possible resistances. If the investment in the possibility of emerging life and the assumption of flexible complexity appear as pervasive modes of thinking and existing today, the strategy might not be refusal, but to ‘charge ourselves as accountable to anticipation’ (Adams et al., forthcoming). For this task also, Cooper’s brilliant and inventive mapping of prevailing contemporary biopolitical imaginaries is precious.
