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SPEAKING TRUTH TO BIOPOWERLars Thorup Larsen aa Department of Political Science , University of Aarhus , DK-8000, Aarhus C,Denmark E-mail:Published online: 01 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Lars Thorup Larsen (2007) SPEAKING TRUTH TO BIOPOWER, Distinktion: ScandinavianJournal of Social Theory, 8:1, 9-24, DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2007.9672936
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SPEAKING TRUTH TO BIOPOWER On the Genealogy of Bioeconomy
Much of the biopolitical literature has been preoccupied with the relationship between biopolitics and economy, or bioeconomy as it is increasingly called. Although much has been said about the economical aspects of developments in biotechnology and biomedicine, the central concept of bioeconomy has been vastly under-theorized, a situation that leads to serious confusion over the novelty of the phenomenon. This article argues that Foucault's lectures on biopolitics clearly demonstrate how intimately its origin is bound up with political economy and liberalism. Instead of seeing biotechnology as creat- ing an unholy alliance with contemporary capitalism, we should rather see today's developments against the backdrop of an initial relationship between biopolitics and political economy; this article seeks to elaborate the genealogy of this initial relationship. Two aspects are important in this alleged genealogy of bioeconorny: first, the concept of the population and its proper form of 'economical' self-regulation is essential. Second, the truth-telling mechanism (veridiction) of political economy plays a central role, because it potentially subjects any political rationality to a critical test.
Keywords: Bioeconomy; biopolitics; critique; Foucault; genealogy; political economy; truth regimes; veridiction.
Introduction
The topic of bioeconomy has gathered much attention in recent years. The view has become pervasive, not only in academic circles, that some synthesis of economy and the biological is a key relationship in contemporary society. It is now also fashionable among economic actors themselves to speak of the bio- economy as a new frontier for investment and production. It is far from clear, however, what the concept of bioeconomy means and to what extent it denotes the emergence of something new. This article does not intend to review all existing meanings of bioeconomy, but instead to use the genealogy of bioecon- omy as leverage for a more elaborate theoretical understanding of the concept. The essential attribute of bioeconomy is found to be the delicate association of biopolitics and economy, a relationship whose origin goes more than two cen- turies back and whose pivotal characteristic is the truth-telling mechanism of political economy. Before I present the main theoretical claim in more detail, let us look briefly at the present articulations of bioeconomy.
Even in cases where the term bioeconomy is not used explicitly, similar terms such as biovalue, biocapital, and bioproperty are used instead. These terms all combine biological life with some property of the economy. It is important to notice that this does not merely happen in academic literature, since a number
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of political and economic actors have begun to use them directly in documents and reports of various kinds.
An oftencited document is the 2005 report from the international account- ing company Ernst & Young titled, Bqrond Borders. Global Biotechnology Rf$~ort 2005 (Ernst & Young, 2005). This report concerns the financial prospects and profitability of the biotech industry and therefore has less outlook on the broader ramifications of bioeconomy than similar documents from policy ac- tors in the field. For example, the topic of bioeconomy is more directly articu- lated in the 2006 OECD publication titled The Bioeconomy to 2030. Designing a Poliq Agenda (OECD, 2006). The latter defines bioeconomy as the totality of society's economic operations utilizing the latent value of biological products and processes to create growth and well being for citizens and nations (OECD, 2006: 3). Side by side with the OECD initiative, the Council of the European Union has also set up a huge initiative in order to strengthen Europe's position in the global bioeconomy. This policy program titled, En Route to The Knowledge- Based Bioeconomy, is set to kick off in 2007 and, like its OECD counterpart, also works with a 20- to 25-year horizon in mind (European Bioperspectives, 2006). Both the OECD and the Council speak of bioeconomy as having very broad implications and yet, they conceptualize it rather mechanically as being the latent profit of new technology. So far, this only constitutes a new market, not a new economy.
The academic contributions are clearly more elaborated on the topic of bio- economy, but, in contrast to the policy documents just mentioned, they reflect instead the differentiation between neighboring academic disciplines. In their work on 'biovalue' and 'tissue economies', Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitch- ell (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006; Waldby, 2002) conceptualize the economy part not as in economics or political economy, but instead on the basis of an an- thropological conception of gift-giving networks partly inspired by Titmuss and Bourdieu (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006: 31). Closer to the biopolitics literature in social science and political theory, we find Nikolas Rose's recent contribution The Politics of Life Itself(2007), in which he boldly states:
A new economic space has been delineated - the bioeconomy - and a new form of capital - biocapital (...) Life itself has been made amenable to these new economic relations, as vitality is decomposed into a series of distinct and discrete objects - that can be isolated, delimited, stored, accumulated, mobilized, and exchanged, accorded a discrete value, traded across time, space, species, contexts, enterprises - in the service of many distinct objectives. (Rose, 2007: 6-7)
I will come back to his use of the expression 'life itself later, but detract this particular concept from the quotation and it basically sounds as if it is taken directly from Marx' analysis of the rise of capitalism. Rose seems to think that the current development of biomedicine and technology has laid the pathway open to the ultimate capitalization of human life. Many Marxists would prob- ably argue that this door was already open, and as exemplified in Hardt and Negri's work, it is perhaps not the usurpation but the production of life that constitutes the novelty of the present bioeconomy (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
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Hardt and Negri also speak of 'bioproperty' (2004: 181), which is understood in a more simple sense as the private property of biological objects.
Finally, Rajan's Biocapital (2006) attempts to bring together all these a p proaches and fuse Foucauldian concepts like biopolitics and power with a Marxist analysis of the reproduction of capital inside the framework of anthro- pological analysis (Rajan, 2006: 14,78). This adds up to a rather comprehensive analysis of the present capitalism, but at least for our purposes it is debatable if the theoretical juxtaposition of Foucauldian politics with Marxist economy is not a little rigid. One could even argue that the possible advantage of using Foucault to decipher the concept of bioeconomy is his insistence on not seeing such categories as the clash of two distinct spheres in society. Rather than syn- thesize opposite positions, the aim of a genealogy of bioeconomy is to demon- strate a certain intractable familiarity between biopolitics and economy at the outset. By demonstrating that biopolitics was co-constituted with economy early on, we can judge today's novelties against the right background, or to put it in simple terms, we need to know what the bioeconomy was in order to properly assess what it is allegedly becoming.
The essential claim in this article is that using Foucault's Naissance de la bio- politique (2004a) as the theoretical cornerstone, it is in fact possible to outline a genealogy of bioeconomy in which biopolitics and economy are coconstituted. Key to this association is both early political economy and the liberal arts of gov- ernment, although the later section also points to a special truth-telling func- tion of political economy, the so-called veridiction at the heart of bioeconomy. Paraphrasing Aaron Wildavsky's legendary Speaking Truth to Power (1987), the article's main title indicates precisely this centrality of economic truth telling. By speaking truth to biopower (or biopolitics),' economic rationality performs a sort of internal check on the political regulation of society, while biopolitics on the other hand supplies political rationality with a natural object to govern, which is the population. Before we get to the question of truth games, it is thus crucial to discuss the concept of biopolitics, because so much hinges upon the use of this infamous category.
There is no point in repeating Foucault's oftencited definition of the con- cept here (see Foucault, 1976: 183; 1997: 216). The idea is instead to position the present argument against the rather two-minded fashion in which it is often used in the literature. The term biopolitics is sometimes used to characterize a relatively recent transformation in the way power relations operate, while at other times it is portrayed as an intrinsic property of Western political rationality and the state. The following two sections attempt to elaborate on what causes this con- fusion by criticizing first the technologycentered view on biopolitics and second the state-centered view typically associated with the work of Giorgio Agamben.
Problems in a Technology-Centered Approach
Today, many scholars choose to combine empirical studies of new develop ments in the life sciences with a more or less explicit use of Foucault's concept of biopolitics. Judging from the empirical side, the sheer quantity of these stud-
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ies should tell us that we are dealing with a very fruitful combination, and it seems clear that the concept of biopolitics effectively uncovers the power effects of practices associated with biotechnology. It is much less clear, however, what broader theoretical lesson can be generalized from the spread of biotechnol- ogy, i.e. if biopolitical power has changed or entered a new phase because of new technological developments. One reason why this question is not easily settled is probably that many scholars in this tradition also tend to follow Foucault's suggestion to diagnose the present rather than theorize. While there are good reasons to do so, it appears relatively clear that his claim about the birth of bio- politics in the 18"' century is a theoretical one in the sense that he claims the exercise of power changed fundamentally when its primary object of regulation was conceived as being a living population.
Rose's recent book (2007) possibly best represents this literature, although it displays some ambiguity on this point. On the one hand, Rose recognizes the risk of seeing frontier technology as the irrefutable proof of a radically new social reality, and thus instead he chooses the more cautious route of writing a 'cartography of our present' (Rose, 2007: 4-7). This, on the other hand, is in clear contrast to the main argument in the book, which repeatedly says that we, due to the rapid developments in biomedicine, now live in an age where 'life itself and the 'very vitality' of human beings have become the objects of politi- cal contestation and economic capitalization (Rose, 2007: 3,40,258). The latter argument represents a technologycentered approach to both bioeconomy and to biopolitics in general because it places considerable weight on the role of new technology in shaping these phenomena.
In addition, this literature strongly favors frontier technology (see also Wahl- berg in this issue), although when Rose explains the importance of bioecon- omy, one of the key examples is the dramatic rise in US health care spending over the past 30 years (Rose, 2007: 34). The latter is indeed an interesting bio- economical case of how health care, state, and market interact, but it is less than clear how these long-standing issues support the claim of a new politicization of life itself. Even though some proportion of US health care spending obviously goes to new pharmaceuticals, research in the field demonstrates that it is not frontier technology but the clash between semicollective insurance schemes and market driven prices that can account for what now constitutes 20 % of the American GDP (Anderson et al., 2003).
The objective here is not to replace Rose's diagnosis of the present with an alternative approach, but to underline a key analytical point about biopolitics and technology. If we begin with the sheer detail of biotechnological develop ment, we can easily take their relevance for granted and forget exactly what general points we are looking for examples of. To exemplify this point further, it is useful to consult Slavoj Ziiek's criticism of bioethics, and even if his argu- ment is guided by Lacanian psychoanalysis, I believe his point also speaks to the core of what genealogy is all about. In his short chapter on bioethics, which was originally a review of Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future, iiiek warns against 'hyphenethics', i.e. ethical principles that only refer to questions about the use of biotechnology ( ~ i i e k , 2004: 123). The situation is similar to the relationship between biopolitics and technology, because we should not merely conceptual-
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ize biopolitics as a sort of 'hyphen-politics' that consists of all political questions related to biotechnology. The various biotech issues accentuate and exemplify problems of a biopolitical nature, but they rarely produce them, and it is here the analytical confusion over biopolitics often set in.
iiiek goes on to criticize the confusion of cause and effect: "It is not so much that, with biogenetics, we lose our freedom and dignity. Rather, we experience that we never had them in the jn t place" ( ~ i i e k , 2004: 130; emphasis in original). The quote refers to the decentered subject, a basic theoretical touchstone in both Lacanian psychoanalysis and poststructuralist positions such as that of Foucault. It is not unusual to find similar paradoxes in studies with a biopoliti- cal approach: the evaporation of the autonomous citizen is blamed on new practices of biotechnology even though we - viewing from the same theoreti- cal point of departure - did not even believe this autonomy existed in the first place. Biotechnological development may often serve to accentuate existing problems in social and political theory, but that does not in itself constitute an entirely new 'stage' of biopolitics. To put it in the terms of Foucauldian geneal- ogy, this would be to confuse the emergence with the origin (Foucault, 2001a). In order to get both origin and emergence into play, we should instead ask: is it because economy in the modern sense was already biopolitical at the outset that biotech could integrate so easily into modernday capitalism and the practices of everyday life? (Cf. Cooper's article in this issue). This article finds the latter view to be right. It does not mean that it would be impossible to find empirical examples in support of the technology-centered view as well, but nevertheless it represents two very different analytical approaches to the topic.
Agamben and the State-centered View on Biopolitics
Confusion over the biopolitics concept does not only stem from the overrated importance ascribed to new technology; the concept has been equally mysti- fied by its status as a buzzword in continental philosophy (on this point, see also Nancy, 2002: 137-43; Rabinow and Rose, 2006). Giorgio Agamben's use of the biopolitics concept in his Homo Sacex Sovereign Power and Bare Lye (1998) has been especially influential. At first, he locates the threshold of biopolitics in Ancient Greek thought but, nevertheless, proceeds to place the operational logic of modern biopolitics in the apparatus of the state (see also Lemke, 2005 on this point). In order to point out clearly why I think biopolitics should rather be understood in association with political economy than with the state appa- ratus, it is perhaps an idea to start by asking why it was ever perceived as being detached from economy in the first place. If, in other words, the claim here is that a generic quality of biopolitics is to embody a specific kind of economic rationality, then where does this association originate from, and why have parts of the biopolitical literature been under a different understanding until now?
There are two main reasons why biopolitics has traditionally been perceived as being more or less uneconomical. The first is that for many years the pub- lished part of Foucault's own writings on biopolitics centered on the final chap ter of La Volonti de savoir (Foucault, 1976) titled "Right of Death and Power over
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Lifen. In a sense, this chapter seems to be a bit of an add-on to the book on sexu- ality, essentially because the chapter originated as the conclusion to Foucault's course, 'Zl faut difmdre la son'iti'from the same year (Foucault, 1997). The 1976 course was very remote from considerations on economy as it centered around the main distinction between the juridical discourse of sovereignty on one side and the history of racism on the other ultimately evolving into an integrated type of biopower.
In later discussions, however, Foucault has apparently left the highly race- centered connotations of biopower entirely. From then on he speaks no more of biopower but only of biopolitics and, in a parallel shift, initial formulations like 'politics of the species' seem to be replaced by a general focus on the popu- lation. This conceptual development stands out more clearly in Foucault's 1979 course, Naissance de la biopolitique, but because this was only recently published in its entirety (Foucault, 2004a), the race- and statecentered conceptions of biopolitics still dominate the literature. As Lemke correctly points out in his critique of Agamben, it is particularly problematic for a Foucauldian perspec- tive to build on statecentered conceptions, because the objective of Foucault's entire work was to release us from the juridical theory of power and state sov- ereignty (Lemke, 2005). The 1979 course - plus to some extent the previous year's course, Simriti, ttem'toire et population (Foucault, 2004b) - attempts to es- tablish the historical and theoretical connection between biopolitics, political economy and the liberal art of government in full scale. We will return to this course in the following section, but let us first address the second reason for why biopolitics becamedetached from economy, which has to do more directly with Giorgio Agamben.
Today, Agamben's Homo Sacer has become a standard reference on biopoli- tics in continental political theory (Agamben, 1998). In this book he argues that the threshold of biopolitical power is in fact not where Foucault locates it, because it allegedly already existed in the political thought of Ancient Greece. Through the original exclusion of bare life, power became biopolitical in the Greek polis, and this constitutive exclusion has essentially repeated itself over and over throughout the history of sovereignty in the West. Agamben undeni- ably points to a very interesting interplay between the inclusion and exclusion of political communities, but it seems less convincing that what he discusses is in fact biopolitics in remotely the same sense as in Foucault's use of the term.
In the latter sense, biopolitics signifies the integration of political power with concerns about the biological life of the population, and where the key notion of population is defined by a series of human sciences. These knowledge forms - of which political economy is a cornerstone - simply did not exist during the period where Agamben locates the origin of biopolitics. He can only achieve a concept of biopolitics detached from economy by redefining it as pure form and thus abstracting it entirely from the genealogy in which Foucault first coined it. Agamben has been rightfully accused of tying biopolitics too closely to the state (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 198; Lemke, 2005) and thus of ignoring Foucault's movement to study governmentality rather than the institutional framework of the state. His detachment of biopolitics from economy follows directly from this state-centered position.
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A later passage in Homo Sacerindicates exactly how far he has in fact removed biopolitics from its original context. The short chapter titled "Politics, or Giving Form to the Life of a People" discusses the text tat et santi published in 1942 during the German occupation of France, and in this text on health policy in the Third Reich, Agamben locates the notion 'living wealth' (Agamben, 1998: 145). He claims that living wealth marks the first time anyone has established a synthesis of biology and economy inside the framework of a political rationality. While he may be right that National Socialism constitutes an extremely tight- knit synthesis of these two knowledge forms, his assessment appears to overlook completely the birth of biopolitics and political economy. In other words, when Agamben finds a threshold of biology and economy under National Socialism, it only indicates to what extent he has ignored this connection in his general assessment of biopolitics.
In Naissance de la biopolitique (Foucault, 2004a), Foucault actually describes a synthesis of biology and economy inside the framework of a political rational- ity. Not in the sense that all knowledge forms merge into one of course, but rather that an integrated biopolitical rationality forms in the latter part of the eighteenth century through a sophisticated combination of principles. From biology it draws the attention to processes of life not only in the human body but, in particular, with respect to the life of the population and its natural prin- ciples of circulation and self-organization. When modern political economy was invented in the same period, it was able to integrate some of these biological properties of the population's life and reinterpret them as positive political goals. For example, while biology or demography would describe the natural patterns of a population's growth, political economy would consider the so- cial conditions for reaching an optimal growth rate. Finally, the liberal art of government would integrate with these knowledge forms by setting limits to political government in order not to harm the natural growth principles of life, population, and economy.
Foucault does not claim that the integration of biology, political economy and liberalism was all seamless and smooth, only that such a connection ex- ists in biopolitical rationalities from the eighteenth century onwards, and that biopolitics is only truly understandable in close relation with this broader gov- ernmental regime (Foucault, 2004a: 23). Here I will only try to clarify a special aspect of this relationship, which is the original connection between life and economy inside this framework of biopolitics and liberalism. The following two sections will discuss this interaction in more detail, first with respect to the concepts of life and population, and second with a specific focus on the role of knowledge in biopolitics and political economy.
Economic Life
It was mentioned already in the previous section that, according to Foucault (2004a: 23), the birth of biopolitics should be understood in relation to the development of liberal governmentality. These transformations are closely re- lated to the internal development in the major economic doctrines of the time
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and, most importantly, the replacement of mercantilist principles of economic policy with the new paradigm of political economy. Whereas the former tended to have a quite mechanical view upon the maximization of richness in each state, the latter took the opposite approach and advocated an interdependent web of trade relations and mutual enrichment among nations, hence Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (Foucault, 2004a: 54-7). These new economists -who in Foucault's view included both the French Physiocrats and the main think- ers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume, Smith, and Ferguson - all tended to employ a series of metaphors of life and nature. Vitalist metaphors such as 'natural price' and 'natural competition' are used in abundance (cf. Foucault, 2004a: 55), but the point is here to focus less on metaphors and more on the involved principles for governing in an 'economical' manner. In the eyes of po- litical economy, Foucault claims, nature does not designate an original reserved sphere on which government intervenes (Foucault, 2004a: 18). It is more cor- rect to say that these economists tried to make the process of governing econ- omy more 'natural' in the sense that it should become able to build on the intrinsic principles of society's natural order. As Foucault quotes Quesnay of saying, real economical government is that which is concerned with the popula- tion (Foucault, 2004b: 79).
Thus, the concept of population played an essential role in this new ensemble of liberalism, political economy and biopolitics and only when these elements are seen in conjunction does the complexity of governing a population become to- tally clear. Biopolitics takes the population as its target and main field of interven- tion, whereby it gains influence over biological processes such as disease, fertility, mortality as well as other aspects of physical reproduction in the working popula- tion. In contrast, it is also well known that liberalism in this period invented such ideas as 'laissez-faire' and Smith's notion of the 'invisible hand' (Foucault, 2004a: 22,289). So how do intervention and laissez faire speak together?
They do not, one could argue referring to some of Foucault's earlier discus- sions of the so-called medical police, a generalized administrative organ result- ing from Prussian reason of state and its notable scholars like Frank (1976) and von Justi (cf. Foucault, 1994a; 2004b: 321). There is indeed a long and inter- esting history to the term 'medical police', but it falls outside the boundaries of this article. As to the development of modern biopolitics, we should notice that medical police mainly functioned as a negative counter image indicating the kind of totalitarian megalomania that would never be compatible with the government of a living population (Foucault, 1994a: 223). Modern biopolitics was invented precisely because this idea of medical police did not work. Part of the confusion over the concept of biopolitics originates here, because readers such as Agamben seem to limit their understanding to this early period when biopolitics basically meant state medicine (cf. Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 198). My claim is that the real clue to understanding Naissance de la biopolitique- and, in effect, Foucault's ultimate testimony on biopolitics - is to see how biopolitics only develops into a fully-fledged form of rationalized power when fused with liberal political economy.
Biopolitics is a form of power that regulates and intervenes in the life of the population, but at the same time it respects the population's principles of
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self-regulation. Perhaps the combination seems less confusing if we remember that in classical liberalism, laissez faire never really meant no intervention at all, only that government regulation became subject to the critical test of being measured against society's own self-regulation. We will return to this critical test in the next section, but it should be clarified further how the self-limiting governmentality connects with the living population.
At first sight, principles like laissez faire and a self-limiting art of government may sound similar to juridical principles of autonomy and right to one's own life, for example, as we know them from earlier rights-centered forms of liber- alism such as John Locke's. This is not the case. Whereas the juridical liberal- ism saw limited state authority as a goal in itself, this later economic liberalism regulated political power with the aim of maximizing the prosperity of society. This principle of maximization clearly indicates the biopolitical nature of eco- nomic liberalism (Leclercq, 2004: 21-2). Hence, Foucault argues that liberal political economy is grounded in 'fact' rather than in the form of juridical norms (2004a: 12). The reason why the state should abstain from governing the economy through strict regulation of prices and production is - according to, for example, Adam Smith - because it is simply not able to do so effectively. In contrast to this fundamental inaptitude, the population has a potential for self-regulation based on the facticity of its natural properties.
The life of the population is a scientific object in both biology and political economy at the same time. This does not mean, however, that you can deduce all connotations of life from the discipline of biology in this period. It is more likely that some of the basic properties of living organisms as seen by biology at the time - such as their means of self-regulation -were somehow transposed and projected onto other quasi-biological entities of a collective nature. In this way, liberal ideas of individual autonomy and self-government are linked to biological notions of self-preservation and self-organization. Furthermore, this process involves a profound reinterpretation because natural properties are re- phrased as normative goals. So even though notions like working life, economic life, and reproductive life have no real basis in biology they are, nevertheless, being modeled on quasi-biological conceptions of organic self-regulation at this time. To some extent, one could say that this process is what Hardt and Negri term the biopolitical production of life (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
This discussion demonstrates an original association between biopolitics and political economy. This association is mainly of a theoretical nature at the outset and, therefore, its alleged novelty in contemporary developments of the bio- tech industry is easily overdramatized. To put it in conceptual terms, if one de- fines biopolitics in a very restrictive manner, as for instance Rabinow and Rose in their recent article (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 199), one can easily overdo the simple and unequivocal 'reality' of biopolitics in the past.
Biopolitics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not limited to merely regulate life and population in the simple sense of man's physical and material being. On the contrary, biological principles were multiplied and mod- eled onto other spheres or collective 'lives' that required regulation in a more economical manner, i.e. in accordance with the natural order of self-regulation working spontaneously at the outset. The concept of life was absolutely essential
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to the birth of biopolitics, but the content of what 'life' meant was equally am- bivalent. Thus, there was no simple core of 'life itself, which our present time must then take responsibility for having jeopardized (cf. Rose, 2007). While analyses such as that of Rose (2007) could leave the impression that 'life itself or the 'very vitality' of human beings are actually existing 'things', I see it as the written job description of a genealogist to dissolve them and show that they have no core.
Truth Telling, Knowledge and Critique in Political Economy
It is almost trivial to point out the importance of knowledge in the context of bioeconomy or Foucauldian studies in general. Most writers in the field seem to be aware that the production and use of knowledge is often associ- ated with the establishment of power relations and forms of subjectivation. The key issue is what precise knowledge forms are under discussion, and how they interact with political rationalities, and in this case, how they interact with what is known as the 'bioeconomy'. As regards the first part, it is perhaps not as straightforward as it sounds to characterize the knowledge input of the bioeconomy. It is tempting to focus mainly on life science knowledge and how private businesses manage to capitalize from each new development in biotechnology (Rabinow and Rose, 2006: 203). This capitalization process no doubt takes place today even if the revolutionary potentials of this 'new economy' are sometimes overblown. It does not imply, on the other hand, that the meeting of life science knowledge and the raw forces of capital is the only locus of knowledge utilization in bioeconomy. The claim here is that some of Foucault's discussions of truth and political economy in Naissance de la biopolitique bear the promise of a more sophisticated analysis with more at- tention to economic knowledge.
The difference between various approaches to knowledge in society can be illustrated through a short digression on the popular concept of the knowledge economy. It is becoming more and more common to speak of the knowledge economy or the knowledge society, and the biotech industry is very often char- acterized as being the prime feature of this new era for example in the cited EU document on the knowledge-based bioeconomy (European Bioperspectives, 2006; cf. also Tony Blair cited in Rose, 2007: 35). Regardless of how much mon- ey biotech makes and will continue to make in the future, it is worth noticing how these popular representations often confuse what exactly knowledge is do- ing in the new economy. A standard reference in the literature is Michael Gib bons and his colleagues' work on The New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994). The book is mainly known for its influential but also widely disputed idea of the major shift in knowledge production from mode 1 to mode 2 (Gib bons et al., 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001: 15; for a critical view see Osborne, 2004). The main idea is that the traditional form of general, scientific knowledge in separate academic sub-disciplines (mode 1) is now increasingly being replaced by a cross-disciplinary form of dynamic and flexible knowledge in the context of application (mode 2) (Gibbons et al., 1994: 2-3).
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In Gibbons' book, there appears to be some uncertainty as to what the knowl- edge economy really is and, to settle the issue, the authors quote a long excerpt from Drucker as expert testimony. Even though this book is now a standard reference on the topic, the dedicated textbox on knowledge economy does not offer particularly clear answers either. Drucker forwards the idea that since the knowledge economy has yet to find its own Adam Smith or David Ricardo, we should try to theorize how knowledge behaves as economic resource side by side with the traditionals, land, labor, and capital (Drucker cited in Gibbons et al., 1994: 57).
In a vague, descriptive sense, I guess it would probably be possible to outline the characteristics of this knowledge trade, but that in itself does not lead to real theorizing of a knowledge economy. In fact, we are stuck with iiiek's 'hyphen problem' again. When the theoretical implications are underdeveloped, they tend to be identified with and deduced from the 'thing' most readily at hand, which, in kiiek's case, was biotechnology while here it is knowledge. As if the knowledge economy is somehow deducible from the essence of knowledge. Thus, in the end Gibbons' approach does not really tell us much more, besides that we live in a society with a lot of knowledge. It does not clarify what this knowledge does, or in what sense the power of this knowledge has become a prerequisite for a new economy.
If we return to Naissance de la biopolitique, Foucault clearly conceptualizes the relationship between truth regimes and political economy in a more sophis- ticated fashion. It is not unfamiliar in Foucault's later works to find various neologisms or reinvented concepts regarding what knowledge does in relation- ships between subjects and political rationalities. Common to all these terms is that they designate some type of game or procedure in which truth - whatever that means in the given context - is articulated about power or the subject, and where the act of speaking truth to power exerts some kind of influence on it. In his 1980 course, Du guuvernement des vivants, Foucault speaks of the 'alethurgie', a constructed term to designate truth manifestations in the service of legiti- mizing authorities (Foucault, 1980: lectures of January 9, 16, 23 & 30).' This concept has a certain dramaturgical aspect to it, and while Foucault maintains a general focus on truth telling throughout the remaining part of his courses, he soon replaces the term alethurgie with the slightly different concept of par- rhesia (Foucault, 1983; 1984; 2001b). While parrhesia also implies some form of dramaturgical manifestation of truth, it focuses more on the obligation of individuals to speak frankly and tell the truth about themselves in public. The political relevance of parrhesia is that, according to Foucault, both classical and modern Enlightenment political thought has these built-in positions for speak- ing truth to power (Foucault, 1983: lectures ofJanuary 5, 12 & March 9).
This brings us back to 1979 when Foucault uses the made-up term 'vkridic- tion' to designate the spatial character of truth games in political economy and the liberal arts of government (Foucault, 2004a: 33; on this term see also Foucault, 1994b; 1994~). The concept is obviously a paraphrase of jurisdiction and fits Foucault's general ambition to replace juridical ways of thinking with new conceptions of knowledge and power. More specifically, he also wants to reverse our understanding of liberalism. Instead of traditionally seeing liberal-
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ism as centered on rights and the rule of law, he generally wants us to think of it instead as a governmental technology that puts the act of governing itself to the test of an economic tribunal. Liberal arts of government are by nature economi- cal, Foucault claims, because they force political authorities to economize with direct intervention. Essential in this respect is not only the obvious valorization of economics, but also how the generation of economic truth seems to have a certain spatial reference in the market. This spatial or spherical referent is the veridiction of the market, a site or venue whose function it is to tell the truth about the whole of society and its proper form of organization.
The point is here to demonstrate that when the so-called knowledge econ- omy is faced with knowledge-intensive companies and products, it is not an entirely new situation for economic rationality to have to deal with epistemo- logical.uncertainty. In a market, the price mechanism functions as thk knowl- edge-gathering apparatus and distributes its elements far more efficiently than even the most good-hearted sovereign could do. In Foucault's reading of Adam Smith, he makes a great effort of pointing out the epistemological criticism posed by political economy against absolutism and reason of state (Foucault, 2004a: 282). This does not mean that everything is clear and transparent in a free market, according to Smith, because the economy is by nature character- ized by a profound opacity (Foucault, 2004a: 285).
The 'hand' of the market is and must be invisible because all the knowledge embedded in the price mechanism cannot be centralized in the hands of an omnipotent sovereign. The reason why liberalism prefers laissez faire to state sovereignty is based upon precisely this epistemic principle, which says that a sovereign should not try to govern the economy because of his fundamen- tal incapacity to know what is required to reach the common good (Foucault, 2004a: 286). Only the market is able to know and therefore do this, and thus this one sphere becomes norm setting for others. Because the market is a su- perior epistemological instrument - a veridiction - it becomes the foundation for liberal political economy and its embedded critique of governmental reason (Foucault, 2004a: 286).
If we elaborate a little from this, the importance of knowledge for bioecon- omy can be summed up in two points. The first point established here is the existence of an internal connection between biopolitics and the liberal mecha- nisms for speaking truth to power. Liberal governmentality composes both bio- politics and political economy and through this combination embodies a more complex truth game than it would be possible for a simple input-output model of knowledge to incorporate. A biopolitical regime does not merely make gov- ernmental decisions based on biology or technical knowledge. Aside from this simple understanding of biopolitics, there is also the critical test posed by eco- nomic veridiction, which means that a potential tension exists between biology and economy. Biopolitics applies life science knowledge through its policies, but under the critical scrutiny of what is economical.
The second point established here is a different understanding of how knowl- - edge works and does not work in relation to economy. It is neither knowledge as object or input in itself nor is it the quantity of gathered knowledge that transforms the economy into a knowledge economy. In fact, the economic ve-
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ridiction has effectively shown us that opacity is just as powerful in truth games as actual knowledge. The main theoretical hurdle is to avoid the simplistic use of a hyphen concept and instead focus on what a specific knowledge form does in social and political processes. Not in the literal sense that individual pieces of knowledge cause change, because the point is rather that a knowledge econo- my is defined by truth games and social practices, not by the object itself. What procedures articulate knowledge, who articulates it, against whom, and with what objective? This is a far more tactical view, which also has the advantage of highlighting the critical functions of knowledge in governmental rationalities.
Conclusion
The aim here is not to finish off with a neat diagnosis of 'late capitalism' in a nutshell. Not only is it a risky genre but it is also besides the point of the present discussion of bioeconomy. In general, the point is to see the alleged 'bio' turn of the economy against the backdrop of the initial coconstitution of biopolitics and economy.
This article set out as a sort of theoretical exercise to recapitulate the rela- tionship between biopolitics and economy and to do it in a way independent of biotechnology as the main cause. Instead of viewing biotechnology as the reason why economy has become biopolitical, the reverse argument here is that since political economy is already biopolitical at the outset, the contemporary synergy between capitalism and biotechnology should be seen in this light. It is important to point out that I have no intention of denying the academic rel- evance of life science development, only to qualify the theoretical background against which this development is measured. If we want to benefit from the beneficial insights of a Foucauldian perspective on power, knowledge and sub- jectivity, we should simply resist the tempting instrumentalism of a technology- centered approach and look for the governmental technologies structuring the political government of life.
Through a specific reading of Foucault's Naissance de la biqolitique, an initial connection between biopolitics and political economy has been demonstrated, and this connection is of a theoretical nature. As fascinating as descriptions of biotechnology may be in all their empirical detail, they do not in themselves constitute an entirely new phase or condition of biopolitics.
Biopolitics and economy are bound together at the outset. While the task of biopolitics is to nurture and optimize the life of the population, the critical dimension of political economy always keeps a check on this form of power to see if its governmental techniques are economical. Political economy comes with the function of speaking truth to biopower, and even though it is obviously contested in practice, we should view the concept of bioeconomy through this epistemological filter. It seems that political economy is already both a bioecon- omy and a knowledge economy, although not necessarily in the same sense as recent diagnoses of the present claim. In a contemporary setting, one could say that economic veridictions are bound to have consequences whether or not you work in a knowledge-intensive business, and the same applies to biopolitics and
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the biotech industry. In other words, the act of trading knowledge or biological tissue does not make a bioeconomy. It is rather the circulation of an economic truth game whose origin is biopolitical.
The article has devoted much attention to the embedded truth games in liberal political economy, because it only achieves its strength by way of these critical mechanisms. The economic veridiction of the market is a powerful and multifaceted instrument that in theory has the ability to test all forms of social organization. The universality of this instrument is only increased by the built- in constructivism of biopolitics. It is constructivist because the category of life has no 'life itself dead center, only some normative principles regarding the self-organization of life. These normative principles can be transferred onto collective identities of a quasi-living nature, just as economic veridiction be- comes a vehicle for quasi-markets of all kinds.
Rather than seeing capital investment in the life sciences as the necessary nexus of the bioeconomy, one should perhaps rather point to the various sites of economic truth telling as being the actual vehicles for capitalizing on the life of the population. This could still be in the avant-garde of genomics, but it could just as well be in broader biopolitical arrangements in modern welfare states, such as pension reforms, health care, or the reorganization of work and private life.
Notes 1. There are several accounts in the literature of the dual concepts of biopower and b i e politics. This article is based on the premise that, for Foucault, biopower and biopolitics is basically the same thing. Although he uses both terms in Volonti & savoir, the fact that all subsequent texts only speak of biopolitics is taken here as an indication that he reconsiders the vocabulary and then sticks with biopolitics. 2. As this concept was not in any of Foucault's published works, the spelling is a little uncer- tain. The word alethurgie is most likely a neologism composed of the Greek 'alethea' (truth) and the Latin ending 'turgy'.
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Lars Thorup Larsen holds a PhD from the University of Aarhus (2005) and is assistant professor in public policy in the Department of Political Science also at the University of Aarhus. His doctoral research has centered on compara- tive public health policy combining a Foucauldian perspective with more main- stream positions in political science. He is currently working on smoking bans in the public space as well as other problems related to the intersection of knowledge and public policy. He has previously edited a book about Niklas Luh- mann and Michel Foucault (together with Christian Borch) and edited several thematical issues of Distinktion where he is also on the editorial board.
Lars Thorup Larsen Department of Political Science
University of Aarhus DK-8000 Aarhus C
Denmark [email protected]
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