BOOK LAUNCH
We have released a new book, from the one and only MeltdownYourBooks. Find all the release information in our books section or on our webstore. This trace consists of the opening passages of Chapter One.
The first formal position I held in biology was at the University of Colorado Anschutz, an academic medical centre with notable–if not particularly exceptional–biomedical research. When I began, the Fitzsimons Innovation Community (FIC), an auxiliary department of the university, was planning to add two more sprawling laboratory and office buildings to the far edge of the campus, just across the street from our laboratory. This move brought the relatively young FIC to a total of five buildings, impressive for a division which was only founded in 2000, but not unusual for a university famed for constant construction and bullish land acquisition.
What made this particular development so interesting–amidst the many construction projects at the time–was that these were not lab spaces for students or publicly-funded scientists, nor were these spaces intended for university staff. These were meant to house 'health and life sciences' startups and private biomedical research. As the FIC states, its purpose is to “offer emerging and established companies and organisations an entrepreneurial environment, specialised space and services they need to translate scientific discoveries into new cures, technologies and solutions.”
The FIC offers spaces for lease near the university’s research campus, with the overall incentive for bio-industry being the ease of access to research partners, laboratories, and expertise provided by the public university. Their goal was to pull in venture bio-industry firms willing to poach the university’s researchers, and then lease them office spaces to fund the university. This is an equivalent to the often discussed ‘political revolving door’ between public office and industry positions, but designed for biomedical research, and it was working. In my few years at that campus, many colleagues bounced between the university and industry positions across the street. It was, as proponents of the venture loved to call it, a ‘dynamic labor market’. Theoretically a scientist could bounce between public and private architecture as their goals demanded, achieving different aspects of a drug discovery research paradigm as it unfolded and maximising the efficiency of the research-to-patients pipeline.
It is obvious to anyone who has interacted with venture capital bio-industry that, while there is overlap in its capacities with public research, the intentions of a public and a private researcher are very different. It seemed odd to me, then, that while conversations on the ‘themes’ or ‘motivations’ of their research was very different between my for-profit and for-publication colleagues, the basic approaches seemed contiguous. When it came to the biology at-hand they spoke an equivalent language. This was not in the trivial way of communicating about similar biological observations, but in the way they conceptualised the approaches to their work and their understanding of what life, natural selection, health, and a body were. For both kinds of biologists these terms were unspoken, undebated, and bore clear meanings. The concepts were largely settled, the matter at hand was mechanics.
It is tempting for an outsider to view biology as a monolith of answers, a stable of solved macro principles which simply need to be explained at smaller and smaller levels with higher and higher degrees of precision. At an academic centre, however, one would expect more concern for the blurry boundaries and unanswered aspects of an evolutionary unit, or for the wildly uncharacterised macro-aspects of cognition. Instead, academic biology–especially its largest sector, biomedical research–has a proclivity for hyper-specialisation and fixations on the smallest possible aspects of a biological phenomena. There is a tendency towards thinking about problems in the smallest possible mechanical terms and ignoring high level considerations.
This atomisation of the biological sciences is parallel to the profound and widespread atomisation in almost every aspect of postmodern society. The appearance of a highly individualised and diverse field of specialised research paradigms has masked an effect similar to Theodor Adorno’s 'pseudo-individualism', referencing the cultural landscape of late modernity:
[This] pseudo-individualisation is prescribed by the standardisation of the framework. [..] Thus, standardisation of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardisation of its own deviation--pseudo-individualisation.
Beneath the veneer of hyper-specialisation there is a movement towards standardisation in the approaches and ontological frameworks underlying all biological sciences. While the superficial details of a biologist’s work may differ from their colleagues, the overarching social functions and underlying views on core conceptual frameworks have never been more universal. In the same way the Western cultural experience has solidified into the universality of marketable consumer experience, despite its apparent flourishing diversity, the central concepts in biology which bear the most fundamental meaning have been subject to the most homogenization.
Universalisation is an actively-produced social effect, and therefore requires complicated new significations and social self-observation. These significations represent an internalised language in which scientists gesture towards use-value in adherence to central biological paradigms. The burden of these effects–much the same as they are distributed in other universalising trends–is actualised horizontally. This is seen from the standardised language of grants, which heavily relies on mechanistic and therapeutic approaches and language, to the ballooning bureaucracy and ‘self-actualisation’ required from each individual scientist. This new burden is distributed among every participant in the field in a horizontal, equalising fashion, not as an easily-identifiable demand pushed down from authorities through vertical hierarchy.
Hyper-specialisation demands a ceaseless engagement with literature, conferences, and minutiae, while simultaneously adding a socially active, homogenising aspect to these tasks. Conferences’ ostensible purpose as a “meeting of the minds” takes a back seat to its networking and hype-generating aspects, replete with biotechnology salesmen, biomedical ‘swag,’ and advertising campaigns. The biological sciences, as much as any other profession in the contemporary age, have become beholden to the self-surveillance and perpetual self-advocacy of what Byung-Chul Han calls ‘achievement society’:
Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.
The achievement-subject is a subject whose boundaries are defined by constant positive affirmations towards self-advocacy. It does not demand, but instead nurtures the internal atmosphere of an individual to market themselves, to network themselves, to career hunt, to stay relevant, to trend-watch, and–if time permits–perhaps do some science. Of course, these promotional and advocacy aspects are not novel to science; professorships and the success of theories have always demanded social acumen. The differences which define the contemporary condition are in subject and degree. In keeping with social and technological advances of the 21st century, modern academic settings demand a constant, bureaucratised, and specific kind of advocacy, and internal motivations are perpetually being generated through positive affirmations delivered relentlessly and globally. All of these are distributed with such speed, and so effectively self-administered, that it no longer demands any top-down hierarchical force to ensure such a culture. In the absence of top-down forces, many find it difficult to perceive any homogeneity.
The inbox of any modern academic shows the barrage of career-improvement, skill development, streamlining, financial literacy, and social networking talks hosted by universities, societies, conferences, think tanks, or biotech firms. These optional spaces exist to remind a working scientist of the constant pressure they should be internalising to succeed. These are not educational efforts offered by a university to help promote their theories, or to advocate alternative methodologies, these are affirmational and atomised pressures to conceive of a scientific career as the primary internal motivation of a scientist’s work. What defines the achievement-subject is that their subjugation to their work is actualised through an internalised effect. Scientists are compelled to think of every moment as a chance to further these internal pressures, to live up to the expectations and imagery of success constantly being presented to them. This pressure precipitates alienation from the motivations which are foundational to academic science and to many individuals’ pursuit of it, forming one of the basic aspects of the expansive mental health crisis within academia.
Significant work has been written in recent years on the 'proletarianisation of doctors', the trending change in the social status of doctors down from clinic owners–those who held singular power over the medical means of production and conditions of practice–towards positions of employment under medical corporations. The ways in which this change in social stratum affected medical advocacy, medical treatment, and the operation of medical organisations is unrivalled in the modern era; a change which bears significant implications for the conditions of medicine in countries with primarily corporatised health systems. Simultaneous to this, and perhaps predating it, is this trend in the academic sciences. While university scientists have never owned their means of production, their role as scientists and intellectuals has materially morphed into positions with a bureaucratic and managerial focus. In many modern labs the primary function of a principal investigator is to field the bureaucratic net in which every lab is perpetually entangled and to take on the advocacy role necessary for its survival.
A properly articulated definition of a ‘scientist’ in the contemporary world, in terms of the skills and positive pressures the average university pushes, would include public relations, management, advocacy, networking, trends analyst, and financial planning. In the formulation of Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society, this constant positive pressure loses sight of negative capacities. It becomes difficult to engage meaningfully with shortcomings or failures or desires to slow down. It is defined by a pressure to accept the perpetual accelerating contemporary conditions and those linked positive requirements, or pressure to abdicate responsibility to someone else. In Burnout Society, you are your own boss and the demands come from within.
In the non-space of a conference hall, the private and public spheres bleed into a single mass. This homogeneity within the biological sciences–which is applicable to so many sciences captured within a capitalistic mechanism–has so far failed to be characterised by philosophers of biology or biologists themselves. Instead, the minute differences of this ‘academic vs. private’ discourse have been emphasised and described in the terms of those pseudo-individualistic aspects which define each sector. Often considerations of contemporary biology focus on pharmaceuticalisation and market-based scientific utilisation as a problem entirely contained within the private sphere's interaction with science. Alternatively, focus is laid on the lack of ethnic or gender diversity in academic institutions or the increased bureaucratisation in academia as unique aspects of the public sciences. Rarely are considerations of all these phenomena considered from a vantage point of universalisation that implicates both spheres. These kinds of descriptive approaches are deeply inadequate for conceptualising the biological sciences of the contemporary era. This text seeks to characterise the essential aspects of this new outlook among biologists, their views on the perceived function of biology, and fundamentally, what they think biology is.
The first chapter, on Ontology, seeks to characterise the fundamental assumptions and precepts of the current biological paradigm so that its relationship to the social can be expounded upon. The next two chapters focus on these aspects in two separate directions, the first from a perspective of Utility, of the general usefulness and intention behind a chosen biological paradigm, and the second on the role of biology within the larger context of Cybernetics and what the French philosophical collective Tiqqun calls cybernetic society. The final chapter presents an alternative Systems Biology, a possible mechanism of antagonism that Tiqqun calls opacity, of disengaging the information flows that seek social atomisation and functionalisation, qualities which intrinsically limit the conceptual range of biology.
This book extends from those first years of research looking out into the FIC construction, and the subsequent years in search for a work which approached this new biological ontological homogeneity. Though many individual aspects of this concept have been explored by philosophers, biologists, historians, and medical practitioners, it appeared to me that no work was yet written which attempted to fully characterise the interrelations of the biological sciences with postmodernity and capital.
If scientists believe themselves capable of foresight, and demand serious consideration for their ongoing contributions to society, it is not enough for them to simply continue scientific production. A scientist who wishes to possess any meaningful foresight must know how the sausage is made: what are they feeding us, and why? Biology has operated as a reductive machine throughout the 21st century, the time has come for it to begin acting like a body.