is a Thursday 3.27.08–Melinda Cooper — Experimental Labor & The Politics of The Event
Comments Off on is a Thursday 3.27.08–Melinda Cooper — Experimental Labor & The Politics of The EventThursday 03.27.08 — Melinda Cooper — Experimental Labor & The Politics of The Event
Contents:
1. About this Thursday
2. About Melinda Cooper
3. Melinda Cooper — Two Additional NYC Events
4. Description — Recent Work — Three Texts
5. ‘Infrastructure and Event’
6. ‘Experimental Labour – Offshoring Clinical Trials to China’
7. Review — Randy Martin’s ‘Empire of Indifference’
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1. About this Monday
What: Talk / Discussion
When: Thursday 03.27.08 @7pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Melinda Cooper
We’re very pleased to be able to host a discussion with Melinda Cooper at 16 Beaver this Thursday night. Melinda’s work has been known to us for some time, and has even served as a reference point for the ongoing Continental Drift seminars. For example, one of the primary texts we sent out in advance of the November 2006 meeting was her “Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror.”
There is obviously a strong overlap between Melinda’s recent research and some of our discussions and/or collective attempts to map the contours of present-day capitalism. She has sent us several very recent texts, and we’re hoping that people may have a chance to read them prior to Thursday’s event.
Because Melinda is also speaking at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and Bluestockings bookstore (see below) this week, we hope this event can be less of a formal lecture and more of a talk leading to a discussion. We look forward to an in-depth conversation about how her work on “experimental labor” and a “politics of the event,” and the structures of transnational biomedical and financial economies, can contribute to an ongoing analysis and ultimately the formulation of new strategies of resistance.
To download the readings (click and save):
1. Infrastructure and Event – Urbanism and the Accidents of Finance
2. Experimental Labour – Offshoring Clinical Trials to China
3. Review of Randy Martin An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management.
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2. About Melinda Cooper
Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001 and is currently lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Sydney. She has published widely in journals such as Theory Culture and Society, Theory and Event, Configurations, Contretemps, Postmodern Culture and Angelaki. She is the author of “Life as Surplus — Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era” (2008) Washington University Press and is currently working on a book project titled ‘Clinical Labour’ with Catherine Waldby, about contemporary economies of drug testing and tissue sourcing. Current interests include clinical labour and emerging biomedical economies; financialization; religious revivalism and sexual politics; theories and politics of the event.
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3. Melinda Cooper — Two Additional NYC Events
We hope our event will function in some ways parallel to the other two public presentations Melinda will be making this week while in New York:
03.25.08 — Infrastructure and Event — Urbanism and the Accidents of Finance
Center For Place, Culture, and Politics
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9204 (ninth floor)
6PM
For directions:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/memeac/directions.htm
03.28.08 — Life as Surplus — Bluestockings
Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era by Melinda Cooper
7:00 PM. Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St. at Stanton.
212.777.6028. $5 (suggested)
In “Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era,” author Melinda Cooper presents the valuable and therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences. She also reveals the violence and debt servitude of the bioeconomy. Cooper scrutinizes HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement. She reveals the contradictions between utopian neoliberal free-market capitalism and the reality of commercialized life sciences.
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4. Three Texts/Recent Work — Description
Melinda writes,
“These papers are indicative of directions in my work at the moment. I’m interested in developing a concept of experimental labour as a way of thinking through some of the groundwork in the production of value in the contemporary drug economy. While orthodox theories of innovation value ascribe the production of value to the cognitive labour of the scientist (that is if they talk about labour at all) the whole clinical trial phase of drug production is left out of the analysis. The concept of ‘experimental labour’ also contains a critique of standard ways of talking about the labour of the body which tend to think of it in terms of reproduction rather than the production of the new – or the evental. I am thus attempting to propose an event-based rather than substance-based theory of labour. Along with Catherine Waldby, I am very interested in the transnational geographies of drug testing and tissue sourcing that are crystallizing around the emerging biomedical economies. The creation of special economic zones for experimental clinical labour is particularly marked in emerging economies such as China and India. Here I am interested in China’s floating populations.
The second paper ‘Infrastructure and Event’ is also interested in the politics of the ‘evental’ this time as exemplified in the extraordinary growth of derivatives markets since the 80s. I argue that this is a mode of capitalism that is better analyzed in terms of the trading and production of events rather than the trading of substances (the commodity conceived of as measurable value or labour as substance). In terms of the accumulation strategies of late capitalism, the transmutability of the event is a given, and financial and ecosystemic events become interchangeable. What does this imply about the way ‘appropriation’ itself is organized? and what kinds of strategies of resistance does it call for?
The review of Randy Martin’s book brings together many of these themes and offers some scattered thoughts on the articulation of homeland security and home securitization in the contemporary US polity. For further detail, I recommend reading Martin’s book itself! which it seems to me is enormously suggestive about how we might analyse today’s politics of the event.”
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5. ‘Infrastructure and Event: Urbanism and the Accidents of Finance” (Excerpt)
To read the full article please download the pdf at:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002543.php
In his 1977-78 lecture Security, Territory and Population, Foucault argues that the science of modern urbanism arises with the political problem of circulation. With the growth in commerce and migration in the 18th century, the necessity of permanent exchange between the city and its outside demanded a whole rethinking of political method. Early modern urbanism is interested in what flows in, around and out of cities – people, traffic, livestock, merchandise, money, water, air and climate. It monitors the dynamics of flows and the material conduits that enable, channel and divert their circulation– roads, rivers, canals, postal networks, miasmas – in and out of the urban centres. In the eyes of the early urbanists, the problematic of circulation is all about ‚actions at a distance‘; movement which inscribes itself in a non-metric field — le milieu – and suppresses time and space (2006, 21). Modern urbanism demands a form of political control that works on the future, in a probabilistic mode: ‚‘one works on the future, that is to say, the town will not be conceived or planned according to a static perception that would ensure the perfection of the function there and then, but will open into a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable‘ (2006, 20). Its horizon is the contingent (l‘aleatoire) and its repetition or seriality. Foucault describes this as a politics of the event and defines its mode of power as one focused on ‚security‘. In this way, Foucault combines infrastructure, circulation and the event as the crucial, mutually connected elements in a modern problematic of security.
These observations on infrastructure and event can usefully be read alongside the work of Foucault’s collaborators, who have written extensively on the problematic of risk which emerged over the same period. ‚Risk is the term that political economy has assigned to the calculable event. It refers to the fluctuations of fortune attendant on circulation – and attempts to assign them a price. In his extensive genealogy of the 20th century welfare state, Francois Ewald suggests that risk first emerges with the growth in international trade and the problems posed by movable assets, maritime exploration and the dangers of sea travel. ‚‘Insurance is the child of capital. It is a form of security that makes no sense in a feudal economy, where property is tied to land and the individual is held to familial, religious and corporatist forms of solidarity. On the other hand, it becomes necessary when fortune becomes mobile, when capital begins to circulate and finds itself exposed to the dangers of circulation. It is no accident that the first form of insurance was maritime insurance‘ (1986, 182). While the work of Foucault and his collaborators is focused on the rise of insurance-linked forms of risk management, culminating with the actuarial vision of the 20th century social state, it also points to the essentially speculative forms of risk management that proliferated in the trading centres of early modern Europe. Prior to the consolidation of the welfare state, Ewald observes, the distinction between the two was far from clear (1986, 181).
Foucault’s account of the rise of urbanism is promising not only because it displaces the problematic or urbanism away from the geometrics of space time, focusing on circulation rather than the localization of power, but also because it suggests a genealogy of the event and its relationship to infrastructure. Considering that Foucault’s genealogy of risk stops roughly with the 20th century welfare state, how can we put these insights to work today? If the 20th century welfare state offered an actuarial vision of urbanism, crisis response and risk-management, what is the peculiar politics of the evental in which we find ourselves today? Urban theorists such as Graham and Marvin, Neil Smith, Brenner and Theodore, have pointed to the profound shifts in urban infrastructure that have occurred over the last few decades, arguing that the privatization and deregulation of formerly public networks such as transport, water, telecommunications and energy have been integral to the strategies of urban neoliberalism. If ‚selective urban regeneration represents one of the major strategies of neo-liberal urbanism, as argued by Neil Smith, I want to suggest that disaster preparedness and emergency response have become integral to this process.
In turn, these developments need to be situated within the context of emerging forms of capital circulation that are themselves exercising a recursive influence on the dynamics of urban regeneration. Two recent, very different studies in political economy have explored the central importance of derivatives markets in generating new, non-actuarial forms of risk management (Bryan and Rafferty 2006; Lee and LiPuma 2004). The pricing of infrastructure and its ‘accidents’ or its ‘events’ is itself one of the processes that has contributed most intensively to the growth in derivatives markets over the past few decades, while the infra-structural landscapes of cities are themselves recursively bound up in the volatile movements of financial markets. According to these accounts, the politico-economic restructuring of the late 20th century has inaugurated an ‚event-based‘ capitalism in which the trading and leveraging of events replaces the exchange of commodities as the decisive force in shaping political relations and urban geographies of power. Foucault’s analysis alerts us to the long history of the ‚event‘ as an object of political calculus. Thus the problematic is not one of simple historical transition – how did late 20th century capitalism become evental? But rather what is the peculiar event-form that is mobilized by contemporary capitalist relations? And what becomes of risk in a context where the very predictability of the future is under question?In this article, I attempt to outline the complex interaction between financial markets, urbanism and crisis response in the metropolitan centres of the US. In the conclusion, I suggest that these developments were anticipated and tested out in the context of humanitarian intervention and complex emergency in the course of the 80s and 90s. In the process, the contemporary politics of the ‚event‘ reveals itself in both its strangeness and its familiarity, returning us to pre-welfare state modes of risk-management, privatized urbanism and speculative finance even as it invents strikingly new problematics of its own.
Capitalism of the Event
Derivatives are contracts that allow a business to hedge against the occurrence of unpredictable, adverse events ranging from exchange rate fluctuation to political turmoil and extreme weather. Traded in the financial markets, derivatives also allow investors to wager on the relative chances of the derivatives contract itself, effectively transforming the risk-hedging contract into an instrument of speculation. Janus-faced, derivatives merge the actuarial and the speculative, circulating as hedging instruments and wagers at one and the same time. A recently published manual for the derivatives trader urges the reader to adapt to the ‚temporality of the event‘ (Webb 2006). What follows is a series of chapters introducing the investor to the complex menu of events now available for trading. Volatile weather, exchange rate fluctuation, a turbulent political climate – all of these provide occasions for entering into a derivatives contract. So too do the field-like catastrophe risks – from financial crisis to hurricanes or extreme precipitation events — which materialize once a certain, critical threshold of turbulence has been crossed. Where the neoclassical economist discards the unexpected event from his calculus of the future, the trader in derivatives focuses on the fluctuation itself and the critical points at which an unexpected event might happen to occur. Derivatives-trading demands a particular kind of relationship to the future, one that might be characterized as speculative, as opposed to predictive, expectation. Since the price assigned to the future is itself a function of the collective expectations of all traders, no single expectation can hope to offer a rational forecast.
Barely visible in earlier decades, the trade in financial derivatives — futures contracts on financial instruments – has expanded dramatically over the last several decades, doubling in volume in the seventiees, increasing seven fold again in the 80s and now far surpassing trading in all other futures markets. Derivatives have been defined as the ‘functional form that speculative capital assumes in the market-place‘ (Saber 1999, 128). Bryan and Rafferty describe them as the new ‚money form‘ of contemporary capitalism. This is not to say that derivatives didn’t exist prior to the 80s. While standard histories trace their origins to the large-scale derivatives markets for agricultural commodities that were first developed at the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock exchange in the nineteenth century, derivatives in the form of futures and options were traded in the ancient world and represent one of the oldest forms of monetized exchange ever documented (B and R 2006, 90). However, it is the particular kind of derivative – the financial futures contract – that dominates trading today, as well as the scope and integration of international markets, which marks the contemporary trading in derivatives as something wholly new.
Derivatives markets have flourished as a direct result exchange rate liberalization and the dismantling of New Deal era restrictions on speculative capital. Regulations established with the New Deal have been dismantled since the 1970s, gaining momentum under Reagan and accelerating in the 1990s with Clinton and George W. Bush. Since the high inflation of the 1970s, the walls that divided securities from banks and insurance firms have been systematically weakened, culminating in the formal repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Alongside this process and as a response to it, the market in financial derivatives has expanded dramatically, with the swap market growing from nothing in 1980 to a value of $45 trillion by 2002 (Prins 1999, 129).
The phenomenal rise in derivatives trading is closely linked to the privatization and ‚deregulation‘ of infrastructure networks. When a market in water or communications or electricity is highly fragmented, as is usual in the immediate aftermath of privatization, the service provider is left to cope with the unpredictable fluctuations of supply and demand that would once have been offset by the long-term investments of the state. In the absence of suitable insurance, a derivatives contract can be created in order to hedge against the risks associated with the circulation of electricity, communications or weather. It then becomes possible, indeed even more profitable, for the investor to wager on the volatile fortunes of infrastructure itself. Thus the private infrastructure companies spawned by deregulation in the 90s essentially become trading companies, deriving their profits from the volatilities associated with the flow of energy, electricity and telecommunications rather than the provision of the service itself. As suggested by Lee and LiPuma, this is a mode of capitalism which profits from the risks associated with its own connectivities, at increasingly greater levels of abstraction, moving from the actual material connectivities of infrastructure to their associated risks, to risks associated with the circulation of those risks, and so on. And when derivatives trading begins to predominate over the trading in assets and stocks, such companies have a vested interest in generating ever newer markets for relational exposure and hedgable risk, diversifying into ever more arcane fusions of risk or creating new instruments de novo such as the burgeoning market in volatile weather products. The curious effect is that climate change has become a speculative instrument like any other for a market hungry in critical events.
Prior to 1980, the bulk of derivatives trading was in commodity-related futures allowing buyers to hedge against future price changes in a given storable asset such as wheat, cotton etc. and each of these categories was traded separately. Forwards, futures and options are all derivatives contracts that speculate on the price volatilities of storable commodities, with differing degrees of abstraction. From the 1980s, however, these contracts were rapidly superseded by derivative products that could be applied to non-storable products such as financial instruments and repackaged amongst themselves. Not only did futures markets begin to be dominated by transactions on financial instruments, but new types of derivative contracts such as swaps emerged that were from the outset financially oriented and could not be understood through the discourse on commodity derivatives’ (B and R 48). In the process, it is the very relationship between the measurable ‚substance‘ of the commodity – its stored value – and the event-related nature of price that is reworked: where traditional derivatives contracts traded in the future prices of commodities, financial derivatives trade in futures of futures, turning promise itself into the means and ends of accumulation.
In this regard, derivatives pose a number of challenges to orthodox theories of money. If money is time, then time is no longer that which measures the movement of commodities and the labour invested in them. In what are called the money markets, money mediates itself and time relates to time, becoming a function of its own fluctuation (Lee and LiPuma 2004, 118). Derivatives thereby challenge the idea that there must be some fundamental value underlying the circulation of money. Indeed what derivatives trade in, according to Bryan and Rafferty, is the very contestabability of fundamental value. As a result of climate change, we can no longer predict the weather and its effect on prices, even in the short term. Its parameters of variation are unknowable. Yet we can create a derivatives contract allowing us to wager on this very uncertainty. The derivatives contract also challenges the causal definition of money in its relationship to debt. If all money is born of debt, with its double reference to promise and obligation, then what is the particular debt form of the derivative? Derivatives work through a process of financial leverage – using debt (borrowing) in order to generate surplus, which can then be used to borrow an even higher amount of money. The generation of surplus from debt is the classic form of capital accumulation, first identified by Marx in his formula for interest-bearing capital M-M‘. Yet the leverage effect is magnified many times over in the case of derivatives, where what is being exchanged is not simply a future claim to a given commodity (labour) but a future claim to futures, at increasingly higher levels of abstraction. When different kinds of derivative instruments are combined together, relatively small wagers allow for an extraordinary degree of leverage over vastly greater amounts of assets.
In an international financial regime in which fixed exchange rates have been abolished, derivatives have emerged as the new money-form, the universal means for deciding the price of money. The absence of fundamental value or measure – even of a nominal kind – is a given in today’s financial markets. There is no final determination to the value of value. No equivalence across borders. No market equilibrium. Nevertheless, money circulates. The derivative, then, can be defined as the instrument that allows for the continuity of circulation in and across immeasurable difference. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctuation. It is the event of turbulence itself that becomes tradable, even when its parameters are unknowable in advance. In both cases, a reduction is involved. Where commodity exchange reduces the world to a mass of standardized, qualitatively indifferent exchange values, what the market in derivatives extracts from the noise and colour of the world are its event-making relations. The turbulence engendered by connectedness. Turbulence is the event emerging from an irresolvable relation between two or more ‘flows’ that are themselves relations. ‘Derivatives are monetized relations of the relations of capital’ (Lee and LiPuma 2004, 86). Thus the derivative contract might respond to the relation between two currencies, whose value is always fluctuating, or it might respond to the relation between exchange rates themselves (the relations of relations), or between kinds of relations, floating and fixed (as in the swap contract).
Up until the 80s, standard economic accounts described derivatives as peripheral effects of cash or spot markets, as if the price of ‘derivatives’ was literally derived from the prices of the latter. The derivative was therefore assumed to represent (in the case of risk hedging) or mis-represent (when it is used for speculative purposes) a fundamental value determined in the spot market and ultimately in the exchange of storable commodities. However, the rise in financial derivatives such as swaps makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the standard account of price determination and causality. The derivative-market trades in events pertaining to the money markets themselves, and in the process inevitably occasions events of its own making. The event-making powers of the derivatives market can be most strikingly illustrated by in the emerging market crises of the 90s. The devaluation of the Thai baht in 1997 has been described by economist Michel Aglietta as a third generation crisis in that it was generated entirely by the movement of derivatives trading within the financial markets (2001, 61). Hedge funds, anticipating that the currency was about to devalue – or rather anticipating that other investors would anticipate the same thing – moved out of the currency and into the dollar. The leverage commanded by derivatives traders such as hedge funds is so vast that they are able to produce the exchange rate valuation they wager on, transforming the wager into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Market-related events have become so endemic to the workings of capitalist relations today that it is no longer possible, if it ever were, to dismiss them as a surface effect of underlying or real economic forces. Far from being restricted to the space of the market itself, financial events reverberate outward, redetermining relationships amongst the commodities and stocks they are assumed to derive from (B and R 63). Indeed as Bryan and Rafferty argue, it has become apparent that in most cases, not only prices in cash and commodities markets but also in financial markets specializing in stock, interest rate and currencies, are now subject to the extreme vicissitudes of derivatives trading rather than the other way around (B and R 2006, 63).
Derivatives raise urgent questions about the nature of appropriation today. How do we characterize the power relationships engendered by contemporary forms of capitalism given that derivatives have an extremely tenuous relationship to ownership as we traditionally conceive it? Bryan and Rafferty comment that unlike traditional concepts of capital, derivatives are exchanged without any change in ownership of the assets or shares to which they are indexed. Admittedly the relationship between capital and ownership is itself a difficult one to resolve, since all forms of capital seem to abstract from the understanding of property as a simple ownership of substance (whether this be the quantitative substance of the commodity and the value stored in it or the labour-force of the worker). Where traditional forms of property involve ownership of corporate assets and stocks involve ownership of a share in a company’s profits, derivatives seem to move to an even higher level of abstraction, since what is being traded is a claim over volatility in the price of shares themselves. But does this mean that the category of appropriation itself becomes irrelevant when thinking about derivatives, or does it indicate that we need to rethink appropriation in wholly new terms? The contemporary dynamics of capital markets, I would suggest, calls for an understanding of appropriation in terms of the event and its relations rather than substance and stored value. The highly abstracted, integrated form of financial capital that is embodied in derivatives trading doesn’t abolish the category of appropriation but refashions it, in very Heideggerian terms, as an appropriation in and of the event. In the era of capital market liberalization, political and economic power lies in the art of leveraging the event, of turning the catastrophe-event into a source of proliferating returns. While former modes of property-right are not abolished, the appropriation of the event ascends to a leading role in the hierarchy of power relations, cutting up, subsuming and recombining the risks associated with the most abstract of economic and social relations. Derivatives can be defined as the most abstract form of capital, since they completely abstract from the qualitative and quantitative substance of commodities, labour and shares. The leveragable event can be of any kind – financial, political or biospheric – or an abstract combination of the risks associated with these. Yet while derivatives abstract from the substantive nature of things and forces, they simultaneously operate at the most intimate of material levels, investing the transversal relations that connect and combine the entire world of priceable risk. Thus, even as it animates relations and generates turbulence at the most abstract of levels, derivatives trading also constantly re-determines the price of labour and reshapes the geographies of urban infrastructure in line with its own demands for valorization, filtering down through the levels of abstraction to make a claim over the relations, connections and networks whose futures they trade in. The power of leverage is one of potentiation through connection, the power to connect and disconnect ‚services‘, to potentialize and depotentialize connections, and thus to reshape the possibilities of movement of everyday life. This is a form of appropriation that operates in the future subjunctive, since the promise of leverage is a claim over the future in all its unknowability — a claim over futures that may materialize in any place and any time.
The politics of event-based capitalism – and its contestation – is therefore readable at the level of infrastructure, movement and urban life. In what follows, I will look at the recent history of American urbanism, to explore how the privatization of infrastructure and the trading of its ‚accidents has demanded a new understanding of domestic security, urban vulnerability and crisis response.
[…]
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6. ‘Experimental Labour – Offshoring Clinical Trials to China’ (Excerpt)
To read the full article please download the pdf at:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/002543.php
Experimental Life
In his study of experimental complexity in biology, the philosopher of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger distinguishes between the testing device, which produces standards or replicas and legitimates prediction, and the experimental system, which is creative only inasmuch as it periodically disrupts the regularities of the test and generates events of an entirely unanticipated nature. The unanticipated event is not the result of subjective error but is on the contrary entirely objective, real, indeed realer than real, since it confirms the resistance of the experimental object (1997: S245-S246). It eludes simple prediction and yet this doesn’t mean that it descends from nowhere, as if ex nihilo. The experimental event can only be generated from within a matrix of provisionally stable connective relations, the established norms, protocols and materials of the experimental system, whose very repetition is what gives rise to occasional instabilities. In Rheinberger’s words, the experimental event is the result of epistemic and material conjunctures; modes of connection that are productive because they destabilize and deterritorialize the normative systems they have brought together.
Rheinberger is interested in the biological sciences in general. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that there is something unique to the biomedical experiment, something that further complicates its relation to the unanticipated event. The testing of a new pharmacological compound, a biological device or tissue, cannot only occur in vitro – it must also be experienced in vivo. It needs to be ingested, metabolized and lived-with, in order to prove its eventfulness. In this way, biomedical experiment is always a self-experiment, even when carried out en masse: a transformation of body and mind whose effects remain a little bit incalculable, whatever the precautions taken. There is thus an interesting tension between the imperatives of standardization and safety that allow a drug to become marketable and the incalculable edge of the experiment—where the event comes into being. Without a doubt we owe much of our present-day pharmacopoeia to the willingness of scientists and other experimenters to ingest the results of their own curiosity, sometimes with fatal consequences. There is a long and fascinating history of scientific self-experimentation, but it exists in an uneasy relationship with the present-day norms of clinical practice. The randomized clinical trial, a testing device designed to measure the likelihood of the unexpected, is one way the modern, post World War II pharmaceutical industry has been able to forge a certain scientific and industrial respectability (Marks 1997). The use of suitably compliant testing populations—detainees in the American state prison system—has been another, less respectable way of standardizing the procedures of clinical trial, while perhaps allowing for a certain margin of ‘creativity’ in the protocols of experiment. Is this space of unconfined experiment the dirty secret of pharmacological invention? And what happens when it becomes too public and controversial, and therefore too costly, for the pharmaceutical industry? At least one commentator and insider of the pharmaceutical industry has suggested that the ethical regulation of clinical trials should be held partly responsible for the dramatic decrease in real pharmacological invention over the last few decades (this comes from a commentator who is extremely critical of the politics of the drug industry) (Pignarre 2003).
The tension between incarceral and voluntary experience, objective and subjective science, self-experiment and rationalized torture, is recurrent in the history of science. But it is particularly salient one today, when the pharmaceutical industry is faced with declining rates of drug innovation, expiring patents and the chronic ‘non-compliance’ of its clinical trial participants. In the era of contract-based, casualized participation in clinical trials, how do you channel the will to experiment into a form of compliant service? And how do you transform a culture of experimental drug consumption into marketable form? From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, these problems have only been compounded by the increasingly intense regulation of the clinical trial, drug approval and drug classification process (legal or illegal status of the compound, use and misuse in its consumption) over the same period. In response to their perceived financial difficulties, the pharmaceutical industries are currently engaged in an intensive restructuring of the clinical trial process itself, both as a scientific method and a clinical practice. There are on-going efforts to replace the golden standard of randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs) with a more ‘flexible’, indeed experimental, protocol, one which would allow the clinician to modify research questions in response to incoming results. The institutional context for clinical trials has also undergone several important shifts over the past few decades, from a situation in which prison-based trials were once the norm to the current rise in contract research organizations (CROs) responsible for outsourcing and off-shoring trials to cheaper locations and subject populations.
In common with other kinds of bodily service, human subject experimentation, even when remunerated, is not often recognized as labour. Human rights discourse in bioethics has trouble distinguishing this kind of service from a ‘gift’, while liberal bioethics confines its analysis to the absence or presence of the informed consent contract. Both discourses obscure the extent to which the ‘clinical service’ contributes to the production of biomedical innovation and the monetary value accruing from it. Moreover in the United States, the market liberalization of health care and insufficiencies of health insurance have meant that clinical trial participation is beginning to be organized along the lines of other, more familiar forms of casualized service labour – as distinct not only from the ‘gift relation’ idealized in bioethical discourse, but also from the incarceral forms of experiment which were common in the United States up until the seventies. A similar process is discernible in China, where the contracting of clinical trials to public hospitals has gone together with a rapid demolition of collective health care. I therefore propose to reconceive of clinical trial participation as a form of clinical or experimental labour and situate it at the very heart of contemporary processes of value creation. Perhaps ‘labour’ is always a critical concept and one that emerges from a point of view of non-compliance or non-readability, to adopt the vocabulary of the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, by reformulating human subject experimentation as labour, I am hoping to open up the scope of political critique to include a consideration of this liminal, but essential moment in the production of biomedical value.
Experimental (or clinical) labour is a term I have coined with Catherine Waldby in order to account for the creation of surplus value in the emerging biomedical economies (2008). We conceive of clinical trial participation and tissue provision as a form of labour in which consumption and production of bodily effects blur together in the experience of self-transformation (Waldby and Cooper 2008). An essential component of clinical trial participation is what is referred to as ‘risk’ in technical terms but which might be better rendered by the more suggestive term ‘exposure’. Human subject experimentation in drug testing can be described as a form of transformative exposure, where the patient is called upon to both experience the sometimes unpredictable metabolic effects of pharmaceutical compounds and to perform a number of second-order tasks such as adhering to a strict regime of diet and drug administration, self-monitoring and recording of information. This is a depiction of labour that places it somewhere between passive and active participation, subjective and objective science. Labour would then be defined as the experience of self-transformation – commodified. The process of self-transformation can be creative of new relations and stabilities, productive of the unexpected and the useful, without being positive, pleasurable or even survivable. If we were to redefine labour in this way, the contribution of the clinical trial participant or tissue donor to the production of bioeconomic value would become more readily comprehensible. The clinical labourer is the person who ‘consents’ to his or her own self-transformation for a certain return (although this return can be direct or indirect, monetary or in kind). What the investor receives in exchange is a surplus of experimental information, or a literal surplus of biological potentiality (the stem cell line for example) that can then be transformed into the surplus value accruing from bio-innovation.
Experimental labour is self-transformation – commodified. But self-transformation, even of the biomedical kind, is not reducible to the commodification process, even when it is difficult to separate these processes historically. Taking my cue from Rheinberger, I therefore want to propose a general theory of experimental self-transformation, not as an end in itself, but as a way of formulating a proper critique of the political abuses of the biomedical experiment in contemporary neoliberal forms of capitalism. The biomedical experiment works through the materialization of conjuncture across multiple levels. Most immediately, it involves the complex interaction of molecules, medical device or tissue transplant with the patient’s body, mind and nervous system. Taking a much larger perspective, the process of biomedical experiment might be widened to include the whole question of disease emergence, mutation and resistance. Recent philosophies of science suggest that evolution itself, particularly when considered at the level of the micro-organism, should be conceived of as a process of natural experiment rather than natural selection, one in which the transversal circulation and recombination of mobile genetics elements plays a key role (Reid 2007). Of course, the properly biological aspects of any disease (emergence, evolution, modes of infection, creation of resistances) are engendered within, and inseparable from, a whole context of more or less stable social relations, desires and practices. Limiting ourselves to the case of an infectious disease such as HIV/AIDS, on the rise in China, this context incorporates everything from the susceptibilities of particular bodies to infection (gender, sexual practices, immune suppression, previous history of medication), the social, cultural and economic risk factors (gender, age, sexual practice, drug use, economic status, work), the medical/public health infrastructure (access to insurance, drugs, public health provision), seasonal migration, sexual violence and desire. Recent epidemiological accounts of China suggest that the highly unstable, experimental nature of post-socialist economic reform has played an important role in the ecologies of emerging, mutating diseases such as SARS and HIV/AIDS.
In this paper, I will be interested in the contemporary politics of clinical trials as it is being played out on a global level. In particular, I will be investigating the stakes at play in the recent trend towards the offshore outsourcing of clinical research and testing from North America to China. What is motivating this push on the part of the multinational pharmaceutical industry? How are the politics of clinical trials connected to the market liberalization of health care in both contexts? The will to experiment, I would suggest, is intrinsic to neo-liberal modes of accumulation. Neoliberalism can thus be provisionally characterized as that form of capitalism which most immediately profits from the experimental destabilization of social norms, the seasonal mobilization of ‘free’ labour and the circulation of non-familial forms of desire — not to mention the emergence of new ecologies of disease. And yet it constantly comes up against the problem of how to confine, render compliant and valorize the fluidities of social, bodily and epidemiological experiment. In a very concrete way, this tension is visible in the recent history of clinical trial research in the US, where the widespread use of prisoners as clinical labourers has been progressively replaced by a highly flexible, all too non-compliant work force of casualized human subjects. I would suggest that the push towards offshore outsourcing of clinical trial research to China is at least partly motivated by the desire to re-discover some of the labour compliance and clinical readability once offered by the US prison-pharma complex. In the meantime however, China itself is undergoing an intense experiment in neo-liberal market reform, which is producing uncertainties of its own. The economic success of reform-era China is crucially dependent on the labour of its floating populations—who also happen to be intensively engaged in the production of new gender, sexual and social relations. The development of a Chinese labour market in clinical research is no exception to these trends. It too draws on the circulation of bodies and desires associated with seasonal migration, rural exodus, communal disintegration, sex work and IV drug consumption. It too, in other words, is interested in capturing some kind of surplus from the experimental destabilization of social connections.
In her recent study on post-socialist China, Lisa Rofel (2007) has argued that the experience of desire has been pushed to the forefront of the neo-liberal transformation in China, inflecting even the language of everyday political discussion, where the idiom of hearts (xinli, xintai) and feelings (ganjue) has replaced that of consciousness. The on-going Chinese experiment in political and economic liberalization, she notes, is widely understood to imply an opening up of desire to the new experience. In this way, ‘desire in China has been assigned the weight of throwing off historical constraints and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature in the contingent context of postsocialist experiments and post-Cold War global politics’ (2007: 198). As politics itself is reconfigured in experiential and experimental terms, she argues that new hierarchies are being built around the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate desire, which more often than not collapses into the difference between non-commodified and transactional desire. With the influx of rural migrants into the cities and the rise in transactional sex work for both men and women, new ideas about social class are emerging, which turn on the difference between those who freely experiment in desire and those who are merely experimented upon. The difficulty of separating the two, I would suggest, is itself revealing about the neoliberal mode of capitalism in China and is of particular relevance to the politics of drug trials.
The Prison and the Clinic
It is not commonly known that prison-based clinical trials were once the norm in North American pharmaceutical research. During the 1960s, an era of intense inventiveness and sales’ growth, pharmaceutical companies in North America were conducting the greatest part of clinical trials amongst prison populations, even going so far as to build state-of-the-art clinical trial laboratories on prison grounds. Their concern was not only to recruit prisoners as human subjects but also to train prison inmates as clinicians, capable of carrying out tests at a fraction of the cost outside prison walls. The commercial benefits of this move were starkly highlighted in the testimonial of a group of prisoners who brought a lawsuit against the corrections department in 1968, claiming that the companies had obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars of labour for free (Hornblum 1998: 103). The penal-medical alliance, it seems, was at least partly motivated by changes to the FDA requirement for clinical trials. In 1962, the FDA responded to the thalidomide scandal by requiring three phases of human clinical trials, including Phase I trials on healthy subjects, before a drug could be marketed. This meant that the small number of hospital patients that had hitherto been required for clinical trials was suddenly insufficient. And as Hornblum points out, state-controlled prisons seemed to offer the perfect conditions for both industrial-scale labour and the requirements of standardized clinical experiment—highly regimented living conditions, and a workforce that was ‘cheap, available and confined,’ not to mention already highly stratified along class and race lines (Hornblum 1998: 108). While the use of prisoners as guinea pigs came under increasing scrutiny throughout the seventies, it is only very recently, in 1981, that the FDA officially outlawed the practice.
In the meantime, the conduct of clinical trials in the US has shifted to a ‘voluntary’ system, which is not without its own forms of control. This is a system in which the greatest part of clinical trials are administered either by private medical practitioners or contract research organizations, both on contract to a larger pharmaceutical company. CROs, who sell themselves on the speed of their results and pay lower wages than their competitors, have progressively taken over much of the work formerly performed in prison, in-house or by academia. The considerable rise in CRO activity has thus allowed the major pharmaceutical companies to cut back on their professional labour costs – and arguably, to sideline some of the pressures from federal regulators (Shuchman 2007). While drug trials no longer take place within the walls of a state prison, the circumstances that drive a patient to volunteer in a clinical trial and a medical practitioner to undertake contract pharmaceutical work may be no less coercive. Indeed it would seem that the very process of health care liberalization has led to the decline of the prison-based biomedical complex—liberating the experiment from the confines of the state institution—only in order to re-establish its new methods of control in the open, unconfined space of the free market. Jill A. Fisher comments that the current practice of private-clinic based contract research, in which an individual medical practitioner will take on trial contracts on behalf of the pharmaceutical industries, is directly motivated by the effects of neo-liberal reform (2007). As medical practitioners face diminishing revenues, contract work becomes an alternative form of income, while for under- or uninsured patients, clinical trial participation may represent one form of casualized, high-risk labour amongst many others and perhaps the only means of access to health care. Not surprisingly, the profile of patient recruitment that seems to be emerging from this labour regime is one that overlaps with the lower echelons of the US economy. The situation is not without problems of its own, even from the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, which routinely complains about the costs of US-based contract work, the length of time required for recruiting suitable patients, their unreliability, high drop-out rates, non-compliance and lack of clinical readability. In other words, at the very moment that neo-liberalism vaunts the flexibilities of decentralization, subcontracting and the de-collectivization of labour and its risks, it finds itself confronted with the problem of excessive flexibility—and how to re-confine it. Even while the pharmaceutical industry intensifies its outsourcing contracts within the US, the drive to push the clinical trial process offshore represents one way of resolving this problem—at least in the short term.
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7. Review — Randy Martin’s ‘Empire of Indifference’ (excerpt)
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Review of Randy Martin. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Randy Martin’s Empire of Indifference deploys the concept of securitization – with its double reference to financial and military processes – as a way of approaching the seeming convertibility of the economic and the political calculus of risk in the US’s most recent imperial investments. If the revolving door between the two now seems as intimate as that between the Republican dynasty and its donors, Martin is not so much interested in these contingent alliances as in the temporality that unites their imperial investments. The leveraged, hyper-volatile investments afforded by the financial derivative thus offer a parallel perspective on the apparent flightiness of recent US imperial strategy. This is a terrain of investigation that seems to be opened up by the philosophy of the event in its different genealogies (Deleuze and Negri, via Lucretius, Spinoza, Machiavelli and pragmatism; Derrida and the later Althusser, via Heidegger and Machiavelli; Badiou via set theory). But whereas the evocation of the event in these philosophies seems to point to a horizon of ontological resistance or even messianism, in some sense beyond the politics of state and capital, Martin places his whole strategy firmly within the field of the event. Event-based capitalism thereby becomes the terrain in which power struggles are to be conducted. The promise and the gift of an unknowable futurity with which the event is associated in recent French theory is nothing more or less than the promissory future of speculative capital. The question then becomes how to think through a counter-politics of the event. With its clean departure from state-based and political theological accounts of power, it seems to me that Martin’s books represents one of the first political philosophies to offer a thorough critique of the political economy of the event.
Martin’s previous book, Financialization of Daily Life (2002) was concerned with the intimate psychology of risk in an era when the barriers between public and private financial spheres were being deliberately dismantled. Standard histories of financialization point to the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the turn to monetarist anti-inflation strategies and the Clinton-era repeal of the Glass Steagall Act as defining moments in the ascent of finance to a commanding position in the US, and global, economy. Less attention is paid to the process by which personal finance in the form of pension savings, education loans, household debt and mortgages were transferred to the global capital markets over the same period. The liquidity of these markets presupposes the availability of a mass of personal finance that was previously sequestered from the vagaries of speculative capital. In Financialization of Daily Life, Martin was concerned with the resounding effects of such a shift on the temporality of everyday life. What happens when the worker/consumer is invited to manage his or her life risks with the same opportunism as the financial investor? And when the Fordist utopias of progressive growth, the middle class and the standard of living, give way to the normalization of indebtedness and credit-based upward mobility? In post-fordism, the savings plan, with its promise of deferred gratification, is replaced by the leveraged investment and its demand that we valorize the future before it gets a chance to bankrupt us. Nowhere is the precariousness of this situation more visible than in the securitization of the home mortgage, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has once again made clear.
Empire of Indifference, which can be read as a sequel to this work, looks outward to the effects of financialization on US foreign policy and imperial intervention, and inward to the parallel militarization of the domestic front. Here it is no longer the ‘home’ but the ‘homeland’ that is subject to the risks and opportunities of securitization. And it is not the home mortgage but escalating governmental indebtedness that provides the leverage for proliferating financial and military opportunism. Martin offers no attempt to discern the ‘real’ reasons underlying the war in Iraq – the oil reserves of Iraq no more determine the risks and gains of war than the market price of energy futures are decided by the fundamental value of oil. Rather he situates the war within the context of an overall shift in US foreign policy that aspires to displace the strategic value of geographic locale and long-term territorial appropriation with the risk-opportunism of short-term investment. This shift, he argues, is visible both in the ongoing reconstitution of the US armed forces and in the changing face of imperial intervention itself. The doctrine of force transformation (otherwise known as the revolution in military affairs) has covered for a thoroughgoing restructuring of the armed forces in perfect alignment with the precepts of corporate outsourcing, asset-stripping and self-government. It has also mandated a shift from mutual deterrence to a strategy of pre-emption not unlike the ‘forward-looking investments’ of financial arbitrage or the speculative counterfactuals of Royal Dutch Shell’s scenario planning techniques. The generative effects of preemptive warfare have been well documented – the fact for example that Iraq has become a training ground for al-Qaeda as a consequence of US intervention or that the possibility of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the Taliban has been rendered more plausible by the alliance with Pakistan. Most importantly, the declaration of a war on terror seems to have provoked a certain unity of purpose amongst the various denominations of militant Islamism, crystallizing alliances that would otherwise have remained dormant. Whatever the costs, pre-emption will have at least succeeded in generating ‘relations at a distance’ and risk opportunities where none existed before. This is a mode of intervention that is curiously indifferent to its own ‘success’ or ‘failure’, since both eventualities open up a market of future risk opportunities where even hedges against risk can be traded for profit. ‘Fighting terror unleashed it elsewhere, just as well-placed put or call (sell or buy) of stock would send ripples of price volatility through the market. Drops in price can be hedged against, turned into derivatives, and sold for gain. The terror war converts both wins and losses into self-perpetuating gain’ (2007, 98).
Amongst other things, this book offers a powerful reflection on method. Martin is particularly illuminating on the limitations of Foucault’s enormously influential account of biopower in Society Must be Defended, which makes the unfortunate move of opposing the dynamism of a relational account of power to a substance-based view of economic exchange and property relations. Addressing himself to the more reductive strands in political Marxism, Foucault ends up deserting the whole field of economic analysis, a surprising move, given Foucault’s early attention to the simultaneous development of the modern life sciences and political economy. ‘While certainly not so in Foucault’s earlier writing such as The Order of Things (1966), in later work the matter of life and money is typically written about as if active consideration of one precluded critical attention to the other. While political economy seems moribund, biopower is money-free’ (2007, 132). Even in his follow up lecture series, La naissance de la biopolitique (1978-79), where Foucault offers his first and last analysis of Chicago school neoliberalism, his analysis of the ‘economisation’ of life is limited to the more reductive neoclassical attempts to measure life’s value in economic terms. Not only is Foucault’s method inadequate to the contemporary co-penetration of domestic and commercial economic relations, argues Martin, it is also singularly unsuited to dealing with the event-based dynamics of financial capital. ‘Of course Foucault is not reading Marx in these lectures but Hobbes, although he is clearly arguing against a particular version of Marxism’ (2007, 135). Hence one of the unexpected consequences of Foucault’s account of biopower is that in spite of its intentions, it ends up reorienting contemporary debate around the question of sovereign power and political theology (Agamben’s work, which responds to Foucault via Hobbes, is representative here).
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