Biopolitics. The Political Potential of the Life Sciences. A Course of Lectures (in English)

by Prof. Alexander V. Oleskin, General Ecology Dept., School of Biology, Moscow State Univ.

Lecture 1

I’m glad to welcome all students to my course of lectures. It seems to be an elective subject, i.e. you feel free to decide whether or not to attend my lectures. If this is the case, I appreciate your interest in my subject called “biopolitics”. This introductory lecture provides a general overview of biopolitics, a modern interdisciplinary field located on the border between the life sciences and political science. A course of lectures should begin with the definition of their subject. In the most general sense, biopolitics stands for the totality of all kinds of interactions between the life sciences and politics, including both the political potential of biology and the biological implications of politics (see below for details). This definition sounds somewhat sophisticated and perhaps even mind-boggling. Its meaning should gradually become clear to you as the course of lectures unfόlds.

Why does this novel field of science get so much attention presently? The reason is that, in the 21st century, biology exerts a considerable influence on the humanities and social sciences, as well as on the whole human society. You are students of the Global Studies Department. Therefore, you are probably familiar with some important recent global political developments that involve biology. Biology is expected to produce both positive and negative effects on the global scale in terms of the people’s wellfare. On the one hand, people around the world pin their hopes on biology which can help overcome the impending ecological crisis. Biology hopefully can provide us with recipes for coping with problems caused by environmental deterioration. Humankind has been destroying the planet and life on it since the beginning of the Modern Age. I needn’t really go into details while talking about such familiar issues as the pollution of water, soil and air or the extinction of a multitude of plant and animal species under the influence of short-sighted, exploitative human civilization. The shrinking world currently requires sound biological knowledge that could inform global political decisions aimed at improving the threatening environmental situation. The conceptual underpinnings of environment-friendly policies are an important subfield of biopolitics, and some global biopolitical organizations focus on them. An example is the Biopolitics International Organisation whose headquarters are located in the nice southern town of Athens. Nevertheless, biopolitics does not only boil down to political efforts for protecting the environment and improving the global ecological situation.

Now I’d like you to get actively involved in this discussion. What’s the reason that biology is so influential nowadays, apart from ecology?

A large number of people – definitely over one billion globally ­ suffer from starvation or at least undernourishment. This certainly concerns the 3^rd world countries. Currently, biologists promise to help these people by producing new kinds of cheap food. I have in mind biotechnologically produced food items such as cultivated edible fungi such as the oyster fungus, the champignon, or the Japanese specialty shii-take. When it comes to preventing starvation, taste is a less important matter. Therefore, microbiologists plan to cultivate tasteless (though improved with spices and taste-enhancing additives) bacterial biomass. One food expert tasted bacteria and stressed that they “have all the makings of the food of the future. They have neither taste nor flavor nor structure”. Notwithstanding these problems, this is an indisputably positive aspect of biology’s impact on the present-day world. But this is only one side of the coin.

People around the globe are also concerned about possible risks associated with recent biological developments. Primarily, potential threats are posed by genetic engineering. I hope you know that genetic engineering aims to change the genetic information of living organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to animals to humans. Genetic engineers insert new genes that for instance, make trees shine in the dark when the air contains toxic gases used as chemical weapons. Genetic engineers cause much concern because they potentially can produce dangerous monsters and cloned humans, since they have already succeeded in cloning animals including dheep, pigs, and the cat called Copycat. Has anyone of you watched the famous movie about cloning Hitler? Political and legal regulations are mandatory for coping with such potentially threatening developments related to modern biology and, more specifically, to its subfield called genetics. For instance, genetic engineering raises political issues such as whether all substances obtained from GM organisms must be labeled. Russia’s government has quite recently adopted a law to this effect, and all GM-enriched goods are really labeled. The USA has so far refused to introduce GM product labeling because one is afraid this might reduce the profits of companies\s that manufacture and market GM organism-containing products. Another important question to raise is which political regulations are to be adopted with respect to genetic diagnostics and therapy. Importantly, genetic therapy is curing hereditary diseases by changing the DNA. It “raises many policy issues regarding what role the government ought to play in encouraging or discouraging such research and application” (Blank & Hines, 2001, p.90). Moreover, genetic therapy applied to practically healthy people becomes genetic enhancement -- “making people still better”. Studies with mice models demonstrated that gene insertion could, e.g., improve their memory.

Another important example is provided by human brain neuromediators that are on the agenda of present-day neurology. Neuromediators perform major functions in various animals, plants, and even microbial cells. Abnormally high or low brain concentrations of neuromediators (more precisely, the increased/decreased activity of neuromediator-dependent brain systems) may result in serious mental problems such as depression and inadequate (e.g., aggressive) behavior and cause negative ethical, legal, and political consequences. There is good evidence that a low level of serotonin in the brain causes severe depression associated with anxiety, anger, and uncontrollable impulsive behavior.The knowledge concerning neuromediators is a prerequisite for developing neurochemical tools for manipulating human behavior, in particular in order to attain political goals.

However, both the positive and the negative aspects of the influence of biology on global politics do not exhaust the whole subject matter of biopolitics. You all focus on global studies that are closely related to the social sciences and the humanities. Therefore, you probably should find fascinating that biology is being increasingly applied to issues related to ethics, linguistics, esthetics, history, and politics. These interactions between biology, on the one hand, and various social sciences, on the other, result in the formation of new borderline disciplines such as

• Bioethics, “the study of ethical problems arising from biological research and its applications in such fields as organ transplantation, genetic engineering, or artificial insemination” (Collins English Dictionary, 2003).

• Biosemiotics that “studies communication and signification in living systems… Moreover, it considers communication as the essence of life.” (Sharov, 1998).

• Bioesthetics (bioaesthetics), the subject of a recent work by Irina V. Botvinko (2011, p.94). She emphasized that, “in addition to its political and ethical dimensions, life is also of interest in terms of aesthetics. We enjoy the beauty of flowers, starfish, tiny foraminifers, and other life forms. …The aesthetics of life is related to its harmony, symmetry, and fractal geometry”.

The bio-humanities deal with all possible interactions of the life sciences with social sciences and the humanities, irrespective of their relevance to politics. For example, linguists draw analogies between biological evolution and the evolution of languages. Moreover, it is possible to use data concerning communication between animals or plants (biocommunication) to improve our knowledge of the laws governing the development of human languages.

And now we’re coming back to biopolitics.

Biopolitics interacts with other interdisciplinary subfields of the bio-humanities and there are many overlapping areas of research. For instance, a large number of the problems faced by society relate both to biopolitics and bioethics (exemplified by modern genetic technologies and environmental concerns).

A hallmark of our time is the increasing interaction between the bio-humanities (and biopolitics as their part) and modern psychology. Evolution-molded behaviors that are partly common to humans and other animals receive increasing attention from psychiatrists who evaluate the psychological status of an individual and can diagnose mental disorders. Both of biopolitical and psychological interest are biobehavioral (ethological) studies of political leaders’ behavior. Although we shall discuss this subject in much more detail in one of the following lectures, I should emphasize that biopoliticians compare human and animal behavior including typical facial expressions displayed both by humans such as the former US president Bush and, for instance, by the chimpanzee.

The political system including the state apparatus has been actively regulating the biology of its subjects/citizens over the course of several centuries. Measures have been taken to register and control their birth rate, morbidity, work capacity, and mortality. These state policies also form part of biopolitics, as emphasized by the prominent 20^th century scholar Michel Foucault and his followers.

Foucault and his followers (Agamben, Lazzarato, Negri, Hardt, and others) emphasized the impact of the political system on the biology of the humans involved. According to Foucault’s lectures, the political systems of Western Europe developed a system of dispositifs, i.e., practical measures and tools to monitor (using censes and other demographic methods) and control human reproduction (obstetricians and, more recently, family planning centers), health and morbidity (health care institutions, sanitation, and hygiene), work capacity (education, safety regulations, and, much more recently, human engineering), and mortality (funeral institutions), as well as the environment. It was in the 18^th century that “the first demographers began to measure these phenomena in statistical terms” (Foucault, 2003 [1976]). Hence the disciplinary measures that had been in use starting from the 17^th century in Europe and dealt with human behavior on the individual level using boarding schools, barracks, prisons, hospitals, and the like were supplemented with policies aimed at monitoring the demographic variables of the population and controlling them.

According to Foucault and his followers, biopolitics, therefore, is concerned with the effects produced by the political system on the biology of its citizens/subjects. In Foucault’s works, the term “biopolitics” is used as a synonym for another term, “biopower”. Biopower exercized by the political system of a state includes regulatory measures aimed at optimizing the biological characteristics and the work capacity of the population or, at least, maintaining them within the normal limits. Defining such concepts as “normal” or “abnormal” is also within the competence of biopower-exercizing bodies. “Abnormalities” of all kinds are to be eliminated, including “aberrant” individuals that belong to “inferior” races; this is the meaning of the notion “racism” in Foucault’s words. In addition, individuals whose bodies or minds deviate from what is considered “normal”, including disabled people, deformed children, and the insane, should also be removed from society by isolating and, if possible, rehabilitating them. “… Disability is comprised of the innumerable aspects of social life that impose restrictions on disabled people, including personal prejudice, inaccessible public buildings, unusable public transportation systems, segregated education, exclusionary workplace arrangements, and so on” (M. Oliver’s views summarized by Shelley Tremain, 2008, p. 104).

Michel Foucault (2003) predicted that biopower (biopolitics) would have new opportunities once “it became technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally desctructive”. In the light of recent advances in the field of artificial human reproduction and cloning, it is to be expected that the biological element of the human being will no longer be considered natural in the future because it will become in part artificial. Recent advances in genetic engineering as well as other novel biological technologies are expected to enable us to create human individuals with intentionally modified features (“designer babies”).

Modern surgery is also making its contribution to the purposeful modification of the human body aimed at “normalizing” and “optimizing” people in the interest of biopower. Surgical techniques, apart from treating diseases, are increasingly used with healthy individuals in an attempt to bring their bodies closer to perfection.

Taken together, these facts suggest that biopower, in addition to partly removing the boundaries between nature and culture, the natural and the artificial, also remove the boundaries between the norm and the pathology as well as between health and disease. Bad mood, spleen, and depression are considered sufficient reasons for visiting a doctor that prescribes anti-depressant drugs such as Prozac. Healthy people also take “lifestyle medication” also including Prozac as well as Viagra and other drug preparations. Drug manufacturers exercize their own biopolitics: they persuade people to search for problems in their own body: they “market diseases and then sell drugs to treat these diseases” (Conrad, 2005, p.5). Gene engineering and other anthropotechnologies (technologies that modify the body) represent the culmination of the trend that existed in Europe, according to Foucault, starting from the 18^th century, and resulted in the increasing influence of the political system on human biology

In sum, recent achievements in the field of genetic, neuro-, and behavioral technologies are expected to provide the political elite with novel tools for regulating the biology of the population to the point of assuming total control over human reproduction, the population’s gene pool (by compiling genetic records for every citizen), and each citizen’s brain (the prospective “Neurosociality” system). These could surpass the innovations described in the utopian novels by Huxley, Orwell, and other writers of the 20^th century.

Lecture 2

Hence the term biopolitics is construed by the author as embracing various aspects of interactions between biology and politics that represent the main subject of this book.

Although a special lecture will be devoted to the philosophical underpinnings of biopolitics, a brief excursion into the field of philosophy should make sense at this point. In terms of philosophy, the whole field of biopolitics is founded on the “soft naturalism” principle implying that the human being is a multilevel entity. In other words, human nature includes several different levels. The biological and the cultural levels coexist, compete, and cooperate inside a human individual. Without equating a human being with an animal, biopolitics, nonetheless, demonstrates to people how important the influence of evolutionary factors on their behavior can actually be. Information concerning biological influences on human behavior can help us explain certain human actions driven by a variety of subconscious or unconscious factors and, still more important, resist these influences if they are incompatible with our social norms, moral rules, or cultural traditions. Human males, in principle, are evolutionarily predisposed to commit rape if their social rank is too low to guarantee that females would be happy to make love to them. This biological (biobehavioral) tendency is clearly at variance with our ethical norms and social rules, and biopoliticians expose the danger caused by our evolutionary legacy and develop strategies to resist its influence.

Biopolitics came into being in the late 20^th century as a result of interactions between (i) the life sciences such as ethology (behavioral research), theory of evolution, sociobiology (and, more recently, evolutionary psychology), genetics, neurology, and ecology and (ii) theories in political science based on behavioralism, organicism, and/or synergetics. The progress in biopolitics has also been promoted by recent political phenomena including ethnic conflicts, international terrorism (including bio-terrorism), and the formation of environment-centered and bioethical political movements.

We should now define the fields mentioned above. First of all, ethology originally emphasized observation of animals in their natural habitats. Through direct observation, ethologists seek to identify rules of behavior vital to the survival and reproductive success of the species under study.

Sociobiology developed theoretical models and widely used ethological data in their studies. Generally speaking, sociobiological models were aimed at explaining complex forms of social behavior making good use of concepts borrowed from game theory, decision-making theory as well as economics and other social sciences.

For instance, sociobiologists interpreted the behavior of various biological species in terms of cost-benefit analysis. In a large number of species, females appear to prefer long-term relationships with the same male. In contrast, males tend to change their “girlfriends” frequently. In terms of sociobiology, this is accounted for by the fact that the two partners make unequal investments in their offspring. In the numerous species in which females nurture the young, they invest considerably more resources than males. Therefore, it is only the males who are interested in changing their partners in order to transmit their genes to a maximal number of offspring. Females aim to secure the long-term support of a resource-providing male.

Evolutionary psychology (EP), a field related to sociobiology with respect to methodology and research goals, took shape in the late 80’s. It was defined as the application of adaptational (i.e. evolutionary – O.A.) logic to the architecture of the human mind (Cosmides and Tooby, 1997). Unlike sociobiology, EP only deals with human behavior. It is assumed that human behavior like the human body evolved as an adaptation to the environmental conditions of the Pleistocene period when primitive human beings lived – to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Accordingly, EP is based upon “the principle that the mind is an adapted organ like any other in the service of reproducing our genes under specific environmental conditions” (Nicholson, 1997, p.1053). For example, child-rearing behavior of women took shape, according to evolutionary psychologists, about 200,000 years ago as an adaptation to cope with dangers faced by children. This point on the time scale corresponds to the EEA for child rearing by women.

A couple of important terms related to political science:

Organicism was characteristic of Morley Roberts (1938) seminal book on biopolitics. In this book, the structures of living organisms and political systems were compared.

Behaviorism. A behavioral science developed by J. Watson, B. Skinner, and others in the first half of the 20^th century. An organism was compared to a black box, i.e., an automaton that reacted to a stimulus (S) by displaying a stimulus-induced behavioral response (R): S → R. For instance, a rat locates food, and its salivary glands fill the mouth with saliva.

Behavioralism. An approach to behavior that, in contrast to behaviorism, assumes that a stimulus can cause different responses, depending on the state of the organism (O) involved. The modified scheme is, therefore, S → O → R. In the example with the rat, a sexually aroused rat male will probably ignore food and produce little saliva if he locates a female. Behavioralism, apart from biological organisms, was applied to social organisms including political bodies.