Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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and the unemployed constitute the bulk of these sacrificial bodies that are the new proletariat of the digital and bio-capital era.
The sense of emergency arising from the posthuman convergence introduces new patterns of discrimination upon older modes of oppression. It exposes the inner power structures of advanced capitalism and the sexualized, racialized and naturalized political economies of exploitable labour and dispensable bodies that support it. Importantly, it combines this analysis with a sense of urgency arising from the spectre of the Sixth Extinction, the ecological crisis and climate change. Environmental scarcity clashes with technological abundance within the fast flows of capital, triggering a short-circuiting of planetary dimensions.
Cognitive bio-capitalism is an internally fractured system that combines high degrees of technological mediation with deep social and economic inequalities. It manages to combine the free circulation of data and capital with a neo-colonial order of migration, control of borders and movement which, like all colonial contact zones, is fraught with violence and struggle (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Tofighian, 2020). The flow of capital controls the space-time of human mobility and migration through disciplinary regimes and highly selective mechanisms of technological surveillance and control (Braidotti, 2011b; Zuboff, 2019). Advanced capitalism functions as the great organizer of the mobility of commodified products.
Human mobility, migration and border-crossings are intensely sexualized and racialized activities. Racialized capitalism functions by systematic practices of coercive mobility (Braidotti, 2011b), expulsion (Sassen, 2014) and expropriation (Fraser, 2016). Unregistered migrants, asylum seekers, homeless and paperless people compose the bulk of the population subjected to controlled mobility. The paradoxical automated landscapes of contemporary global cities reflect these social partitions, with hyper-modern, wired infrastructure (Sassen, 1994, 2002, 2005) and glossy architectural facades standing alongside post-industrial slums and postcolonial wastelands (Harvey, 2006; Bhattacharyya, 2018). Advanced capitalism produces economic polarizations and a schizoid affective economy that alternates between exhilaration and exasperation, and expectation and exhaustion. It shows the staggering ability to accommodate programmes of human enhancement with a cynical acceptance of the need to sacrifice entire sectors of the labour market, neglect large parts of the world population, and exploit most non-human species. All kinds of non-human organisms fit into this logic of technologically mediated intervention for the sake of consumption, alongside various specimens of humanity. The genetic propensities of entire populations are patterned and stored for the sake of further research and capitalization. The commodification of the informational capital of all species relies on what Vandana Shiva calls ‘bio-piracy’ (Shiva, 1997); Eisenstein opts for ‘global obscenities’ (1998).
Feminist technoscience scholar Sarah Franklin offers an illuminating example in her analysis of contemporary stem cell research. The first cloned transgenic animal, Dolly the sheep, is the product of a ‘realignment of the biological, cultural, political and economic relations that connect humans, animals, technologies, markets and knowledges’ (2007: 2). Dolly the sheep provides valuable insights into the working of cognitive capitalism and how it constructs life forms for the sake of commercialization. Biology is accordingly denatured and modified. Not a clone in the strict sense of the term, Dolly’s cells were reworked and transferred dozens of times, in a mixture of sexual and asexual forms of reproduction. This mixture of science and business is in itself not new, but it increases in speed and scale, de-naturalizing and commercializing biological matter more than ever before. Feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern first identified this practice in 1992 as ‘entreprised-up biology’ (1992: 212), where cellular reconstruction is explicitly connected to bio-commerce and bio-capital. The capital is the regenerative potential of cells themselves, especially stem cells, which can be cultivated and engineered into a number of life-science products. Cognitive capitalism harnesses and capitalizes upon living material. Reproduction is inevitably caught within a technological exploration and exploitation of the potency of life.
What counts as ‘life’ is not only the embodied and embedded realities of bound individuals, but also the specific properties, propensities and inclinations of matter itself: genes, cells, codes, algorithms, stocked in databanks that can be stored, sold and exchanged. Knowledge is mediated and the true capital is the generative power of matter itself. This intense degree of technological intervention produces a de-materialization of the lived experience of empirical humans, but also their re-materialization as retrievable and sellable data on a global scale. The posthuman turn is at work right there, in this schizoid double pull between the de-materialization of production – given that what is produced are data and information – coupled with the re-materialization of exploitative, embodied labour conditions. As the case of Dolly proves, biology gets technologized as much as technology gets biologized. Advanced capitalism is thus a research-driven knowledge economy bent on profit.
Trans-feminist theorist Paul Preciado stresses not only the mediated materiality of technoscience and bio-engineering, but explores its subversive potential in terms of gender identities. Biogenetic technologies invented by advanced capitalism can be appropriated to construct radically different bodies. Acknowledging that bodies are malleable and transformable, Preciado puts it as follows: ‘the success of contemporary technoscience consists in in transforming our depression into Prozac©, our masculinity into testosterone, our erection into Viagra©, our fertility/sterility into the Pill, our AIDS into Tritherapy, without knowing which comes first: if depression or Prozac©; if Viagra© or an erection; if testosterone or masculinity; if the Pill or maternity; if Tritherapy or AIDS’ (2013b: 269). For this branch of posthuman feminism, bio-technosciences and queer and trans subjects are actually joining forces to re-design biological structures and defy determinism. They are bio-hacking the future.
Much as I share an enthusiasm for technoscience, I want to introduce a note of caution here against a complete de-naturalization of bodies. It is paradoxical, to say the least, that a system built on bio-power displaces the human the better to exploit its genetic material. The same system that profits from life itself neglects the humans crushed by the structural injustices of our social and economic systems, including structural indebtedness (George, 1976, 1988, 2015). Socialist feminists are right in reminding us that many marginalized and disposable people are denied access to these technological advances and their economic profits.
Posthuman feminist scholars take a materialist, but not necessarily socialist, approach to the analysis of the embodied and waged aspects of post-industrial labour. In keeping with the politics of locations, they focus on the embedded and embodied materialized relations of work and production and take critical distance from any claim that the global economy is virtual and de-materialized. In addition to issues of wage inequalities, the context of cognitive capitalism imposes a new agenda, which includes what Cooper and Waldby call ‘clinical labour’ (2014: 4). That idea refers to the provision of reproductive and bio-medical services related to technologically assisted reproduction and other forms of bio-medical care. Within the posthuman convergence, these technoscientific practices are often presented as delinked from real-life embodied subjects and focus instead on specific activities such as surrogacy, the exchange, donation or sale of organs, tissues and cells. Similarly, the unmistakably material, carnal nature of this labour contradicts any claim by the new economy to be ‘de-materialized’. A posthuman feminist perspective foregrounds the bodily contribution of sexualized and racialized subjects to the new economy in terms of their biological labour and their genetic capital. This also means that feminists cannot restrict the analyses of contemporary capitalism to the mere claim of technological liberation, or the fear about de-materialization of labour, anymore that we can separate the fourth industrial revolution from the Sixth Extinction. We need to approach this with more dexterity as a convergence, which means focusing on the intersection of these phenomena.
The current economy is not only about technological mediation, or exclusively about gene-editing and stem-cell engineering, or only about the exploitation of labour, or just about climate change and the spectre of species extinction. It is about all these factors at the same time. The fact that the human mind may crack under the strain of thinking through so many painful complexities is that mind’s problem. The imperative to think about and within that complexity remains, and posthuman feminism is