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A Surplus of ‘Surplus’?David Tyfield aa Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University , UKPublished online: 12 Mar 2010.

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REVIEW

A Surplus of ‘Surplus’?

DAVID TYFIELD

Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, UK

Life as Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, by Melinda Cooper,

University of Washington Press, 2008, 222 pp., £18.99.

In recent years a number of STS researchers, including some of the field’s most distin-

guished scholars such as Michel Callon and Donald MacKenzie, have sought to apply

their methods to understanding the economy, especially finance. This ‘economic turn’

has undoubtedly yielded important insights, highlighting the ‘performativity’ of much

economic activity and the striking similarity between the sciences and economics in the

transformation of contingency into fact.

Even more recently, however, there has been a renewed interest in issues in political

economy and their mutual interaction with the development of science. This is particularly

apparent in the life sciences, with the blossoming of research exploring the concept of

‘biocapital’ (see Sunder Rajan, 2006; Helmreich, 2008). Arguably this shift—it is prob-

ably too grand as yet to call it a ‘political economic turn’—is long overdue and opens

up important opportunities for STS to contribute in a much more meaningful way to pol-

itical debates; debates in which science and technology are increasingly central and hence

to the mutual benefit of both political economy and science studies.

Yet the obstacles to such a shift are clear. The interactionist social ontology of much

STS, for instance, has not merely eschewed but renounced any reference to issues of pol-

itical economic ‘structure’, while the prevalent focus on detailed ethnographic research on

the production of scientific knowledge has, in any case, often meant such issues seem all

but irrelevant. The current global economic crisis, however, seems to demand even deeper

engagement with political economy as these issues will no longer form a relatively stable

context that can be taken for granted.

To support this trend is not to suggest it is straightforward, let alone that political

economy holds the key to STS’s problems. There are, of course, numerous ways to go

about this reconnection to political economy so that it merely opens up a new arena for

Science as Culture

Vol. 18, No. 4, 497–500, December 2009

Correspondence Address: David Tyfield, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.

Email: d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/09/040497-4 # 2009 Process PressDOI: 10.1080/09505430902951334

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contestation and argument. This is true even for the diverse projects that make use of

Marxian analysis and terminology, which need not have very much in common. As

such, anyone bold enough to accept the challenge of interdisciplinary merging of STS

and political economy leaves themselves open to numerous lines of attack: at the very

least regarding the perspective and methodology assumed in each case and the way in

which they are combined.

Melinda Cooper’s book Life as Surplus is one such Marxian-inspired project and one

which dives head first into these shark-infested interdisciplinary waters. The book is a

bold synthesis exploring the intimate relations between the trajectory of the global capitalist

economy in the neoliberal period since the 1980s and the spectacular and contemporaneous

rise of biotechnology. It is a hugely ambitious book that embraces whole-heartedly the

opportunities for insights from interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation and from exploring

the interaction of ‘big themes’ such as those that feature in its title: ‘biotechnology’,

‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’, ‘life’ and ‘surplus’. And it is thus both a challenging

and insightful read and one that is often frustrating, breathless and overstated.

Cooper’s book is extremely wide-ranging, but there is a unifying thread that runs

through it. This central thesis, however, is not so easy to set out briefly but is curiously

slippery and never stated explicitly. The overall theme is simply that the life sciences

are currently being employed for the creation of surplus value and being shaped (and dis-

torted?) by this goal. However, the argument goes much further than this by claiming that

the life sciences and biotechnology are a central element of the neoliberal project of finan-

cialised global capitalism.

This is not an economic argument regarding the centrality of biotechnologies to econ-

omic practice across the economy or its place as the dominant sector of the economy.

Rather, biotechnology is central in terms of the transformation in the understanding of

the economy—particularly that of the dominant agents of this process—that the interplay

of biological and financial capitalist concepts affords. The crucial conceptual fusion here is

between (1) the self-regenerative nature of biological life and its autopoietic capacity to

transcend apparent ‘limits’ to growth through mutation and emergent complexity, and

(2) the capacity for finance continually to transgress apparent limits of economic growth

in a self-propagating dynamic of speculative promise begetting speculative promise in

the production of surplus value.

The key concept of the book is thus self-(re)generation, Cooper then offering a series of

case studies across the life sciences that provide Foucauldian genealogies of how this con-

ceptual combination was accompanied by the (ongoing) attempt to fuse the regenerativity

of finance and of biological life in practice. She suggests that there is a perfect fit between

the speculative and self-regenerative logic of surplus value under neoliberal financialised

capitalism and the understanding of biological life that emerges with biotechnological

breakthroughs in the early 1980s. In this way, the life sciences have become increasingly

subjected to the logic, not merely of commodification, but of financialisation and the

speculative self-regeneration of profit, our starting point above.

These case studies take the reader across a wide diversity of life science-related issues.

Chapter 1 introduces the overall argument and focuses in particular on the interaction of

the rise of the ‘bioeconomy’ and the transformation in the global political economy

towards US-centric neoliberalism. It also incorporates discussion of the resonance

between the complex systems analysis of biospheres and microbial ecologies developing

at NASA, especially within its exobiology (i.e. life on other planets) programme, and the

498 D. Tyfield

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neoliberal backlash to the Meadows’ 1970s work on Limits to Growth. Chapter 2 discusses

Big Pharma, HIV/AIDS and access to drugs, the South African government’s refusal to

admit a connection between HIV and AIDS and the militarisation of AIDS as a global

security threat. Chapter 3 discusses ‘the biological turn in the war on terror’ (p. 74) and

the discourse of pre-emption regarding complex and unpredictable biological risks as

well as WMDs; Chapter 4, tissue engineering, developments in topological research and

the promise of renewable bodies; Chapter 5, (embryonic) stem cells and human reproduc-

tive labour; and Chapter 6, the American evangelical right, neo-conservatism and the

‘right to life’ movement. As this (inexhaustive) list shows, the book is thus not only

wide-ranging in the areas of life science research it incorporates, but exceptionally ambi-

tious in the range of broader social trends it seeks to illuminate.

There is much to admire in the book. It raises important ‘macro’ questions regarding the

intimate interaction of the life sciences and the neoliberal transformation of the global

capitalist economy, under the aegis of the United States, in a way that is generally over-

looked in STS and is absolutely essential—in this reviewer’s opinion, at least—to under-

standing of the current trajectories of many sciences. It is also motivated by a laudable goal

of contributing to a ‘counterpolitics’ (p. 99) that aims to open up the possible trajectories of

change and opportunities for preferable futures beyond the singular options presented by

dominant discourses (as per ‘there is no alternative’), even in the case where catastrophic

change can no longer be totally avoided.

Furthermore, it is ‘promiscuous’ (p. 4) in the detailed illustrations it provides across the

life sciences. Not only is this a singularly impressive display regarding the diversity of

subjects mastered, but it also helps to illustrate the pervasive influence of neoliberal

logics and, conversely, the diverse forces and loci in which these logics have themselves

been formed and developed. This promiscuity, however, comes at a cost and there is also

much that is problematic with the book. I focus here only on the most important weakness

given the thesis and title of the book as a whole, namely the (largely metaphorical) use of

the term of ‘surplus’.

I have discussed above how the central concept of the book is self-regenerativity, but

Cooper herself focuses rather on the concept of ‘surplus’. Every chapter ends with a dis-

cussion of how that particular development in the life sciences is related to the production

of surplus value and the transmutation of biological life into ‘surplus life’, a concept that is

pivotal but never really explained, hence the difficulty of summarising the argument of the

book. But what work is ‘surplus’ doing here? The answer is that it is through the terminol-

ogy of ‘surplus’ that Cooper conceptualises the connection of the self-regenerativity of

biological life with the logic of financial capital and the production of surplus value.

That is, the term ‘surplus’ is taken from Marx and then its applicability for understanding

of the contemporary life sciences is used to show that the latter are dominated by the

speculative logic of finance capital.

This is a curious form of argument. In short, the ubiquitous use of the term ‘surplus’

through the book is at best unclear and, at worst, positively obfuscatory because it is used

both to insinuate a connection to financial capitalism and as a synonym for autopoiesis;

yet this latter connotation is indirect and, even then, only in the specific context of

Marx’s critique of political economy. According to Marx, there is a self-(re)generating

dynamic to capital and this involves the production of surplus value. But to use the term

‘surplus’ as synonymous with autopoiesis is entirely mistaken for at least two crucial

reasons, insofar as it is being used to suggest a connection to Marxian political economy.

A Surplus of ‘Surplus’? 499

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First, it is to conflate two analytically distinct elements of Marx’s theory, for it is value

that is self-valorising not surplus value, and while this self-valorisation by necessity

involves the production of surplus value, surplus value per se has no self-regenerating

character. Indeed, there is no inherent conceptual connection between surplus and self-

regeneration. This can be seen quite clearly by considering the lay meaning of the term

‘surplus’, namely as ‘more than is required for a given purpose’ or ‘too much’. In the

case of surplus value, ‘surplus’ thus refers to the creation in an economic process of

more value than was needed to cover its costs of production. The creation of such

surplus is indeed an irreducible element of the self-valorising dynamic of capital, but it

has nothing directly to do with autopoiesis. Cooper, however, uses ‘surplus’ in the

sense of being associated with matters of limitlessness and potentiality and hence self-

regenerativity—a sense that is completely unrelated to its use in Marxian political

economy—while at the same time explicitly trading on the link to (Marx’s analysis of)

capitalism that the terminology evokes.

This leads to the second reason that it is mistaken to conflate ‘surplus’ and autopoiesis,

namely that the theory that seems to provide some rationale for that conceptual identifi-

cation also makes it quite clear that the apparently self-regenerative character of capital

is actually entirely fallacious. Rather, value can only revalorise itself through command

of human labour power. The culture of a financialised economy, such as that of the past

30 years, is particularly prone to be taken in by this falsehood, for the dominant sector

of the economy (i.e. finance) appears to make profit ex nihilo in a way that industrial

capital, necessarily and daily mediated by an actual labour force, cannot. As such,

Cooper’s argument that there is a particular resonance—at a cultural level—between a

financialised economy and (current understanding of) biological life, their apparent limit-

lessness and autopoiesis, is interesting and plausible. But if we actually conflate the pro-

duction of surplus value and autopoiesis, and describe a financialised capitalist economy in

terms of a ‘surplus’ of potentiality, we thereby immediately negate any attempt to describe

the immanent limitations of such an economy and, indeed, the impossibility of its self-

propagation; i.e. in marked contrast to the autopoiesis of biological life. Furthermore,

in the context of the current global economic crisis, these immanent limits to financialised

growth are now all too clear and can hardly be overlooked in a credible analysis.

In short, Cooper’s book presents a significant challenge to STS, demanding that engage-

ment with issues of science and technology should also incorporate broader factors of pol-

itical economy in a much more concerted way than has been common to date. Yet her book

also suffers from this very ambition, seeking to explain much more than her argument can

support. Perhaps, however, these first forays into new inter-disciplinary territory must of

necessity be so bold and contentious. In stimulating this debate for further research, at the

very least, Cooper’s book deserves to be widely read.

References

Helmreich, S. (2008) Species of biocapital, Science as Culture, 17(4), pp. 463–478.

Sunder Rajan, K. (2006) Biocapital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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