Abstract
This article critically examines the global humanitarian innovation movement by conjuncting it with the stem cell biotech sector to trace how in the assemblage of matter and code conflicts emerge about notions of suffering, pain, enhancement as well as markets that alter the very material forms of life and economy. In the first section, I look at two things simultaneously: a bio-humanitarian project—the Cypriot search for and DNA identification of the post-war missing—and clinical trials performed by the biotech corporate sector. I trace their respective methods of value and valuation as not only dependent social molecuralised practices but also as translation technologies of kinship, creation of new notions of life and death and governance. In the second section, I take a close look at the emergence of humanitarian and clinical labour as a global assemblage to show how humanitarian organisations and transnational corporations orient themselves towards certain labour assemblages in the search ‘anywhere’ to learn about, borrow and translate technologies supporting the ‘business’ of empire. I finish with broader theoretical implications of the humanitarian work post war and the clinical labour of patients in stem cell therapies.
Introduction
In the biosciences, in both private and public sectors, the emerging bio-economy is accompanied by promises about the eradication of diseases, agony, suffering and vulnerability. Such scientific research and innovation, scientists and companies suggest, will eradicate problems, allow equitable global futures and offer a moral vision, that is, a set of designs for intervening in agony, suffering and pain and the extension and enhancement of life, including the materialisation of a notion of the good. These promises carry over into humanitarian projects like immigration (Ticktin, 2011, p. 140) or post-war projects, such as in Cyprus with the introduction of DNA to identify those who are missing (Agathangelou forthcoming).
Science, technology and society (STS) has opened up space to see how biology and law (Jasanoff, 2011) and biology, knowledge and value (Cooper, 2008; Kaushik, 2006) are co-constitutive, but this debate is said to have prioritised the ‘biological’ or ‘techno-scientific’ without considering how finance, capitalism and assetisation processes ‘reconfigure science, technology, and innovation’ (Birch, 2016, p. 23). In evading how financial processes reconfigure biology and vice versa, Birch and Tyfield argue this literature ‘has posited a transformation of modern capitalism without due attention to the transformation of economic and financial processes in modern capitalism’ (2013, p. 301). This line of argumentation that the side of the economy is equally important (or more so?) has highlighted a dominant view in STS—the prioritisation of techno-science instead of the political economy—albeit with more nuanced qualifications. It is equally important to look at these processes simultaneously so that the bio or the economy side does not subsume the materiality of the bios and capitalism in either financial inscriptions or bios (i.e., health and subjective capacities of individuals; environment; human artefacts; other species etc.). Considering how capitalism and techno-science assemble themselves sheds light on the social practices of capitalism in the now. More so, conjuncting humanitarian projects post conflict as well as biotech projects with a vision for profits will allow me to highlight the shared history of value and knowledge co-constitutions and the global order including the production of value and its translation of disparate desires and judgements into measurements (Lilley and Papadopoulos 2014: 974) and to trace the emergence of ‘regional networks of scientific and human rights workers that have constructed a particular and unique relationship to forensic sciences’ and the law (Smith, 2013, p. 2).
In this article, I pursue three main themes. First, I argue that while bios and zoe, as life and death previously derived their value from social relationships and practices and particular cosmologies, the self-organising systems of bioscience and capital, now dynamically coupled, are pushing to take over but not without contestation of and struggle over meaning. Questions about justice, value generation processes and ways to resolve problems are at the forefront of this contestation. Looking at both the bio-humanitarian and biotech corporate sectors of clinical trials simultaneously and their methods of value and valuation as not only social practices (Birch, 2016) but also technologies of kinship (Smith, 2013) and relations (Crossland & Joyce, 2015) will allow us to see whether and how transnational humanitarian projects and private, transnational drug companies’ projects are playing a role in manufacturing and selling certain sites instead of others as innovative ones in the formation of value and global power. Second, I trace how both humanitarian organisations and transnational corporations search ‘anywhere’ to learn about, borrow and translate the technologies circulating around the globe to support the ‘business’ of governance building, however, in ways that rupture the dominant notion in STS that focuses either on humanitarianism (Ticktin, 2011) or on clinical trials, presuming a separation that is not so easily delineable, as well as the usual model of technology transfer that ‘posits the development of scientific technologies in the Global North and their dissemination through training and capacity building in the Global South’ (Smith, 2013, p. 2). Rather, biology stutters and disturbs such dominant notions pointing also at postcolonial sites as landscapes development, and biofinancial regimes of accumulation. Third, I argue that humanitarian institutions intervening to redress suffering and violence post war and biotech companies performing clinical trials learn from each other what innovation means. In learning how to innovate, they push each other in different ways to ‘innovate’ give rise to new emergences of social and capital re-configurations; they push each other also to reconstruct notions of life and death including ideas about the ‘biological’ and ‘national family’. However, in arguing about innovation as a form of value creation they also elide the more complex questioning of governance and racial and economic fractures in the society. To address the three themes, the article proceeds as follows. In the first section, I look at two things simultaneously: a bio-humanitarian project—the Cypriot search for and DNA identification of the post-war missing—and clinical trials performed by the biotech corporate sector. I trace their respective methods of value and valuation as not only social practices (Birch, 2016) but also technologies of kinship, creation of new notions of life and death and governance. In the second section, I take a close look at the emergence of humanitarian and clinical labour as a global assemblage to show how humanitarian organisations and transnational corporations orient themselves towards certain labour assemblages in the search ‘anywhere’ to learn about, borrow and translate technologies supporting the ‘business’ of empire. I finish with broader theoretical implications of the humanitarian work post war and the clinical labour of patients in stem cell therapies.
Innovation Incorporated and ‘Stutterings’: 1 Humanitarianism and Stem Cells
Since the end of World War II (WWII), humanitarian non-governmental organisations have responded to natural disasters and complex emergencies by providing life-saving emergency relief across borders. International society perceives humanitarianism, or the desire to protect lives and relieve human suffering, as an ethical obligation or a ‘codified compassion’ (Barnett, 2009, p. 662; Le Carre, 2001). Yet there is no singular or obvious definition of what is good or right in an uneven power global system. Indeed, since WWII, the practice and meaning of humanitarianism has changed. From the 1960s to the 1970s, ‘doing good’ meant providing rapid, palliative, emergency aid while demonstrating financial accountability to donors. By the 1990s, ‘doing good’ had evolved to mean supplying relief assistance in a way that addressed the root causes of conflicts and minimised the negative impacts of aid on local populations. More recently, the focus of humanitarianism has shifted to include the provision of personnel, training and know-how along with the aid. Meanwhile, historians of science and medicine explore the relations among donors, medical personnel, health impacts and medical charity (Cody, 2005). Some argue that charitable enterprises burgeoned with the expansion of international capitalism.
Against this backdrop, theorists have grappled with humanitarianism, explaining it as part of a constitutional field (Barnett & Weiss, 2008; Bourdieu, 1993) and a forum. They see a set of performative practices that humanitarianism brings into being by constituting that which is said to be its object of analysis and regulation (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Walker and Russ argue humanitarianism has reassembled itself more recently through technology: ‘Emails, interactive websites, webinars and social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook have allowed workers dispersed across the globe, to interact with each other and form the beginning of a truly global community’ (Walker & Russ, 2010, p. 14). While they do not speak of global architectures per se, their analysis certainly suggests assemblages of humanitarianism. For them, new technologies co-produce a ‘global community’of humanitarianism and a social order whose organising principle is the opening up of new markets that companies can test their products. Simultaneously, such an opening generates possibilities for new kinds of workers who can disperse across the globe while remaining connected to achieve the hard and soft skills required in the assemblage of institutions (i.e., medical ones; work forensic data markets), knowledge, norms and training.
Amit Prasad’s (2016) work complicates the emergence of a ‘transnational shifting landscape’ of science, ethics and law and allows us to read humanitarianism as a not given or natural phenomenon and, thus, mutable. It is imbued with historical and liberal notions of the human, certain norms and values, and as a phenomenon, it emerges out of the deterritorialisation of certain practices of science, ethics and law. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Prasad says, ‘“Territory” is not pre-given; “territorializing” involves marking of functions, rhythms, rituals, milieus, etc. and “becoming-expressive”’ (2016, p. 196). Humanitarian discourses and practices are not given; rather, they emerge and are territorialised and re/de/territorialised.
As the following sections suggest, the Cypriot search for the missing (Agathangelou, forthcoming; Cassia, 2006; Uladag, 2006) and their identification using DNA technologies and the springing up of stem cell projects in Cyprus illustrate how two quite different assemblages (humanitarian and for-profit biotech) result in the ‘stuttering’ of normative discourses about biology and capitalism. In his use of the word ‘stutter’, Prasad points to transnational shifts in political economy, science, law and ethics: ‘If the system appears in perpetual disequilibrium or bifurcation, if each of its terms in turn passes through a zone of continuous vibration, then the language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter’ (Prasad, 2016, p. 198, citing Deleuze, 1997, pp. 107–108). To this, Prasad adds, ‘The stutter reflects displacement and contestation of the discourses through which we assess right/wrong and true/false’ (2016, p. 198) and social good. This stuttering happens in multiple registers with which we ought to be engaging by tracing how they become possible rather than simply presuming such projects as neoliberal.
Bio and Economy: Value and Valuation in ‘Humanitarian’ Assistance Projects
Post-war Cyprus was divided physically, with 265,000 displaced and 2,000 missing. Since the 2000s, DNA technology has reshaped scientific and legal questions around the missing (Loucaides, 2011; Rosenblatt, 2010; Smith, 2013). Much of the literature on the missing in Cyprus (Kovras 2013; Cassia 2006) focuses more on issues of violence and transititional justice. The introduction of DNA evidence (forensic science) together with law enforcement and legal practices, changed this focus including our notion of the category “the missing.” Despite the United Nations (UN)-brokered amnesty, the introduction of DNA evidence tends to shift the terms of the deliberation and the materiality of what is possible. While it opens the possibility of identify those who came missing in the racialized conflict, it also generates opportunities of connections between a certain human and a particular crime and results in collating forensic evidence that is at once material, a metaphysical device, a set of discourses, an institution and a technology of governance (Jasanoff, 2006, p. 284). In effect, the missing can be understood as continuously reterritorialised through material techno-scientific practices and through subject positions and social spaces. Public–private relations (mostly industry and academic sites) are pivotal in the effort to recover the missing, but this relationship is being reconfigured in humanitarianism, as embodied in the relations among non-profit organisations, the state, the forensic lab, the funders and the families.
From 1974 to 1977, several inter-communal meetings on the missing were held with no significant progress. Between 1977 and 1981, negotiations in Nicosia, Geneva and New York led to the establishment of a Committee on Missing Persons (CMP). This committee was set up in April 1981 with an agreement between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the UN. For 20 years, Greek and Turkish Cypriots conducted investigations to establish the fate of the missing and negotiate a common official list. DNA samples were collected from relatives to aid identifications. In 1997, the leaders of the two communities agreed to provide each other immediately and simultaneously all information already at their disposal on the location of graves.
The CMP turned to the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics (CING), a bi-communal, non-profit, academic, medical centre with a focus on DNA training. The CING’s Laboratory of Forensic Genetics (LabFoG) uses state-of-the art DNA-based typing methodologies to study evidence from civil, criminal, mass disaster and missing person investigations. The first director of this project in this institute was trained in the United States by the military establishment. Simultaneously, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) recommended the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) to train the Cypriots on a bi-communal basis to search the identified graves for the missing. The CMP was to design, set up and initially coordinate the project. Until the end of 2007, international forensic experts from EAAF coordinated and trained the CMP bi-communal forensic team of over 60 Cypriot archaeologists and forensic anthropologists.
While the humanitarian project is rife with contradictions (e.g., whether the state will allow searches/exhumations in certain places), it is seen by many relatives as a ‘blessing’. Much of the work of the new emerging archaeologists and forensic anthropologists is laborious and intricate. Turning, for instance, quarter-inch samples of bone and tooth from the missing in Cyprus into genetic data takes a lot of time and a lot of creative work. While many may think that the DNA identification is the primary end goal in this humanitarian project, it is really pivotal to recognise that ‘this is neither the beginning nor the endpoint of the identification process’ (Smith, 2013, p. 3). There is much work that is being done by many people to identify witnesses, to identify the grave sites, to collect the DNA samples from the surviving members of the family and also to exhume and forensically identify the remains of the missing. The EAAF has been a pioneer and an emerging global institution in the Global South in identifying graves, for instance, that killers tampered with in order to subvert the medical examiners and the mortuary state system (Smith, 2013, p. 3). This same insight became important in the search for the burials of the missing in Cyprus. The CMP, for instance, was able to search not only in villages where the Turkish military killed Greek Cypriots or where some of the Greek Cypriots killed Turkish Cypriots but also in possible sites in plain view, such as wells, places into which many missing were thrown in order to tamper with evidence. These sites complicate the process of identification as the laboratory has to clean potential sources of contamination from samples. While carefully cleaning the bones and teeth with sand paper and a dental drill, and carefully assembling the bones together in cases of whole bodies to secure enough sample for genetic analysis, the CMP workers follow the ‘carefully coded and circumscribed’ standard operating procedures (SOPs) and ‘best practices guiding each step of the analysis’ (Smith, 2013, p. 3). The SOPs and best practices not only travelled to Cyprus with the Argentine Anthropology Team but also changed and transformed in the process of searching, identifying and settling the case of missing persons in Cyprus.
A man from Greece who lost his brother in 1974 told me:
The DNA is a blessing. We can finally draw on this technology to identify our missing. And we finally hope for some kind of a relief. Not that we are going to forget but it would be a kind of relief. (Interlocutor 20, June 2013)
Many relatives have been waiting for the Cyprus Republic, Turkey and the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus [TRNC] to address the missing for a long time. With the introduction of DNA testing, they feel things are finally starting to change. Of course, the Republic of Cyprus, Turkey and the TRNC are playing important roles by acquiescing to the process. Other governments, especially from the European Union, are invested in seeing the problem addressed and finally settled. But in all cases, the nature of the investment can be questioned. For example, the UN sees this humanitarian project as an opportunity for supporting Cypriots to settle their missing question. Simultaneously, other crucial relations and visions of Cyprus emerge. A UN representative involved in the project told me that this could also allow the Cyprus forensic lab to invite other anthropologists and state representatives interested in creating their own labs in their search of their own missing:
UN official: Cyprus can play a leading role in the Middle East especially in training those who are interested in creating such labs in their countries. Author: Like which… UN official: Iraq, for example. Author: Do you have the resources to do that though? I thought that there is not enough funding for completing the search and identification of all missing Cypriots. Do you have the funding? UN official: We are still grappling with the question of funding. We have to settle all the missing cases in Cyprus. But we are also learning in the process—this kind of knowledge may be useful for others elsewhere. We are developing already guidelines in how to carry out these searches and identifications. We may need more funding…we will deal with this when the time comes.
These various visions for Cyprus are used as ‘poles of attraction’ (Stewart, 1999) to align actors, resources and relatives of the missing towards the humanitarian projects and create a ‘community of promise’, transforming bi-communal divisions and bridging the gaps between and among the racialised communities. Desperate families, global leadership and the creation of humanitarian hope all have the potential to legitimate the project’s activity.
The CING, itself founded on a bi-communal mandate, has collected and created a ‘bank’ of 4,000 DNA samples and a computer database of relatives of missing persons (Peterson, 1999). The forensic anthropologists work long hours; finding and identifying the missing contributes to the formation of new subjects and workers in the new bio-economy. For one thing, while race and ethnicity are not supposed to be a primary category of sorting the missing, they become so because of the geography and the agents of the killings. For another, CING, like non-profit organisations elsewhere (Argentina, Bosnia, Guatemala and South Africa), has come to orient itself towards a transnational method of value and valuation that allows for capitalizing emerging capabilities (i.e., the ability to innovate, for example, or to respond to changing needs in post-conflict societies by bringing people and resources together to accomplish quickly the identification process).
Workers in the CMP lab are grappling with this question on a daily basis and at a grass-roots level. As professionals, they look at the bones in front of them as they work to put them together. As Cypriots, they look at the bones and the work they do very much in a sacred manner; it is a ritual that is going to redress the tremendous suffering and pain of the relatives of the missing. The workers do not feel a sense of alienation from the humanity of the samples. Rather, some of them feel directly connected to the bones, the skeletons of the missing, and imagine the lives they led. A forensic anthropologist told me she felt a sense of ‘loss’. She did not have a direct relationship with any of the missing, but she was still affected:
In the process of laboring assemble the bones toward identification I always think, ‘Who is this person? How did s/he die? What if s/he was alive? What kind of a life would s/he be leading? What kind of work would s/he be doing?’ During this time, I am not really emotional about the whole thing. It is just a job like any other. Other times, when we have finally identified the person and have to return the bones to the families that moment is really emotionally complicated for me. It is as if, I am now for the first time connecting the bones with the living person. (Forensic Anthropologist 1, Interviewed, Translated by the author, 2013)
This kind of work is distinguished as both detached labour (just another job) and attachment labour. This particular anthropologist links production and reproduction through the artefact of human remains, understood ‘as having social agency through their continuing relationships with the…bodies of the living’ (Williams, 2004, p. 267). However, many of the anthropologists, forensic workers and photographers struggle with the ‘alienation from the labor of DNA analysis’ (Smith, 2013, p. 4). As professionals, they see their primary role as focusing on the science. However, and as Smith tells us about Guatemala, they similarly feel a
sense of alienation [not] from the humanity of the samples, from the real flesh and blood of the massacred, but from the labor and authorship of scientific research supplanted by a global hierarchy of value that constructed this space as one of throughput and processing, not creation. (Smith, 2013, p. 4)
For them, there was a sense of frustration as their success was seen only as a repetitive, daily effort to assemble together the bones and decide which parts to send for the processing as a kind of attending to the conflict of Cyprus. However, much of their work was about innovation and creative collective conversation of how to assemble the dead. More so, some of them also see themselves as workers whose capabilities and their lab can be capitalized.
In the field and labs, anthropologists mention other work issues that go to the heart of value and valuation and science:
Of course, those countries which invest in this kind of work (and I am not talking here about Cyprus only) are concerned with us gaining insights that they can translate into some product for sale or speculation of somekind and then disappear. And that may happen sooner or later as the new generation is not concerned with suffering per se and solutions to any kind of crisis but rather with turning themselves into skillful entrepreneurs. This is though innovation and creative work. It is not a mere routine. Are we entranced by the powerful professionals working through us that we haven’t noticed new emerging economies and our position in them? (Interview, June 2013)
As Birch says, accounting for assets ‘is not an objective measure of some latent or inherent quality of biology itself…. Any analysis of value in the bio-economy has to analyze a range of valuation practices, especially those valuing knowledge’ (Birch, 2016). While Birch is talking about corporations and how they embody practices beyond biology, a similar logic is embodied in humanitarian innovation valuation. What the interlocutor above is highlighting is how the labour and authorship of scientific research is supplanted by a global hierarchy of value that constructs some spaces as ‘throughput and processing, not creation’ (Smith, 2013, p. 4) or innovation. However, this emergence generates stutters. These sites grapple also for a position in this global chain of value not only as output and processing but also as subjects/institutions with capacity to innovate and create.
Humanitarian innovation requires a valuation process to mediate the loss of productive capacity; humanitarianism emerges precisely at the point where conditions become socially unacceptable and require reterritorialisation. Harvey (1990) shows that capitalism overcomes its internal crises through hegemonic spatial transformations, but I argue that humanitarian aid and its concomitant biological projects (i.e., DNA and identifications) are co-constituted with innovation (i.e., possibilities of commercialization of social practices and relations as well as financialization of accumulation regimes). Because development and humanitarianism can intervene in the worst instances of exploitation and violence, they make such a system tolerable. The effect is the continued and complementary expansion of both capitalism and aid. In other words, what capitalism undoes, often in the form of war, humanitarian projects sweep up.
Guattari’s articulation is useful for thinking about humanitarian innovation and bio-financialisation. With Alliez, he articulates the idea of an Integrated World Capitalism (Guattari & Alliez, 1996). In a later work, he describes the bases of this capitalism as semiotics:
(1) Economic semiotics (monetary, financial, accounting and decision-making mechanisms); (2) Juridical semiotics (title deeds, legislation and regulations of all kinds); (3) Techno-scientific semiotics (plans, diagrams, programmes, studies, research, etc.); (4) Semiotics of subjectification, of which some coincide with those already mentioned, but to which we should add many others, such as those relating to architecture, town planning, public facilities, etc. (Guattari, 2000, p. 48)
In a very early work, Deleuze and Guattari analyse capitalism not only as a desiring machine, production and socius but also as deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The capitalist socius is different from other social organisations as it combines the flows of money with the flows of labour:
By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 33)
Capitalism is both liberating and repressive, deterritorialising and reterritorialising, because ‘it continually sets and then repels its own limits’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 372). More significantly, the state regulates for the bourgeoisie the immanent deterritorialisation induced by capitalism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, p. 253). Capitalism, therefore, needs the space striation of the state to operate worldwide and restructure itself when necessary, in particular in banking crises (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 434). States can appropriate the dynamism of war machines to collate an apparatus of capture of ‘land’ through ‘rent’ as proprietor of the land, of ‘work’ through ‘profit’ as ‘entrepreneur’, of ‘money’ through ‘taxation’ as ‘banker’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 443–444). Ultimately, while Deleuze and Guattari do not speak directly of financialisation, they provide some notions crucial for understanding humanitarian innovations and bio-financialisation, notably their understanding of capitalism as a transformative system operating through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation at the register of the molecular code.
In his engagement with financialisation, Martin says the whole society participates in capitalist exploitation:
[T]he present invitation to live by finance…is still being extended to players beyond the corporate world. A financially leavened existence asks for different measures of participation in shaping the values of polity and economy than did earlier challenges posed by market life. Finance…presents as the merger of business and life cycles, as a means for the acquisition of self. The financialization of daily life is a proposal for how to get ahead, but also a medium for the expansive movements of body and soul…‘In a market economy, money is both the means and ends of life.’ (Martin, 2002, p. 3)
In penetrating the everyday existence, this financial logic generates a ‘tethering potential’ (Hinterberger and Porter, 2015, p. 362). This tethering of subjectivity and capitalism allow for life and the self to be managed as a financial portfolio. For their part, Ertürk and colleagues draw on Deleuze and Guattari to argue that financiers use financial devices as ‘weapons’ in a social war (Ertürk, Froud, Johal, Leaver & Williams, 2013, p. 337); financial devices such as hedge funds of ‘high-frequency trading’ are part of the war machine (2013, pp. 340–341). In other words, as warriors, financiers consciously wield specific financial weapons. All these authors point to new forms of innovation and the machine of capitalism, thereby challenging notions of humanitarianism as a fix or a tool of social invention.
The humanitarian innovation movement involves more than forging temporary alliances with states and businesses to secure funding or purchase supplies; it moves towards adopting the priorities, language and world view of the private sector.
Humanitarianism does not just indirectly serve bourgeois interests in a way impossible to prove; it is explicitly involved in a project of opening up new markets for companies with an interest in testing their products at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, among the two billion people who live on less than two dollars a day. (Scott-Smith, 2016, p. 14 citing Cross & Street, 2009, pp. 4–9)
Within this humanitarian configuration, the search for the missing and their identification in Cyprus not only addresses and redresses human rights’ violations but is itself recanalised as a project of invention, that allows Cypriots to escape an intolerable situation and invent a new form of life through humanitarian innovation. The burial sites indicate the conflation of humanitarian work with the production of a certain political value.
On the one hand, humanitarian workers are increasing their entrepreneurship; on the other, they are participating in the creation of ‘banks’ that could (and not always) be drawn upon to generate profits by stem cell or other venture capitalist companies whose primary focus is the bio (i.e., capitalizing on capabilities or even speculating on new emerging knowledges about DNA and bones). Such labor and knowledges can be taken up by global research networks and translated into genetic information for drug development. Birch asks, ‘At what point and how does biological potential turn into income-generating assets?’ (2015, p. 25). In interviews, scientists at the neurology centre in Cyprus argued against the sale of DNA databases to corporations but told me DNA identification was now outsourced to a US corporation (Prainsack & Aronson, 2015). Problematically, the assembled ‘regimes of value in space and time’ (Appadurai, 1986, p. 4) in the form of emerging socio-technical configurations open the door for states and humanitarian organisations alike to ‘sell their knowledge assets—capitalized and converted into financial assets (e.g. biotech firms)—even though these IPR owners may never contribute to the productive process’ (Birch, 2015, p. 25).
What is the value of this labour of searching, exhuming and identifying the missing to the assemblage of a bio-economy and a global order? Is there a connection? While human life is regarded in terms of market value, this is not the explicit language of humanitarianism but its operational reality is. Families of the missing persons, at moments, turn into a form of financial weapon by which humanitarian innovations generate possibilities for experimenting with scientific work; these data, though not always directly, become a financial device, a ‘weapon’ in a social war. Also, this humanitarian work and its contingent DNA identification technologies become activated as institutions of governance in the global politics of biotechnology (i.e., within a global hierarchy of value); ‘it shapes forms of social life by influencing how people choose to, or are able to, live with the products of bio-industry’ (Jasanoff, 2006, p. 284).
For some families, the collection of DNA and the identification of the missing in the anthropological lab are not moments filled with meaning. Rather, they are placeholders, moments spent waiting for something else to happen. Families are waiting for their daily conversations with their lost ones, their displaced neighbours and friends. These moments where emptiness resides—often in place of other meanings—constrain the families’ attempts to find and construct meaning. Some challenge humanitarian innovations (i.e., the taking of DNA) as impoverishing their attempts to live a meaningful life with their loss. One man said:
Not only they [refers to the state] made possible [sic] the loss of my brother now they want me to give my DNA. For what purpose? For what benefit? I also heard that they are now going to be using the data from DNA for other purposes even when they did not ask us to sign such a form. (70-year-old Greek Cypriot male whose brother has been missing since 1974, June 2011)
To this man, giving his DNA represents stolen life and assets to be resituated elsewhere with no benefit to him and his family. Once again, DNA turns into a site of displacement and contestation, to recall Prasad here. As a site of challenge, it asks how one ought to do politics against the tendency to financialising everything. The interlocutor cuts through a notion of subtraction of deterritorialisation to challenge the state (Zibechi, 2010) and its enabling a theft of a bit of code without any returns.
Of course, finding and identifying the missing is important to the families because they can assuage their suffering by burying a loved one. They can also redress their suffering by taking the state to court, and demand financial compensation after court. When I asked a lawyer to explain his involvement in cases of the families of the missing against the state, he explained that if he wins, he becomes a major transnational player, likely to defend other families against a state that claims to be protective of all its citizens but did not do so in the case of the missing persons.
In one notable case, Davut Cakicisoy and others v. Cyprus, heard at the European Courts of Human Rights in 2014, 247 Turkish Cypriots complained about violations of Article 3 (failure to protect life) and lodged complaints under Article 8 of the Convention on DNA Samples. The applicants were relatives of 84 men killed during the conflict in Cyprus in 1974. Their application was triggered when the ministry of foreign affairs published an invitation in newspapers in northern Cyprus for families of missing persons to give blood samples to CING to aid in the identification of remains. The applicants came from the north of the island and gave blood samples between 16 and 23 of July 2003.
In this case, the applicants argued that the Republic of Cyprus did not carefully protect their DNA samples or give them enough information about the ways their DNA was used. While CING was no longer involved in the identification of the missing because CMP change its contract to work with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo and more recently to work with BODE Technology ( apply…to the authorities for destruction [which] is neither unreasonable nor onerous in the circumstances. If the authorities then in fact failed to comply with the request, it might be that this could raise issues of interference with the applicants’ right to respect for private life that would require justification under the second paragraph of Article 8. (Application no. 6523/12 Davut Cakicisoy and others v. Cyprus, p. 13)
What the literature on missing persons and scientific labour misses is that a larger, ontological dilemma underpins material loss, psychological trauma and social upheaval. The same economy of force that generated the missing also forced people to reconsider the value of the human after the war. Some families have relocated their sense of value around what is gone and may never return. In contrasting valuable living before the war with worthless living after, they see humanitarianism as contradictory work that comes in the form of relief, necessary scientific labour for such a relief, and sometimes in the form of new emerging experts whose job is to innovate for a machine that has its eyes on turning relatives into artefacts. All these activities are forms of “investments” in the configuration of a certain machine:
‘by shaping [one’s] current activities according to the possible future gains in unstable labour markets or how bio-matter of life [and death such as the exhumed bones and objects are] evaluated according to future monetary gains from its potentially scientific or com- mercial exploitations’ (Lilley and Papadopoulos 2014, p. 974).
Their humanity lies elsewhere. A family member of a missing person finally identified and returned in 2011 told me:
The state gave us nothing. It took from us our children and it gave us nothing. Our villages were full of wealth and vitality. After this loss the island has become a place housing only nothingness after the war. Giving us a few bones in a very small box is nothing. They have systematically collected all our genetic material all in the name of our returning back our missing persons. I do not want to sound sacrilegious here but some have gained at our expense once more. They can now even use information on the development of possible diseases by Mediterranean people to speculate in the health market and make profits on our children’s brutal deaths.
The new co-constituted humanitarian innovation and social contract (Wagner, 2015, p. 166) is not filling the loss by finding the remains. As this interlocutor suggests, even in the identification, the value derived and not only from biology towards the construction of databases but also from the positionality of this work in a global chain of value remains in the hands of the scientists as both an asset and a knowledge skill, with the possibility of generating profits for biotech companies who could gain access to this material for speculation.
Innovation Incorporated and Stem Cells
DNA testing coincided with the emergence of biotech companies working on stem cells in Cyprus and other parts of the world, including many countries of the Global South. I interviewed two such labs and one company in Cyprus; in what follows, I refer to them collectively as ‘Innovation Incorporated’. The interlocutors in these two Cypriot labs said the proliferation of stem cells will place Cyprus in the global stem cell arena. It may not make Cyprus a global leader like, let us say, the United States or India and China, but it will put the country on the global map of science and commercial markets. While Cyprus is a very small country and much of its research funding comes from the European Union, scientists, doctors, labs and other key players of stem cell research see Cyprus as an excellent emerging geographical site of clinical trials. A doctor involved in the policy-making process of stem cell research believes that while Cyprus stem cell sector is not as developed as Germany’s or the UK’s, it can produce some significant results in the biotech global chain of value around stem cells:
Definitely we are moving at the same pace with other European countries even when we do not have the same kind of funding as major countries but I definitely see Cyprus at least to be having some results in the next few years. See, for example, how many labs are springing up publically and privately. (Policy maker, June 2015)
In spite of the absence of legitimate products or services, the stem cell sector in Cyprus is raising a significant amount of funds and attracting more clinical trials than patients from the island and elsewhere in the world. On its home page, Biovault Cyprus, a company that stores cord blood and tissue, peripheral blood and bone marrow stem cells, says ‘There are positive expectations of stem cell in terms of its capability in basic and translational research as well as in embryology.’
Drawing on the notion of biocapital (Kaushik, 2006), I argue that, at least in the case of stem cell research, Cyprus is exhibiting both commodity and commercial capitalism. While in other parts of the world, such research could be seen as a departure from an initial mode of commodity capitalism, as in drug development in India (Kaushik, 2006), Cyprus’ stem sector is in its initial stages. This does not prevent it from embracing corporate practices and discourses, such as those of the US where vision, hope, hype, etc. dominate the bio-economy. A venture capitalist argues:
Cyprus, due to its significant comparative advantages, can increase its market share in stem cells and be established as a center for biotech companies from all over the world…in the area through coordinated and targeted activities that should be implemented under the umbrella of a strategic plan. (Interlocutor 5, June 2013)
While some may critique this notion of the venture capitalist, it converges with the desires of patients elsewhere. In an interesting shared story on the YOUCARING/Compassionate Crowdfunding website, we read how Jesyka Small is seeking our funding support to make her desire to heal herself a reality:
Jesyka has a date with fate in the cradle of civilization itself…. That fate is in the small country of Cyprus…near Israel, Egypt, and Greece. That date is June 15th. She needs your help! The trip to that place is very expensive. Please, help her make this into a reality! Every contribution, no matter how small, is really needed and much appreciated if this is going to happen…. Stem cell therapy has shown incredible results for others that have experienced injuries of this kind. Since she is not allowed to receive this type of therapy in the United States, she has had to look outside of these borders in order to make this a possibility. Without your help, this ceases to be a possibility. (
While many patients recruited for clinical trials may be seen as doing ‘free labour’ for Innovation Inc., the biotech sector is a major emergence. Discussing the changing configuration of capital and labour, production and consumption in the moment of the emergence of the digital economy, Terranova conceptualises the emergent form of labour as ‘free labour’. Free labour marks the ‘moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited’ (Terranova, 2000, p. 37). It is free labour in a double sense: workers do it without pay, and they do it freely. The notion of free labour highlights the question of value distribution (unpaid/paid), and the question of the subjectivity of the workers who participate. The conventional notion of labour leads us to focus on the alienation and visible exploitation of workers; in contrast, the notion of ‘free labour’ shows how affects, desires and relations not necessarily produced in commodified labour relations are captured by capital in value creation.
Value can be produced only when it is given ‘a place in life’ and allowed ‘to live and evolve’ (Lazzarato, 1996, p. 145) by the actors inhabiting the field. Innovation Inc. desires patients. In this sense, it is generating value on the economy of desire. While Innovation Inc. acts as if it were the custodian of desire for youth as a provider of experimental treatments, it generates profits from patients’ desire to maintain a certain life; desire materialises in the body of patients as ‘living evidence’.
Some systems biologists say the properties of stem cells might be better understood as the properties of the system in which stem cells come to gain certain capacities, or ‘stemness’ as the effect of the system or the relations between the cell and its environment. As technical objects, then, the intrinsic property of stem cells is their potentiality for the social production of a certain human. This technological orientation of the stem cell enterprise corresponds to what others have observed in the increased interest of the life sciences on controlling life. In this sense, the notion that stem cells have potential in and of themselves is explicitly linked to imaginaries of future orientation and the economy of desire whose primary vision is extending life.
The regenerative potentiality of stem cells is at the centre of both the stem cell enterprise and the critical analysis of the stem cell economy. One way to approach it may be through the ‘social life’ (Appadurai, 1986) of vital matters, as Waldby and Mitchell have done. They show how in ‘tissue economies’, tissues are disentangled from previous relations and entangled in the biotech relations of production, caught in a legal, ethical and technological infrastructure. The status of tissues changes as they flow—tissues that once were the donor’s body parts turn into gifts and/or commodities, what would otherwise be biomedical ‘waste’. These flows in tissue economies are enacted by the technological possibilities of controlling and manipulating the vitality latent in tissues to produce therapeutic and economic values (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006). Waldby conceptualises biovalue as ‘the yield of vitality produced by the biotechnical reformulation of living processes’ (2002, p. 310). This implies that ‘vitality itself has become a potential source of value’ (Rabinow & Rose, 2006, p. 15). Embryos whose reproductive process is associated with a specific value for reproduction of the family in the IVF context are taken to stem cell labs and turned into biovaluable objects for regenerative medicine; their reproductive value is doubled at the IVF–stem cell interface (Franklin, 2006).
Yet the flows of biological matter, which presumably contains vitality and will turn into biovalue under certain techno-scientific and ethico-legal conditions, cannot be initiated or continued without bodies and the labour required to produce and maintain the vitality in and out of organisms’ bodies. Feminist scholars are particularly interested in this issue and have proposed important analytic tools to rethink the increasing capitalisation of the biological in tissue economies—attending to invisible women donors (Dickenson, 2001), reproductive/regenerative labour of egg donors/vendors (Cooper & Waldby, 2014) and reproductive agencies of living things (Franklin & Lock, 2003).
While these discussions help us rethink the novel mode of (re)generation in the contemporary bio-economy in general and the stem cell economy in particular, there is a tendency to take for granted the vitality of biological materials as if they are not assembled together with the economy. It is true that they are vital, but what kinds of labour should be done to generate their possibility? What are the relations, labours and substances required to keep the biological ‘vital’ in a manner malleable to manipulation and within what institutions and financial collaborations? Also, as Birch (2016) pushes us to think, how does this biovaluation become collapsed with the processes of bio-financialisation?
The pre-clinical drug development for the treatment of human carcinoma is taking place in Cyprus, through the formation of a consortium including the Cyprus University of Technology, Photobiotics Ltd, a UK company, and Trojantec Ltd, the coordinator in Cyprus. This development highlights the ‘itinerant’ politics Pignarre and Stengers see as associated with a circulation between and among different situated practices (2011, p. 123), with each situated experience implying a moment of collective creation (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011, p. 123). The proposal reads:
The TROJANDRUG project aims to carry out the first pre-clinical drug development using innovative capabilities and expertise previously unavailable in Cyprus. The proposed consortium has been assembled to provide the proper pre-clinical setting that will enable the TR4 cancer drug molecule developed by Trojantec, to cross the barrier from pre-clinical phase and into the clinical trial phase, the first of its kind in Cyprus. The project consortium recognizes the need for initiatives that foster synergies between industry and academia and among EU countries, and considers the role and input of each P as integral to the successful execution of the project. The cancer inhibiting potential of the TR4 fusion protein is based on increasing available evidence, which suggests that the same molecular pathways regulating the self-renewal of stem cells are also being employed in cancer progression. (
As the proposal suggests, innovative science depends on collective creation, with several contingent actors, including both universities and companies, working to reterritorialise knowledges, assets and other financial instruments.
In Cyprus, the stem cell is a business enterprise systematically based on financialised instruments to fulfil people’s desires. Businesses are springing up, promising parents something they want—their children’s health. Simultaneously, they are reterritorialising science and finance. A citizen who has experience with Incorporated says it is practically impossible to retrieve stem cells from frozen cord tissue, even when this is promised:
You make up fictions. You are a company and you want to make some fast euros. And you are also listed on the stock market. You pay us some Euros and we’ll save the tissue for you. We will take the umbilical cord tissue and we will save it for you. Whenever you want it come back to us and we defreeze the cord and derive any cell from it. This is a marketing joke! (Interlocutor 8, June 2013)
Private cord blood banking firms in Cyprus are primarily business ventures, businesses based on generating surplus value rather than making tangible products or services. Some firms even claim they can treat various genetic disorders by using a child’s own cord blood, even though stem cells in the cord blood may have genetic defects.
These new companies ‘depend on a promissory future economic value and potential rather than present use’ (Martin, Brown & Turner, 2008, p. 128). They are also ‘stutterers’ in the dominant discourses arguing for the promise of methods of healing and regeneration in the sense that the public highlights some of these practices and social relations as problematic. The stutter expressed above as a different vantage and personal affectation (‘you make up fictions’), ‘cannot be extricated from the stuttering of the normative discourses of science(s)’ (Prasad, 2016, p. 201) or the emerging discourses of financialisation. As different elements of science are brought together, biomedical, ethical, legal and social discourses, including notions of certain practices, are being ‘deterritorialized and reterritorialized and as such they find expression in the messy becoming of the patients (and their caregivers)’ (Prasad, 2016, p. 201), the venture capitalists and their speculation processes, and in the messy becoming of companies, including the state.
These questions might not matter in the future for these families’ children, yet they become central concerns in the financialisation of social relations and practices in the now. Ultimately, while the analytic terms developed by feminist scholars may miss some salient details, especially what Birch (2016) is arguing about finance, assetisation and management of value to tell us that the biological is not directly linked to the economy part of the bio-economy, it is important to notice that there is a convergence and a divergence simultaneously with the bio that generates tensions and conflicts with the dominant set of practices, norms and ‘prevalent cultures of valuation and the extensive embodiment of value production’ pushing for a bio-financialisation that ‘alters the very material infrastructure of bodies and forms of life’ (Lilley & Papadopoulos, 2014, p. 972). The focus on speculation and future orientation and their production of a ‘socio-technical imaginary’ (i.e., the forms of social understanding embedded in policy action that elucidate how certain forms of techno-science and social order are co-produced (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 124)) are informed and shaped simultaneously by the practices, actions and actors of the bio and the economy. While political–economic processes such as financialisation, capitalisation and assetisation as valuation practices are not inherent in biological materialities (Birch, 2016, p. 1), it is important to note that there is an assembling that takes form and shape reconfiguring knowledges and making possible emergences of global chain value institutions of about biological materialities and vice versa which impact these processes. Speculation both as a cognitive and as a financial practice engineers a future both uncertain and imminent, both risky and foreseeable that alters the every day. Lilley and Papadopoulos (2014, p. 974) allow us to push further the grammar of Birch (2016) by pointing that bio-finance ‘becomes molecularized in code and matter’ thereby evading all life and politics. In their own words,
The worth of almost everything—including the present and future appreciation of assets, goods, services, intangibles, the health and subjective capacities of individuals, the physical environment, human artefacts, other species, urban space—is in principle transferable into one single logic of financial value that is potentially tradable in the market: this is biofinancialisation.
In our own moment of volatile bio-finance, the future of any biology is commodified by derivatives, quantified by risk management models and pre-empted in fiscal policy and post-conflict military strategy. Knowable and instrumentalised financialised future seems to no longer be connected to the past and no longer able to promise utopian possibility and yet, it draws on desires and suffering to affect the ways people deal with the violence of the past and the ongoing desire for regeneration.
Biocapitalists see ‘biovalue’ as constituted by the vital potentiality of stem cells. Emergent legal and ethical infrastructures aim at a biotech mode of enclosure, attributing value to the ‘cognitive’ labour of scientists within the current intellectual property regimes. At the same time, the critique of bio-economy draws attention to the emergent forms of biovalue production and sheds light on the infrastructure and epistemological grounds of the biological processes and entities. The analysis inadvertently takes the future for granted, as an irreversible coming of a new era of biological control. My ethnographic engagement with the stem cell enterprise turns the clock back to the now and looks at what is happening in the meantime. It points to how the potential of stem cell promise becomes assembled and acquires social efficacy. Various science and financial actors co-produce a certain order whose primary tendencies are biofinancial (i.e., its major principle of valuation and evaluation is whether the product, the idea, the artefact etc., can be potentiatly tradable in the market). This biofinancialization provides a framework for states, individuals, and organizations to seek proprietary entitlements over artefacts, scientific labor and expertise even while the promised future is constantly deferred.
As a Way of Conclusion: Rupturing Value and Valuations
Deleuze’s conception of radical politics as a series of relays resonates with the formation of the Prison Information Group, a group seeking productive collaboration between prisoners and intellectuals through leaderless practice (Dosse, 2010, p. 310). In reading these two sites together, I point to those who want to assemble techno-science and financialisation and to those whose practices and discourses stutter the process. In global ecological movements, occupy movements, the Prison Information Group and many others, a series of relays of leaderless resistance against an assemblage of techno-science and financialisation prioritises certain visions and ethical projects. The idea of itinerant politics suggests a circulation among a variety of situated practices, with each situated experience implying a moment of collective creation (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011, p. 123). Families’ personal experiences of the missing can be compared to specific stem cell site experiences, for instance, where people find themselves buying into a promise without much in return. Experiences of itinerant politics such as these could bring about a reterritorialising of techno-science and financialisation by intensifying both the itinerary and the multiplying relays.
Put otherwise, humanitarian innovation and biotech sectors of stem cell research are not separated. People in Cyprus are engaging with the promise of science (humanitarian and otherwise), and techno-scientific labour is proliferating, not only in the biomedical sciences but in other domains. The promise of humanitarian innovation and innovations in stem cell biology are generating various forms of commitment among people who imagine and desire a future that will come when the promise is realised. In each site, the promise becomes a signpost showing the way to the future of innovation. As long as the innovation’s commitment is sustained, the innovation will gain sufficient force, including a market to thrive.The sites are linked; they seek to understand each other and translate each other in ways that allow for the financialisation of social life in a biological/capital shifting landscape that is uneven yet shared.
Following Cooper and Waldby (2014), I argue these sites cannot be seen as independent. They should be viewed from each other’s analytic lens. In this way, what becomes apparent are the ways that each shapes the other contributing to the shifting landscape of labour accumulation regimes which though full of risks and inscribed contractual guarantees such as the bioethical valourisation of scientific beneficence territorialises a new contract. Assembling techno-science and financial instruments and devices, this contract generates more value for some at the expense of the many who may not be able to participate in these innovative projects without some kind of affectation (i.e., you are suffering, but through humanitarian intervention we can redress your pain).
Both genetic knowledge about one’s kin and the healing of cancer and other diseases come to include an expanding notion of who counts as a cosmopolitan Cypriot. In each of these innovative sites, we see an expansion of modern medical practice assembled with assets and finance. The shifting landscape of bioscientific STS inquiry requires us to trace how these emerging innovations stutter in those times and places least expected.
But what is the imagined future? There is a general promise of innovation in both humanitarian projects and for-profit projects of regenerative medicine. In the case of the latter, therapeutics, intellectual properties, instruments and substances are involved in the production of healing and therapeutics and are co-constitutive of notions of yielding economic value. Global investments in stem cell science, in the radically different humanitarian and medical paradigms of regenerative medicine, come with promises of health, wealth, fulfillment of hopes and dreams and the eradication of anxieties. As stem cell innovations move to the popular domain, different kinds of promises emerge. With the technological scientific possibilities these innovations offer (rejuvenating old bodies, regenerating injured organs), biology is no longer conceived as fate, and biological time is no longer seen irreversible, as long as investments are made. This plasticity of biology suggests more than an advent of an age of biological control. In Cyprus, the flexibility of humanitarian innovations in the search for and identification of the missing points to other promises—of healing and redress—giving rise to important questions of value of social relations and their (re) evaluation.
DNA technologies and scientific labours in the humanitarian and biotech sectors may find their social and biological niche within a sociocultural and politico-economic milieu fraught with anxieties and desires regarding a future that differs from the present, thereby becoming revelatory of the textures of governance.Humanitarian innovations and the biotech industry are new sites of resolution of sovereign problems (i.e., racial conflicts), health and wealth generation. In attending to the forms of power in the identification of the missing and the stem-cell sector in Cyprus I traced the emerging valuation processes which include appropriation, exchange, and financialization. I have pointed to the changing political authority of the state and a rearticulation of the market as the primacy decision-maker of and the governance of people’s suffering, pain, and desires for enhancement. While these two sites may be seen as opposite to each other, a market logic and imaginary based on a measurable future value inflects both of them but not without a challenge by publics. As some of the relatives of the missing pointed out and challenged in the courts it is important to reclaim the “stolen” bits of code, material processes, artefacts, and imaginaries toward a process of invention of an order whose primary goal is not generation of surplus-value for profits.