Animals as Biotechnology

Dead liveness/living deadness: Thresholds of non-human life and death in biocapitalism

“…Further, in setting aside traditional selection and breeding techniques based on sensory and visual appraisal and tacit/haptic knowledge (cf. Holloway and Morris, 2008; Twine, 2010), this micro-anatomo-politics works with biopolitics to regulate and produce profitable animal (individual and collective) bodies by fostering the adoption of molecular selection techniques based on the calculation of profits and an understanding of the “animal as biotechnology” (Twine, 2010). For example, an understanding centred on a partial conception of animal life incorporated in numbers and images (Holloway and Morris, 2008).…”

“…However, most of these works seem to imply that what is novel about today’s capitalism is the exploitation and manipulation of the biological aspect of life. Yet, as Twine (2010: 185) notes, “the biological within capitalist economies” is not a new characteristic of capital accumulation (see also Birch and Tyfield, 2013). In this paper, we suggest that biocapitalism is an emerging mode of production not only manipulates and exploits biological life.…”

“…It must be noted that most of this specific body of work primarily focuses on the cognitive, affective and socio-cultural aspects of life ( bios ) and it is largely anthropocentric. More generally, with a few notable exceptions (Shukin, 2009; see also Twine, 2010), scholars disregard to take into account how animal lives and deaths are intrinsic to this mode of production. In order to bridge the divide between the works that primarily focus either on the bios or zoē side of life, and to bring animals’ (socio-material and symbolic) lives/deaths back into studies of biocapitalism, we elaborate on key concepts drawn from Shukin’s (2009) zoopolitics and Agamben’s biopolitics and we analyse the commercialisation of the semen of Piedmontese bulls.…”

Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory

“…In fact, he identifies a limit within ethical writing about human and animal encounters, in which only animals that are close to humans have been the object of ethical concern. As Bull (2014) argues, often accounts of multispecies ethics or the ethics of relationality are limited to the scope of animals with which humans have close relations such as domestic animals, "companion species" (Haraway 2008b), animals on which we rely as food resources (Twine 2010) and at points laboratory animals with which we recognize kinship as mammals, such as apes and mice, (Haraway 1989(Haraway , 1997. I would like to define disgust as a methodological tool, relying on Bull's work.…”

Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia

“…Despite these problems, care was still afforded a pivotal role and thus the work at Davis cannot simply be read in terms of a straight-forward narrative of instrumentalization, or even framed in relation to more complex socio-economic concepts that examine the animals' role as biocapital (e.g. Shukin, 2009;Twine, 2010 what and by whom' research takes place (Haraway, 2008: 87), in order to guard against care being used to reinforce pre-existing (experimental) research epistemologies and ethical values rather than transforming them.…”