Biosurveillance as a Terrain of Innovation in an Era of Monopoly Finance Capital

Abstract

Situated in a context of higher education policy, this article examines the institutionalization of 'innovation' as a national neoliberal economic strategy. As neoliberal capital has become increasingly financialized, this innovation strategy has come to be woven through biotechnological innovation as an economic strategy, and oriented to the politics of permanent war. Following a 'strong-state' thesis, relations of monopoly finance capital increasingly organize knowledge production within higher education and the need for technological innovation related to national security. The author shows that the resulting academic cultures of innovation are heavily invested in subordinating research in the areas of health and environment to military strategy in order to achieve full spectrum global systems of biosurveillance.I have written this article from my location as a higher education researcher who has been studying and mapping out how neoliberal economic policy has been reshaping postsecondary education. More recently, I have turned my attention to the increasingly evident transformation of higher education systems brought about through their contact with, and irresistible pull into, the economic orbits characterizing the financialization of capital. As Bellamy Foster (e.g. 2010) points out, the financialization of capital goes hand in hand with the topics of neoliberal economics and globalization, and yet has received relatively little attention. This article aims to correct this paucity by examining how relations of monopoly finance capital have deeply penetrated knowledge production in the areas of biotechnology and communications through the institutionalization of 'innovation' policies. The resulting academic cultures of innovation, I will show, are heavily invested in subordinating research in the areas of health and environment to military strategy in order to achieve full spectrum global systems of biosurveillance.

Fungibility in the Academia

“…What we called 'the necropolitics of higher education' (Bui, 2016, p. 161) will become the first sphere where collective scholarships can challenge. The role universities play in the (re)production of the biomedical-military-industrial complex and its 'global financialized imaginary' (see Haiven, 2014;Haiven & Berland, 2014;Magnusson, 2013;Shonkwiler, 2017) will become unstable when individualbased publications are withered by the force of a collective turn. For example, the current speculative financialization of certain biomedical or STEM innovations generated by different labs can be understood as the privatization of knowledge produced in a collective; the collective logic, therefore, can potentially counter contemporary financialization by refusing to be patterned on the basis that it is the knowledge from the people, of the people and is inscribed on their bodies, consequently, it should not be a marketized commodity.…”