4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
predicated upon a lifting of ‘the biological’ to the second power. In twenty-first-
century biopolitics, writes Rose (2007: 20), ‘the human becomes, not less biological,
but all the more biological’. Once again, the analytic focus here is on productivities –
the generation of a novel biomedical field. ‘The new molecular enhancement
technologies’, contends Rose (2007: 20), ‘do not attempt to hybridize the body with
mechanical equipment but to transform it at the organic level, to reshape vitality from
the inside’. On this view, the implantation of nanobots in our bloodstream – already
trialed on rats, and projected by some researchers as a pathway to radical human life
extension – will not only keep women and men healthy at the cellular and molecular
level but transform the very definition of life itself. Thus by combining a Foucaultian
notion of biopolitics as underscoring the powers of mobilization, accumulation and
exchange, Rose seeks to demonstrate biomedicine as both ideological discourse and
production of life, as ‘managing’ subjectivity but also ‘performing’ it.
The path to molecular biopolitics for Rose is intricately intertwined with global
capitalism, specifically the extraction of economic value from biological processes.
As a result of various economic crises and the spread of globalization, capitalism has
undergone in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries a dramatic makeover
- one in which technologies controlled by capital seek now to ‘capitalize’ on the vital
processes of living things. Rose terms this the arrival of ‘bioeconomics’. In a world of
multinational pharmaceutical industries, biotech companies, genetech firms,
biobanks and molecular manipulation, capital has become biological – ever more
reliant on the transfer, mobilization, manipulation and commodification of living
nature. We are now confronted by the bioeconomy, the interweaving of finance and
the laboratory. Molecularization is, from this angle, part and parcel of the West’s
global ambitions for capitalist optimization. Molecular biopolitics, says Rose (2007:
15), ‘is conferring a new mobility on the elements of life, enabling them to enter new
circuits – organic, interpersonal, geographical and financial’. This is more than saying
that biomedicine is big business; rather, biological processes and technological
capitalization interpenetrate in a new configuration.
A second strand of social thought addressing posthuman identity comes from critical
European thought and philosophy, and is broadly speaking more affirmative in
character. Rosi Braidotti makes the case for what she terms ‘critical posthumanism’,
and across a range of publications has addressed the implications of the posthuman
turn for the analysis of identities and newly emergent forms of subjectivity. Braidotti’s
starting point is that the crisis of Western humanism is not catastrophic, but rather
involves various positive consequences. For Braidotti, the crisis of Western humanism
- reflected in recent sociological and philosophical critiques of Eurocentrism,