12 R.M. Shaw
Affect and Bio-Intimate Economies
Alongside the literature emphasising the centrality of economic action
with biomedical and technological innovation, several scholars have
examined the bioeconomy for its facilitation of novel ways of doing eth-
ics. For Rose (2007a, 2007b, 2008 ), the economic aspect of ‘vital poli-
tics’ or ‘the politics of life itself ’, which he relates to the ever-growing
commodification of biological materials as profit-generating for the
health industry, is supplemented by ‘an ethical framing of the term
value’ (Birch and Tyfield 2012 : 304). In his work, Rose signals the
importance of identifying the intersection between the economic and
the ethical as a register of value to understand the nature of contem-
porary biopolitics. Notably, he posits an ‘elective affinity’ between the
spirit of biocapital and ‘our contemporary somatic ethic’, in a manner
reminiscent of Max Weber’s account of ethical action, to suggest that
people organise their conduct and practices to realise specific values in
response to the dilemmas they face. In Rose’s account, individuals are
self-managing, active citizens, subject to new forms of responsibility
centred on the body (Rose and Novas 2005 ). In the process of endeav-
ouring to make good their identity, individuals in post-Fordist neo-
liberal economies choreograph their health, vitality and well-being by
prioritising somatic life. It is this focus on the body, and its regulation,
that has become the central field of political and cultural action and the
defining property of who we are in the contemporary period.
While Rose, Waldby and others (e.g. Cooper 2008 ; Rajan 2006 ;
Thompson 2005 ) have theorised the promissory value of reproductive
and bodily tissues for the global bioeconomy, the fields of globalisation
studies (Appadurai 1986 , 1996 ), interactionist sociology (Hochschild
1983 , 2012 ; Zelizer 1997 , 2011 ) and affect theory (Ahmed 2004 ;
Berlant 2008 ; Hardt 1999 ; Hardt and Negri 2000 ) offer valuable
insights through which to examine the conjunction of somatic eth-
ics with human vitality in the context of transplant, fertility and stem
cell travel. Building on Appadurai’s ( 1996 ) theory of modern globalisa-
tion and his vocabulary around the global cultural economy to describe
the movement and flow through different ‘global scapes’ of people
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