In the policy discourses of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Commission, modern biotechnology and the life sciences are represented as an emerging “bioeconomy” in which the latent value underpinning biological materials and products offers the opportunity for sustainable economic growth. This articulation of modern biotechnology and economic development is an emerging scholarly field producing numerous “bio-concepts.” Over the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to theorize this relationship between biotechnologies and their (...) capitalization. This article highlights some of the underlying ambiguities in these conceptualizations, especially in the fetishization of everything “bio.” We offer an alternative view of the bioeconomy by rethinking the theoretical importance of several key economic and financial processes. (shrink)

This review essay of two edited volumes sketches how STS scholars have analyzed scientific representation and visualization in recent work. Several key foci have emerged, among them attending closely to materiality, engaging the digital through embodied action, turning to ontology, as well as benefitting from artistic practice and critique. In diverse ways these choices are informed by a discontentment with the Cartesian split of mind and body as well as the picture theory of language. Yet, naturalism endures as a template, (...) an expectation, and sometimes a specter with and against which much representational work in science is done. What STS scholars have learnt about representation in laboratory and expert settings still awaits being employed more comprehensively for making sense of practices beyond the lab, especially in contested political, social and ecological environments. In setting out to do so, they ought to reflect on the kinds of logic that their practices of representing representation enact. (shrink)

While he develops three different aspects of Lacan's “Real,” Slavoj Žižek does so only partially, in the end leaving an inconsistent and contradictory account. Here these three versions of the Real are outlined and clarified by showing their relation to Marx's account of capitalist exchange and socialist politics. This leads to a discussion of two other aspects of the Real that appear in Žižek's work: the pre-Symbolic Real and the “Sinthome.” Where the former is simultaneously the fear of a unified (...) working class and the fantasy of a world of “total enjoyment” without conflict, the latter is discussed here in terms of political struggle that takes on not only the form of a means to an end but also that of an end in itself. (shrink)

This thesis constructs a model of the material causes of the capacity of individuals to act at work, by using the ontology of scientific realism to facilitate a synthesis between Marx and Foucault. This synthetic model is submitted as a solution to the long-standing problem of Industrial Relations theory, now manifest in the deconstruction of the organon of 'control'. The problems of 'control' are rooted in the radical concept of power and traditional, base/superstructure, interpretations of Marx. Developing an alternative to (...) the last provides the means of transcending the limitations of the first and the second. A realist, chronological-bibliographic reading of Marx provides an alternative to traditional interpretations, by creating a novel concept of his object, his initial explicandum and his putative explicans. This reading identifies a fresh problem with his model of capital: it cannot explain how labour is organized into a productive power and subsumed to capital. Foucault provides the means of resolving these deficiencies of Marx's explicans. A realist interpretation turns Marx and Foucault around to face each other, renders them compatible and establishes points of contact between their work. Together they constitute a model of the operative logic of production relations capable of explaining the organization of labour, its subsumption to capital and the materialism of civil society and the idealism of the state. On this basis, the contemporary form of the problem of Industrial Relations theory is explained. (shrink)