Melinda Cooper

Genealogies of resilience From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation

The concept of ‘resilience’ was first adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management toward the far-from-equilibrium models of second-order cybernetics or complex systems theory. Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in financial, urban and environmental security discourses, where it reflects a general consensus about the necessity of adaptation through endogenous crisis. The generalization of complex systems theory as a methodology of power has ambivalent sources. While the redefinition of the concept can be directly traced to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, the deployment of complex systems theory is perfectly in accord with the later philosophy of the Austrian neoliberal Friedrich Hayek. This ambivalence is reflected in the trajectory of complex systems theory itself, from critique to methodology of power.

Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror

This article looks at the increasing prominence of bioterrorist threat scenarios in recent US foreign policy. Germ warfare, it argues, is being depicted as the paradigmatic threat of the post-Cold War era, not only because of its affinity for cross-border movement but also because it blurs the lines between deliberate attack and spontaneous natural catastrophe. The article looks at the possible implications of this move for understandings of war, strategy and public health. It also seeks to contextualize the US’s growing military interest in biodefence research within the commercial strategies of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. In its methodology, the article weaves together elements from defence literature, scientific perspectives on infectious disease, catastrophe theory and political economy. The conceptual underpinnings of the strategy of pre-emptive warfare, it argues, lie as much in the theory of biological emergence as in official US defence strategy.

Turbulent Worlds Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis

Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses on the ‘evental’ and ‘atmospheric’ quality of contemporary power. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctutation. Whether we are dealing with the turbulence of world financial markets or that of complex earth systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be extracted, recombined and liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own. In the same way that financial derivatives price the variable relation between and across national currencies, weather derivatives now make it possible to issue contracts on the unknowable contingencies embedded in complex atmospheric relations. This reconfiguration of value requires a thorough rethinking of classical sociological conceptions of debt, promise and political violence.

THE BIOPOLITICS OF REPRODUCTION Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women's Clinical Labour

cases, they are proving ineffective, as women and couples prioritise economic security and career development over the production of large families. The reasons for this shift in priorities are complex, intertwined, as Neilson notes above, with transformations in the biopolitical ordering of life. 3 These transformations could be summarised as the neoliberalisation of life, both in the sense of the everyday life of citizens, and the biological life of populations. The decline in reproduction demonstrates these two forms very succinctly. In the realm of everyday

From reproductive work to regenerative labour: The female body and the stem cell industries

The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biomedical research that are rapidly expanding throughout the world. Women constitute the primary tissue donors in the new stem cell industries, which require high volumes of human embryos, oöcytes, foetal tissue and umbilical cord blood. Such material is generally given for free in the advanced industrial democracies, constituted as a surplus (‘spare’ embryos) or waste (umbilical cord ‘afterbirth’, cadaveric foetuses, poor quality oöcytes) whose generative powers should not be withheld from others. At the same time, among impoverished female populations in developing nations, such biological material is now often procured through frankly transactional relations, where women undertake risky procedures for small fees. In each case, female bodily productivity is mobilized to support bioeconomic research, yet the economic value involved in these relations is largely unacknowledged. In this article, we consider both the gift economy and the transactional economy for reproductive tissues as a form of labour. In order to fully conceptualize the specificities of feminized productivity in the bioeconomy, we distinguish between earlier feminist theories of reproductive labour and the emerging practices generated by stem cell research, which we term regenerative labour. We consider how historical transformations in the regulation of feminized labour and the technical repertoires of stem cell research renegotiate the productivity limits of female reproductive biology, opening it out to novel and profitable forms of surplus value and enrolling women in complex negotiations over their role in bioeconomic activity.

Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age

This article looks at the history of the stem cell as an experimental life-form and situates it within the context of biological theories of cellular ageing which emerged in the 1960s, under the banner of ‘biogerontology’. The field of biogerontology, I argue, is crucially concerned not only with the internal limits to a cells lifespan, but also with the possibility of overcoming limits. Hence, the sense of ‘revolution’ that has surrounded the isolation of human embryonic stem cells. The article goes on to situate the problematic of cellular ageing within the larger historical transition from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production – a transition whose effects on the life sciences have been insufficiently theorized – and points to resonances between the concerns of biogerontology and an emerging political rhetoric on the crisis of ageing and limits to growth. Having surfaced in parallel with the neo-liberal euphoria of the 1990s, the field of regenerative medicine presents itself as a biomedical solution to the problem of limits to growth. What is at stake in the contemporary biosciences, I suggest, is not so much the mass commodification of life itself as its transformation into a source of speculative surplus value.

China and the global stem cell bioeconomy: an emerging political strategy?

There is a growing consensus, amongst policy analysts and scientists alike, that China is likely to play a key role in the scientific, clinical and commercial development of stem cell research. However, to date, there exist few detailed analyses of Chinas current investment in the field. After introducing the UKs recent political strategy on stem cell science, this article develops an in-depth discussion of the formal organization of Chinas research and development in the area, as well as its rapidly evolving commercial, regulatory and ethical environment. From here, we go on to assess the probability of Chinas emergence as a global player in the increasingly internationalized business of stem cell biomedicine.

Stem cell science in India: emerging economies and the politics of globalization

The globalization of stem cell science is increasingly being shaped by the emerging economies of the Asia/Pacific region. Undaunted and unhampered by the more established views of the commercialization of science, countries such as India are constructing models of innovation, policies and patterns of investment that challenge such orthodoxies. This report examines the position of India within the globalization of stem cell science, its adjustments to the developing knowledge market in this field and its particular contribution to the likely future of this promising bioeconomy.

COMPLEXITY THEORY AFTER THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Amongst the many calls for regulatory reform voiced in the wake of the global financial crisis, the contributions of Andrew G. Haldane and his colleagues at the Bank of England stand out as some of the most politically and intellectually ambitious. In 2009, Haldane, the Banks Executive Director of Financial Stability, delivered a speech advocating the integration of complex systems theory (particularly as developed in the field of ecosystems science) into the toolkit of financial regulation. In an effort to understand what is at stake in such calls for theoretical and regulatory regime change, this article traces the prehistory of complex systems thinking in economics. It focuses special attention on two contributions to this minor tradition – the little-known later work of the Austrian neoliberal, Friedrich von Hayek, who elaborated a philosophy of spontaneous economic order on the basis of complex systems theory, and the more recent work of the so-called ‘new institutionalists’, economists who lay claim to the tradition of ‘evolutionary’ philosophy articulated by the neoclassical Alfred Marshall. These exemplary currents in economic complexity theory articulate very similar critiques of the neoclassical orthodoxy yet diverge sharply in their political commitments. This paper situates recent calls to import complexity theory into financial regulation in ambivalent tension between the Austrian and new institutionalist traditions. It concludes with some skeptical reflections on the notion that the financial crisis signals the ‘death of neoliberalism’.

Regenerative medicine : stem cells and the science of monstrosity

The nineteenth century science of teratology concerned itself with the study of malformations or “monstrosities”, as they were then called. The first major contribution to the field was the work of Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire Generale et Particulière des Anomalies de l’Organisation chez l’Homme et les Animaux, published in 1832, whose classifications formed the basis for the later experimental science of teratogeny, the art of reproducing monstrosities in animal embryos. In this article, I will argue that recent developments in the field of regenerative medicine can be situated in the tradition of teratological and teratogenic studies dating back to the nineteenth century. In particular, I will be interested in the historical link between studies in teratogenesis (the artificial production of teratomas) and stem cell research. Recent advances in stem cell research, I will suggest, return us to the questions that animated nineteenth century investigations into the nature of the monstrous or the anomalous. In the process, our most intuitive conceptions of “life itself” are undergoing a profound transformation.