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I define the technocratic worldview slightly differently to the original popular use of the term. A technocracy is not simply a society ruled, or where decisions are basically taken, by elites with technical or elite knowledge; a technocracy is a society whose rules, mannerisms, and patterns are shaped by technology and technological processes, interfaces, and developments. It is a society where there has taken place a “onedimensional reduction of reason to its operational and functional forms” (Berardi and Mecchia 2007, 61); an instrumentalisation of discourse which has limited the possibilities of alternative thought; and the “flattening out” (Berardi and Mecchia 2007) of technology, causing the society to be increasingly driven forward in relationship to capitalist formulations of utility. It is also a world whose real is increasingly defined by its virtual, as virtual objects and markers begin to gain an increased significance in economic, social, and political transactions. The psychological shift is thus from an interface of reality–imagination (one sees reality, and one uses imagination to imagine other possibilities) to that of reality–virtual (one sees a limited reality, with the role of imagination taken over by the continuous, but flat and rectangularly bordered, spatiality of the online and constantly streaming world, which overwhelms or hypnotises the alterity of the imagination’s spatiality).

Arguably, the virtual world has now increasingly taken the place of the subconscious; in fact, the virtual world of social media is our new subconscious. Proof of this can be found in the following: how often does one in an idle moment automatically go to social media and scroll through, absentmindedly? Social media has filled the space of the bodily imaginary; 21 social media is a mirror image in which the self is shaped; 22 the self is fed its jouissance from a mass virtual sphere. We are also part of the data of this new world—whether through the information that is daily harvested from us by Google, Facebook, and others (which also will play an increasing role towards predicting and channelling future human behaviour, the maximalisation of Skinner’s behaviouralism in nightmarish proportions), or simply through the increasing tendency of all jobs and roles to focus on an audit culture and data collection.

We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.

In this paper, we have highlighted the link between climate change, colonialism, and capitalism, and the ways that emergency politics have been used by the settler-colonial nation state to consolidate itself. If our goal is climate justice, and not merely climate mitigation and adaptation that leaves existing inequities intact, emergency politics has little to offer. We have noted that so far, climate emergency declarations are largely ineffective in achieving their stated goals, but this is not our primary concern— if they were effective, we would be even more concerned about the implications of their use. As discussed in section “Emergency politics in the climate movement”, there yet remains some distance between climate emergency declarations and the kinds of authoritarian politics often justified by emergency politics, and we hope this paper serves as a timely caution. For, while we cannot make firm predictions, there are troubling precedents where systems established to respond to environmental disasters are used to sustain the oppression of marginalised people. For instance, the U.S. Emergency Management Assistance Compact was established to support disaster response and relief116; its powers have been used against Black and Indigenous movements for justice, notably those protesting the police after the death in custody of Freddie Gray, and the water protectors at Standing Rock117.

By learning from histories of emergency politics as practiced in the settler colony and from long-standing critiques of Indigenous scholars globally, we argue that climate emergency politics may actively stymie our attempts to create climate just futures. Discourses and practices of emergency politics tend to reinforce existing modes of governing and knowing, increase the use of authoritarian, militaristic, and carceral measures, reduce opportunities for participatory and accountable decision-making, and reinscribe exploitative settler colonial capitalism as the ‘status quo’ to which we seek to return. We note that the push for climate emergency declarations is generally coming from more liberal, progressive, even left-wing groups, who may well also hold critiques of the state and desire more equitable modes of governing and distributing benefits and harms. And yet, in their (our!) legitimate frustration, desperation, and fear, we often find ourselves co-opted into a crisis politics that obfuscates and reproduces colonial power and capitalist hegemony.

Our case study of Latin America’s place in global health as it developed over the past three to four decades demonstrates that the field’s conceptualisation of the ‘global’ is much more limited than the word indicates. It suggests that the definition of what ‘counts’ as the domain of global health – what is included and prioritised, and what is not – has changed over time in largely unexamined ways. We argue that the political dimensions and consequences of these changes exhibit the need for more sustained critical analysis of how the field of global health has developed over time.

As the research that does address this topic reveals, the transition from what was previously described as ‘international health’ to what today is known as ‘global health’ began to take shape in the 1980s, deepened significantly during the 1990s, and became more clearly consolidated in the 2000s and 2010s (Macfarlane et al., 2008; Packard, 2016). Latin America’s approach to public health research and practice made significant contributions to the emergence of global health during the 1980s and 1990s, especially in emphasising the importance of social epidemiology, social medicine, and what came to be known as ‘collective health’ (Abel, 1996; Breilh, 2021, 2023; Carter, 2019; Lima, 2007; Susser & Myer, 2007; Waitzkin et al., 2001). These traditions were central in shaping what were viewed as highly successful responses to HIV and AIDS across the region, as well as in promoting access to health as a fundamental human right (ABIA, 2000; Badilla, 2006; Paiva et al., 2013). Latin American policymakers and ambassadors were also recognised for key strategic contributions to emerging structures and processes of global health governance as they developed during the 1990s, with active involvement in the changing institutional architecture of the field through intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO, the World Bank, UNAIDS, and the WTO (Buss & Tobar, 2017).

In this paper we have developed the concept of incidental governmentality as a way of interpreting some of the governmental ambitions of surveillance capitalists and emerging digital expression of liberal governmentality. Incidental governmentality is primarily characterised by the separation of governmental action from rationality. It is evident when corporations utilise the pretence of acting governmentally to primarily achieve commercial goals. As we have seen, in the context of responses to Covid-19 it can involve the exploitation of trusted state brands (such as the UK's National Health Service) to gain access to user's data, and the formation of partnerships with government agencies so that Big Tech can become permanently embedded within the digital architectures of the state. We claim that the identification of incidental forms of governmentality is important for two primary reasons: 1. because it is not accounted for fully within existing theories of surveillance capitalism; and 2. because it reflects an emerging form of (bio-corporate) power which simultaneously exploits the actions of government while undermining many of its moral forms. In the context of the examples of incidental governmentality we have considered in this paper, we have seen how corporations have been able to utilise the pretext of governing as a way of exploiting public trust and exposing new streams of commercially valuable digital data. While appearing to be governmental, however, incidental forms of government are marked by troubling epistemological tendencies (namely a focus on commercial learning as opposed to effective government), and democratic shortfalls (expressed in a lack of contestable reasons for governing).

The examples of incidental governmentality discussed above demonstrate two things. First, that the operational forms and underlying commercial models of surveillance capitalism means that Big Tech are particularly adept at the practices of incidental governmentality. The fact that such companies seek to perpetually monitor and learn from human behaviour means that it is relatively easy to promote a governmental goal and yet to be disinterested in the extent to which it is achieved. When observing the impacts of a behavioural prompt to action and training algorithms to learn from public data sets is the commercial bottom line of such companies, the contributions of these actions to the public good will always be a secondary consideration. While there are few corporate forms which facilitate the practices of incidental governmentality quite like Big Tech, it is clear that incidental governmentality can be part of non-digital governmentality, and indeed be practiced by the state for political gain.

Why do people participate in genocide? This thesis seeks to answer the question of what prompts civilians to actively participate in genocide or, alternatively, to passively support genocidal policies. Through the concept of the “banality of evil,” Arendt, a political philosopher and Holocaust survivor, explains that participants in genocide are not necessarily fanatics or sociopaths but rather ordinary people who may be motivated by other aims than extremist ideology, such as professional success or peer pressure. Similarly, the recent political science scholarship questions the role of dehumanization and propaganda in mass mobilization for genocide, i.e., whether civilians simply hear dehumanization discourses on the radio or read about it in the newspapers and suddenly decide to participate in the commission of mass atrocities. This thesis relies on the writings of Michel Foucault, a French thinker who coined the concept of biopolitics, which refers to the state’s management and regulation of all biological aspects of a human population through modern technologies, e.g., birth control, marriage, food, religion, sexuality, and public health. As such, it revisits Foucault’s theory of biopower to explain mass mobilization in intrastate genocide, defined as cases in which a genocidaire government seeks to destroy one of its own groups. This thesis therefore argues that, well before genocide is planned or even intended, biopolitical restrictions taken by the state regulate – and call into question – the existential rights of the targeted group. As such, it argues that dehumanization and hate propaganda are only made possible whenever compounded with pre-existing structural violence against the targeted group enshrined in laws and institutions.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

COVID-19 has led to renewed interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, but it has also revealed that this concept is widely misunderstood. Too many commentators have relied upon an overly broad definition of biopolitics as a ‘politics of health’ or a ‘politics of life.’ Panagiotis Sotiris’ popular recent article ‘Is Democratic Biopolitics Possible?’ exemplifies this problem. Sotiris gives definitions of both ‘biopolitics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’ that we should reject. Let’s turn to these definitions:

Sotiris understands ‘biopolitics’ as a set of political practices that “attempt to guarantee the health (and productivity) of populations.” He relies upon this broad definition because he wants to use the term ‘biopolitics’ to discuss a wide range of political practices related to health. For example, he argues that practices as diverse as social distancing amidst COVID, the battle against HIV, and bans on smoking in closed public spaces are all part of biopolitics.

Sotiris understands ‘biopolitics’ as a set of political practices that “attempt to guarantee the health (and productivity) of populations.” He relies upon this broad definition because he wants to use the term ‘biopolitics’ to discuss a wide range of political practices related to health. For example, he argues that practices as diverse as social distancing amidst COVID, the battle against HIV, and bans on smoking in closed public spaces are all part of biopolitics.

When Sotiris speaks of ‘democratic biopolitics,’ he means that biopolitical practices could be authorized by “collective decision processes that are based on knowledge and understanding.” This definition implies that democratic biopolitics hasn’t yet been realized. After all, if democratic biopolitics already exists, then asking whether it is possible would be trivial. In summary: democratic biopolitics happens when rational, collective decision-making processes legitimize biopolitics, and democratic biopolitics does not currently exist.

Moreover, post-structural political theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Robert Esposito, and Jacques Rancière, focus on biopolitics from many different angles in their engagements with modern western democracies (see also Campbell, 2011; Prozorov & Rentea, 2017).1 For Agamben, what sets liberal democracies apart from ancient Greek notions of democracy, is not the integration of biological life into the sphere of politics per se, but the fact that biopolitics becomes inseparable from sovereignty in modern democracies. The “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). Agamben distinguishes zoe as the negative foundation of bios as the essence of modern politics (Agamben, 1998, p. 7). A crucial aim of Agamben's critical engagement with biopolitical sovereignity is to show the ways in which democracy and totalitarianism converge. Roberto Esposito similarly highlights the fundamental importance of biopolitics in liberal democracies. He views biopolitics as underlying all democracies, because democratic citizens are understood as purely rational individuals, which are per definition separated from their bodies. In modern liberal democracies, personhood equals disembodied subjectivity, which is an effect of biopolitics itself (Esposito, 2012). In its current form, democracy is used on and not in favor of bodies. With this insight, Esposito reveals a fundamental paradox of liberal democracies; namely, that the democratic rights that aim to protect the precarious reality of a human embodied life, rest upon a fiction of legal personhood that is based on disembodiment.2

From a different angle, Jacques Rancière's work also applies the premise that biopolitics and democracy are inseparable. Rancière's theory is grounded in the duality of police and politics, whereas the “essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living” but “in a certain way of dividing up the sensible” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). The “‘distribution of the sensible’ … defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). Thus, the order of the police always entails a biopolitical dimension. It is an “order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible, and sayable” (Rancière, 1999, p. 29). Based on this premise, Rancière identifies the act of disrupting the existing bodily order as democratic politics. Democracy then is “the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency" (Rancière, 1999, p. 101).

In particular, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September (9/11), “West-ern” societies that dominate the (neo)liberal discourse with its attributes of freedom, autonomy, individuality and tolerance imagine themselves in distinction from an apparently non-liberal, intolerant “other”. The “West” perceives itself universalistic as liberal because different from Islamic states, religion and state are separate, women and minorities are not discriminated against. A religious “other” is constructed that supposedly is more misogy-nist and homophobic than the “West”.1

The “Western” model of society perceives itself as a success story, a con-cept which guarantees, together with nation statehood and market econ-omy, democracy for its citizens. In the context of the economic, social and political effects of globalisation leading to precariousness, the limitations of models of society based on capitalism become apparent. Furthermore, numerous critical, deconstructivist, feminist, queer, trans and postcolonial approaches point out that contemporary (neo)liberal societies imagine themselves through the exclusion of the “other” (also the “other” within their own societies), based on the construction of essentialised and hege-monic ideas of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, religion and so on. This form of epistemic violence is linked to economic and sovereign violence and becomes manifest in biopolitical intrusions in the life of every person.2 The legal order of the state is connected with hegemonic, conservative, theo-logical and ecclesial presumptions. Thus dominant discourses of (Christian) religious communities support epistemic violence.3 Furthermore, in times of global, neoliberal invasion, we notice a symbolical reorganisation of modes of inclusion or exclusion within the nation.4

Such narrative tropes of endurance – putting up with, working through – construct characters that are ground down but also, and crucially, sympathetic and heroic. They are figured as contemporary parables of morality, where the bleaker the context, the starker the highlighting of the good, the kind, the purity of the human condition. They are, in short, ‘getting by’69 and their suffering is occluded by narratives that augment the kernel of interior humanity that is hiding behind the layers of biopolitical and economic exhaustion. Yet this is too easy: these figures are painted too simply; their innocence and quiet ‘ploughing on’ assuages the guilt of metropolitan privilege through their moral redemption. These narratives work for the scholar and critic through a double confessional: by making visible the violence through which their lives are shaped, and at the same time reassuring us (the reader, the liberal elite), that this violence, of which we are part (and upon which our good life rests), is not for nothing. As a basis for politics, we find the implicit morality of the concept of endurance in the academy problematic. This moral framework elevates dignity, and keeping it together in the face of the unliveable. Figures of endurance are wretched, dogged and unflinching in their living on. They do not cry out, nor do they complain; they find hope and solace in each other, in the small things, in the ashes of their ruined worlds. The politics inscribed here are ultimately conservative rather than revolutionary. As Berlant asks, in the context of the neoliberal United States, in such a situation, ‘is the best one can hope for realistically a stubborn collective refusal to give out, wear out or admit defeat’?.70 While we do not want to dismiss a politics of salvage and making do, we refuse to elevate this through the invocation of the otherwise; the ontological indeterminacy of becoming in ruined worlds should not be framed as redemption, or even consolation.

Spectres of progress

Policies, such as the alternative schools program, that were historically posited as “progressive” policies, and created previous to the advent of “choice,” are now firmly located within neoliberalism. Foucault (2008) posits the need to understand neoliberalism through the techniques by which states and individuals govern and are governed. The political-economic theory of neoliberal posits that markets are the primary rationalities of contemporary government and governance, with a particular focus on “choice” and “freedom” that indicates not the withdrawal of the state as such but the economization of the state (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010). Neoliberalism is characterized by “its unevenness, its lack of self-identity, its spatial and temporal variability, and above all, its reconfiguration” (Brown, 2015, p. 21), while this plasticity has the effect of reconfiguring many of what were considered liberal democratic projects, including the project of anti-racism (Goldberg, 2009). For example, being part of the independent and community-driven school lineage, the AAS is located within a policy realm where parental choice is the primary market mechanism that defines and enacts much of what constitutes ideas such as “independent,” “community,” and “educational equity.” As Brown (2015) maintains,

As both individual and state become projects of management, rather than rule, as an economic framing and economic ends replace political ones, a range of concerns become subsumed to the project of capital enhancement, recede altogether, or are radically transformed as they are “economized.” These include justice (and its subelements, such as liberty, equality, fairness), individual and popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. (p. 22)

Climate change mitigation comprises a vast array of economic and technological interventions and strategies, operating at multiple scales and across multiple sectors. The cornerstone of mainstream mitigation policy is, on principle, a shift away from fossil fuels—the highest global CO2 “emitter”—towards “renewable” or less carbon-intensive forms of energy generation. The socioenvironmental implications of expanding renewable energy frontiers are becoming central to research and debate in political ecology and critical geography (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2017; McCarthy, 2015). There is increasing attention, for instance, to the extraction of minerals necessary for batteries and other “low-carbon” technologies (Sovacool et al., 2020); the recasting of large hydropower projects as “climate-friendly” development (Huber et al., 2017); the “green grabbing” and conflicts associated with wind energy generation (Avila ´ Calero, 2017; Siamanta & Dunlap, 2019); the expansion of photovoltaics and “solar colonialism” (de Souza et al., 2018); or the use of climate mitigation funds to promote biofuel plantations (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017).

These processes can be seen as instances of energy or carbon colonialism, whereby countries in the global South and other peripheries are treated as carbon dumps, or targeted for grabbing land and resources necessary to reduce CO2 emissions generated primarily in the North (Bachram, 2004). Moreover, several of those projects “rely on extractive landscapes forged through various forms of physical and structural violence” (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017, p. 62). In other words, projects as diverse as wind farms, biofuel plantations, dams and lithium mining follow the same “green extractivist” logic. According to this logic, extracting as much resources, energy and profits as fast as possible from a territory, irrespective of the impacts on local socioecological relations, is framed as necessary not only for the wealth and wellbeing of populations in host locations—but also, increasingly, as an imperative for “saving” the climate and the planet.1

(Links to big tech, big pharma, seeds, plants, microorganisms)

Not only big tech but also big pharma was mostly erected on public funds. The changes in the patent system represented a qualitative break in the real subsumption of knowledge under the capitalist mode of production, from being allegedly a means of knowledge stimulation to becoming a means of controlling and blocking knowledge. Basic research was consequently engulfed by the proprietary model of knowledge. While Mazzucato unveils how this affects hepatitis, cancer, and HIV treatments, Fabienne Orsi, Christine Sevilla, and Benjamin Coriat have shown how this model affects health on a broad scale, as it also hinders testing. Patents have enabled “monopoly over the diagnostic and therapeutic activities based on genes” (Orsi et al., 2006, p. 327). The notion that privileges were conferred to inventions and not discoveries was once again blurred, making it theoretically possible for “gene sequences per se” to be patented (Nicol, 2021, p. 111). The arbitrary power over the privatization of life has thus far attained many forms. One could argue that owning and con trolling plants and animals, and even human beings in the multiple forms of slavery and servitude, have kicked off a long process of naturalization and normalization which culminates in the privatization of genes. Additionally, intellectual privatization in relation to life was already taking place at least since the nineteenth century, continuing throughout the twentieth century before the famous Diamond v. Chakrabarty case in the late twentieth century. For instance, microorganisms in the form of yeast received patents as early as in 1873. From that point on, seeds and plants were also subjected to privatization in the form of intellectual property.

Unfolding before us today is a massive realignment of human, animal and bacterial life in order to facilitate the reproduction of capital. In place of the old liberal order we have a neoliberal consensus celebrating the modernising powers of marketbased reforms on seemingly backward agricultural systems. The neoliberal truth regime presents global markets, agrarian biotechnologies and multinational corporate initiatives as the structural preconditions for alleviating world hunger. This discussion invariably ignores Amartya Sen’s (1981, 154; Roberts 2008, 263; WFP 2009, 17) classic point that the volume and availability of food alone is not a sufficient explanation for the persistence of hunger. Indeed, it is well established that enough food exists to feed in excess of the world’s current population (OECD 2009, 21). The conviction that further production gains will seamlessly translate into more calories for the poor is empirically shaky and ideologically driven. So long as the world’s hungry remain poor consumers, they are unlikely to reap the benefits of a food system hinged on the cash nexus. Calories will continue to flow up the food chain, reappearing as meat or fuel, available at a price.

This paper has sought to historically contextualise this crisis and the power structures that underwrite it. Much of what seems current has in fact a long genealogy. In the mercantile period, for instance, fears of scarcity led to the production of political pamphlets attacking hoarders and private speculators for driving up food prices (Rashid 1980, 493), but by the 18th century a vocal coterie of free-trade theorists were able to turn these fears on their head by arguing that market forces were the most effective means to prevent food scarcity. In their view, a liberalised food system would increase competition, depress prices and eradicate hunger. In Europe the gradual commercialisation of provisioning cultures represented a ‘great transformation’ (Polanyi 2001) between peasants and their environment. In the colonies, however, the destruction of pre-existing anti-scarcity programmes was rapid and severe as market mechanisms were frequently permitted to operate unchecked and with devastating consequences.

In Myriad, however, the US Supreme Court questioned whether the act of dening human genes as scientic property has actually had the opposite effect in the generation of biovalue. During the oral arguments, many of the justices expressed concern that Myriad’s possessive right to exclude others from using the genes had in fact rendered DNA as dead capital, hampering its circulation and use as a research object and medi - cal commodity. In a departure from Moore, the justices and the executive branch of the US government joined forces to argue that the pivotal act of ontologically converting a biological substance from biocommons to bioenclosure is the application of labor not as extraction but as use. They achieved this by recombining Jeremy Bentham’s speculative possessive with John Locke’s model of property as use to argue that corporations and researchers have a right to expect to use genetic materials, as much as they have a right to possess them when they have sufciently transformed them through the labor of use.

Throughout the proceedings, counsel for the plaintiff, Christopher Hansen, worked to disarticulate utility (use) from ontology (being) in the context of biological property, such that new ways of using a natural sub - stance could be remain patentable but simply making a substance avail - able to new uses through discovery or extraction would not be considered ontologically transformative. Within the parameters of the product of nature doctrine, therefore, he had to rst ontologically dene genes as natural properties and then revise which types of human labor can convert genomic nature into property. Put simply, Hansen had to uphold the first part of the legal reasoning in Moore — maintaining that human cells are a commons — while reversing the second part of the argument: insist- ing that the act of extracting a gene did not render it legally and factually distinct from “native DNA” in the bodily environment.

In the new millennium, with the rapid development of biotechnology—the most important human science Foucault described, transactions connecting with the body appear to have become the most important areas of the market economy. As a consequence, knowledge of genetics does not only represent the new orientation of scientific knowledge and history of science in response to the special economic needs or the social and historical conditions, but is accompanied by the politicization of science. This moves into the new materializing structure with power and subjectivity, and in an unprecedented form and scale, broadly and profoundly influences the economic, political and cultural life of contemporary capitalism. A new biopolitical system, named biocapitalism, is taking shape and redefining the living circumstances of modern people.

As a new stage or sub-form of capitalist development, biocapitalism, to some extent, presets a biotechnological “utopia” of promoting and optimizing life. On the same hand, biotechnology has come to represent the capitalistic advanced productive forces, opened up new room for the technological, industrial and consumptive innovation of capitalism, and promised health, beauty, wisdom, longevity and environmental protection through organ transplant, reproductive intervention, bio-medicine, genetically modified food and bio-fuels, and other benefits. A genetically based value system is created, and life is no longer a natural and immutable destiny, but rather a cultural or artificial construct open to calculative and regulative interventions of administration (Rabinow 1999, 407–416). However, what one discovers beneath biotechnological revolution and its seductive promises is actually a “control revolution.” (Shenk 1997, 45) Modern biotechnology is no longer satisfied with the external plastics or anatomy of nature, but tries to play the role of God through dominating the inner mechanism of life to reorganize nature thoroughly, creating “technosapiens” and causing a animal-like state of life. Therefore, compared to industrial technology, the key specialty of biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, is its biological nature. Body is knowledge, and knowledge is power.

In theoretical terms, we witnessed the discourse transforming from biopolitical to technological determinist – foregrounding technology as the cause underlying social phenomena, good or bad, and de-emphasising concerns about institutionalised racism and mass surveillance (see also, Gangadharan and Niklas 2019). Ironically, this shift was precipitated by a well-intentioned scientific experiment carried out by a civil rights group. It is possible the ACLU experiment helped the bill get past the assembly floor by making the harms FR can cause appear more concrete and measurable. However, it simultaneously reduced the concerns with FR to the level of the technology itself – an example of what Selbst et al. (2019) have called a failure of abstraction. The social discourse lost its biopolitical magnitude – and so did the bill.

Shahin (2019) has drawn attention to the theoretical significance of ‘critical junctures’ – emergent conditions in which a social discourse takes on a new direction without the principal stakeholders intending it to – in shaping regulations about technology. The ACLU experiment in August 2019 was such a critical juncture in the discourse about AB-1215. Even though ACLU’s own position on why FR had no place in law enforcement did not shift after the experiment – its press releases, for instance, retained their focus on systemic issues – both Assembly member Ting and the media latched on to Rekognition’s manifest failure as a piece of technology. This quickly undermined the original intent of the bill. To be sure, other factors may have also played a role in the willingness shown by Ting and other supporters of the bill to accept a sunset clause – twice – and change the character of the bill from a permanent ban on the use of FR in police body cameras to a three-year moratorium. But the noticeable change in the social discourse following the experiment, coinciding with changes in the bill itself, does indicate that the experiment weakened the bill even as it became instrumental for its passage.

Furthermore, these critiques should also be read in connection with a broader examination of the epistemological and ideological violence underpinning capitalist culture in all its facets. In addition to the earlier mentioned frames of necropolitics and slow violence, an acknowledgement of the “cruel optimism” and “slow death” (Berlant 2011) at play within contemporary society is necessary. These components are identified through critical challenges to the mindset of superficial optimism10 inherent within contemporary capitalist society. They become evident through critiquing ideological outlooks which romanticise the aggressive and accelerationist nature of the capitalist episteme, blur the destructivity of militarised economic apparati, and close an eye to the oppressive hegemonies and interpellations of capitalist life.

The current moment retains the spectre of past traumas and the phantoms of unrealised hopes; it is a time of technological change and social attritions. The era of the 4IR and reformulated, reproduced, or repackaged neo-liberalism and death capitalism is a stage for experiencing war by diffuse means, spread across all temporalities and spectrums of living. Poets react to this changing and yet simultaneously static climate through their use of language and by harnessing a diversity of poetic techniques, allowing and stimulating aesthetic modes that are able to critique the status quo. A pertinent in situ example would be Gqeberha-based poet and artist Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, who in 2019 published a volume titled skeptical erections. In a poem titled “violent seed” (2019, 32), the narrator holds forth from the scene of a location neighbourhood, mustering and gathering a series of concrete images that display psycho-geographical violence and mass media permutations and replays of slow death—not forgetting the simmering traumatic content of post-apartheid society, a depiction of relational fracturing. The narrator reveals: