The aff mirrors discourses of the gift—communities giving to one another out of altruism, but this is co-opted by biopolitics

This tension surfaced with Marcel Mauss’s 1925 publication of The Gift, which Esposito (1995:193) aptly describes as “l’architexte” of a line of discourse that presents the gift as a critique of the ever-expanding utilitarianism of modernity. Mauss ([1925] 1990:76) presented anthropological accounts of archaic gift-exchange societies precisely to challenge the instrumental view of human beings as the “‘economic animal’ . . . homo oeconomicus.” As an alternative to the commodity-exchange societies produced by these economic animals, Mauss was particularly intrigued by potlatch communities, such as the Kwakiutl of Northwest America. In such communities, gifts were reciprocally exchanged in an obligatory and selfinterested manner rather than a gratuitous and altruistic one, and social status was determined not by the accumulation of wealth but by the ability and willingness to return even greater gifts than those received (Mauss [1925] 1990). Despite being governed by a “principle of rivalry and hostility that . . . takes on an extremely marked agonistic character” (p. 6), Mauss nevertheless claimed that the three obligations of the potlatch—“to give, to receive, to reciprocate” (pp. 39–43)—were the foundation of social integration in these premodern cultures. He recognized vestiges of gift exchange in contemporary culture and sought to cultivate them as a check on the “constant, icy, utilitarian calculation” of capitalist societies (p. 76). When the first widespread intermingling of body parts occurred, with the transfusion of blood during the world wars, the tension between gift and commodity exchange intensified, and it has shaped the bioeconomy ever since. As would be expected in this nationalistic context, voluntary donation was the standard practice for blood procurement among combatant nations; after the wars, the gift remained the prevalent model for gathering blood. England established the Blood Transfusion Service in 1946, which eventually became the National Blood Service, and the American Red Cross began a national civilian donation system in 1948. Blood donation was of particular symbolic potency in France, where it was viewed as a heroic gesture during the Resistance. In 1949, France established the Centre National de Transfusion Sanguine (CNTS), which “was organized and run according to three sacred guiding principles: benevolence, donor anonymity, absence of profit” (Rabinow 1999:79). Nearly half a century after The Gift, Richard Titmuss (1971) praised this voluntary blood donation model in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, claiming that this form of gift was morally superior to Mauss’s potlatch because it involved no obligation of reciprocity; blood was exchanged anonymously among strangers, and “[n]o givers require or wish for corresponding gifts in return. They do not expect and would not wish to have a blood transfusion” (Titmuss 1971:74; see also Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Titmuss (1971) was effusive in praising this allogenic gift model, but he was equally scathing in his criticism of the way some blood was procured in the United States. Voluntary donation was the prevalent technique for procuring blood in the United States during and 362 Sociological Theory 34(4) after the Second World War, but local blood banks also appeared that paid for “donations” or required recipients to make a deposit of their own blood or that of a proxy (Titmuss 1971; see also Waldby and Mitchell 2006). Titmuss (1971:158) condemned this commodified exchange of blood and warned quite presciently: blood as living tissue may now constitute in Western societies one of the ultimate tests of where the “social” begins and the “economic” ends. If blood is considered in theory, in law, and is treated in practice as a trading commodity then ultimately human hearts, kidneys, eyes and other organs of the body may also come to be treated as commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Titmuss’s warning was late, however: U.S. biomedical practices had already infiltrated the voluntary donation systems of England and France. The practice of private blood banking encouraged U.S. pharmaceutical companies to develop techniques for separating blood plasma from red blood cells and “fractioning” the plasma into biovaluable components, such as Factor VIII, a concentrated clotting agent that greatly increased hemophiliacs’ life expectancy. These U.S. companies began to purchase blood from developing countries in the 1970s in order to produce enough Factor VIII to distribute internationally as a bio-commodity. Because France and England could not produce enough Factor VIII through their voluntary donation systems, they imported this life-saving product from U.S. pharmaceutical companies (Waldby and Mitchell 2006; see also Rabinow 1999), “tainting” their gift models by participating in the profitable, commercial exchange of blood. I will return to this tension between the treatment of blood as a gift and a commodity in the third section, when I discuss the second line’s criticisms of the gift model, but here I want to emphasize that the circulation of blood as a commodity occurred in the particular neoliberal culture that developed in the United States during the postwar period. Foucault examined this American strain of neoliberalism, just as it was about to manifest politically as Reaganism and Thatcherism, in his 1978–1979 Collège de France course La naissance de la biopolitique. These lectures were published in French in 2004, along with the lectures from his 1977–1978 course, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, as what editor Michel Sennelart describes as a “diptych unified by the problematic of bio-power” (Foucault [2004] 2007:369). These volumes appeared in English as Security, Territory, Population in 2007 and The Birth of Biopolitics in 2008, which was too late for them to be taken into account in many of the second line’s major works on the bioeconomy. In fact, among the works from the second line cited here, only Cooper’s (2008) Life as Surplus actually acknowledges these lectures, and she mentions La naissance de la biopolitique in her Introduction only to emphasize that her analysis begins precisely where Foucault’s analysis ended (Cooper 2008:8–11, see also notes 5 and 6, pp. 177–78).1 I would like to linger a bit on The Birth of Biopolitics, however, because these lectures reveal a facet of American neoliberalism that has proven particularly seductive to some members of the second line, other than Cooper. Foucault distinguished two contrasting models of postwar neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics: German “ordoliberalism,” which developed at the University of Freiburg in the 1930s to 1950s, and American neoliberalism, which flourished at the University of Chicago in the 1960s to 1970s. Ordoliberalism sought to create an “enterprise society” that was conducive to market competition but also supported “the reconstruction of a set of what could be called ‘warm’ moral and cultural values which are presented precisely as antithetical to the ‘cold’ mechanism of competition. . . . The enterprise society imagined by the ordoliberals,” Foucault ([2004] 2008:242) emphasized, “is therefore a society for the market and a society against the market” (see also Lemke 2011b; McNay 2009). There was no such Tierney 363 ambivalence in American neoliberalism, which recognized no values beyond economic rationality. Rather than treating society as a check on the extension of “economic analysis,” as both Titmuss and the ordoliberals had, American neoliberalism instead saw society as an “unexplored domain” that offered “the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic” (Foucault [2004] 2008:219). The epitome of this American neoliberalism was the “human capital” theory developed at the University of Chicago by Nobel laureates Theodore W. Schultz and Gary Becker, which dissolved the “warm” social values of ordoliberalism into nothing more than individual decisions about the use of scarce resources to satisfy competing ends (Foucault [2004] 2008:222– 23; see also Lemke 2011b:109–11).