The aff is a form of Neoliberal Biopolitical subjectification which defines what it means to be human and turns to bare-life all those that don’t become Homo Economicus.

In what follows, I develop the theoretical lens of this book. In brief, I will argue that the question of what IP does can be approached through an analysis of how power operates socially. That, in turn, requires an understanding of what we are talking about when we talk about “power.” I will argue that there are three competing ways of understanding power that are relevant in the present context. One is the power of law in the traditional, “juridical” sense: Repressive and coercive, "law” tells you what to do and prescribes penalties for not doing it. The second, emergent in classical liberalism - around the same time as the first IP policies - I will call “public biopolitics.” Power in this sense is less a matter of repressing than it is of generating, of harnessing the life energies of a population toward some sort of end, usually cashed out in terms of public/social welfare. The third, currently ascendant, is that of neoliberal biopolitics. Neoliberal biopolitics takes from its public predecessor a concern with generation and optimization, but drops the focus on the public sphere: Neoliberalism is a regime of intense privatization.* The central theoretical claim I will make is that intellectual property (IP) evidences a move away from both juridical law and public biopower, and toward neoliberalism. This process is uneven, incomplete, and contested, but the trend is nonetheless evident in a number of doctrinal areas. In so doing, IP has begun to adopt two of the key techniques of neoliberal biopower. The first is the production of a specific “truth” about what it means to be a person. All ways of life of course encourage an understanding of what it really means to be human; in the case of neoliberal biopolitics what it means to be human is to be a rationalizing economic agent: The human is homo economicus. The second technique, consequent upon the first, is that neoliberalism deploys an intense strategy of “subjectification,” which is to say that neoliberalism deploys a number of strategies for making people into exemplars of homo economicus. I will develop specific examples of how IP has adopted these strategies of subjectification in subsequent chapters, and suggest that they help to explain otherwise puzzling departures from the traditional goals of IP.