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ARTICLE
Economic imaginaries of the Anti-biosis: between
‘economies of resistance’and the ‘resistance of
economies’
Nik Brown1& Sarah Nettleton1
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to report on the way economic principles, formulae and
discourse infiltrate biological research on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the life sciences.
AMR, it can be argued, has become the basis for performing certain forms of ‘economic
imaginary’. Economic imaginaries are ways of projecting and materially restructuring eco-
nomic and political orders through motifs, metaphors, images and practices. The paper
contributes to critical social science and humanities research on the socio-economic
underpinning of biological discourse. The performance of economy in this context can be
seen to follow two key trajectories. The first trajectory, discussed at length in this paper,
might be described as ‘economies of resistance’. Here the language of market economics
structures and frames microbiological explanations of bacterial resistance. This can be illu-
strated through, for example, biological theories of ‘genetic capitalism’where capitalism itself
is seen to furnish microbial life with modes of economic behaviour and conduct. ‘Economies
of resistance’are evidence of the naturalisation of socio-economic structures in expert
understandings of AMR. The methodological basis of this paper lies in a historical genea-
logical investigation into the use of economic and market principles in contemporary
microbiology. The paper reports on a corpus of published academic sources identified
through the use of keywords, terms, expressions and metaphors linked to market economics.
Search terms included, but were not limited to: ‘trade-off’,‘investment’,‘market/s’,‘com-
petition’,‘cooperation’,‘economy’,‘capital/ism’and ‘socialist/ism’,etc.‘Economies of resis-
tance’complements a second distinct trajectory that can be seen to flow in the opposite
direction from biology to economic politics (the ‘resistance of economies’). Here, economic
imaginaries of microbial life are redeployed in large-scale debates about the nature of eco-
nomic life, about the future of the welfare state, industrial strategy, and about the politics of
migration and race. ‘Economies of resistance’and the ‘resistance of economies’are not
unrelated but, instead, they are mutually constituting dynamics in the co-production of AMR.
In attempting to better understand this co-production, the paper draws upon literatures on
the biopolitics of immunity in political philosophy and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
DOI: 10.1057/s41599-018-0178-5 OPEN
1University of York, York, UK. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to N.B. (email: nik.brown@york.ac.uk)
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Introduction
Over the course of recent decades, the immune system has
become the focus of concerted academic enquiry into the
increasingly entangled relationships between economy
and the biosciences. This is a recognised feature of broader life
science markets and industries, and the translation of the immune
system into new sources of biovalue. For example, the immune
system has become a transformative object of modern economic
activity in regenerative medicine (Waldby and Mitchell, 2006),
allergy testing (Nettleton et al., 2009), the geopolitics of trans-
plantation (Beck, 2011) and global infrastructural investment in
stem cell banking (Brown et al., 2011; Brown and Williams,
2015). The immune system serves as a pervasive way of imagining
and performing the self (Haraway, 1999), as well as markets and
the varied forms taken by capital (Martin, 1994; Brown, 2018).
In this paper, we want to build on this avenue of enquiry to
explore the relevance of an immunitary perspective to scientific
and political debates about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The
context for our discussion is the apparently limitless capacity of
microbial organisms to develop, through mutation and/or
acquisition, resistant forms of immunity to the many che-
motherapeutic compounds designed to keep them at bay. AMR
registers a particular turn taking place in the politics of the
bioeconomies, premised increasingly on biosecurity discourses of
anticipatory pre-emption of a hostile microbial resurgence
(Cooper, 2006). But, what we want to do here is also explore the
way AMR has become the basis for performing certain forms of
‘economic imaginary’(Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop,
2004) by projecting and restructuring economic and political
orders.
We show below how the immunitary performance of economy
in AMR can be seen to follow two key trajectories. The first we
have called ‘economies of resistance’in which principles of
economy are borrowed into biological explanations of AMR. This
is, for example, most clearly expressed in theories of ‘genetic
capitalism’in microbiology where capitalism itself is seen to
provide or furnish microbial life with modes of economic beha-
viour and conduct. ‘Economies of resistance’are evidence, we
suggest, of the naturalisation of socio-economic structures in
expert understandings of AMR. Another trajectory we have
explored elsewhere (Brown and Nettleton, 2017) is concerned
with the way microbial life is re-deployed in the large-scale
reconfiguration of political agendas about the future of national
economies, the public-private interface, and even migration and
race. This can be expressed as the ‘resistance of economies’and is
empirically located in an analysis of high profile political inter-
ventions on AMR in the UK, spanning several decades into the
present. ‘Economies of resistance’and the ‘resistance of econo-
mies’are not, we will suggest, unrelated but mutually co-
constituting dynamics in the co-production of AMR. In other
words, how we come to ‘know and represent’AMR is, at the same
time, a question of both biological and social ways of life and
living (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 2; see also Chandler et al., 2016 and
Landecker, 2016). Before exploring these two trajectories in more
detail, we want to foreground our discussion through scholarship
on immunity as a configuration of economy.
Brown et al. (2011) have written of the ‘immunitary bioec-
onomy’and the ‘capitalisation of immunity’whereby the immune
system, its characteristics and properties, becomes the basis for
new forms of commercialisation and trade. In this case, umbilical
cord blood units, banked throughout the world (Brown and
Williams, 2015) can be seen to extend the properties of what
Roberto Esposito (2008) calls an ‘immunitary paradigm’.
Immunity here constitutes new forms of bioeconomic flow, cir-
culation and exchange. Esposito writes of the immunitary para-
digm as a developing biopolitical and historical juncture in which
biology, politics and economy have become steadily more inter-
twined. Building on this we want to show how both the science
and politics of antimicrobial resistance operates as a vehicle for
particular kinds of economic enterprise.
In a very similar way, Beck (2011) explored how bone marrow
donation and transplantation disrupts nation-state borders, even
those entangled in long-standing military hostility. The context
for his thinking is post-colonial Cyprus, militarily bisected since
the 1970s along Turkish and Greek-Cypriot ethnic lines. Never-
theless, donor registries of potential bone marrow donors cut
across and increasingly disrupt these hostile settlements. Immu-
nophenotyping can be seen to supersede and supplant ethnic
identification, producing new forms of inter-ethnic association
between Turkish and Greek donors and recipients. In this way,
the bioeconomies of transplantation reconfigure economic and
political-administrative entities and social movements, resulting
in a transformative immunitary cosmopolitanism.
As we suggest above, the immune system can also be seen to
become a medium for what Jessop and Oosterlynck (2008) have
called ‘economic imaginaries’. That is, immunity performs modes
of imagining and projecting visions of economy which embody
various moral values, norms and codes of behaviour. Economic
imaginaries become attached to and articulated through cultural
systems of knowledge, like immunology, virology and bacteriol-
ogy, and institutions, like hospitals, financial institutions and
educational establishments. In approaching AMR through the
ideas of an ‘economic imaginary’we acknowledge the semiotic
and material dimensions of the biotic political economy. Eco-
nomic imaginaries are performative, they guide the patterning of
priorities and concerns. They establish ‘… how and why only
some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate
actually come to be selected and institutionalised…’ (ibid., 1155).
In what follows we outline just some of the broader features of
this terrain before focussing more directly on AMR. We also want
to explore AMR as an aspect of biopolitical life in which the
immune system serves as a primary site of economic and cultural
enterprise. Before discussing ‘economies of resistance’in micro-
biology, it is worth briefly revisiting what we have called the
‘resistance of economies’in politics and policy.
We have told some of this story elsewhere (Brown and Net-
tleton, 2017) but it is useful to sketch some elements of it here.
The ‘resistance of economies’counter-balances the crosscurrents
between economy and biology found in the world of micro-
biology documented below. As we move from biology to the
parallel world of politics and policy we have shown how AMR
becomes a vehicle for economic strategies. It was possible to see
this in the way the former British Prime Minister, David
Cameron, in 2014, sketched out the dystopic prospects of a future
‘return to the dark ages of medicine’. One of the reasons we found
this of particular interest is because it echoes a previous inter-
vention by one of Cameron’s predecessors. In the mid-2000s,
Michael Howard, the former leader of the British Conservatives,
in opposition at the time, spoke of hospital infections (MRSA) as
institutionally symptomatic of a nation and not national in
decline under a Labour government.
Howard’s rhetoric settled around the equally alarmist language
of ‘superbugs’, and Britain as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Britain
could only be restored to health once again by a more strident
return to the principles of Thatcherism, of the economic refor-
mist logics of privatisation, the profit motive, internal markets
and competition between public healthcare suppliers. A moral
and biological crisis had broken out in the NHS. MRSA also
melted easily into anxieties over crime and immigration (Wring,
2005). The Conservatives announced manifesto plans to impose
the compulsory screening of migrants prior to departure from
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their countries of origin, a biopolitics that positioned ‘immigrants
as vectors of disease’(Craig, 2007, p. 273).
For Cameron, almost exactly a decade later, the threat of being
‘cast back into the dark ages’quickly gained traction in political
and media commentary. The ‘dark ages’sits in opposition to
other temporal figurations including the ‘golden age of medicine’,
‘modern medicine’and even ‘civilisation’itself. The ‘dark ages’
reference reinvigorated political and policy attention and shifted
AMR’s apocalyptic register (Nerlich and James, 2009; see also
Crawford et al. 2008). The important point about both of these
moments is the way they differently express the ‘resistance of
economies’. Both are underpinned by the underlying logics of a
neoliberal agenda and the promise of the market. Cameron points
to ‘market failure’and weakening profit incentives in the supply
chain of antimicrobials, contentiously appointing the monetary
economist Jim O’Neill to lead the new government review. Many
of the preceding national and international government reports
had attached far greater importance to surveillance, the stew-
ardship of antimicrobials or ‘rational prescribing’(reduction),
together with the control of infections (hygiene) and better
diagnostics (Department of Health, 2000). In both of these poli-
tical moments, the biotic becomes the basis for ‘economic ima-
ginaries’(Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008), for reconfiguring the
role of consumers, advancing the privatisation of healthcare
delivery, and more recently, incentivising pharmaceutical market
motives. In this way, as Emily Martin (1994;1997) has observed,
the immune system becomes a vector for the political and moral
economies of business, security, class and race.
In all of these differing accounts, immunity is always eco-
nomically and politically idiosyncratic. That is, versions of
immunity are specific to their context and times, naturalising
political agendas and underpinned by changing distributions of
agency and sometimes blame, guilt and responsibility. In what
follows we bring these conversations to bear on what we call
‘economies of resistance’, the naturalisation of economic princi-
ples in the development of microbiological resistance. This
complements directly the parallel process, discussed above, in
which microbial behaviour is projected into the restructuring of
political and economic life, a process we call the ‘resistance of
economies’.
In documenting ‘economies of resistance’we have undertaken
a genealogical investigation into the history of economic and
market principles in contemporary microbiology (Foucault,
1991). Our purpose has been to engage in the critical analysis of
expert microbiological discourse, and its ‘regime of practices’
(ibid.) in order to question the seemingly self-evident nature of
ideas that govern life. In this case, we want to locate ‘economies of
resistance’in their political, historical and cultural present. Here
we are interested in the structuring of medico-expert knowledge
through the power nexus of market discourse, and how it is that
this becomes organised and sustained. Methodologically, we have
identified a relevant and highly cited corpus of published aca-
demic sources that elaborate on the parallels and relationships
between market economies and resistant bacterial ecologies. This
has included tracking keywords, terms, expressions, metaphors
and ideographs linked to market economics. Search terms
included, but were not limited to, the following: ‘trade-off’,
‘investment’,‘market/s’,‘competition’,‘cooperation’,‘economy’,
‘capital/ism’and ‘socialism’. We have also focussed our attention
on the migration of a number of economic formulae and financial
explanatory principles into microbiological discourse. This
includes the Matthew effect, Zipf’s law and the Pareto principle
(see below). There are thousands of sources in academic micro-
biology and related fields in which these themes are evident,
either implicitly or more unequivocally. Our approach here has
been to identify a sample of several hundred sources, which are
illustrative rather than representative, of ‘economies of resistance’.
This, we hope, lays the foundation for a potentially wider and
more ambitious future analysis of economic tropes in expert
biological research on AMR.
Economies of resistance
One of the more explicit articulations of market economics in
AMR centres on the discourse and theories of ‘genetic capitalism’
in microbiology. Here, capitalism itself is seen as the prototypical
model par excellence for the behaviour of resistant bacterial
strains selectively evolving to outcompete each other and their
toxic market rivals. Capitalism, in this context, is more than a
passing metaphor but instead becomes an explanatory theory
with its own suite of prognostic propositions and hypotheses.
Baquero et al. (2003) place the concept of ‘genetic capitalism’
squarely in modern evolution theory, but also ranging eclectically
across classical and modern sources including Aristotle, the
philosophy of Solomon ibn-Gabirol, Darwin, Dawkins, Gould
and others. Resistance is seen to accumulate in equal proportion
to uninhibited flow where ‘… the best combinations for local
survival increase in number, facilitating further adaptive possi-
bilities, reflecting a kind of genetic capitalism’(ibid., 547). Genetic
capitalism situates AMR in foundational conceptual interactions
between social and economic notions of agency and structure,
action and form. ‘The source of life flows’they write, ‘… because
of the continuous interplay of matter (individuals) and form
(order)’(ibid.). Not untypically in the context of contemporary
writing in evolutionary biology, what is or is not an ‘individual’is
far from straightforward. The ‘individual’can be anything ‘with
the potential to maintain, replicate, or reconstruct its self-identity’
they write. What defines the individual here shifts from its classic
Darwinian meaning where the ‘… the finger of evolution operates
within the selfish organism’before turning to its later ‘Dawkinian
sense’in the ‘selfish gene’(ibid.). The conception of individuality
then progresses towards an ‘ultra-Darwinism’where evolution
occurs much more systemically at the ‘sub-and supraorganisa-
tional levels’. Notwithstanding market volatility, the purpose or
objective of the ‘individual’is here located in a biological natur-
alisation of the economic tendency towards order and the
avoidance of chaos. ‘Nature’itself is rendered ‘an ordering force’
operating according to self-equilibralising laws of market funda-
mentalism. They write of the inherent tendency for, all things
being (un-)equal, the ‘rich to become richer’.‘Individuals’are
seen to ‘fight’for time (multiplication into the future) but also for
space (colonisation). Modelling AMR through time and space is
articulated as an investigation into the ‘protein universe’of
unending replication and adaptation.
Genetic capitalism also connects with more recent theories of
complexity in both immunological and economic theory. In
AMR, ‘…we can observe a hierarchical gradient from lower to
higher complexity. Indeed, this hierarchical theory links evolu-
tionary research with the science of complexity, reflecting an
almost universal property of complex systems’(ibid.). The
interest here in complexity theory borrows upon significant
intellectual forces, documented by Tauber (1998) and others,
bubbling up in immunology and microbiology. Immune system
theory is seen to move away from its static and binary mid-
twentieth century framework, to one increasingly guided by the
conceptions of ‘fluid’dynamics and ‘emergence’, of the ‘network’
and ‘complexity’. Genetic capitalism illustrates the identification
of, as Tauber put it, ‘…new kinds of models, perhaps most
effectively described by nonlinear logic, complexity theory, and
self-organisational precepts’(ibid., 462).
In a follow-up article (Baquero 2004), genetic capitalism
emphasises the ‘acquisitiveness’of successful and highly dynamic
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microbial strains able to absorb and accommodate advantageous
genetic assets, or rather, ‘pieces’. Acquisition is the basis for new
forms of microbial wealth where, ‘…by analogy with capitalist
societies, those organisms that have become rich by acquiring
pieces have an increased probability of becoming richer and,
therefore, of acquiring further pieces’(ibid., 510). Organisms here
are seen to rival one another within the market space of local
‘trading zones’. These may be clinics, wards or whole hospitals.
Crucially, genetic capitalism reframes biotic spaces through
metaphors of banks, banking, finance and investment. Clinical
space is reconfigured becoming a depository of available bio-
wealth to be borrowed, invested and traded by biotic share-
holders. The hospital is a site in which a ‘bank of adaptive pieces
might be established in the local metagenome’(ibid.). Acquisition
in theories of genetic capitalism borrows upon the market logics
of economic monopolisation and institutionalised modes of asset-
stripping or ‘mergers and acquisitions’. Resistant strains may be
seen to develop from the assimilation or consolidation of the
traits of multiple genetic entities into that of a single organism.
Acquisition, in the microbiological context, as in that of corporate
law and practice, occurs through transfers in the ownership of
‘genetic stock’, assets or equity interests. It is hard not to be
reminded here of Martin’s attention to a flexibly dynamic
immunity when Baquero writes of the way ‘winner configura-
tions’are seen to absorb and ‘attract more adaptive advantages
through genetic capitalism’(ibid.). And further, the way advan-
tages result from fluid exposure within the flux of a ‘broader
range of interactions’(ibid.).
As in good business etiquette, mutations carry ‘visiting cards’
to be liberally distributed amongst microbial contacts and
acquaintances. Business cards are subsequently collected together
within the bacterial chromosome, which in turn ‘facilitates further
exchanges’. Much of the subsequent literature on genetic capit-
alism is littered with market and engineering-based theory where
antibacterial assets are conceptualised as circulating through
‘circuits’within ‘the local evolutionary toolbox…acquiring new
and potentially advantageous pieces’(Baquero, 2004). The
metagenome of capital is a volatile and opportunistic space in
which ‘chance favours the prepared genome’. However, any strain
establishing a successful monopoly position risks temporary
states of ‘bankruptcy’before ‘stabilisation’is re-established and
‘members’re-emerge in ‘a new organisational format’(ibid.).
Recombination and gene transfer in the highly complex interplay
between traders results in, as Leavis later puts it ‘…a genetic
subpopulation that is highly specialised for survival and spread in
hospitals; this process is called ‘genetic capitalism…’ (Leavis et al.,
2006, p. 454; see also Willems et al., 2005). Another paper
emphasises the powerful way in which a theory of genetic
capitalism ‘…predicts [that] the most successful clones are also
more likely to acquire MDR [multi-drug resistant] determinants
and be selected under antibiotic pressure, hence being spread’
(Juan et al., 2010, p. 474). It is also telling that this particular
reference to genetic capitalism, like many others, occurs in the
context of a discussion about the globalised biological flow of, in
this case, ‘…internationally widespread (successful) P. aeruginosa
clones…suggesting that the driver of this incipient MDR P. aer-
uginosa pandemic is a global spread of successful clones com-
bined with the local acquisition of MDR determinants’(ibid.).
In the literature on antimicrobial resistance and in wider
microbiology, genetic capitalism is often used interchangeably
with the concept of the ‘Matthew effect’. Like genetic capitalism,
the use of the Matthew effect interweaves socio-economics and
evolutionary theory into microbiological understanding. Here
however, the concept of the Matthew effect has its origins in the
functionalist sociology of R.K. Merton (1968). Here it is a dis-
tinctively sociological construct that now in the context of AMR
frames the tendency of resistant organisms to benefit from
accumulated market advantage. Merton’s coinage of the term is
taken from the scriptural reference to the parable of the talents
(‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance’), or in economic parlance, ‘the rich get richer’.In
Merton’s sociology of science, the term expresses the way credit
and status amasses around those already prestigiously positioned
to take advantage of reward. In AMR, microbiology can here be
seen to draw on functionalist explanations of social selection to
explain the natural and disproportionate relative advantage of
some microbial strains over that of others.
A more recent editorial in Nature (Römling, 2013), entitled
‘Bacterial communities as capitalist economies’describes the way
the grouping of bacteria on surfaces ‘reveals a ‘rich-get-richer’
mechanism’amplified in a ‘positive feedback loop’(Zhao et al.,
2013). What is important about some of the literature on, in this
case, biofilm formation, is its focus on the ‘individual’bacterial
cell. Whilst much of microbiology is preoccupied with bacterial
colonies and colonisation at the whole population level, other
work centres on the sometimes mutually beneficial behaviour of
single individuals. In documenting the attachment of cells to
surfaces, the individual bacteria is seen ‘exploring the surface and
priming their environment for subsequent biofilm development’
(Römling, 2013, p. 321). Successful colonising agents are seen to
be highly selective and discriminatory. Bacteria purposefully
search for and select such sites in a ‘non-random manner’,
directing their attention to locations most frequently visited by
other actors in the marketplace. Bacteria are understood to be
mutually guided by ‘a synergistic ‘rich get richer’mechanism, in
which cells go where other cells go most often’(ibid.). ‘Elite’
bacteria are those who leave more evidence of themselves at sites
‘extremely rich in communally produced’traces left behind after
being visited. It is this ‘social structure’which is necessary for
‘cooperative invasion’. Another source (Li et al., 2012) had pre-
viously described how microbial resistance comes to depend on
‘just-in-time’bacterial responses to the environment. Here how-
ever, in addition to the Matthew effect, we now have ‘Zipf’s law’,a
mathematical probability distribution used to explain power
differences. The editorial goes onto describe how it is that many
‘self organised systems, including wealth distribution in capitalist
economies, follow Zipf’s law’(Römling, 2013). Without going
into too much detail here, the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, in
the first half of the twentieth century, pointed out how in any
language system, as might be expected, a small number of words
are used with disproportionately increasing frequency. That
‘power frequency’results in languages exhibiting a lengthy ‘tail’of
underused or semi-redundant words, grammatical rules and
expressions. The formula subsequently makes its way into eco-
nomics and other disciplines to explain the apparently inevitable
naturalness of almost any disproportionately unequal distribution
(the possession of wealth in capitalist systems, internet traffic, city
growth, etc). Here in the context of microbiological explanations
for the monopolistic dominance of resistant Pseudomonas aeru-
ginosa, Zipf’s law is being used in its classically economic, or more
accurately its ‘capitalist’, sense.
The original Nature paper (Zhao et al., 2013) presented in the
editorial discussed immediately above does not go into very much
detail on the original power laws upon which it is based. Instead it
briefly mentions Zipf’s law but also that of the Pareto principle:
‘This Pareto-type behaviour indicates that the bacterial commu-
nity self-organises in a manner analogous to a capitalist economic
system’(ibid., 388). The principle, named after the right-wing
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, is a distribution formula in
which roughly eighty per cent of all effects (the possession of
wealth say) are attributable to twenty per cent of the causes
(ownership, entrepreneurship, etc.). In Zhao’s article, both of
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these power frameworks are derived from secondary summaries
published in economics and physics (Gabaix 2009; Newman,
2005) rather than grappling with the cultural and political con-
tingencies and contexts of their original sources.
Much of the above is evidence of the sustained and expanding
influence of economic theory underpinning microbiology with
calls for more explicit comparison between capitalist social sys-
tems and the behaviour of bacteria. Baranyi et al. (2015, p. 162)
lament that ‘microbiology has not yet explored this idea suffi-
ciently’and argue for the compelling similarities of biology,
‘politics and industry’(see also Gloag et al. 2015). Taking a more
cognitivistic position on biotic markets, another contribution to
the debate calls for greater consideration of bacteria as ‘intensely
social organisms’exhibiting ‘… information pooling, control
skew, speed vs. accuracy trade-offs, local feed backs, quorum
thresholds, conflicts of interest…collective decision-making in
microbes shares many features with collective decision-making in
higher taxa…’ (Ross‐Gillespie et al., 2015, p. 2; see also Cordero
et al., 2012). There are frequent references in the scientific lit-
erature to wider commentary in financial services writing and the
popular press. In just this vein Baranyi et al. (2015) support their
argument with Cookson’s2013a article in the Financial Times
(entitled ‘How bacteria invest for success’). With somewhat
startling poignancy in the post-2008 crash world, bacterial ecol-
ogies are understood to constantly vacillate between two coun-
tervailing responses to essentially economic crises: that of
centrally imposed austerity on the one hand, and that of market
driven consumption on the other (ibid.). Bacterial ecologies are
seen to adapt to the anti-biotic environment by making adjust-
ments to their ‘investment portfolio’in resistant traits (Ross‐
Gillespie et al., 2015; see also Hibbing et al., 2010). Familiar
debates in market economics figure prominently here, especially
those pitching the relative merits of either competition and/or
cooperation against one another. According to some the former
are understood to overwhelmingly ‘dominate interactions
between cultural microbial species’(Foster and Bell, 2012; see also
Nadell et al., 2016 and Freilich et al., 2011).
Maharjan et al. (2013), in their attempt to integrate experi-
mental microbiology, synthetic biology and economic-
mathematical modelling, propose a much more explicit com-
parison of bacterial and financial behaviour. They describe an
economics of bacterial speculation (investment decisions) fol-
lowed by ‘boom-bust’cycles in response to certain antibacterial
stressors (variable market conditions). ‘Successful’bacterial
strains are those able to balance the ‘trade-off’between the evo-
lution of stress-resistance (requiring the acquisition of costly
proteins) or increasing consumption to grow. The study draws on
nearly half a century of experimental biology on microbial ‘trade-
offs’but offers, what it describes as the ‘first experimental test of
this theory based on a fully controlled trade-off between multi-
plication…and survival (resistance to external challenges)’(ibid.,
1268). In a media interview, one of the authors went on to argue
that bacterial investment strategies ‘…are constrained by the
subtleties in trade-offs that are usually invisible or ignored in real
markets. The study is a classic demonstration of Darwinian
economies and survival of the fittest’(see the headline ‘Bacteria
give lessons in investment economics’, BBC, 2013). The petri dish
itself is seen to be a ‘living market’in another Financial Times
article entitled ‘Why bacteria are model investors’(Cookson,
2013b). Building on this, a subsequent study distinguishes
between what it calls ‘public’and ‘private’goods referring to the
trade-off between shared or individually fixed assets, respectively
(Bachmann et al., 2016; see also Ross‐Gillespie et al., 2015). And
another describes the ‘evolution of fast and efficient [our
emphasis] anti-biotic bacterial genomes’(Reding-Roman et al.,
2017).
It should by now be clear that our point is to locate the expert
microbiological construction of AMR in its cultural and political
context. The discourses above can be understood as evidence of
the naturalisation of economy rooted in the influence of multiple
socio-economic registers. These include, but are not limited to
sociobiology, classical market economics, functionalist sociology,
cognitive neuroscience and even complexity theory. The refer-
ences to Merton’s Matthew effect, Zipf’s law and the Pareto
principle are only some of the many influences where theories of
the market are interjected into the modelling of microbial
‘behaviour’in AMR.
It is important therefore to think genealogically about the
cross-currents of market imaginaries flowing between the social
and biological sciences. In biology, power distribution formulae
and genetic capitalism are proposed as neutral and objective
descriptions of the selection pressures resulting in AMR. But in
social science, concepts like that of the Matthew effect and even
genetic capitalism are deployed as pejorative tools used to critique
the modelling of the social on the biological. Both expressions
enter discourse in order to challenge, in Merton’s case, the nat-
uralisation of unequal distributions of reward. The term ‘genetic
capitalism’is first deployed in the mid 1970s by the anthro-
pologist Marshall Sahlins in the battle of ideas against an
ascendant sociobiology. For Sahlins (1976), genetic capitalism is
intended to mock the naïve inscription of economic ideology first
into nature, and then back to the social with all the obdurate force
of nature behind it. What emerges is ‘…the entrenched ideology
of Western society…’ (101) expressed succinctly as ‘genetic
capitalism’(72) legitimating the ‘naturalness’and ‘inevitability’of
the ‘exploitation of others’(77).
Genetic capitalism is therefore but another twist in the long-
standing migration of economic theory into biology, and visa
versa, dating to nineteenth century liberal political economy and
beyond. The well trodden expression of this traffic in meaning
goes back to Malthus, Spencer, the ‘survival of the fittest’, the
migration of liberal economy into Darwinism, and its subsequent
return in laissez faire economic market fundamentalism. Sahlins
would possibly not be surprised to find a new variant of this here
in what we call the ‘economisation of resistance’:‘We seem
unable to escape’he writes, ‘…from this perpetual movement,
back and forth between the culturalization of nature and the
naturalisation of culture…It might be said that Darwinism, at
first appropriated to society as ‘Social Darwinism,’has returned to
biology as a genetic capitalism…’ (ibid.).
It is therefore important to think about ‘genetic capitalism’as
an instance of the naturalisation of markets, or the re-
appropriation of market economics into biology. Genetic capit-
alism is situated within a broader toing and froing across the
hybridising boundaries of nature and culture. More recent
articulations of genetic capitalism reflects critically on the mate-
rial positioning of microbial life as agential in the production of
capital, biowealth, and reproductivity of biovalue. This occurs
both within and beyond the confines of antimicrobial resistance.
Bardini (2011) writes of an economic turn towards the ‘invention
of genetic capital’whereby ‘junk’DNA (surplus, excess, mutation,
waste) is converted into ‘living money’(see also Carruth 2011).
Shukin (2009, p. 16) writes too of ‘animal capital’and speculates
on the contradictions of free market economic vulnerabilities to
‘novel diseases erupting out of the closed loop’of a volatile bio-
economic genome. Raley (2004) writes of the way postmodern
theories of capitalism are articulated through the fusion of eco-
nomic and biological conceptions of adaptation and mutation.
For Braidotti (2013), late or advanced capitalism absorbs and is
reproduced in the biological naturalisation of economy such
that…‘contemporary bio-genetic capitalism generates a global
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form of reactive mutual inter-dependence of all living organisms,
including non-humans’(49).
Concluding discussion
In this paper we have sought to outline two unfolding key reg-
isters in the cultural politics of antimicrobial resistance, both of
which can be seen to constitute parallel economic framings of the
problem of AMR. In ‘economies of resistance’in biology, the
operations of the market and principles of capitalist market-based
political economy serve as the foundations for expert under-
standings of antibiotic resistance in experimental and observa-
tional microbiology. This trajectory can be seen to be reversed in
the ‘resistance of economies’outlined in the introduction above,
whereby resistant infections become a vehicle for a somewhat
right-of-centre politics of welfare state reform, privatisation, the
securitisation of national borders and reinvigoration of pharma-
ceutical commercial enterprise. Whist this is a modest step in
better understanding underlying economic and cultural framings,
more critical reflection and empirical enquiry needs to be directed
at the mutual co-production of the science and politics of AMR.
How is it, and through what chains of agency, authorship,
endeavour and translation, that the science and politics of anti-
biosis supply meaning to one another? Such a question goes way
beyond the ambitions of this paper and instead points to a far
wider critical research agenda within the medical humanities and
social sciences.
We would however argue for a sustained focus on the immu-
nitary biopolitics of the anti-biosis, and the way in which the
‘problem’of AMR expresses deeply hybrid entanglements of
economy and biology. We can see this in, for instance, the
twentieth century shift from a static self-versus-non-self para-
digm of immunity, to one focussed on a dynamic trafficof
exchange in immunitary properties. Economies of resistance
centre on the ascendency of globally mobile epidemic strains of
resistant bacterial species, resulting from accelerated processes of
gene swapping, acquisition and random variation. It is in this way
that a rigidly self-other framework subsequently gives way to a
revised model and understanding of the immune system
anchored in the flexibly dynamic and responsive features of post-
fordist and subsequently neoliberal capitalism. Immune system
discourse and knowledge becomes preoccupied with porosity,
flecked with idioms derived from ‘networked’economic enter-
prise, computational neuroscience, and the logics of flexible
accumulation and just-in-time production.
Just as AMR is beginning to take shape as a problem for policy
and politics, roughly from around the 1980s and into the 1990s,
immunity begins to mirror the attributes and features of a
decentralised form of capitalism characterised by geographical
and temporal flexibility responding dynamically to global fluc-
tuations in the costs of labour, exchange rate variations and
market volatility. Immunity, infectivity and defence mimic these
major shifts in the workings of markets, the workplace itself, the
organisation of labour and the underlying market principles of
state institutions. It is this synergy between immunity and the
logics of flexible specialisation that allows advanced capitalism to
become resident in the very corporeal fabric of our co-evolution
with microbial life. It is possibly in these terms, and in a very
different context that Helmreich writes of the way evolutionary
capitalism increasingly ‘structures the actual threats to which
networks are subject, resistance to national and market forces
may indeed begin to speak in the language assigned it by the
dominant discourse’(2000, p. 485).
It is in the work of Emily Martin that this sense of an economic
imaginary has been most explicitly expressed in her claim that
that ‘… the immune system has risen to eminence in Euro-
American culture…’ (1994, p. 32). For Martin, immunity is
inextricably linked to the political and moral economics of
business, security, class, racism and gender. Twentieth century
scientific immunological discourse is littered with language that
codifies working class bodies as immunologically unfit and auto-
destructive. Immune systems are racially configured in fighting
off invading ‘foreign’hoards, and gendered through notions of
passivity and aggression. Immunity has also become a means of
comparative socio-economic striation and segmentation. Martin
documents the changing historical articulations of capital through
both expert-biomedical and popular representations of immunity.
Here immunity operates to mutually define and then redefine the
entanglement of politics, economy and biology. Her account
charts the transition from an early and mid-twentieth century
account of immunity as the basis for the protected prosperity and
the security of the nation state, to that of a globally flexible,
dynamic and transnational capitalist fluid order. For Martin then,
we have two parallel versions of immunity. One is anchored in
the bounded and hermetically sealed notion of the defensive
militaristic nation rooted in the economic competition of cold
war imperial rival powers. The second is modelled on the post-
empire fragmented flexible dynamism of late capitalism. Immu-
nity here expresses multiple contending versions of economic
organisation and their competing claims to ‘naturalness’. Martin’s
take on the immunity-economy nexus, we suggest, is essential to
understanding concepts like that of genetic capitalism and eco-
nomic imaginaries in the biology of AMR.
Forms of economy and the economic imaginary figure too in
the way the immune system underpins technological security and
particularly the vulnerability of computational systems to the
spread of contagious infection. Helmreich (2000) focuses on
computer security rhetoric and the way notions of capital and
capitalism ‘powerfully shape the way computer viruses are con-
strued and combated’(p. 472). Popular understandings of
infectivity and contagion re-encode computational code through
biological notions of immunology. Ultimately, such immunolo-
gical frameworks are underpinned by an evolutionary discourse
that rests on economic conceptions of flexibly adaptive economy,
yet another variation on what Helmreich himself calls ‘evolu-
tionary capitalism’.
Evolutionary capitalism clearly echoes and chimes with bio-
logical research literature in which capitalism is similarly seen to
provide a naturalised template for the biology of antimicrobial
resistance. But in Helmreich’s hands, computational security
depends upon defensive protocols, algorithms that incorporate, in
their design, the ‘virtues’of flexible adaptability, values ‘connected
to market ideals of advanced capitalism production and also to
contemporary descriptions of the immune system’(p. 473). Neo-
evolutionary theory therefore provides a means with which to
conceive of the capacity of computational code to capitalise on
adaptability in order to ‘out-evolve’new viruses, or other bacterial
organisms in the context of AMR. In this way, the simile of
immunity and neo-evolutionism becomes physically embedded in
material processes (code, algorithms, defences) that, in turn,
endorse the economic and evolutionary foundations upon which
they are based. In contexts like this, we suggest, there is a
mutually reinforcing circuitry between immunity, economy and
code. Helmreich writes that the ‘… solution to the problem of
giving immunity [code] to viruses, solved initially in terms of the
biological metaphor, is played out on the field of flexibly specific
capitalist production, from where it can double back to confirm
the validity of the biological metaphor…’ (486). This provides yet
another way for thinking about how microbial threats become
interwoven into the dominant language of capitalistic market
forces such that computer viruses, in this case, are seen to
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appropriate the very evolutionary adaptive virtues that they are
seen also to attack.
It is then of little surprise that much of the language and
conceptual terrain of immunity, predates its coinage in biomedical
discourse, and instead originates in economic and political orga-
nisation. Both Cohen and Esposito have traced the etymological
and genealogical roots of immunity in political and moral eco-
nomic order. For Esposito (2008), immunity is traceable to the
classical Roman principle of the munus, the obligatory bond of
dutiful and sometimes burdensome citizenship. Cohen focuses on
the way immunity underpins an early modern politics of indivi-
dualism, autonomy, exemption and self-possession. He then turns
to the way immunitary individualism becomes encoded in biolo-
gical and scientific understanding. Indeed, such is the profound
success of this process of naturalisation that we no longer
remember or think of immunity as first and foremost biopolitical
or socio-economic. ‘Biomedicine’he argues ‘fuses’and ‘then
transplants this new biopolitical hybrid into the living human
body. We have not been the same since’(Cohen, 2009, p. 3).
Jamieson (2016) has been critical of the uni-direction of travel
evident in Cohen’s work, and possibly that of others, whereby
juridical and constitutional notions of immunity prefigure a bio-
logical meaning that ‘comes after’that of the political. Never-
theless, she recognises how the politics and economy of immunity
articulate the way, as she puts it ‘… situated world views or
dominant cultural values, permeate the world of scientific facts…
facts so often taken as axiomatic are themselves evidence of our
collective investment in certain political and social ideas’(ibid., 3).
Again, in the context of our discussion here, we do not assign any
particular primacy to either economic-political or medico-
scientific registers of resistance to antimicrobials. Rather, we are
interested in the alternating expressions of economic imaginaries
as they move between politics and biology.
There are other cultural agendas to be alert to here as well. It is
probably important to think more critically about subtle shifts in
the political emphasis on AMR. How is it that biological under-
standing, political practice and policy-making serve to reinforce
one another, often unwittingly, in notions of surveillance and
exposure that reinforce naturalised discourses of sovereignty (the
individual, the nation, bacterial investors, etc.). There is more to
be said of course about aspects of monitoring and surveillance
preoccupied with the role of international travel, and the vul-
nerabilities of the traveller, in AMR. Interestingly, this question
was also addressed more recently by one of the microbiology
sources for ‘economies of resistance’discussed above (see Zhou
et al., 2014). There is also more to understand in the way the
politics of AMR, only relatively recently in the post-austerity
period, moved on from a concern with labour relations, priviti-
sation and welfare reform. Instead, in the midst of the Brexit
years, there is much to unravel about an anti-biosis politics
underpinned by questions of surveillance, vigilance, sanitation
and a renewed commitment to the integrity of borders. Our
undertaking here is but a small attempt to understand just some
of the threads proliferating in the cross currents between the
biology and politics of AMR, between ‘economies of resistance’
and the ‘resistance of economies’.
Received: 4 May 2018 Accepted: 28 September 2018
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