Autopoiesis | Ethopoiesis: Bioconvergent Media in the Age of Neoliberal Biopolitics

Abstract

This essay serves as an Afterword to the double special issue on Bioconvergence. In addition to summarizing the 11 essays gathered in this collection, the authors argue that bioconvergence serves as a useful critical theoretical frame, a means to describe and to interpret the convergence of media, technologies, and bodies across such representative sites as biomedicine, genomics, contemporary warfare, securitization, economics, informatics, entertainment, law, gender, and race. Specifically, bioconvergence is analyzed (1) as social praxis; (2) as bioethos, or, against ethics; and (3) as a specular ecology that constitutes a convergent episteme. Throughout, neoliberal biopolitics is a key referent for bioconvergence, and helps us to understand how bioconvergence is more than the mere sum of its convergent parts. Raison d’état becomes raison d’être: Bioconvergent networks operate autopoietically, producing entrepreneurial individuals, iterated by and implicated in their own techno-mediatized surveillance, prosumption, risk-management, securitization, and public morality.

Keywords

• convergence
• bioconvergence
• Foucault
• neoliberalism
• ethics
• bioethics
• media
• prosumption
• securitization
• surveillance