WHAT IS MEDICINE?

Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) Seminar

This paper considers the relocation of clinical trials and human subject experimentation to China as a key site for examining the evolving fortunes of Chinese and North-American neo-liberalism. Beginning with the premise that neo-liberalism as a mode of capitalism oscillates between the imperatives of labour fluidity and incarceration, it considers the history of clinical trials, imprisonment and regulation in the US as the necessary context for understanding the recent rush to offshoring. What can we deduce about the trends towards social and economic reform in China, where a strikingly state-planned, indeed eugenic, approach to public health, is coupled with a dramatic restructuring of the health system, every bit as radical as that pursued by Reagan and his successors in the United States? In this paper, I seek to understand drug and body experimentation as practices that characterise both neo-liberal accumulation strategies and an anti-disciplinarian politics of health. In other words, if the will to experiment has become a distinguishing trait of contemporary capitalism, it is also much more than that. Keeping in mind the slogan of AIDS activists in the nineties,who claimed that “clinical trials are health care too”, I will be interested in some of the tensions that are arising in China around the politics of infectious disease, sex and drug use.

Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001. She has published widely in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society, Angelaki, Configurations, Contretemps, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, PostModern Culture and Distinktion: Journal of Scandinavian Social Theory. Her book Surplus Life: Biotechnology in the Neo-Liberal Era is forthcoming from Washington University Press in 2007. She is currently post-doctoral research fellow in the Institute of Health at the University of East Anglia, where she is part of the Global Biopolitics Research Group.

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