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Paper short abstract

In this paper, I reflect on debates about the 'biosocial' from the mid 2000s, in light of the reanimated relationship between fascism and biology that has since emerged.

Paper long abstract

In the mid 2000s, a set of heated debates took place around the role of interdisciplinarity in STS and adjacent fields. In particular, debate centered on how those fields could (or should) learn to cultivate new forms of engagement in, or entanglement with, the biosciences – a set of fields, buoyed by new genomic and neurobiological techniques, making novel claims of their own to speak of, to, with and through ‘the social.’ Some scholars in this period diagnosed a new ‘biosocial landscape,' offering new avenues for interdisciplinary experiment between the biosciences and nearby social science and humanities fields, such as STS or the medical humanities (Rose, 2013; Meloni, 2016; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2016). For others, what was happening was something more like a biological colonization of the social, a troubling development that presaged a new reductionism scientifically, and a new governmentalizing force politically (Choudhury et al., 2015; Young, 2012; Gillies, Edwards and Horsley, 2016). In this contribution, situating myself as someone who participated enthusiastically on one side of them, I want to reflect on these debates from the perspective of a decade or so later. In particular I want to ask whether the broadly anti-biology and anti-interdisciplinary arguments that were then advanced, which were perhaps less potent at the time, or which at least seemed untimely with regard to the demands of the day (indeed, such were claims that I myself made at the time), are not, in fact, worth revisiting in the light of recent political developments.