Capital ventures into biology: biosocial dynamics in the industry and science of gambling

Abstract

This paper draws upon and develops Paul Rabinow's concept of biosociality to analyse how the field of gambling research, the facts about gambling addiction and the politics of gambling regulation are in the process of transforming one another as the US gambling industry has begun to provide large amounts of funding for scientists and clinicians working on gambling problems. In particular, the paper focuses on the political economy of research that suggests that the negative consequences associated with gambling are not just social problems, but neurobiological ones. The paper introduces the notion of ‘biopolitical capital’ in order to describe how the gambling industry invests in particular kinds of research which are more likely to yield results that can be mobilized to support particular kinds of approaches to dealing with the social and personal problems associated with gambling.

Keywords:

• neuroscience
• biosociality
• gambling
• research funding
• social problems
• biopolitics

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from the generous insights and feedback offered by Nikolas Rose, Linsey McGoey and Ayo Wahlberg. Participants in a seminar at the University of Nottingham's Institute for Science and Society, to which I presented a version of this paper, also offered helpful comments. Special thanks is due to Tom Kemple for detailed discussions and numerous helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. Of course, the vast range of social influences and processes that provide a context for changing biologies has been documented extensively by social scientists studying the molecularized human sciences and the emergence of new forms of human life. However, such changing biologies are rarely examined within the framework of biosociality, except when patients groups are involved. Rabinow's work might provide a prophylactic against analyses which focus more or less exclusively on the social shaping of bioscience.

2. The notion of socio-biological looping places the emphasis on processes of continuity and gradual change, rather than sharp breaks or paradigm shifts in either social or scientific thought. As will be discussed towards the end of this paper, Rabinow does at times seem to suggest that the molecular revolution in the life sciences may be intensifying the interactions between the social and the biological to such an extent that those two categories, which are usually taken to be distinctive totalities (biology as the opposite of society, and vice versa), dissolve into one another – with epochal consequences for society as we know it. For the moment, however, I make the assumption that biology and society are not yet the same thing, and that a key question for social scientists thus remains of how to theorize and analyse the relations between the two (Escobar, 1999; Franklin, 2003).

3. This is not, however, to suggest a one-to-one relationship, in which either the social or the biological strictly determine the ultimate form of the other. Biological reality, known and acted upon in a certain way, provides a range of possibilities for social organization, but this range is limited by more than just scientific conceptions of biology; other social, political and economic factors are, of course, also influential. Similarly, to the extent that new social forms provide a context for intervening into biological processes, these processes may become newly intelligible, newly malleable, and may provide new – but not unlimited – possibilities for social organization.

4. This is the maxim that, in the late 1990s, was featured prominently on the front page of the weekly research bulletin published by Harvard Medical School's Division on Addiction.

5. A ‘syndrome’ refers to an assortment of symptoms and signs that relate to an underlying condition, only some of which are present in any particular case.