GOVERNING LIFE AT THE MOLECULAR LEVEL: BIOCAPITAL AND THE POLITICS OF AGENCY IN ANNALEE NEWITZ’S AUTONOMOUS
GOVERNING LIFE AT THE MOLECULAR LEVEL: BIOCAPITAL AND THE POLITICS OF AGENCY IN ANNALEE NEWITZ’S AUTONOMOUS

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) through Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecular biopolitics, focusing on the novel’s contribution to debates on biocapital and subjectivity within a biotechnological regime. Set in the near future, the narrative is structured around the patenting of life saving drugs at high cost and the dominance of pharmaceutical corporations over the global economy. It follows Jack, a scientist who disrupts this system by recirculating modified drugs, and Paladin, a military robot whose emerging self-awareness prompts questions of freedom, ownership, and autonomy. The study employs Rose’s key concepts of molecularization, optimization, subjectification, expertise, and bioeconomy to frame a mode of governance in which life is regulated at the molecular level. The novel articulates this structure through patented pharmaceuticals, engineered affect, and artificial beings, exposing how life is reduced to economic value and how subjectivity is organized within biocapitalist systems. Jack’s intervention in the productivity drug Zacuity and Paladin’s search for selfhood demonstrate that subjectivity is neither autonomous nor inherent, but produced and constrained within these systems. In this context, the article reconsiders subjectivity through the relations between human, technological, and biological processes and proposes the concept of synthetic molecular subjectivity to account for its reconfiguration. Autonomous thus presents molecular biopolitics as a system that regulates life, labour, and subjectivity, while still containing limited possibilities for resistance.

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