Bio-objects and the bio-objectification process

This short text is the second in a series of articles from the recently established “Bio-Objects” research network supported by the European Commission’s Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) program (1). Here we explore in more detail the ways in which we understand the boundaries of bio-objects determined through a “bio-objectification” process wherein life-forms or living entities are first made into objects, become possible, through scientific labor and its associated technologies, and then come to be attributed with specific identities. This move from living entity, through bio-objectification to what we can call “bioidentification” helps us to understand the contested, often controversial process seen in the biological sciences (and not merely in biomedicine, but elsewhere, such as in agriculture and food research) where we see a new mixture of relations to life or to which “life” is attributed, such as animal-human hybrids, chimera, genetically modified organisms, or transgenics. As a consequence of these novel relations, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and nonorganic, living and the suspension of living (and the meaning of death itself ), are often questioned and destabilized, and their identities have to be negotiated and (temporarily) stabilized, and so given an identity. What is common to what we call bio-objects, is that they all in various ways challenge conventional cultural, scientific, and institutional orderings and classifications.