Bee vaccine: when biopolitics affects animals

It’s a first: a vaccine for honey bees has been licensed in the United States. The goal: to protect insects from bacteria Paenibacillus larvae which decimates the beehives, and consequently the beekeeping industry. vortex perhaps he would see in it an extension of the field of biopolitics.

Excuse me vaccines for bees on the other side of the Atlantic, “biopolitics”, a concept developed by Michael Foucault, extends not only to humans, but also to animals? To answer the question, we have to go back to the meaning of this notion in a nutshell.

From biological laws to biopolitics

At the beginning of his course at the Collège de France on March 17, 1976, Foucault defines biopolitics as “taking into account the life and biological processes of the human species” for power. More precisely, the philosopher identifies an inflection, around the XVIII^And century, starting from which life was no longer considered only as a given, but as a political issue. To the alternative between “kill and let live”characteristic of the medieval state, it is replaced by another: “live and let die”.

This inflection, Foucault still specifies it in his lecture “The Meshes of Power” (1982) as the transition from a “anatomical-politics” to a biopolitics. Torment, imprisonment… The political anatomy is a “individualizing power technology, a technology that basically targets individuals down to their bodies, their behavior” taken in isolation. With biopolitics the logic changes: “We discover that the power exercised is the population. And population, what does that mean? This does not simply mean a large human group, but living beings crossed, commanded, governed by processes, biological laws. »

With biopolitics comes a new way of managing populations, who is interested not in individual existences but rather in the dynamics, in the flows that circulate between individuals. Who is also interested in the framework, the environment in which these vital processes take place. “It is at this moment that we see problems such as housing, living conditions in the city, public hygiene emerging. »

The vaccination of animals, a consolidated practice

Vaccination (and the policies that accompany it) fit perfectly into this biopolitical universe. Viruses and bacteria represent threats par excellence that circulate between individuals, from one to another, that contaminate and spread within a population, that transform the collective future of this population. From this point of view, bee vaccination appears to be an extension of the field of biopolitics to other living groups than the human species.

These practices are certainly not new. All pet owners are familiar with vaccination records for dogs or cats. Farmers also vaccinate cows and other animals. However, all these animals show a very high degree of domestication: for centuries they have been the object of ever closer integration into the human world, to the point that, irreparably transformed by controlled evolutionary processes, many of them would henceforth be unable to survive without rely on human societies. In a sense, the degree of connectedness is almost as intimate as the vital bond that binds man to his community. Enclosed in the human world, isolated from the wild world, domestic animals constitute the first extra-human sphere of extension of biopolitics. Perhaps we should also consider that, to some extent, human biopolitics has fed on these pre-existing forms of population control?

The bee, an atypical case

Anyway, the extension of these logics to the bee is amazing. Called “domestic”, Apis mellifera [l’espèce principale élevée pour la production de miel] it is actually much less tame than the cow. There are numerous cases of “wild” hives, that is, returned to the wild state. Indeed, honey bees also spend their time exploring their surroundings, soaring outside the human world into contact with other species and life forms. Their vaccination thus marks a clear expansion of the sphere of biopolitics.

Michel Foucault probably would not have thought of this extension. But the very idea of ​​biopolitics, which supports anonymous vital processes, invites him. The vital currents – human, animal, vegetable, bacterial – in fact intertwine in a mesh that is becoming increasingly inseparable. This is what zoonoses show, the passage of a virus from animals to humans, which has been talked about a lot with Covid-19. Seen from this angle, biopolitics necessarily opens up to a more than human horizon: it pushes, as if by itself, the same strategies, the same procedures to other peoples.

Genetic manipulation and reproduction control

We are witnessing this ever more intimate penetration into the plant kingdom, with the development of logics of genetic manipulation. Practiced for decades for plants (with for example GMO corn), genetic manipulation now also affects animals. A few months ago, millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes were released in Florida and California. The objective of the operation implemented by the British company Oxitec: significantly reduce the population ofAedes aegypti, local mosquitoes carrying many diseases such as chikungunya, dengue fever, Zika virus or yellow fever. The “GMO” mosquitoes introduced into the environment (all male, which therefore do not bite humans) had been altered in the laboratory so that their larvae could not develop.

This strategy appears as the extension of the so-called “necropolitical” side, according to Foucault’s term, proper to every biopolitics. It is the “making die” that inevitably responds to “making alive”. Unlike the strategies of anatomo-political elimination, it is no longer a question of directly putting to death a certain number of individuals taken in isolation. It is a question of controlling a population rather than aiming at the extermination of every single individual – eradication, however, almost impossible, since a few pairs of individuals are enough for the entire population to be reborn.

Biopolitics shifts the focus. Shift the approach: the logic that comes into play is the direct intervention, through genetic manipulation, in the vital processes of reproduction through which the species perpetuates itself. The interference in sexuality, human or animal, is a decisive step in the advent of biopolitics. Controlling sexuality means controlling the future of the species. Such is also the logic of certain invasive species control strategies, which attempt to develop methods of contraception and sterilization rather than elimination – generation restriction strategies. Those the tactics aim, in one way or another, to take possession of the interior of the vital drive, in order to eventually turn it against itself. It is in fact the genetically modified mosquito which, carried by the reproductive movements, from a retching, with an insistence in its being, participates in the control of its own kind. Do not kill, but let die, therefore.

Ethics of biopolitics

We can rightly expect the generalization of these practices. One can even question their acceptability. By what right do we intervene, in one form or another, in the existence of creatures who evidently have not consented to this intervention, whether it is a question of favoring or slowing down the movements of life that run through them?

Philosophers sue Donaldson and Will Kymlickaauthors of Zoopolis (Alma Éditeur, 2016 for the French translation), see it as a last resort to avoid the excessive killing of animals: ” May […] that we are forced to kill animals. They sometimes attack humans or pose a deadly threat to humans in the spaces they share with them. […] An animal species that did not present any risk can suddenly develop a deadly virus for humans, forcing us to take protective measures […] On the contrary, by developing certain technologies (such as vaccines) that allow very old risks to be controlled, it is no longer necessary to adopt protective measures harmful to animals. » For the same reason, they consider it legitimate to encourage forms of contraception in case animals are not “not able to self-regulate”to avoid a population explosion that makes coexistence with humans impossible, which would lead to the need for slaughter.

These logics must first apply, according to Donaldson and Kymlicka, to creatures most closely related to human life: “There are various relatively benign methods of controlling domestic animal reproduction rates: contraceptive vaccines, temporary physical separation, non-fertilization of chicken eggs, etc. » But they still apply to animals “liminaries”between two worlds, which roam in human space without really belonging to it, like foxes, pigeons – or so-called honey bees. “For coexistence to be possible, it may be necessary to limit the total number of liminal animals (using contraceptive vaccines, protecting habitats suitable for population dispersal, and promoting the resurgence of predators and competitors.”

The two authors also hint at the possibility extend some of these practices to wildlife, but with a different perspective: starting not from human interests, but from those of the animals themselves. “Humans might actually be trying to help wild animals, on an individual level […] for example on a collective level (e.g. by vaccinating a wild population against a disease). » If it makes possible new forms of control, and carries with it an inherent danger, biopolitics could at the same time be the key to a more peaceful coexistence with the creatures that surround us.

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