Finally, it seems apt, given the remit of this volume, that chemistry has proven interesting for such scholars as Barry, Bensaude-Vincent, and Stengers in part for methodological reasons. Barry (drawing on A.N. Whitehead before him) finds chemistry good to think with in large part because its mode of research is not guided primarily by theory or general principles. Rather, it is ‘attentive to the singularity of the case’ (Barry, 2005: 52). As Barry argues, ‘chemistry is not so much a positivist science, but a discipline which points to a new form of empiricism’ (ibid.: 53). Chemistry’s empiricism – a way of making (not ‘discovering’) entities, substances, and the relations between them – may also help us think population’s possibilities anew. I argued above that SimiPolitics draws our attention to the many ways in which pharmaceuticals participate in the making of collectives, or multiplicities. It has not been my intention to argue that SimiPolitics ‘starts’ in pharmaceutical chemistry and emanates out into wider social, political, or economic spheres. Nor is thinking chemically a matter of looking for metaphors of the chemical in the social/political, or vice versa, any more than Foucault’s biological operates as a metaphor for the social. Rather, SimiPolitics offers an empirical challenge to which chemistry seems to bind well – both in form, and in content. Science studies scholars have indeed been wrestling with precisely this question, in other ways. For 180 Cori Hayden
Isabelle Stengers, chemistry (eighteenth-century chemistry, to be specific) suggests a mode of doing politics that is more auspicious than the idioms provided by either physics or biology. It is one that allows her to think about efficacy, propensity, manipulation, and the ways in which entities act on and influence each other. These relations of efficacy are central to her ‘cosmopolitical’ project and its delicate matter of theorizing and organizing activist collectives (Stengers, 2005: 1000). With an eye on SimiPolitics, I think there is another case to be made for how chemical relations can configure the collective or the political. Thus when Dr. Simi deftly calls into service resonant idioms of popular politics organized around the copy, he also brings the pharmaceutical into view as an object that can make a series of material demands – irreducible as they are – on our analytic vocabularies. Chemistry’s formula – its way of making and thinking substances that are the same as but different from each other, and the way in which these relations of sameness and difference can cross scales, can take form in different environments – offers resources for asking empirically grounded questions about the particularities of form, of syntax, of claims and substance that are configuring politics in relation to and beyond pharmaceuticals. Enacting ‘in politics’ the operations we might (also) locate in the material production and commercial proliferation of copied drugs, Dr. Simi has made clear the need for an analytic idiom or a methodological device that can account for the relationship between chemical and political modalities. Population, strangely enough, might just do the trick.
Notes
1 The anthropology of pharmaceuticals, one field in which I work, has inarguably delivered a great deal in this idiom, showing how pharmaceuticals reanimate and redefine the boundaries of population by producing new experimental aggregates, eliciting new subjectivities, and stretching population logics themselves beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (Biehl, 2004; Petryna, 2005; Petryna et al., 2006; Sunder Rajan, 2006; Dumit, forthcoming).
2 Insofar as chemistry is a discipline driven by the singularity of the case rather than by general theories (Barry, 2005: 53), this experiment already bears a chemical imprint.
3 Though González Torres has added the prefix ‘Simi’ to many things, including products such as condoms (the SimiCondón), his ‘spokesmodels’ (SimiChicas) and his health insurance plan (the SimiSeguro), at this point, I think I have to take the blame for SimiPolitics.
4 In the years following the 1994 peso devaluation, the country’s integration into the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the reinstatement of pharma- ceutical patents (which had been briefly abolished in a moment of pharmaceutical nationalism in the mid-1970s), medication prices and access had become a significant problem for many people, and hence for the state (see Hayden, 2007). 5 The argument that generic drugs cannot really be ‘the same’ is an argument that routinely surfaces in efforts to challenge the quality of the generic. As Jeremy Greene’s work shows, since the early 1970s, especially in the US, the sites for contesting or asserting sameness have continued to shift, including but not limited to pill size and shape, chemical compound, measures of bioavailability, packaging, etc. (Greene, 2011). In the US, as in Mexico, India, Argentina and elsewhere, the
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regulation of standards of equivalence has, not surprisingly, been an intense site of political maneuvering, as leading industries have long exerted pressure to keep the quality of generics under permanent suspicion (ibid.).
6 Among the operative distinctions here is that between chemical equivalence (20 mg of naproxen = 20 mg of naproxen), and bioequivalence, a threshold of sameness established in the US in the 1970s which requires that generic drugs also demonstrated an equivalent (within limits) rate of absorption into the bloodstream. In Mexico, ‘interchangeable generics’ meet this higher, bioequivalence threshold – they are thus more equivalent than their merely chemical equivalent, ‘generic’ counterparts.
7 I explore these dimensions of the argument in a separate essay, ‘New same things’. 8 As we might expect, Dr. Simi (the mascot) does indeed appear in the SimiMural,
dispensing pharmaceuticals.
9 Among the prolific commentary on the rise of interest in Tarde, see Latour (2002) and Toews (2003).
10 Laclau insists on assimilating Tarde’s argument into his own ‘logics of equivalence’, wherein different and competing claims are made equivalent through common appeals to ‘the people’. But I would suggest that this reading arguably flattens out and misreads some of the most generative aspects of Tarde’s idiom (see, in contrast, Deleuze, 1994: 313, n. 3).
11 Thus, for Laclau, populism works through the creation of a relation of equivalence and exchangeability between different and competing claims (so that, for example, in Argentina, both the right and the left can be Peronists, a move that works insofar as both invoke ‘the people’ as their reference point). In this way, Laclau takes Tarde’s idiom of imitation conflates it with the making of equivalences.
12 ‘The round or series of interchangeable beings’. The phrase belongs to Mexican essayist Carlos Monsivais, discussing how, and to whom, early twentieth-century Mexican novels were addressed (Monsivais, 2000: 21)
13 The production and consumption of an authentic national culture (consider the famously ‘folkloric’ Mexico) accompanies the consumption of domestically manufactured goods as key mechanisms for incorporation. The fate of the national- popular in the context of the opening of markets and the ‘globalization’ of popular culture is the subject of much debate among Latin American and Latin Americanist cultural critics and political essayists (García Canclini, 1995; Lomnitz, 2001; Yúdice, 2001).
14 See Daniel Cosío Villegas’ critique of his own ‘Revolutionary’ party, the PRI, which he accused of the sin of reproducing itself fissiparously, ‘in the manner of inferior biological organisms’ (Cosio Villegas, 1947, quoted in Joseph and Henderson, 2005: 473).
15 Thus Foucault argues, ‘Because it . . . has procreative effects, sexuality is also inscribed, takes effect, in broad biological processes that concern not the bodies of individuals but the element, the multiple unity of the population. Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet’ (Foucault, 2003: 251–2).
16 See, for example, the entry for copier in the Dictionnaire de poche de la langue
Français, Larousse étymologique, Librairie Larousse (1971). Many thanks to
Hélène Mialet for pointing out this connection. 17 See http://redtechnopolitics.wordpress.com/.
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