The affect of Raman and Tutton's critique of Rose and Rabinow's was to reamalgamate the framework of biopolitics towards a sensibility of it's contingency on both the molecular and collective. Rose and Rabinow's critique had been excessive in it's reevaluation of Foucault's framework in light of neoliberalism's political and economic dominance. Their differentiation of the term biopower in strictly molecular forms isn't provident to the multiple politics instantiated at different levels. If multiple agents act unilaterally on a issue it is often the case that at some point communitarianism will come into play. There is a matter of scale that needs to be accounted for when considering the operation of biopower in social space, molecularization can be an attributed to agents of varying levels of complexity. In Individual Good and the Common Good, Callahan establishes that when individualism is brought into tension with communitarianism a modality is established based on the contingency of each. Callahan's critique is less focused on the general notion of biopower but bioethics stemming from it's operation, his predilection is towards communitarianism in regarding its' biopolitics. Raman and Tutton do not commit themselves to any particular predilection- in fact the whole effect of the critique is to dispose of any such assumptive ideality. What is the practicality afforded by such differentiation one might ask? As we have seen from these three frameworks, whatever practicality such differentiation enables, there is a loss to the same degree of it's modality. The compound effect this type of differentiation has in the social sciences is to translate old social theory into new perspectival understanding of ourselves.
At long last, I am back to comment. When reading this a couple of weeks ago I recall thinking that the question of scale is something we have skirted, largely letting our recognition of "complexity"/"entanglement" stand in for a close examination of scale—and especially of "scaling"...moving from small to big actors, from small spaces (particular patients or clinics or laboratories) to the "space" of research networks, health insurance consortia, or national economies. While Raman and Tutton do not speak the same language as Callahan, do you think it likely that they are otherwise communitarian?
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