Life at the Border: Contemporary Biopolitics and the Concept of Lithbea

The biosciences are reshaping the sociotechnical landscapes of the present. In the 2000s, Nikolas Rose identified five key transformations: molecularisation, optimisation, subjectification, somatic expertise, and economies of vitality. In this paper, we extend Rose’s argument by suggesting that these tendencies not only reconfigure the vital capacities of human beings, but also engineer, manage, and control new kinds - or even species - of more-than-human entities. Genetically modified organisms, artificial cells, chimeras, xenobots, organoids, engineered microbiomes, synthetic viruses, and biohybrid robots exemplify the industrial power of science-intensive capitalism. This heterogeneous and uncertain multitude is enabled by the emergence of new disciplines, innovative patents and fabrication techniques, the expansion of international trade in biomaterials, and new funding streams from major public bodies. At the same time, it remains dynamic and opaque, making it difficult to describe and map. One of the most suggestive attempts to do so has been proposed by Jaime Gómez-Márquez, who, in a series of recent articles, has identified ‘life-in-the-border entities’ (lithbes) as a distinct domain of biodiversity called Lithbea. Many lithbes are developed and exist exclusively under laboratory conditions. They live in Petri dishes, depend on tightly regulated temperatures, nutrient media, careful laboratory logistics, the embodied expertise of research teams, and are destroyed when something goes wrong. Their reproduction is fully controlled by scientists, meaning that they participate only marginally - if at all - in natural evolutionary processes. In this sense, lithbes are excluded from the Tree of Life and completely depend on technoscientific infrastructure. In many cases, they are developed in response to biomedical objectives, which makes biomedical companies the primary stakeholders monitoring developments across fields engaged in Lithbea. Possessing weak and highly specialised micro-bodies, many lithbes are subject to near-total biopolitical governance in the service of human health and wellbeing. The paper has four related goals. First, it introduces Lithbea as a classificatory framework and outlines its principal categories, paying particular attention to gaps and possible new taxa. Second, we show how the theoretical exclusion of Lithbea from the evolutionary tree is mirrored in everyday laboratory practices in specific research centres. Third, it demonstrates how the concept of Lithbea enables the tracing of partial and fragile connections between emerging more-than-human entities, while remaining itself provisional and open to further development. Finally, the paper places Lithbea at the intersection of biopolitical theory - from Foucault to Rose and beyond - and posthumanist scholarship, drawing on work by Thomas Lemke, Anna Tsing, Melinda Cooper, and Sonja van Wichelen.