Javier Lezaun

The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?

There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. Until recently, the term ‘ontology’ had been sparingly used in the field. Now it appears to have acquired a new theoretical significance and lies at the centre of many programmes of empirical investigation. The special issue to which this essay is a contribution gathers a series of enquiries into the ontological and reflects, collectively, on the value of the analytical and methodological sensibilities that underpin this new approach to the make-up of the world. To what extent and in what sense can we speak of a ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies? What should we make of, and with, this renewed interest in matters of ontology? This essay offers some preliminary responses to these questions. First, we examine claims of a shift from epistemology to ontology and explore in particular the implications of the notion of ‘enactment’. This leads to a consideration of the normative implications of approaches that bring ‘ontological politics’ to centre stage. We then illustrate and pursue these questions by using an example – the case of the ‘wrong bin bag’. We conclude with a tentative assessment of the prospects for ontologically sensitive science and technology studies.

Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

Abstract This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

Creating a new object of government : Making genetically modified organisms traceable

Since the late 1990s, the European Union (EU) has embarked on an effort to make fully traceable and identifiable every genetically modified organism (GMO) that travels through its territory. New regulations force market operators to record the presence of genetically modified material in foods and feed, and to pass this information along in every transaction, thus creating a continuous paper trail for every bioengineered organism as it moves through the EU market. This new regulatory regime represents a momentous change in the nature of biotechnology governance in Europe, for it enunciates as its fundamental unit a novel bio-legal entity - the ‘transformation event’ meant to identify the particular instance of genetic modification from which each GMO has been developed. This paper describes the processes through which this new regulatory entity acquires a concrete and material meaning and thereby becomes a viable object of governance. Two parallel developments are described in detail: the creation of international rules for attributing to ‘transformation events’ unambiguous names - an instance of ‘bureaucratic nominalism’ - and the creation of detection methods and biometrological chains of custody capable of identifying the fragments of DNA that mark the specificity of each ‘event’. These two interventions involve the creation of infrastructures of referentiality capable of giving the ‘event’ a singular and unambiguous referent. By analysing how a new regulatory category like the ‘transformation event’ becomes an identifiable bio-legal object, I suggest that the governance of biotechnology should be understood as a series of acts of ‘demarcation’, through which the categories and entities enunciated in regulatory texts acquire a material foundation in bureaucratic practices and in the organisms these bureaucracies are expected to oversee.

Responsible innovation across borders: tensions, paradoxes and possibilities

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from Sao Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the workshop.

Regulatory experiments: genetically modified crops and financial derivatives on trial

Experiments play a crucial role in contemporary policy-making, yet their political and epistemological dimensions have been neglected in studies of regulatory practice. This article offers an initial examination of the uses of experiments in regulation. It analyses two examples: the partial release of genetically modified organisms in the UK Farm-Scale Evaluations, and the unleashing of option contracts in the Chicago Board of Options Exchange. We analyze both cases in terms of the dialectic they institute between the ‘experimental gap’ created to observe these regulatory objects under controlled conditions, and the need to ‘project’ the experimental evidence onto the world at large. In our two examples, experiments fail to produce a final consensus or definitive certainty, but serve to translate conflicts into amenable forms of uncertainty. Regulatory experiments should thus be seen as tests on the governability of new objects, and should be open to further scrutiny by interested parties. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Crafting a public for geoengineering

In a short period of time, climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific issues subject to deliberative public engagement. Here, we analyse this rapid trajectory of publicization and explore the particular manner in which the possibility of intentionally altering the Earth’s climate system to curb global warming has been incorporated into the field of ‘public engagement with science’. We describe the initial framing of geoengineering as a singular object of debate and subsequent attempts to ‘unframe’ the issue by placing it within broader discursive fields. The tension implicit in these processes of structured debate – how to turn geoengineering into a workable object of deliberation without implying a commitment to its reality as a policy option – raises significant questions about the role of ‘public engagement with science’ scholars and methods in facilitating public debate on speculative technological futures.

Bees, Beekeepers, and Bureaucrats: Parasitism and the Politics of Transgenic Life

Over the last decade the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees have become a matter of public policy in the European Union. Determined to establish a system where transgenic crops can ‘coexist’ with conventional and organic farming, the EU has begun to erect a system of demarcations and separations designed to minimize the extent of ‘gene flow’ from genetically modified plants. As the European landscape is regimented through the introduction of isolation distances and buffer zones, bees and other pollinating insects have become vectors of ‘genetic pollution’, disrupting the project of cohabitation and purification devised by European authorities. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres on parasitism, this paper traces the emergence of bees as an object of regulatory scrutiny and as an interruptor of the ‘coexistence’ project. Along with bees, however, another uninvited guest arrived unexpectedly on the scene: The beekeeper, who came to see his traditional relationship to bees, crops, and consumers at risk. The figure of the parasite connects the two essential dynamics described in this paper: an escalation of research and the intensification of political attributes.

Food Control Emergencies and the Territorialization of the European Union

Abstract This article addresses the response of European institutions to a series of food control emergencies: the BSE crisis of 1996, the dioxin scandal of 1999, and the introduction of an illegal genetically modified organism in 2005. The protection of European consumers from threats arising in the food chain has become a core value of the European polity and a basic function of its institutional apparatus. It is argued that in order to fulfil this function the European Union has become an increasingly territorial actor — one progressively more capable of applying control measures uniformly across its territory and of projecting its regulatory force upon an increasingly homogeneous geographical space.

Missing the (question) mark? What is a turn to ontology?

Our introductory essay in this journal’s 2013 Special Issue on the ‘turn to ontology’ examined the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies and explored the implications of the notion of enactment. Three responses to that Special Issue argue that (1) there is no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and social constructivism, (2) we need to be wary of overly generic use of the term ‘ontology’ and (3) the language of ‘turns’ imposes constraints on the richness and diversity of science and technology studies. In this brief reply, we show how each of those critiques varies in its commitment to circumspection about making objective determinations of reality and to resisting reification. We illustrate our point by considering overlapping discussions in anthropology. This brings out the crucial difference between the science and technology studies slogan ‘it could be otherwise’ and the multinaturalist motto ‘it actually is otherwise’.

The Pharmaceutical Commons: Sharing and Exclusion in Global Health Drug Development

In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived “market failure,” the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. This article explores the paradoxical role of private property in this new configuration of global health research and development. Rather than a tool to block potential competitors, proprietary assets function as a lever to attract others into risky collaborative ventures; instead of demarcating public and private domains, the sharing of property rights is used to increase the porosity of that boundary. This reimagination of the value of property is connected to the peculiar timescape of global health drug development, a promissory orientation to the future that takes its clearest form in the centrality of “virtual” business models and the proliferation of strategies of deferral. Drawing on the anthropological literature on inalienable possessions, we reconsider property’s traditional exclusionary role and discuss the possibility that the new pharmaceutical “commons” proclaimed by contemporary global health partnerships might be the precursor of future enclosures.