The technosciences between markets, social worries and the political: How to imagine a better future?

Abstract

I have a central aim in this paper - to consider the recent and profound restructuring of science and of society which took shape over the last three decades. This epoch-making transformation has to do with the rules of social life, the dominant norms of justice and of good government, but also, and centrally, with the place, function and usages of the sciences and techno-sciences.1 As a way of introduction, I intend to show that the sciences (at least in their 'modern' form, from the 16th Century on) have always been of interest to political and economic powers. As social institutions, they have always been in close relations to various interests and have been produced in a large variety of social spaces - courts, universities, academies, military and engineering institutions, business and popular contexts, etc. In the second section of this article, I intend to turn my attention to what I take as the first decisive aspect of the new regime of science production and regulation that has been established over the last three decades (Pestre 2003). I claim we moved from a system of science in society dominated by an equilibrium between science as public good and science as industrial good to a system in which a financial and market-oriented appropriation of scientific knowledge is now in the ascendant, to science as mainly a financial good. This mode of appropriation is both larger in what it includes and rooted in an aggressive extension of property rights. In fact, radically new definitions of patenting, as well as attitudes aiming at invalidating 'commons', were the main tool of this first transformation. In the third and fourth sections, I turn my attention to two other dimensions of that change. First, to the emergence of new kinds of techno-scientific practices and products, notably in the life sciences and information technologies, but also through techniques of modeling, and of mapping at Earth level. I will here insist, however, on the fact that what is usually called our new 'knowledge-based economy' is driven by a socially-shaped, an economically-embedded arrangement of science and technology - and not by science-and-technology per se. In the following section, I look at the emergence of a new 'civil society' - to employ contemporary parlance - with new relations to industrial techno-science, to moral and social values, and to political regulations. Because the techno-industrial world to which scientific knowledge is now organically linked has the power to dramatically and often irreversibly alter our lives, and because of major transformations in the social body itself, a greater attention and a growing demand for social accountability has surfaced in many segments of the population. In the last two sections, I consider how such an understanding might help us in devising tools for the future. If we agree on the diagnosis I propose, and if we consider that a lively democracy cannot but rely on different 'cités de justice' (a notion borrowed from Boltanski and Thévenot 1991), certain proposals could be made to help us face the situation which emerged in the 1970s and 80s. © Springer Berlin - Heidelberg 2005.