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Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-Publics and Non-Publics of Technoscience

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Abstract

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ‘political society,’ and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement. This re-categorization is possible when the central role of the state in its citizens’ engagement with technoscience is put upfront and the non-Western empirical contexts are taken seriously by Science, Technology and Policy (STP) studies. The paper argues that in most of the world the state maintains a political contract with technoscience to form a functional coupling as the state-technoscience duo, which shapes public engagement with science through different functional modalities of government. Civil society is the sphere of legitimate engagement and participation in technoscientific issues for the scientific-citizen publics. The quasi-publics choose to be in the shady zone of political society establishing a paralegal relationship with the state-technoscience duo, while the non-publics come into being due to conditions of extra-legality created by the duo. The non-publics are implicated in the political community paradoxically as an excluded category who cannot be included in deliberation because of their status as being expelled from political community in a ‘state of exception.’ The paper proposes that the scientific-citizen publics are mobilized in contrast to the quasi-publics and with reference to the non-publics, helping STP studies to identify the ‘missing masses’ of technoscience.

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Notes

  1. See Wynne (1994, 1996) for detailed discussion of the model.

  2. See Dryzek (2000) for a nuanced exposition of the deliberative turn in democratic theory.

  3. Italics as in the original.

  4. See Collins and Evans (2002), Rip (2003), Jasanoff (2003), Wynne (2003), Durant (2011).

  5. According to Irwin (1995: xi), ‘citizen science’ “implies a form of science developed and enacted by citizens themselves.” See also Irwin (2001), Leach and Scoones (2005).

  6. See Jasanoff (2003) for a detailed substantiation of this position in response to Collins and Evans (2002).

  7. The category draws theoretical insights from the Habermasian idea of public sphere and communicative rationality, but also recently from the politics of difference, a trend in political theory that goes against the grain of the former. See Durant (2011).

  8. Therefore, the term scientific-citizen publics will be used hereafter to denote the civil society publics.

  9. An idiom used by Chatterjee (2004).

  10. In the US, however, the history of this relationship can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

  11. India has been rapidly doing away with its Nehruvian emphasis on self-reliance in science and technology since the neoliberal refashioning of its economy in the 1990s, initiating collaborative research projects where diverse stakeholders are involved and rapid technology transfer from developed countries. This has also ensured direct participation of multinational corporations in high-tech projects in various sectors of the economy.

  12. A detailed analysis of this problem is beyond the scope of the paper.

  13. Mahyco is an Indian subsidiary of Monsanto.

  14. This opposition is in sharp contrast to the acceptance of the environmental release of Bt Cotton by Indian farmers a decade ago. Bt Cotton is now widely cultivated in India.

  15. For details, see Frontline, 27 February–12 March 2010: 4–24.

  16. For a similar case wherein the media played a crucial role, see Varughese (2011).

  17. See Chatterjee (2004: 32).

  18. It is actually the deficit model that successfully identified the existence of quasi-publics, although negatively as unruly publics or passive masses.

  19. Therefore, the three categories of publics—the lay opinion public, counterpublics, and official publics—proposed by David J. Hess are all civil society categories (see Hess 2011).

  20. Emphasis as in the original.

  21. See Foucault (1981) for a detailed discussion on pastoral power.

  22. Police fired at the protest march organized by the local people under the National Fish Workers’ Union in May 1989, killing one person. The Hindu, Sunday, November 13, 2011, p. 6.

  23. In an essay published in a national English daily he strongly supported India’s nuclear energy program by raising the issue of self-reliance, future energy security and the S&T oriented development. See Kalam and Singh (2011).

  24. The Hindu, Sunday, November 13, (2011), p. 6.

  25. They are often represented as victims in STP studies literature, wrongly implying that they are devoid of agency.

  26. Agamben (1998: 159) points out that in the Nazi concentration camp the normal ethical principles and research procedures were suspended and the VPs “were persons sentenced to death or detained in a camp, the entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political community. Precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life.”

  27. See the special issue on Endosulfan, Mathrubhumi Weekly, December 26, 2010.

  28. See the special issue of Mathrubhumi, op cit.

  29. See Foucault (2008) for a detailed exposition.

  30. The mutant bodies of Endosulfan ‘victims’ raised much scientific curiosity. The disfigured bodies were observed by expert teams to gauge the effect of Endosulfan on biological systems and to classify the unknown syndromes. Medical teams also tried to ‘repair’ these bodies through experimental medical operations.

  31. The non-publics may also include altered life forms and future generations who are/will be affected by technoscientific decisions, but cannot be included as legitimate participants in the very process of decision making.

  32. See Remesh and Vinod (2010) for such a nuclear radiation accident in a scrap market in New Delhi, India.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Atul Mishra and Jomy Abraham for detailed discussion on various dimensions of the subject and close reading of multiple drafts of the paper. Dhruv Raina’s comments and disagreements were helpful in realizing the shortcomings of my arguments and the gaps in understanding the Indian context of public engagement with science. Satheese Chandra Bose was a sympathetic but critical listener of my arguments. I am extremely grateful to Arie Rip and Dan Sarewitz for their detailed comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of the paper as referees and guest editors, which shoved me into unknown waters of political philosophy and STP studies. I am thankful to them for the enthusiasm and patience they have shown at each stage of development of the paper and for being available for elaborate discussion on a variety of conceptual issues involved.

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  1. Centre for Studies in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, School of Social Sciences, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar-Sector 30, Gujarat, 382030, India

    Shiju Sam Varughese

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Correspondence to Shiju Sam Varughese.

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The title of the paper draws inspiration from Latour (1992).

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Varughese, S.S. Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-Publics and Non-Publics of Technoscience. Minerva 50, 239–254 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-012-9197-3

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