Democratic Experiments: Problematizing Nanotechnology and Democracy in Europe and the United States by Brice Laurent

Author:Brice Laurent [Laurent, Brice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Public Policy, Nanotechnology & MEMS, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Science & Technology Policy
ISBN: 9780262344494
Google: 68MjDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32078442
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Extending the Domain of Public Expertise to Impure Categories

Considering these difficulties, it may be tempting to disregard the mandatory declaration initiative, or to be critical of it. Yet within our exploration of the problematization of nanotechnology as a lens for the analysis of contemporary democracies, one needs to identify what this initiative says about processes of democratic ordering. The challenge is the same as in the case of the national nanotechnology debate. In this latter case, I did not attempt to evaluate whether or not this initiative was “participatory enough,” but I described the problematization of nanotechnology as an issue related to publics, and the associate problematization of the French national public as an additional topic of the centralized public expertise. One can adopt a similar perspective with the substances à l’état nanoparticulaire—a public intervention to which the conclusions of the national debate made explicit reference.

The technical and social difficulties of the French mandatory declaration were not ignored by the civil servants in charge. They knew that the measuring infrastructure was not there, and that they had little power over foreign firms distributing materials on the French territory. Yet they concluded that what was required, in this situation, was a public intervention for the state to know at least in a rough manner what was going on in the nanotechnology domain. When I met the head of the bureau des substances chimiques (“chemicals office”) at the ministry of ecology right after the publication of the decree, he was explicit on these points: “I am perfectly aware that the category is not pure, we don’t have everything we would need. ... But we knew that when we decided to go on with the substances in a nanoparticulate state. We know it’s an impure category, that we will not be able to control everything and everywhere. But it is a way of starting to identify what is going on, it is a necessary means for the public administration to grasp these objects.”42

That the “substances in a nanoparticulate state” was an “impure category” within the French regulation is telling. The expression points to the attempt of the French centralized administration to make uncertain objects governable, indeed to make ontological uncertainty itself governable. In intervening to define new entities with an impure category, the French public administration was also adopting a different approach than the European Parliament. Rather than defining in order to label consumer products for consumers to choose to buy them or not, the substance initiative sought to gather information for the sole sake of the centralized expertise. This is the role of ANSES, the French public health agency, in charge of gathering and analyzing the collected declarations. Ultimately, the mandatory declaration is thought of as an instrument of knowledge for the government to use to identify (if in an incomplete manner) the landscape of nanotechnology industrial activities.

This attempt is tentative, as yet to be stabilized within an agencement that could distribute roles and responsibilities among public and private actors, and define regulatory categories in uncontroversial ways.

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