Democratic Experiments Inside Technology Edited by Wiebe E

Democratic Experiments Inside Technology Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book. Democratic Experiments Problematizing Nanotechnology and Democracy in Europe and the United States Brice Laurent The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laurent, Brice, author. Title: Democratic experiments : problematizing nanotechnology and democracy in Europe and the United States / Brice Laurent. Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Series: Inside technology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016028724 | ISBN 9780262035767 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Nanotechnology--Political aspects--European Union countries. | Nanotechnology--Political aspects--United States. | Nanotechnology-- Government policy--European Union countries. | Nanotechnology--Government policy--United States. | Science and state--European Union countries. | Science and state--United States. | Democracy--European Union countries. | Democracy--United States. Classification: LCC T174.7 .L379 2017 | DDC 338.94/06—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028724 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Prologue xi 1 Problematizing Nanotechnology, Problematizing Democracy 1 Representing 33 2 Representing Nanotechnology and Its Publics in the Science Museum 35 3 Replicating and Standardizing Technologies of Democracy 63 Governing 91 4 Making Regulatory Categories 93 5 Making Responsible Futures 121 Engaging 149 6 Mobilizing against, Mobilizing within Nanotechnology 151 7 Democratizing Nanotechnology? 179 Conclusion 205 Notes 211 References 235 Index 257 Acknowledgments This book has been developed over the past few years, while I was a PhD candidate and then a permanent researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) of Mines ParisTech. CSI has been an extremely stimulating and friendly environment, and I thank all of its members for the support they provided. Among them, Michel Callon holds a special place. He was an irreplaceable guide in my first encounters with sociology and, later, in the development of this work. He has been a thoughtful, open- minded, and stimulating mentor, eager to help me develop new trains of thoughts. Sheila Jasanoff welcomed me as a fellow in the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) of the Kennedy School of Government at the early stages of this research and a few years later, as it developed from the PhD thesis it had become. She has been a constant support and a permanent source of inspiration. I am grateful for all I have received from her, including the possibility to participate in the annual discussions of the Sci- ence and Democracy Network. These meetings have been fruitful sites for presenting and discussing many of the themes and arguments that are developed in this book. I developed some of the ideas presented in this book from (or alongside) papers published in academic journals or collective volumes. My initial empirical explorations in Grenoble led to a paper published in Inno- vation (Brice Laurent, “Diverging Convergences: Competing Meanings of Nanotechnology and Converging Technologies in a Local Context,” Inno- vation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 20, no. 4 [2007]: 343– 357), which I used to develop part of chapter 6. I initiated the analysis of the political questions related to the definitions of nanomaterials in a 2013 paper (Brice Laurent, “Les espaces politiques des substances chi- miques: Définir des nanomatériaux internationaux, européens et français,” Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances 7, no. 1 [2013]: 195–221), which viii Acknowledgments provided some of the first elements from which I wrote chapter 4. I presented the analysis of OECD as a site where international expertise and public engagement were problematized (as discussed in chapters 3 and 7) in a chapter written for a collective volume (Brice Laurent, “Boundary- Making in the International Organization: Public Engagement Expertise at the OECD,” in Jan-Peter Voß and Richard Freeman, eds., Knowing Gover- nance: The Epistemic Construction of Political Order [London: Palgrave, 2015], 217–235). I owe a lot to the coauthors of some of the papers from which I developed sections of this book. I started a reflection on the critical engagement of the social scientist in nanotechnology with Michiel van Oudheusden, as we worked on a paper published in 2013 (Michiel van Oudheusden and Brice Laurent, “Shifting and Deepening Engagements: Experimental Normativity in Public Participation in Science and Technology,” Science, Technology & Innovation Studies 9, no. 1 [2013]: 1–21). This was extremely helpful to work on chapter 7 of this book. I discussed the case of the French national debate on nanotechnology in a paper written with Véra Ehren- stein, in which we compared two state experiments with public participation, in France and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Véra Ehrenstein and Brice Laurent, “State Experiments with Public Participation: French Nanotechnology, Congolese Deforestation and the Search for National Public,” in Rethinking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Pub- lics, ed. Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes, 123–143 [London: Routledge, 2015]). Thinking of the French example in those experimental terms helped me develop some of the arguments presented in chapters 3 and 7 of this book. Henri Boullier and I characterized a European mode of public reasoning as a “regulatory precaution” (Henri Boullier and Brice Laurent, “La précaution réglementaire: Un mode de gouvernement européen des objets techniques,” Politique Européenne 3, no. 49 [2015]: 30–53), which helped me analyze some of the European examples discussed in the book (chapters 4 and 7). The reflections I have been conducting with Jim Dratwa were helpful in considering responsibility as an operator that organizes the European political, economic, and moral space (as presented in chapter 5)—a perspective that I developed for this book alongside a chapter written for a collective volume published in 2016 (Brice Laurent, “Perfecting Euro- pean Democracy: Science as a Problem of Technological and Political Pro- gress,” in Perfecting Human Futures: Technology, Secularization and Eschatology, ed. Benjamin Hurlbut and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 217–238 [Dordrecht: Springer, 2016]). I benefited from support from the Transhumanist Imagina- Acknowledgments ix tion project directed by Ben Hurlbut and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson when I worked on this latter chapter, and on the corresponding sections of this book. As I sought to build on Science and Technology Studies to reflect on the politics of governmental action, I benefited from numerous exchanges with a group of scholars interested in technologies of participation, including Jason Chilvers, Ulrike Felt, Jan-Peter Voß, Linda Soneryd, and Sonja van der Arendt. They helped me undertake a more thorough reflection on political experiments, which directly contributed to the study of technologies of democracy presented in this book. The editors of collective volumes who invited me to contribute to their projects have been very helpful as I developed some of the arguments presented in this book. I thank Jason Chilvers, Ben Hurlbut, Matthew Kearnes, Richard Freeman, and Jan-Peter Voß. As friends and demanding researchers, Nicolas Benvegnu, Stève Bernar- din, Benjamin Lemoine, and Liliana Doganova played a central role in my research approach for this book and helped me develop and clarify some of its arguments. Understanding the democratic questions that nanotechnology raises required collaborating with many people directly involved in its problema- tization. I am grateful to the people with whom I discovered this unusual field, and particularly to the members of Vivagora and of the nanotechnology working group at the French standardization organization (AFNOR), and participants in the Working Party on Nanotechnology at the OECD. I thank the researchers of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Ari- zona State University and particularly David Guston, who welcomed me at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) as a visiting scholar, and Erik Fisher, with whom the conversations about his projects and about nanotechnology policy in general have been fruitful. As I extended the study of constitutional ordering to other fieldwork, I refined the questions explored in this book. As such, some of the research projects I have been involved in as the book neared completion have been important to finalize it and to start reflecting on the analytical paths it opens. These projects include the PhD thesis I have been co-supervising with Madeleine Akrich and David Pontille: Julien Merlin’s study of the articulation of sovereignty, political representations and economic valua- tions in mining activities; and Mathieu Baudrin’s ongoing work on the critical historical analysis of regulatory and market spaces related to mass consumption objects. Further informing the

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