Kristin Asdal, Christian Borch and Ingunn Moser: Editorial: The Technologies of Politics
Kristin Asdal: On Politics and the Little Tools of Democracy: A Down-to-Earth Approach
The aim of this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities of government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way of a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context of the microphysics of power, as techniques of domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion 'tool of democracy'. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics of emissions down to earth, thus enabling the environmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracy was never like we thought it to be.
Keywords: Actor-network-theory; deliberative democracy; environment; governmentality; history of objects; politics and administration; the public.
Noortje Marres: The Making of Climate Publics: Eco-homes as Material Devices of Publicity
This article seeks to enrich material perspectives on environmental citizenship by considering current deployments of eco-homes as devices for public involvement in climate change. It discusses environmental awareness campaigns that centre on the home in the light of a warning voiced in political theory, that attempts to locate citizenship in 'the world of things' might mean that this category loses its distinctiveness. These campaigns, it proposes, define public involvement with climate change along socio-material lines, as they suggest that people participate in the public by virtue of their domestic habits. For this reason, the domestication of citizenship cannot be equated with its privatization in this case, as that would be to uphold a classic republican understanding of the public, which is precisely rendered problematic in the context of climate change and the making of low-carbon economies. However, the paper also questions materialist understandings of environmental citizenship, by pointing out that the publicity device of the eco-home equally enables the virtualization, that is, the 'de-materialization', of environmental issues. Thus, awareness instruments like carbon calculators format public involvement with climate change as an operation upon domestic energy data. Finally, the paper discusses how eco-homes can also be put to use as devices of 'de-citizenization', absolving domestic subjects from environmental responsibilities. Seeking to come to terms with these various conflicting deployments of eco-homes, the paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of eco-homes as experimental sites of issue articulation.
Keywords: Climate change; environmental citizenship; household appliances; materiality; publicity; sustainable housing.
Peter Sloterdijk: Foam City
Politics and political collectives are not merely symbolic phenomena. They are anchored physically in space and often supported by particular architectural representations. This article analyzes a specific example of this, namely the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, and demonstrates how architectural designs were integral to establishing an assembly for the post-revolutionary collective. The article focuses on the Fête de la Fédération of July 14, 1790, celebrated on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The author argues that the architectural staging of this spectacle served to generate an embodiment of the nation, enhanced by affective and acoustic measures. While the article is mainly concerned with the architectural technologies of politics related to the French Revolution, it also points beyond this specific historical case and briefly indicates how 20th-century fascisms used techniques that were prefigured by 18th-century French inventions.
Keywords: affect; architecture; crowds; foam sociality; French Revolution; noise.
John Law: Culling, Catastrophe and Collectivity
This paper explores the epidemiology of the culling policies used to control the UK 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. It treats these as a set of political technologies for defining and implementing a version of the common good, and for distinguishing between those parts of the animal-related collective that were to be saved from slaughter, and those that were to be culled. Describing the differences in the policies as these evolved during the crisis, it argues that the last of these, derived from a model developed at Imperial College London, was unnecessarily and inappropriately draconian. It considers why this model was preferred, and argues that it and its surrounding practices were technically, politically, socially, and organisationally opaque. It concludes by pressing the case for political technologies that are, by contrast, relatively transparent, and therefore contestable, and also suggests that devolved political technologies (which often develop in practice as they did in 2001) deserve serious attention.
Keywords: Epidemiological modelling; epidemiology; foot and mouth disease; political technologies; policy; politics; STS.
Richie Nimmo: Governing Nonhumans: Knowledge, Sanitation and Discipline in the Late 19th and Early 20th-Century British Milk Trade
This article aims to show how elements from the work of Michel Foucault and actor-network theory can be used as complementary strategies for grasping the constitution of the 'subject' and the 'social' through political technologies. In particular, I try to show that the ontological separation of human from nonhuman and culture from nature is enacted within specific techniques of government, which can therefore be seen as ontological political technologies. This theoretical agenda is worked through empirical case materials in the form of a historical study of the British milk trade, which offers one particular example of how 'the social' has been inscribed within political assemblages. Using documentary analysis I examine the period from around 1890 to 1920 in dairy agriculture, showing how the modern 'social' was enacted within the sanitary drive for clean milk in the towns and cities, and especially within the struggle against zoonotic tuberculosis transmissible through dairy milk. In this sense my analysis is both a contribution to the theorisation of political technologies and an attempt to shift the terms of debate on these technologies substantially towards the ontological politics of knowing, classifying, and policing the human/social vis-à-vis the nonhuman Other.
Keywords: Actor-network theory; governmentality; milk; nonhumans; ontological politics; political technologies; tuberculosis; zoonoses.
Guro Ådnegard Skarstad: Balancing Fish: A Meeting between Food Safety and Nutrition in an Assessment of Benefits and Risks
The problematization of the relations between science and politics in science and technology studies implies that scientific methods generally, and risk assessments specifically, are not neutral tools. Risk assessments have in the last years become a common arrangement for scientifically assessing the possibly adverse health effects of contaminants in food. Inspired by actor-network theory the article will explore the following: What do risk assessments do to food matters? How do risk assessments shape their objects, and what objects and knowledge do they bring into politics? The article follows the work of an interdisciplinary group of scientists in Norway who, in a charged political and cultural context, were given the task of conducting a balanced assessment of the health effects of eating fish, involving a new understanding of fish as potentially both risky and healthy food. The balanced assessment will be interpreted as involving a meeting between the epistemic cultures of toxicology and science of nutrition. It provided a way of studying what happens when a toxicological risk assessment methodology was partly applied to an issue, healthy food, which is not usually viewed in terms of risk. My argument is that the practices of risk assessments contributed to shaping fish as food in a specific way: as an issue of risk or non-risk. But the demand for balance ensured that the positive health effects of eating fish were also considered, and gave rise to a new way of conceptualizing food.
Keywords: Environmental contaminants; epistemic culture; fish; food risks; risk assessments; science of nutrition.
Nigel Thrift: A Perfect Innovation Engine: The Rise of the Talent World
This paper is intended to be a synoptic account of the current trajectory of capitalism. Such an account demands a focus on the cultural technology that has been constructed around the sigil of 'talent'. I argue that this small word hides a multitude of different responses, each of which adds up to the same thing, namely an attempt to produce a new resource based around the capacity for invention. The paper is in two main parts. The first part considers the sphere of production and how talent is being mobilised there. The second part considers the sphere of consumption and the various means of maximising inventive capacity that are able to be found there as well. The conclusion to the paper considers the politics of this situation: an important one given that the goal of talent is ontological.
Keywords: Capitalism; consumption; innovation; politics; production; talent.