As serpentes e o bastão: tecnociência, neoliberalismo e ... - CTeMe

ABSTRACT
In this work practices and discourse of contemporary technoscience are analyzed.
Technoscience is defined not only as the merging between science and technology, but as an
event, functioning inside a certain economy of power and characterized by the interaction and
reciprocal feedback of capitalism, science and technology. Movements and ruptures in
technoscience are mapped by means of the examination of the sources of funding for research,
the ethos of scientists, the forms of appropriation of knowledge and S&T policies, using
concepts by Michel Foucault, such as governmentality and apparatus (dispositif). The
contemporary technoscientific discourse is analyzed by monitoring official documents and
public declarations by entrepreneurs-scientists, policy-makers, NGOs, etc. By crossing such
elements, it is shown that sciences, techniques and capitalism function today inside an
entanglement. In some cases, they boost each other: every part is supported by the successes,
the authority, the truth effects of the other ones. In other cases, dissonance and friction exist.
The results of this research show that contemporary technoscience is, at the same time,
pyramidal and reticular; it may seem inexorable, but it may also be modulated. Technoscience
depicts itself as grounded on an a-political, neutral, objective, universal knowledge, “falling”
down into society when applied, popularized and transformed in a technical object or a
product. Its progress is told to be semi-automatic, and its regulation should be left with the
experts. On the other side, in neoliberalism, technoscience needs also to receive feedback, to
listen to the demands of the market and to the worries of the citizens. It can be concluded that
contemporary technoscience is a dispositif of variable geometry, modulates by parameters that
cannot be always established by a technocracy. It functions by acting mechanisms of
depolitization and invisibilization of conflict; it constitutes itself as politically implacable by
means of continuous performances of inevitability and mobilization of population. However,
its configuration is an event grounded on shifting epistemic, economic and social lands
Key-words: technoscience, governmentality, dispositif, discourse
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