TECHNOSCIENCE

Technoscience refers to the strong interactions in contemporary scientific research and development (R&D) between that which traditionally was separated into science (theoretical) and technology (practical), especially by philosophers. The emphasis that the term techno(-)science places on technology as well as the intensity of the connection between science and technology varies. Moreover the majority of scientists and philosophers of science continue to externalize technology as applications and consequences of scientific progress. Nevertheless they recognize the success and efficiency of technology as promoting realism, objectivity, and universality of science.

The prehistory of the concept of technoscience goes back at least to the beginning of modern science. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) explicitly associated knowledge and power; science provided knowledge of the effective causes of phenomena and thus the capacity for efficient intervention within them. The concept became clearer during the first half of the twentieth century. Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) in Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934; The new scientific spirit) places the new scientific spirit under the preponderant influence of the mathematical and technical operations, and utilizes the expression science technique to designate contemporary science. However the term techno(-)science itself was not coined until the 1970s.

The History of Techno(-)science

The first important occurrence of the term appears in the title of an article titled "Ethique et techno-science" by Gilbert Hottois, first published in 1978 (included in Hottois 1996). This first usage expresses a critical reaction against the theoretical and discursive conception of contemporary science, and against philosophy blind to the importance of technology. It associates technoscience with the ethical question, What are we to make of human beings? posed from an evolutionist perspective open to technical intervention.

Throughout the 1980s two French philosophers, Jean François Lyotard and Bruno Latour, contributed to the diffusion of the term in France and North America. For Lyotard technoscience realizes the modern project of rendering the human being, as argued from the work of René Descartes (1596–1650), a master and possessor of nature. This project has become technocratic and should be denounced because of its political association with capitalism. As a promoter of the postmodern, Lyotard thus facilitates diffusion of the term within postmodern discussions.

In Science in Action (1987), Latour utilizes the plural technosciences in order to underline his empirical and sociological approach. The technosciences refer to those sciences created by human beings in real-world socioeconomic-political contexts, by conflicts and alliances among humans and also among humans and non-humans (institutions, machines, and animals among others). Latour insists on networks and hybrid mixtures. He denounces the myth of a pure science, distinct from technologies susceptible to good and bad usages. In reality it is less technology that Latour internalizes in the idea of science than society (and therefore politics), of which technologies are part in the same ways as other artifacts. He rejects any philosophical idea, whether ancient or modern, of a science that is supra- or extra-social and apolitical. The worldwide successes of the technosciences are a matter of political organization and will, and do not derive from some universal recognition of a rational and objectively true knowledge that progressively imposes itself. Latour has contributed to the success of the term technoscience in social-constructivist discussion since the 1990s.

The work of Donna Haraway illustrates well the diffusion of technoscience crossed with the postmodern and social-constructivist discussions in North America. Technoscience becomes the word-symbol of the contemporary tangle of processes and interactions. The basic ingredients are the sciences, technologies, and societies. These allow the inclusion of everything: from purely symbolic practices to the physical processes of nature in worldwide networks, productions, and exchanges.

In France, in continental Europe, and in the countries of Latin America, the use of the term technoscience has often remained closer to its original meaning that involves more ontological (as with German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)), epistemological, and ethical questioning than social and political criticism. Indeed in a perspective that complements the one provided here, in La revolución tecnocientífica (2003; The technoscience revolution), Spanish philosopher Javier Echeverría provides an extensive analysis of technoscience as both concept and phenomenon. A political usage is not, however, rare, especially in France where there is a tendency to attribute to technoscience a host of contemporary ills such as technicism and technocracy, multinational capitalism, economic neo-liberalism, pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the climate change, globalization, planetary injustice, the disappearance of human values, and more, all related to U.S. imperialism. The common archetype of technoscience is Big Science, originally exemplified by the Manhattan Project, which closely associated science, technology, and the politics of power. In this interpretation, technoscience is presented from the point of view of domination, mastery, and control, and not from that of exploration, research, and creativity. It is technocratic and totalitarian, not technopoiétique and emancipating.

The Questions of Technoscience

What distinguishes contemporary science as technoscience is that, unlike the philosophical enterprise of science identified as a fundamentally linguistic and theoretical activity, it is physically manipulative, interventionist, and creative. Determining the function of a gene whether in order to create a medicine or to participate in the sequencing of the human genome leads to technoscientific knowledge-power-doing. In a technoscientific civilization, distinctions between theory and practice, fundamental and applied, become blurred. Philosophers are invited to define human death or birth, taking into account the consequences of these definitions in the practical-ethical plans, that is to say, in regard to what will or will not be permitted (for example, the harvesting of organs or embryonic experimentation).

Another example is familiar to bioethicists. Since the 1980s there has existed a line of transgenic mice (Onco mice) used as a model for research on the genesis of certain cancers. Here is an object at once natural and artificial, theoretical and practical, abstract and concrete, living and yet patented like an invention. Their existence and use in research further involves many different cognitive and practical scientific questions and interests: therapeutic, economic, ethical, and juridical. It is even a political issue, because transgenic mice are at the center of a conflict between the European Union and the United States over the patentability of living organisms.

The most radical questions raised by technosciences concern their application to the natural (as a living organisms formed by the evolutionary process) and manipulated (as a contingent creation of human culture). Such questions acquire their greatest importance when one takes into account the past and future (unknowable) immensity of biological, geological, and cosmological temporality, in asking, for example: What will become of the human being in a million years? From this perspective the investigation of human beings appears open not only to symbolic invention (definitions, images, interpretations, values), but also to techno-physical invention (experimentation, mutations, prosthetics, cyborgs). A related examination places the technosciences themselves within the scope of an evolution that is more and more affected by conscious human intervention. Both approaches raise questions and responsibilities that are not foreign to ethics and politics but that invite us at the same time to consider with a critical eye all specific ethics and politics because the issues exceed all conceivable societal projects.

GILBERT HOTTOIS TRANSLATED BY JAMES A. LYNCH

SEE ALSO Critical Social Theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Echeverría, Javier. (2003). La revolución tecnocientífica [The technoscience revolution]. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Espan˜a.

Haraway, Donna. (1997). Modest-Witness@Second-Millenium: Female-Man_Meets OncoMouseä. New York: Routledge.

Hottois, Gilbert. (1996). Entre symboles et technosciences [Between symbols and technosciences]. Seyssel and Paris, France: Champ Vallon and Presses Universitaires de France

Hottois, Gilbert. (2002). Species Technica [Species technica]. Paris: Vrin.

Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François. (1988). Le postmodern expliqué aux enfants [The postmodern explanation of children]. Paris: Galilée.

Séris, Jean-Pierre. (1994). La technique. [The technique] Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.