ABSTRACT
Science and technology are commonly taken as drivers of social change. Less visibly but quite centrally, as this book argues, they are also crucially important objects and instruments of politics.1 What happens in the course of knowledge production, and still more plainly in the translation of knowledge into technologies, affects the kinds of lives we lead, the relationships we form, and, increasingly, how we perceive ourselves and what entitlements we therefore claim. All of the traditional categories of social organization – race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, economic and professional status, occupation and family – have been profoundly reshaped in modernity’s long march through the scientific, industrial and high-tech revolutions. Whether we see ourselves as enlightened, globalized, networked or knowledge societies, those era-defining terms themselves reflect epistemic and social configurations that would not have been possible without fundamental changes in science and technology. Hence, science and technology are fitting though strangely neglected subjects for political analysis. The project of politicizing our understandings of science and technology holds formidable difficulties. One measure of science’s extraordinary institutional successes over the past four centuries is that intellectuals have by and large fallen out of the habit of thinking that there is anything political about science, either as a domain where politics happens or as a subject matter that is influenced – except in the most mundane and corrupting sense – by politics. Almost by definition, science is the sphere of incontestable knowledge, a space that both is and should be immune to politics because it is simply about being truthful to nature. We get to science, conventional wisdom holds, precisely when we have shorn away values, conflicts, passions, desire, emotions, interests; in short, all those things that make up the stuff of politics. It follows that to politicize science seems in principle a forbidden act; it sounds suspiciously like settling the truth by popular vote, by economic power or by diktat. It is how to keep politics out of science, often described as preserving scientific integrity, that has preoccupied the politics of knowledge making for many decades.
