As serpentes e o bastão : tecnociencia, neoliberalismo e inexorabilidade / The serpents and the wand : technoscience, neoliberalism and inexorability

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

ln 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 govemmentality 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. ln 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 dispositlf 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

ASSUNTO(S)

science and technology capitalism capitalismo ciencia - aspectos sociais science ciencia - aspectos politicos analise do discurso sociologia ciencia e tecnologia sociology discourse analysis science

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