From Publics to Practitioners: Invention Power and Open Technoscience

Abstract

In technoscientific conditions what counts as knowledge creation is not primarily the individual experimental achievement that gives coherence to scientific practice and separates science from its publics; rather, it is a form of dispersed experimentation in more than human worlds: distributed invention power. Distributed invention power is organised and regulated through the pervasive securitisation of technoscience: surveillance and control of technoscientific fields as well as financialisation of its activities and research outputs. The securitisation of science reorders the traditional split between the public sphere, the private sector and the commons. The folding of each one of these spheres into the other underlies a constant, often antagonistic, oscillation between big science and open science. What is constitutive of the diverse movements that sustain open technoscience is not that they challenge technoscience as such but that they experiment with technoscience to create alternative forms of life.