Technoscience, environment, and the technoscientific subject

Abstract

«Technoscience», in its strong sense, can be understood as a new mode—among others—of producing science and technology in the twenty-first century. From this strong perspective, technoscience as a phenomenon of scientific and technological production exhibits several distinctive features, among which stand out the predominance of private capital over public funding, a distinctly corporate structure, mercantilist aims, the plurality of agents and actors, and consequently, a plurality of values and conflicts. Yet, most fundamentally, it creates an entire social environment and thus produces its own social subject, which may be called the «technoscientific subject». The problem—as this paper will show—is that this subject displays worrisome tendencies that threaten to bring us, perhaps inevitably, to the twilight of Western civilization.