The comic “Queer Adventures in Synthetic Biology” was made to be presented at the Sixth International Meeting on Synthetic Biology (SB6.0) in July 2013, in London. SB6.0 is a technoparade just like any other in the realm of technoscience. But this time, we wanted to do something.
To download the comic, click here : Queer Adventures in Synthetic Biology
The text below was distributed to explain our approach: you’ll find the story of the original comic and the reasons why we hijacked it.
Détournement of the Adventures in Synthetic Biology.
“Parodistic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects. But such humor is the result of contradictions within a condition whose existence is taken for granted. (…) Such contradictions don’t make us laugh. It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.”
A User’s Guide to Détournement, Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, 1956.
Over the last four years we have grown closer to the synthetic biology and the DIYbio communities : observing and learning from their members, discussing and arguing with their spokespersons, sometimes being outraged by, disagreeing with or making fun of their projects and values. For most of us, the participants at this conference, this closeness between scientists, engineers and social scientists is now rather familiar. To a certain extent we all are part of the political phenomenon called “interdisciplinary collaborations”, taking place both within the natural sciences and/or between the natural sciences and the humanities.
Where they have been institutionalized, these collaborations have often led to various forms of conflicts and frustrations that have since been expressed in different ways. More specifically, some social scientists have told their story in newspapers1 and written controversial books2 about the failures of these arrangements; while others have called for a renewal of the principles on which such collaborations should be undertaken leading to the “manifesto for experimental collaborations”3. Together, these examples point out the incapacity of working under “persistent inequality of power”, and they deplore the opposition of some scientists (often old men) to change their institutional habits. They also regret that they are expected to simply take care of “science and society” and risk related issues, resulting in them being “portrayed as joyless, humorless and ‘nay sayers’”4.
Our proposition is an attempt to find a way of making our own concerns visible; a way based on our political interpretation of the technoscientific project characterizing synthetic biology. This way is the détournement of the cartoon Adventures in Synthetic Biology that we present to you today.
We decided to misappropriate the comic The Adventures in Synthetic Biology. The OpenWetWare webpage of the project encourages anyone to “Go make your own comics”. We took it to the letter and decided to make this iconic scientific fetish into something else. This narrative mascot successfully plays both on the register of authority and of fun, on education and technological promise, relying upon the powers of technoscientific promises and science fiction’s liberty to imagine futures. Scientists are portrayed as joyfully arrogant and uninhibited.
Since its publication, the comic has found several loyal translator and interpreters, and as a result it had been translated in 5 languages. These faithful translations participate in its duplication, guaranteeing the proliferation of synthetic biology’s narrative mascot in its original form. For us, “making our own comics” meant to respond outside these demonstrations of loyalty. We wanted to practice blasphemy and show that not only technoscience, but also its narratives and communication strategies, can have “unwanted consequences”.
A blasphemy is meant to critically address a community of interest while being part of it, it “protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community”5. The community we seek is the one of the forum we propose in our comic, a place where we could think and collectively decide which are the technologies that we want and which are the ones we don’t want.
This project is grounded in our political and scientific concerns about synthetic biology’s program. We are concerned by the ignorance of synthetic biologists regarding other disciplines and forms of knowledge, concerns that are not solvable by collaborative attempts. The arrogance of “the engineer” who is unable to recognize that they are not equipped to understand what is a global economic and environmental issue such as energy, or what it implies to modify and release an organism into the environment.
Some recent political changes are also worrying, as is the fact that “participation”, “responsible innovation” and “collaboration” have become the present form of crisis management for research institutions and scientists. These political concerns are not rights that have been gained, nor goals to achieve. They are the new form of production of collective consent, of social order and of the organization of technological production. They have colonized scientific policy making and they are now an additional step in the smooth path linking the laboratory to the marketplace.
Synthetic biology’s epistemology and biotechnology as an industrial project are deeply connected. “Making biology easier to engineer” is an essential step of an industrial program that aims to re-conduct global inequalities and which sees environmental crisis as a new path for economic growth, as is said in every political report and communication in the USA and the UK6. Science as business, industrial development and an occidental way of life are still strictly non-negotiable, as are most of the promised “applications” that embody it (biofuel, agroindustry, etc). As citizens, we have no right to say anything about it. We are just invited to constitute the “rational public” of participation devices.
Forms of “collaborations” have never meant to affect technoscience’s usual business but to avoid public controversies, and we are afraid that social scientists have now built ties with synthetic biology that are too deep to be in position to call for radical changes. To position ourselves differently, we claim that we don’t want life to be “easier to engineer”. We want life to be livable for all beings, and we want concerned crowds such as the one we pictured in the forum.
We would like to replace “collaboration” based on disciplines by “alliances” based on political affinities. Thinking through disciplines sets up the ground for the wrong questions while, “alliances” recognizes that ideas, people and values are the material around which to collaborate and to gather.
The détournement of the comic is an attempt to express differently, outside of our usual disciplinary habits (writing abstracts and papers, giving presentations, etc.) as is expected by natural science and performed daily by scholars in the field of Science and Technology Studies. This is the expression of who we are, as individuals, citizens, and not only as “social scientists”. Opposed to any kind of unifying and monolithic “problem-solving” initiatives that manufactures consensus, we hope to be trouble-makers, because we care about problems and we want to stand up for them. This is where our activist inspiration comes from, helping us to be critical by different mean such as demonstration, détournement, provocation, theater, performance…
Our ecologist, feminist, anti-capitalist détournement of the Adventures in Synthetic Biology is a satirical exercise, a militant irony7, a serious play8. It is not about “the thrill of transgression”9 (which the researchers in synthetic biology have so often made use of) but it has to do with the world we’d like to live in. Our blasphemy is addressed both to synthetic biology and to social sciences, it claims to be a serious political and sociological criticism, while hoping to generate reactions, alternative collective practices, and call for other, endless, blasphemies, including those against ourselves.
Finally, this blasphemy is not only about the comic. It’s also about performing the comic in a big SynBio Clerical Communion: Synthetic Biology 6.0. It’s about sending a Trojan-abstract, having a poster, and standing in front of it, in front of you and facing disagreement
This is what some of us call to create a diplomatic incident10. We’re taking the risk of creating a conflicted situation in order to stand for problems and conflicts that are ignored. The realm of diplomacy is a realm of conflict, but it’s also the realm of discussion11. We want to talk about the failures of collaborations, about the conflicts and frustrations that came out of this project. We shouldn’t wait for technoscience’s main players to let us speak ; we have to take the floor. We want to discuss the industrial and political projects of synthetic biology as such, to debunk the myth that it would be impossible “not doing it”, and to reflect on how social sciences are part of a process for the assimilation of criticism.
We hope that irony and satire will help loosen tongues, that they will allow a departure from a manufactured consensus and provide a meeting point for alternative critical positions and practices.
1 J. Gollan, “Lab Fight Raises U.S. Security Issues”, The Bay Citizen, October 22nd 2011.
2 P. Rabinow, G. Bennett, Designing Human Practices, University of Chicago Press, 2012
3 Balmer et ali, Towards a Manifesto for Experimental Collaborations between Social and Natural Scientists, http://experimentalcollaborations.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/towards-a-manifesto-for-experimental-collaborations-between-social-and-natural-scientists/
4 Ibid.
5 D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991
6For two recent exemple, see the Nation Bioeconomy Blueprint (US) and the Speech by Hon George Osborne to the Royal Society (UK) https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequer-rt-hon-george-osborne-mp-to-the-royal-society)
7 F. Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press 2000
8D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
9D. Haraway, “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies”, Configurations, 1994
10F. Thoreau, V. Despret, Les Jourdain de la réflexivité : Du bon usage des incidents diplomatiques, Working paper.
11I. Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, Pour en finir avec la tolérance. La Découverte, 2003.