Paper short abstract:

Shifting citizen-state-market subjectivities are emergent with imaginations of a future bioeconomy. Efforts to update U.S. biotechnology regulation shed light on commitments in policy, law and public investment that are framed as indispensable to bringing this imagined future to fruition.

Paper long abstract:

The proliferation of bioeconomy strategies, blueprints and plans that have emerged in the last several decades has offered a variety of visions of a world transformed by biotechnology, and prescriptions for pathways to these futures. Though the visions vary, they are unified by the notion that biology holds the potential for profound, cross-sectorial economic transformation with corollary benefits for human wellbeing. They are also unified by the notion that this future depends upon particular commitments in the present—in policy, law, and public investment.

We examine actions surrounding the recent directive to update the U.S. Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, examining it as a site where imperatives articulated around visions of the bioeconomy come together with critiques of existing regulatory precedents, such as the AquaAdvantage Salmon. In these visions, markets are seen as secondary to and dependent upon political infrastructures that facilitate the forms of technological transformation that ostensibly portend economic transformation. Thus while the market is seen as a constitutive infrastructure of the bioeconomy, it is figured more as an achievement rather than a driver of techno-entrepreneurial activities. Because the not-yet-realized conditions of the market are also the conditions of possibility for the formation of rational consumer subjectivities, citizens are constructed as necessarily ignorant of what serves their own future best interests. From this follows particular interventions of the state to create (future) markets by disciplining (future) consumers, and figuring (future) innovation as a necessary and sufficient mechanism to ensure the security and wellbeing of its citizens.