Creating Public Alienation: Expert Cultures of Risk and Ethics on GMOs

j INTRODUCTION Public concerns about new technologies like genetically modiŽ ed organisms (GMOs) have occasioned recognition of a crisis of public conŽ dence in science in late-modern society (UK House of Lords, 2000; CEC, 2000). The long-held belief on the part of promoters of such technologies that the public’s unwillingness to comply with scientiŽ c prescriptions is due to public ignorance and media irresponsibility, has been falsiŽ ed by copious evidence and experience (which is not to say that these conditions do not exist). Nevertheless, the key insight continues to be systematically overlooked—namely, that sceptical public reactions are not reactions to (supposedly misperceived) risks as such, or to media representations of these, but rather are public judgements of dominant scientiŽ c and policy institutions and their behaviours, including their representations of the public (Wynne, 1980, 1989). This alternative understanding of the basic forces and responsibilities underlying public responses recognizes that they have intellectual substance, which of course is always fallible and arguable, yet their intellectual substance does not correspond with institutional expert categories, since it goes much deeper than simply ‘disagreeing with’ or ‘rejecting’ expert views. Conventional approaches, on the other hand, reproduce long-standing, deeply cultural presumptions of a categorical divide between factual, objective and real knowledge on the one hand, and cognitively empty emotion or values on the other; and that whilst science looks after the former, lay publics are only capable of taking sentimental, emotional and intellectually vacuous positions.