ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way that promotion of the public 'acceptance' of (bio)technological developments is attempted, and the way that, pivotal to such attempts, is the fashioning of particular, amenable, representations of the 'public' that will do this 'accepting'. It attempts to chart some of the ways in which shifting representations of the public as both consumer and citizen, underpin a number of efforts at 'articulating' the relation between biotechnology and the 'public'. By regarding the Eurobarometer on Biotechnology, the survey conducted in each European Union country to sample public perceptions of modern biotechnology, in terms of a 'subjectifying technology', The chapter demonstrates that the ways in which these surveys measure the public's understandings of biotechnology and genetic engineering are also a mode of portraying a particular vision of the 'citizen' as tightly interwoven with the figure of the 'consumer'.
