ABSTRACT

The fetus and the planet earth are sibling seed worlds in technoscience. If NASA photographs of the blue, cloud-swathed whole earth are icons for the emergence of global, national and local struggles over a recent natural-technical object of knowledge called the environment, then the ubiquitous images of glowing, freefloating, human fetuses condense and intensify struggles over an equally new and disruptive technoscientific object of knowledge, namely ‘life itself’ (Franklin, 1993b; Duden, 1993; Foucault, 1978). Life as a system to be managed-a field of operations constituted by scientists, artists, cartoonists, community activists, mothers, anthropologists, fathers, publishers, engineers, legislators, ethicists,

industrialists, bankers, doctors, genetic counsellors, judges, insurers, priests, and all their relatives-has a very recent pedigree. The fetus and the whole earth concentrate the elixir of life as a complex system; that is, of life itself. Each image is about the origin of life in a postmodern world.