ABSTRACT
Jurgen Habermas warned that biotechnologies were collapsing the traditional, ‘categorical’, distinction between the made and the grown, or between ‘what is manufactured and what has come to be by nature’. Regulatory policy in the European Union (EU) starts from the premise that ‘coexistence is not about environmental or health risks because only genetically modified (GM) crops that have been authorised as safe for the environment and for human health can be cultivated in the EU’. Some representations of Transcontainer technology pick up on the sense in which regulation through technology might cut through social contingency by materialising specific means/ends operations, and by automatically generating certain effects in the world. The objective of the Transcontainer project is ‘to facilitate coexistence by containing GM plants next to conventional plants in neighbouring fields’; the premise is that ‘containment has the potential to allow the application of shorter isolation distances between GM plants and fields with conventional or organic crops’.
