GERMAN POLITICS OF GENETIC-ENGINEERING AND ITS DECONSTRUCTION

Policy-making, as exemplified by biotechnology policy, can be understo od as an attempt to manage a field of discursivity, to construct regul arity in a dispersed multitude of combinable elements. Following this perspective of politics as a textual process, the paper interprets the politicization of genetic engineering in Germany as a defence of the political as a regime of heterogeneity, as a field of 'dissensus' rath er than 'consensus', and a rejection of the idea that the framing of t echnological transformation is an autonomous process. From its beginni ngs in the early 1970s, genetic engineering was symbolically entrenche d as a key technology of the future, and as an integral element of the German politics of modernization. Attempts by new social movements an d the Green Party to displace the egalitarian imaginary of democratic discourse into the politics of genetic engineering were construed by t he political elites as an attack on the political order of post-World War II Germany. The 1990 Genetic Engineering Law attempted a closure o f this controversy. But it is precisely the homogenizing idiom of this 'settlement' which continues to nourish the social movements and thei r radical challenge to the definitions and codings of the politics of genetic engineering.