Eric Deibel

The study of non-modern networks (Latour 1993) has much to learn from science fictions - in particular from its lively debates over what counts as life and nature in biology and informatics. Even though futuristic viewpoints on life and nature are necessarily over dramatized, such perspectives are not as limited in their diagnosis as many academic views of science and society. Only they provide an alternative for the dismal situation that is the result of not being quite non-modern enough -the possibility that this humanity would become unrecognizable and will be replaced by something else entirely.

Slavoj Žižek has observed that the fear about the future of human nature and for our post-human future is the shadow side of the triumph of liberal democracy; when its universalism took on the shape of an end of history, its human subject started dissolving. The possibility to genetically engineer "better" humans does not demonstrate that we are in danger of losing our freedom and dignity as individuals, but rather that "we never had them in the first place" (Žižek 2004: 130). In other words, genetic engineering makes it explicit that human consciousness was never in control of the biological body and its distributed cognition. This appears to be the aim, for example, of those that would protect 'human nature' from biotechnology, which Žižek explains has as its positive condition a 'fetish split' between science and an ethics that clings to the illusion of human autonomy (Žižek 2004: 194). The subject that is idealized as autonomous, reasonable and dignified can only survive through more control over the dissolution of its increasingly informatic body. Continuously biogenetics - especially in medicine and food - affirms the post-human theme; suggesting an expiry date for a political subjectivity that is considered as unchanging and as the universal standard for democracy in the future. In brief, biogenetics reveals the end to history of liberal democracy as an illusion in its demonstration of an end to nature.

Furthermore, when the inflated liberal subject is threatened by biogenetics it reveals the 'non-modernity' that Bruno Latour (1993) proposes. Latour suggested that the seemingly separated domains of science and society can be combined on the precondition that these are not so much two separate domains that at times interrelate, but were always already one domain to begin with. This is where the science fictions are important: often their imagination about a separation of science and society has catastrophic consequences - like the 'end' to humanity theme. This dramatization could be considered as the flipside to the 'patch up' that Latour imagines. Where Latour would rejoin the big divide of science and society, the science fictions imagine the unfolding of brave new worlds wherein the drama of his symbolic division is magnified to the maximum.

This paper draws on some of the vigor and urgency of the discussions of the dystopian and utopian connotations of biology in science fiction literature. More specifically the convergence of biology and informatics is studied as it appears in recent science fictions as alternative imaginaries to the many promises about food, empty fuel tanks and the weather that permeate biology. This is what the title refers to: there is fiction in biology and there are many science fictions that demonstrate an admirable proximity to the contemporary issues in biology and bioinformatics. A selection of science fictions is studied in relation to post-humanity and the commodification of life, to a fear of (dis-)embodiment in genetic modification and the geo-political consequences of the business-interest in the management of more and more informatic bodies at a time when life is being rendered into information resources that can be programmed, engineered and traded.

Charlotte Epstein (University of Sydney)

Aysem Mert (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Sustainable development is one of the most ubiquitous concepts in international relations today: Most UN system institutions use the term in their mission statements; international summits are held in its name; governments construct sustainable development programmes; corporations write reports and establish their own global 'council' on the matter, and NGOs make sure that they merge it with their various aims and demands. Wherever one looks, one can find it is constantly reified.

Such omnipresence makes it difficult to analyse social phenomena, as it inhibits the construction of a uniform reality; what Arturo Escobar (1995: 5) -following Michel Foucault- calls colonisation of reality. In a more practical vein, Ivan Illich has also shown how certain institutions not only limit the modes of thought one is able to make sense through, but also make alternative modes of institutions, technologies, and living impossible, which he names the creation of radical monopolies. It is the aim of this paper to analyse the 'colonisation of reality' by the sustainable development paradigm. To escape this omnipresence, the psychological/fantasmatic level will be the starting point of my analysis. It is possible to trace back in the western myths that the two ideological roots of sustainable development (environmentalism and developmentalism) are interwoven: the myth of development emerges from the disruption of the principles of moderation that originally flourished in ancient Greece. The Greeks acknowledged, feared, and avoided the infinite, as their social imaginary was based on limits and the myth of moderation. Human arrogance against gods (hýbris) would necessarily bring divine wrath (nemesis), which would restore the natural order. The idea of 'divine limits' and the golden rule of 'maintaining the proper mean' were central to Greek thought, and was only dismissed after monotheism has rationalized the myth that the universality of Christianity and the Roman state would assume a global model on the basis of a coherent 'civilization of growth.' Luigi Zoja (1993 [1995]: 7, my emphasis), argues that the Western psyche still continues to (1) "nourish the taboos and fears of punishment that in the past were associated with arrogance and excessive fortune" and (2) "to live in fear of catastrophe, the forgotten denoument [sic] of its myth." In this sense, the growth-focused developmentalism and the limits-focused environmentalism belong to a unifying myth.

The paper uses a detailed study of myths as an introduction to a more complex analysis of the politics that merged developmentalism with sustainability. In order to understand this hybrid, I first trace the two ideologies separately and relate them to their respective historical contexts. Only then, will it be possible to account for how sustainable development became the dominant discourse in international relations and ineradicably shaped the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon, and how its institutions became 'radical monopolies'.

Stephan Engelkamp & Katharina Glaab (university of Münster)

How do myths influence the local adaption of norms in non-Western contexts? In their seminal essay, Meyer and Rowan (1977) consider isomorphism of institutional structures as a "celebration" of an institutionalized myth of rationality. According to this approach, social actors ground their practices in a myth of modernity ("world culture") in order to raise legitimacy for their policies. This implies that norms diffuse in a simple top-down direction of effect which leaves the "delivered" norm unchanged.

This paper takes up Meyer and Rowans' focus on myth. However, we look at the discursive conditions of normative change from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. This enables the identification of local contingencies and struggles for discursive hegemony which concurs with the diffusion of apparently universal norms to local contexts. Here, local norm adoptions are complex discursive processes that entail interpretation and re-signification of global norms. Myths play a key role in these processes as they are necessary to translate global norms into local contexts. Norms hybridize in these discursive processes; a norm does not only diffuse, the norm itself also gets diffuse. Thus, the approach sheds light on the hybridizing effect of myths in the adaption process of "global" and "local" norms.

Two case studies illustrate the argument: the debate about genetically modified food entering Indian markets and the persistence of ritual constructions of legitimate authority in Southeast Asia. In both cases, the role of myths is crucial for the different strategies social actors pursue to construct political legitimacy by trying to "naturalize" their respective political positions in the political discourse. Our focus on mythscapes (Bell 2003) opens a discursive field in which purportedly dominant Western myths of rationality and modernity struggle for discursive hegemony vis-à-vis alternative local narratives.

Richard Holtzmann (Bryant University)

The 2008 election of President Barack Obama, on the heels of a major defeat of the Republican Party in Congress just two years prior, signaled the possibility that a major ideological realignment was taking place in American politics. Obama's promises to aggressively reform the nation's ailing health care system by providing health care coverage for the 47 million Americans who are without, represented an effort to translate this perceived leftward shift into policy reality. However, while this proposed reform had overwhelming public support and appeared well within the realm of possibility just one year ago, today the effort has come to be interpreted by a majority of the population as inimical to American values. What happened? Or more precisely, how can we explain the breakdown in this policy-making process? What are the forces that have frustrated Obama's attempts to reform a set of social practices that has come to be driven more by profits than the health of patients? 

While these questions could be addressed in many ways, my project offers an explanation that focuses on the power of ideas, the ideological dimension of politics and policy-making, rather than drawing upon behaviorist or materialist premises. Specifically, it explores the operation of fantasmatic logics within the American public discourse regarding health care reform. Of particular interest is the American myth of "creeping socialism" and its rhetorical use as a means to sow fear and block the progressive transformation of U.S. social policy. Coined by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944), the notion of creeping socialism warned of America's "drift" toward state control of the means of production as a consequence of FDR's New Deal policies. This narrative has reemerged with new vigor during the Obama presidency, accompanied by claims that the president himself is a socialist. Consequently, his efforts to reform the health care system, which ironically would (to the dismay of liberals) increase both the power and the profits of private sector insurance companies, has largely been dismissed by the poorer and middle classes-those whom it is intended to help-as fundamentally un-American. Therefore, the concept of fantasmatic logics, which Glynos and Howarth (2007) offer as a means to understanding the "inertia of social practices," represents a particularly valuable analytical tool in this context.

This myth of creeping socialism has the impact of reproducing existing social practices that maintain a stark division between the "haves" and "have nots" in the American health care system. As Glynos and Howarth (2007) argue, identifying and conceptually articulating the logic of fantasy in this policy arena can "generate reasons for why practices are maintained or transformed," as well as provide a "means for the ethical critique and normative evaluation" of these practices. Employing the concept of fantasmatic logic as an analytical lens, this project explores the perserverance and  influence of the American public narrative of creeping socialism and identifies its obstructionist effects on Obama's attempts to reform the American health care system.   

Maja Essebo

This paper presents the prospect of a somewhat novel approach to sustainable mobility transitions - the merger of myth and mobility theory. It addresses the prospects for shaping policies for structural transition towards sustainable mobility by investigating the myths that currently underpin resistance to such a transition. Mobility myths, this paper suggests, serve and sustain patterns of high mobility by granting them intrinsic value and making them appear as if part of natural societal evolution.

The concept of myth, although in itself not new, is a novel and underexplored approach to mobility policies, which can help explain why, in spite of the environmental urgency, a transition to a sustainable mobility structure has yet to be made. Although the word myth is part of everyday life, it is a mysterious and multifaceted concept, often mistakenly used as synonymous to an amusing tale, or, worse yet, a lie. This paper seeks to explore another, deeper aspect of myth - myth as a shaper of desires and a definer of society. The main active component in this function is a covert power, a naturalising power. Its strength lies in its ability to make appear natural that which may not be so. It is based on non-conflict and inaction rather than discord and action. In the matter of mobility, the naturalised can be found at the very core of the mobility concept, in the idea that mobility has evolved naturally as an incontrovertible effect of and prerequisite for modern society. High mobility, says the myth, is the very mark of success, individual as well as societal. It is, literally, the way to prosperity that no man, community or nation can afford not to take. Note that even though the power of the myth is challenged, its "truth" is neither claimed nor denied. It is simply stated that the myth is created and, as such, can be recreated in order to aid a policy shift towards a sustainable mobility structure. It is a key component in the understanding of policy making and structural change and/or inertia. 

In order to illustrate these concepts more concretely, this paper will reframe them in the context of a case study of the Øresund region in the south of Sweden - a region where the mobility myth has fundamentally changed policymaking and, as a consequence, the societal structure . Here high mobility has become a way of life, a development lead by a strong policy agenda but that now equally moulds and limits the policymaking process of tomorrow.

Ben Glasson (University of Melbourne)

The most vocal opponents of measures to tackle climate change come from the political hard-right of fossil-fuel dependent nations, often aiming their opposition at the spectre of global bureacracy likely to emerge as a response to climate change.  Yet these critics remain oblivious to the operations of power/knowledge at work in their naturalised version of liberalism.  Their acquisitive and entrepreneurial liberalism, has been shown to be the product of particular technologies of the self rooted in a complex web of historically specific discourses such as private property, Protestantism, and consumerism, among others.

The discourses employed by these critics are substantially enforced by a range of fantasmatic nodal points which, from a Laclauian perspective, maintain the force and regularity of discourse through their status as tendentially empty signifiers.  An analysis of chiefly US and Australian discourses of climate 'skepticism' or 'denial', can demonstrate how purportedly rational arguments are buttressed by a collection of deeply sedimented nodal points which disavow the contingency of the discourses they serve.  This is not to suggest that discourses in concordance with the prevailing climate-change science are somehow immune to the structuring role of the fantasmatic.  But it is to argue that climate skeptic discourse is a fruitful site of analysis and one of strategic interest for progressive politics.  Prevalent among these fantasmatic constructions are those that gather under the signifiers of 'science', 'nature', 'Man', 'progress', as well as a fantasmatic logic of masculinity and domination especially embedded within Western political culture.  It is also argued that the rich fantasmatic content of nodal points of 'nation' are deeply embedded within, chiefly, US discourses of climate change and the environment.

Through the analysis of US and Australian skeptic discourses, this paper demonstrates how the operation of nodal points can be discerned from key texts.  It argues that a logic of interdiscursivity governs the interactions between both elements both logico-semantic and fantasmatic, which implies that climate policy discourses are embedded within, and therefore cannot be studied in isolation of, the rich fantasmatic repertoires of their broader discursive contexts.

Charlotte Dany & Katja Freistein (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

Civil society participation in global governance has a mythical core, which we seek to reveal in our paper. Beyond identifying different narratives that help to constitute this myth, i.e. the legitimacy of global governance or the effectiveness of political outcomes, we will look at the functions and political consequences of these mythical narratives in concrete political processes. We aim to find a perspective to civil society participation in governance without normatively exaggerating their potential contributions or simply denying them any political influence at all.

Our understanding of political myths sees them as repeated claims that is made in a certain political context to legitimise a specific form of governance: "what makes a political myth out of a simple narrative is not its content or its claim to truth, but first, the fact that this narrative coagulates and produces significance, second that it is shared by a group, and third that it can come to address the specifically political conditions in which this group operates" (Bottici 2006: 14). Myths have a political content in this sense; however, at the same time, myths do also depoliticize certain issues (Barthes 1964: 131). Therefore, we aim to demonstrate what political consequences the myth of civil society participation has for international negotiations.

Empirically, we will analyze the repeating claims about civil society participation in two international governance processes: the UN World Summit on the Information Society (2003, 2005) and recent developments in the regional institution ASEAN. We analyse and compare political statements of all political actors involved - those representing states and international organizations as much as NGOs - about the role, function, and necessities to include civil society in these international policy processes.