(Re)making bioeconomic past and futures

Bioeconomy as a political-economic project generates and performs distinctive distributions of value, power and agency. Under neoliberalism, bioeconomy not only turns nature and knowledge into new fictitious commodities (Pavone and Goven 2014, 2017), it also triggers fictional expectations about the future (Beckert 2016). As a narrative package, however well dramatized, the bioeconomy project cannot simply take over the world. To be effective, it needs to be activated and enacted in different and contradictory ways. Following Anna Tsing (2004), I argue that bioeconomy is made through “friction” between a global project originating in Western conjuring centers (European Commission, OECD) and “the sticky materiality of practical encounters” at the peripheries. Focusing on the case study of genetically modified (GM) soy in Argentina, I will analyze bioeconomy as a site of struggles, as much to make sociotechnical futures as to recapitulate the past. In my situated inquiry of agricultural bioeconomy in Argentina, struggles materialize in attempts to re-think agriculture as-we-knew-it, and to re-name it as “agro-industry” (Delvenne 2017). The presentation will explore these developments as evidence of an attempt to reject the idea of agriculture as the reactionary stronghold of a backward bourgeoisie and instead embrace agriculture as generative of an industrial avant-garde that promises political-economic transcendence. I will conclude with stressing theoretical and methodological challenges for STS scholarship to carry out ethnographies of global connections within and across bioeconomies.