Creating a New Object of Government

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, the European Union (EU) has embarked on an effort to make fully traceable and identifiable every genetically modified organism (GMO) that travels through its territory. New regulations force market operators to record the presence of genetically modified material in foods and feed, and to pass this information along in every transaction, thus creating a continuous paper trail for every bioengineered organism as it moves through the EU market. This new regulatory regime represents a momentous change in the nature of biotechnology governance in Europe, for it enunciates as its fundamental unit a novel bio-legal entity - the ‘transformation event’ meant to identify the particular instance of genetic modification from which each GMO has been developed. This paper describes the processes through which this new regulatory entity acquires a concrete and material meaning and thereby becomes a viable object of governance. Two parallel developments are described in detail: the creation of international rules for attributing to ‘transformation events’ unambiguous names - an instance of ‘bureaucratic nominalism’ - and the creation of detection methods and biometrological chains of custody capable of identifying the fragments of DNA that mark the specificity of each ‘event’. These two interventions involve the creation of infrastructures of referentiality capable of giving the ‘event’ a singular and unambiguous referent. By analysing how a new regulatory category like the ‘transformation event’ becomes an identifiable bio-legal object, I suggest that the governance of biotechnology should be understood as a series of acts of ‘demarcation’, through which the categories and entities enunciated in regulatory texts acquire a material foundation in bureaucratic practices and in the organisms these bureaucracies are expected to oversee.