Technoscience, imagined publics and public imaginations

This essay begins from the intensified entanglements of technoscientific innovation with miscellaneous societal and public fields of interest and action over recent years. This has been accompanied by an apparent decline in the work of purification of discourses of natural and human agency, which Latour observed in 1993. Replacing such previous discursive purifications, we increasingly find technoscientific visions of the imagined-possible as key providers of public meanings and policies. This poses the question of what forms of legitimation are constituted by these sciences, including the ways in which they enter into articulations of public matters. Revisiting historical and contemporary theories of imagination and science, this essay proposes a joint focus on imagination, publics and technoscience and their mutual co-production over time. This focus is then directed towards recent reconfigurations of technosciences with their imagined publics and towards how public issues may become constituted by social actors as active imaginations-exercising agents.