New Technologies and Human Rights. By Thérèse Murphy (ed)
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.00865-3.x |
| Date | 01 July 2011 |
| Author | Mark Flear |
| Published date | 01 July 2011 |
ing forms of political subjectivity. Nevertheless, such a rich consideration of the
history andpolitics of the monster, as this booko¡ers, does invite us to consider
these possibilities in more depth. Perhaps then, after all, a subject for a future
work?
Ben Golder
n
The
Łre'se Murphy (ed), New Technologies and Human Rights,Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009, 282 pp, hb d50.00.
Hardly a day goes by without news of the actual or potential application and
impactof new and innovativetechnologies.For instance, in 2008 Claudia Castillo
became the ¢rst patient to receive a bio-engineered windpipe grown from her
own stem cells. In early 2009 the potential of gene therapy to treat HIV was
revealed. Moving from ‘red’ to ‘green’ technologies (the former intervene in
human biology, the latter in the environment), genetically modi¢ed organisms
(GMOs) areperhaps the archetypal example of the high pro¢le of new technolo-
gies on national and international agricultural law and politics. Other technolo-
gies concern information andcommunications, and those that have largely yetto
come into reality, such as nanotechnology. The promise of new technologies, as
well as the emotions provoked by them, alert us to theway inwhich science and
technology often develop in the imaginary realm andmove forward at sucha fast
pace that law and morality seemingly ¢nd it hard to connect.
The acuteness of the problem is captured by Michel Foucault’s notion of
power/knowledge, which recognises howchanges in knowledge provide a basis
for the production and exercise of governmental power and control. Foucault
took this insight further through his neologism ‘governmentality’, alerting us to
the wayin which knowledge provides the basis for various techniques ofgovern-
ance that in late modernityare fused with the concern for optimisation through
neoliberal political rationality, encompassing technical reason or means-end/
instrumentalrationality, and which organisethe conduct of conduct. Other tech-
nologies have been developed by governments (and others providing the knowl-
edge that supports and produces power, such as scienti¢c experts) to legitimate
this regime.‘Technologiesof hubris’, in Sheila Jasano¡’s phrase, these include risk
assessment and other techniques that permit management and control, even in
areas of high uncertainty like new technologies, and which keep the economy
working(S. Jasano¡,‘Technologies of Humility: CitizenParticipation in Govern-
ing Science’ (2003) 41Minerva 223).
When science and technologybecome increasinglyentwined with formal sites
of power, accountabilitybecomes ever more crucial. Of course, hitherto lawand
morality have eventually caught upwith science and technology. This is in part
because individuals, communities and institutions ¢nd new ways ofconnecting
them so as to demand and contest the exercise of power over life itself, so-called
n
Faculty of Law, Universityof New SouthWales
Reviews
642 r2011The Authors. The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011) 74(4) 631^6 60
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