Accueil>After innovation. Intellectual property and climate change

28.03.2022

After innovation. Intellectual property and climate change

À propos de cet événement

Le 28 mars 2022 de 12:30 à 14:30

Visuel Atelier interdisciplinaire de recherches sur l'environnement (AIRE)

>La direction scientifique de Sciences Po a le plaisir de vous inviter au séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l'Atelier interdisciplinaire de recherches sur l'environnement (AIRE) avec Alain Pottage, professeur des universités à l’École de droit de Sciences Po.

In the course of the twentieth century, patent jurisprudence and its practitioners were captured by the ethos of technology and innovation; from having been a means of encouraging ‘progress’ in the ‘useful arts’, patent law became the vehicle of a policy that articulated the fossil-fuelled imaginary of innovation. With the benefit of the anthropological practice of reflexivity or distancing, Marilyn Strathern observes that the modern sense of technology fashions a mode of habitation; that the Euro-American self-description in terms of ‘technology’ articulates a relation to time and nature that conditions the way in which we inhabit the Earth. ‘Technology’ allows Euro-Americans ‘to dwell in a thoroughly taken-for-granted world, an envelope that allows them to live within themselves’. And patent law has a particular role to play in fashioning this mode of dwelling; patents are a kind of ‘technology within a technology’. Patent jurisprudence articulately expresses the sense of inventiveness as an inexhaustible social faculty, as the activity of ‘the continually creative mind that seeks to enlarge society’s capacities’. First, it distinguishes ‘technology’ from ‘nature’ by rigorously dividing what pertains to the agency of the mind from what pertains to the agency of nature, which occasions the process of invention but is not consumed by it. Second, it evolves a specific trajectory of time; not clock time but a temporality of ‘novelty’ that differentiates particular inventions by situating each as a successive phase in the evolution of the process of generalized innovation that characterises each as ‘technology’. The sciences of climate change tell us that the planet upon which this mode of habitation was premised no longer exists. And yet, patent jurisprudence continues to press the agenda of ‘innovation’. Indeed, the response of corporate intellectual property lawyers (and more than a few professors of intellectual property law) to recent decision of the US Supreme Court on the products of nature doctrine has been to focus that agenda even more sharply by suggesting that the sole criterion of patentability should be innovation, as though that were a self-evident value. In fact, this approach is a mode of denial: it aligns patent jurisprudence with the negative momentum of the past, with the infrastructures of fossil capital that are precipitating us into a future that they are simultaneously foreshortening. And, if the message of Earth science and social-scientific reflections on the Anthropocene is to reveal the sense in which discourses such as technology presuppose and perform a relation to the Earth, a mode of habitation, that is no longer sustainable, then the objective should be to turn to what comes after innovation, and to new ways of imagining the artefacts that we consume in the form of ‘technology’.

Son exposé sera discuté par Bernard Reber, philosophe, directeur de recherche CNRS au CEVIPOF.

Chair : Richard Balme, professeur des universités à l'Ecole des affaires internationales et chercheur au Centre d'études européennes et de politiques comparées.

Inscription obligatoire auprès de marina.abelskaiagraziani@sciencespo.fr

À propos de cet événement

Le 28 mars 2022 de 12:30 à 14:30