Consulting citizens: technologies of elicitation and the mobility of publics

The new centrality of "the public" to the governance of science and technology has been accompanied by a widespread use of public consultation mechanisms designed to elicit from citizens relevant opinions on technoscientific matters. This paper explores the configuration of legitimate constituencies in two such exercises: the UK "GM Nation?" public debate on food biotechnology, and a Swedish "Transparency Forum" on the risks of mobile telephones. We consider the apparently paradoxical combination in these two examples of a tendency to produce static images of the public with a high valuation of mobility-of citizens and their opinions-as the key outcome of deliberation. We discuss the organizers' careful delineation of a distinction between "stakeholders" and the "general public," and their aversion to any sort of "eventfulness" in public deliberations. Finally, we introduce the classical notion of the "idiot"-the individual who minds exclusively his or her own private affairsand argue for the need to develop a new vocabulary to evaluate the politics of "listening to the public".