Biosecurity, as a response to threats from zoonotic, food‐borne and emerging infectious diseases, implies and is often understood in terms of a spatial segregation of forms of life, a struggle to separate healthy life from diseased bodies. While an ensuing will to closure in the name of biosecurity is evident at various sites, things are, in practice and in theory, more intricate than this model would suggest. There are transactions and transformations that defy easily segmented spaces. Using multi‐species ethnographic work across a range of sites, from wildlife reserves to farms and food processing plants, we argue for a shift of focus in biosecurity away from defined borderlines towards that of borderlands. The latter involves the detachment of borders from geographic territory and highlights the continuous topological interplay and resulting tensions involved in making life live. We use this spatial imagination to call for a different kind of biopolitics and for a shift in what counts as a biosecurity emergency. As a means to re‐frame the questions concerning biosecurity, we argue for a change of discourse and practice away from disease ‘breach points’ towards the ‘tipping points’ that can arise in the intense foldings that characterise pathological lives.

In a recent televised review of British science fiction (Bell, 2006) a wonderful contrast was made between two famous and linked dystopiasöGeorge Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-four and Terry Gilliam's film pastiche of that novel, Brazil. If the former drew a world that involved and served as a warning of total control, the latter raised the incredible failures of control, the inevitable epicurean swerve immanent to any organisation. From the housefly that flew into the typewriter, which resulted in a change of and mistaken identity, to the failing surveillance system interfering with its own material complexity, Brazil, to some extent in contrast to Orwell's classic, drew a full rather than sparsely populated world, where the complexities of matters made governance and rule frighteningly unpredictable. To be clear, both dystopias end with terrifying landscapes, but it is the indeterminate nature of Gilliam's piece that may offer more to social scientists interested in the ways in which orderings are practised, ways that involve, from the outset, a heterogeneous array of matters. Our sense is that by highlighting the failures of ordering practices we can offer more options to intervene in the making of the social. This is hardly a new argument, though it is one that possibly distinguishes social science thinking informed by work in actor-network theory from those studies of sociotechnical networks which tend towards tracing the completeness and complicity of networks in the delivering of social order (for important contributions to this argument see Callon

In spite of the recent proliferation of theoretically informed writings on all things ‘cyber,’- it remains the case that much of the literature on ‘electronic spaces’ is characterised by a strong current of technological determinism. That is to say, it assumes and reproduces a stable and matter-of-fact distinction between the material/technical and the social such that changes in the former are supposed somehow to ‘impact’ on the latter. In those accounts which eschew this position, authors tend to employ an approach towards technology that might broadly be termed social constructionist. After Latour, I argue that, in that they operate according to the same ‘logic’, both these positions—technological determinism and social constructionism—remain within a ‘modern’ worldview. I propose that if we are to (and I argue that we must) tell stories of a world in which what the moderns refer to as the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ are always already bound together, always already binding together, we require other vocabularies than those which divide and ‘black box’ the world into easy categories, vocabularies that are able to grant all sorts of things their rightful place in the (co)construction of the world. Drawing on a variety of writers, I suggest that one element of these other vocabularies might be what I term a ‘materialist semiotics’. Having elaborated certain strands of what this could mean, I offer some tentative accounts of what our ‘virtual geographies’ might look like from an a modern perspective.

The author seeks to decentre some already familiar geographies of biotechnology. By asking, with respect to genetically modified (GM) crops, not ‘what is the new?’, but ‘where is the new?’, the intention is to redirect attention (at least briefly) away from the GM technique or genetically modified object and its supposed properties, to the world to which that technique or object is being added. This in turn allows the question concerning GM to be approached from new directions, for example, via the routes taken into the controversy by three specific organisms. Not fully taken into account in the calculations of the biotechnology industry, the honey bee, the Monarch butterfly, and the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis have all, in very different ways, made their presence felt as they literally and metaphorically encountered GM. In an attempt to do justice to these marginalised lifeforms, the forms of life of which they are part, and the biopolitical questions which they raise, the works of Jacques Derrida on friendship and animality, Jean-Luc Nancy on being with, and Bruno Latour on making things public, are brought into conversation. It is suggested that together what they offer is a way of thinking ourselves as collectively in the midst of things.

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