The aim of this case history is to elucidate the multi-layered ways in which scientific knowledge -including as a form of non-knowledge -can act in the name of nature to reflect and embody, and thus perform, particular cultural values and power relations. In the following sections, we discuss how DNA detection methodologies enacted selective reduction and standardization of what are in situ fluid, as well as connected in-the-field genomes, so as to produce an in vitro knowledge of them that may have co-produced a corresponding cognitive, political, commercial, and cultural order (Jasanoff, 2004 (Jasanoff,, 2006. Critical STS resources -the analytic of epistemic cultures, complemented by the model of ignorance and exclusion as an effect of framing, and by co-production, the ANT account of immutable mobiles, and analyses of relevant power-knowledge asymmetries -provide a perspective from which to explore connections between the most technical and social aspects of non-knowledge in the Mexican GM maize controversy.