Abstract
What are the forces that determine the development, diffusion and appropriation of emerging technologies? This question becomes particularly pressing and particularly difficult to answer with respect to the current status of nanotechnology. This technoscientific enterprise is marked on the one hand by nearly unanimous endorsement and on the other hand by an apparent absence of power. The following reflections serve to address this challenge by suggesting a suitable theoretical framework that is needed at least to complement extant accounts of power implicit in current regimes of knowledge production. The proposed framework posits a seductively structured space of options. This space is unbounded, and demands no determinations, decisions, claims, or contestations.
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- 1.
Note that this appeal to precaution is strangely toothless. This precautionary attitude consists in waiting-with-vigilance for a state of knowledge that may never be forthcoming. Precaution could also be invoked to justify the prohibition of certain actions at least until the time when the desired state of knowledge is reached.
- 2.
Compare the three scenarios of nanotechnological development that were suggested and developed by the Wuppertal Institute: They show two ways in which the development could go wrong and one way to do it right. Here, the responsible way of developing of nanotechnology coincides with and is measured by the eventual success of nanotechnology. And the responsible way consists in everyone taking responsibility – not in terms of being accountable but by caring for the success of nanotechnology (Türk et al. 2006).
- 3.
This is also how these reports are read. The most radical (also by no means unusual) recommendation of the CEST-Commission is taken by authors and readers alike to be quite innocuous and common-place: “health and environmental monitoring agencies [are to] establish the mechanisms needed to assess the toxicity of processes and products derived from nanotechnologies prior to authorizing their commercialization“ (Commission 2006: vi). In light of what is known about medium-term or in-principle obstacles to the establishment of such mechanisms (Maynard et al. 2006), this recommendation is tantamount to a moratorium on the commercialization of nanotechnology – but it is taken by all parties merely as a call to “proceed with caution”.
- 4.
So far, Astrid Schwarz has begun articulating the “economic” dimensions (Schwarz 2009, Schwarz and Nordmann forthcoming).
- 5.
The report goes on to identify a problem associated with this regime of the economics of technoscientific promise (ETP): “The ambivalent role of policy makers, promoting the specific interests around the technoscientific promises and taking the public interest into account, is unavoidable under the regime of ETP. This can become problematic when concerns are raised about the new developments: space for public deliberation quickly becomes reduced to polarised interactions for or against the technoscientific promise” (Felt et al. 2007: 23). In contrast, we are showing that technoscientific promise has allowed for the construction of a space for public deliberation that excludes polarised interactions “for or against” but – beyond “interests” – unites those who have no choice but to be “for” the technoscientific promise. This is not to say, of course, that these polarisations have not occurred in respect to biotechnologies and might not come about even in regard to nanotechnology.
- 6.
It may be possible to provide a delimiting definition of nanotechnology, one that refers only to the capabilities that have been disclosed by available instrumental procedures (compare Nordmann2008). It is significant for the context at hand that there appears to be no scientific or policy interest in developing such a delimiting definition of a finite set of practices or intended applications.
- 7.
The story of the American frontier might be told as follows: It was “closed” only when the continent had been settled and the westward expansion concluded, e.g. when the colonists ran out of the openness suggested by the very existence of the frontier. Since the Western frontier-experience has served as a resource for the formation of a shared identity, Americans have been seeking out new frontiers ever since. After Vannevar’s Bush “endless frontier” oriented American science to ever-new-challenges such as space-exploration, nanotechnology is challenged only by limits of imagination (Jeanne Cortiel: in conversation).
- 8.
To be sure, Feynman was “read into nanotechnology” and his role of founding father is a retroactive construction (Toumey 2008).
- 9.
The most trenchant critique of the future imagined as a mere space of possibility has been provided by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2002).
- 10.
According to Martin Rudwick, pre-Darwinian representations of other geological epochs did not place them in historical continuity with present-day flora and fauna. Instead, they looked like pictures of another world, not unlike the pictures brought back by sea-faring naturalists. The “past” thus looked like some place in the South Sea (Rudwick 1985). The “future” of nanotechnology refers to a similarly disjointed simultaneous reality – the idea of exotic otherness steps in when our imagination of a historical future fails us. Against this failure, Jean-Pierre Dupuy (and Hans Jonas) propose a heuristics of fear that would help us conceive our historical future (Dupuy 2002, Jonas 1984). Such a heuristics of fear may have been effective in stopping the nuclear arms race between the US and USSR. It is currently doing work in regard to global warming. There is no analogue for nanotechnologies (and good reasons, perhaps, why there couldn’t be a heuristic of fear with respect to “enabling and emerging technologies”): Indeed, stories of “grey goo” and other scenarios of nanotechnology-gone-wrong serve to flatter nanotechnology in that they reinforce notions of its unlimited potential. They do not serve as a vantage point from which to critique nanotechnological developments as such.
- 11.
Technology platforms are an instrument of EU science policy. They are akin to various similar initiatives that bring stakeholders together for areas such as nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, etc.
- 12.
This is not the place to explore the connections between these various spaces of possibility. One such connection is the discursive identification of physical possibility (all that is not contradicted by known laws of nature) and technical possibility (all that can be humanly engineered). Another connection was suggested to us by Ann Johnson, namely a new science and practice of management that construes management as a generic problem-solving exercise. Different kinds of general purpose technologies (management being one of them) may be reinforcing each other in the production of unbounded discursive, technical, and historical space.
- 13.
On Röttgers’s interpretation of Baudrillard (and Bataille) power is identified with rationality and disenchantment, reifying the circle of production. In contrast, seduction, challenge, and cunning are three kinds of processes that work against the principle of power (Röttgers 1990: 529).
- 14.
At its current state of development, nanotechnological research is arguably oriented to the acquisition and demonstration of basic capabilities of visualization, manipulation, intervention (Nordmann 2008).
- 15.
See especially the volume Power, Action and Belief, edited by John Law, where Michel Callon, but also other authors are dealing with the term “obligatory passage point”.
- 16.
See, for example: http://www.nanotec.it/GovernareNano/slides/RTomellini.pdf (01-01-08) or, http://www.feast.org/conference2006/documents/6.5_Tomelllini.ppt (01-01-08). (We would like to thank Arie Rip for drawing our attention to this.)
- 17.
Numerous authors have shown how hype and funded research are not only equally important, reinforcing each other, but indivisibly entangled in nanodiscourse.
- 18.
An intermediary example was developed in Nordmann 2006: Spelling “IBM” with individual atoms and other forms of “molecular writing” is a rehearsal of nanotechnology’s promise to realize completely arbitrary human designs. The manipulation of atoms on a two-dimensional plane for the creation of symbols, symbolizes in an anticipatory fashion the real unlimited effectiveness of an envisioned nanotechnology.
- 19.
The recruitment of ethics in the establishment of nanotechnology could provide a third case to the extent that anticipatory ethics treats a merely hypothetical future as something that may as well be real. Only by assigning to ethics the power of adjudicating what an all-powerful nanotechnology might do, “nanotechnology” becomes empowered as that which will effect the good and bad in our future.
- 20.
This reading corresponds roughly to the notion of “plastic words” as characterized by Uwe Pörksen. Those plastic words commute between scientific and everyday language and thereby become “constructive elements of models that are followed by reality. They are like templates that magically generate models of reality; and the step from a word towards reality seems to become very small” (Pörksen 1988: 67, translated by the authors).
- 21.
This is where Baudrillard speaks of power as being “cumulative and immortal” and partaking of “all the illusions of production” (see above).
- 22.
Some of the present remarks are inspired by Yannis Stavrakakis (2005). His analysis is based on Lacan but fails to see the difference between an identification with something (which can serve to produce ethnic or national or otherwise parochial identities) and an identification with emptiness (which can serve to produce an unbounded solidarity among those who are no longer separated by subscribing to different frameworks of interpretation).
- 23.
As mentioned above, Hegel, Marx, critical theorists, or Foucault do not suppose that power needs to localized in particular offices, social classes, persons or institutions. In a sense, each offers an account of how power can arise in a vacuum and like a fine ether it can be everywhere diffused. Here, the notion of emptiness as a source of power has a different and rather more specific meaning: Power is a desire for fullness (and the production of a corresponding reality) that starts from the emptiness of merely symbolic interaction. In regard to reality, this desire is everywhere frustrated (“this is not it”!) and is thus a constant hunger. What better way to feed this hunger but by the promise of an unlimited potential – a promise that creates a fullness of participation and solidarity among all those who jointly engage in the empty play of symbols. (For this Lacanian account see Stavrakakis 2005: 73.)
- 24.
“La séduction est ainsi union entre raison (gnome) et force (rome), de façon à prendre des décisions avec celle-là et à obtenir un résultat pratique avec celle-ci’” (Perniola 1980: 4).
- 25.
When it is argued, for example, that it might be irresponsible to forego the potential benefits of nanotechnology and that it is therefore responsible to develop nanotechnology even in the face of uncertainties and risks, proponents of a precautionary approach do not dismiss this argument and do not expose it as a sleight of hand. The situation demands that one must do justice, without contradiction, to both meanings of “responsibility”. The joint commitment of all parties to “responsible development” produces that commitment.
- 26.
“Donc, il existe une logique de la séduction, qui s’impose autant à l’être séduit que à la séducteur, qui a une dimension totalement indépendente et opposée à leur volonté subjective, qui est en rapport avec le kairos, avec l’occasion. En conséquence, l’activité du séducteur n’est nullement l’affirmation de sa volonté subjective […]” (Perniola 1980: 4).
- 27.
To be sure, “non-meaning” is a horrible “non-word” but perhaps as necessary for the analysis at hand as the term “unpolitics” in Felt et al. (2007).
- 28.
This was suggested to us by Ann Johnson.
- 29.
“Mit der Nanotechnologie werden sich die Umweltprobleme von selber lösen.” – The statement was made during a popular presentation of nanotechnology by a speaker of the Wuppertal Institute during an event at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, October 2006.
- 30.
- 31.
A report “Nanotechnologies for Sustainable Energy: Reducing Carbon Emissions through Clean Technologies and Renewable Energy Sources” (published in June 2007) highlights that current applications of nanotechnologies will result in a global annual saving of 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide in 2007, increasing to over a million tons by 2014. It also states that over the next seven years, the highest growth opportunities will come from the application of nanomaterials to making better use of existing resources, rather than generating new forms of renewable energy.
- 32.
“Shaping the World Atom by Atom”, published in 1999 by the U.S. National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), chaired by Mikael C. Roco and commissioned by President Clinton.
- 33.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus prompted fierce debate with their self-published essay The Death of Environmentalism that provides the basis for Break Through. One of its most disputed claims is that environmentalism cannot deal with global warming because the issue is more complex than pollution problems. Also, American values are to have changed since the environmental movement’s successes in the 1960s. Thus, it would be better if environmentalism faded away so that a new politics can be born in Amercia.
- 34.
Comment by Richard Florida (author of Rise of the Creative Class); for more such statements of praise see http://www.thebreakthrough.org/#quotes, (04-01-08).
- 35.
This is not the place to elucidate the alternative moral economies that might support the game of seduction. If hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure appear rather obvious, this is only a sign of the very same times that sustain a remarkable optimism about nanotechnology’s ability to cure the world’s ills. Ourselves pleasurably implicated in the game of seduction, the authors of this paper would like to believe that the pleasures at issue might involve specifically democratic virtues.
- 36.
Here “all is possible” goes further than “everything is possible”, it goes beyond a list of denumerable items.
- 37.
The theory of power as emerging from the pleasure of mutual seduction should thus be complemented by Pierre Klossowski’s account of simulacra. Compare Baudrillard as quoted above on seduction “without substance and origin,” “gaming as pure form” and “formal bluffing.”
- 38.
In light of standard conceptions that tie power to interest, this sounds paradoxical. Power is to be a rationalizing expression, a rathionalization of pure interest, and its effect the disenchantment of the world (Röttgers 1990). – And yet, this “magical” form of disinterested power is familiar from various “invisible hand” accounts (Adam Smith to the Matrix).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and criticisms we would like to thank Hans Glimell, Ann Johnson, Matthew Kearnes, and Arie Rip.
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Nordmann, A., Schwarz, A. (2009). Lure of the “Yes”: The Seductive Power of Technoscience. In: Kaiser, M., Kurath, M., Maasen, S., Rehmann-Sutter, C. (eds) Governing Future Technologies. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2834-1_14
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