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Geographies of nano‐technoscience

2007; Wiley; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00748.x

1475-4762

Ben Anderson, Matthew Kearnes, Robert Doubleday,

Nanotechnology research and applications

AreaVolume 39, Issue 2 p. 139-142 Free Access Geographies of nano-technoscience B Anderson, B Anderson Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorM Kearnes, M Kearnes Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorR Doubleday, R Doubleday Nanoscience Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FFSearch for more papers by this author B Anderson, B Anderson Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorM Kearnes, M Kearnes Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorR Doubleday, R Doubleday Nanoscience Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FFSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 May 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00748.xCitations: 11AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Posed between dream and reality, and suspended between the future and present, nanotechnology has been heralded as a technology that may define the twenty-first century. Based on claims of either the ability to precisely control and manipulate the material world at the nanoscale, or the ability to modulate living processes at the nanoscale, nanotechnology is said to promise a set of transformative applications that will disrupt established categories such as the artificial/natural or the biological/informational. Nanotechnology is defined by the possibilities for technological exploitation of the nanoscale, and the current institutionalization of nanoscience through coordinated research funding and support mechanisms is dependent upon a broad set of expectations of the potentially transformative implications of this exploitation. For example, a recent UNESCO report expresses something of this ambivalent potentiality as it presents nanotechnology as the next step-change in human progress and development – albeit a step change with uncertain consequences: Nanotechnology could become the most influential force to take hold of the technology industry since the rise of the Internet. Nanotechnology could increase the speed of memory chips, remove pollution particles in water and air and find cancer cells quicker. Nanotechnology could prove beyond our control, and spell the end of our very existence as human beings. Nanotechnology could alleviate world hunger, clean the environment, cure cancer, guarantee biblical life spans or concoct super-weapons of untold horror. Nanotechnology could be the new asbestos. (UNESCO 2006, 3; emphases added) The repetition of the conditional 'could' exemplifies that what we will hereafter term 'nanotechnoscience'– the diverse and interdisciplinary confluence of scientific practices and technological developments organized under the prefix 'nano'– can be described as both ontologically and temporally indeterminate. Informed by overlapping expectations of social, economic and political value, nanotechnoscience also therefore entails the strategic attempt to exploit this indeterminacy (Mody 2006). As might be expected, for a field vaunted as providing the tools for the 'next industrial revolution', nanotechnology has also been criticized as a superfluous creation of intellectual fashion that fails to designate a novel field of scientific knowledge or experimental practice. In response, attempts to demonstrate the novelty of nanoscale research have asserted the material distinctiveness of the nanoscale, rather than rely on traditional 'natural' distinctions between different classes of object associated with different fields of scientific enquiry (that would designate physics as a distinct field of enquiry from biology, for example). Typically, nanoscale research is defined by an interest in the unique properties of the space between 1 and 100 nm, in which novel properties are said to emerge. As such, the novelty of nanotechnology is defined by the uniqueness of a particular space. Nanotechnology might therefore be thought of as a geographical project, capitalizing on – and also enacting – such novel properties (Nordmann 2004). Given the ontological and temporal indeterminacy of nanotechnoscience – that is, its promissory mode of being – how could or should Human Geographers respond?11 With notable exceptions, including Clark's (1998) work on molecular engineering, limited geographical scholarship of current nanoscience research contributes to what might be called a geography of nanotechnology innovation with embryonic analyses suggesting the significance of the physical location of nanoscience research through the emergence of 'nano-districts' and regional 'clusters of innovation'. See, for example, the Nanodistrict project (http://www.nanodistrict.org/) and the Nanostructural Analysis Network Organisation (http://www.nano.org.au). Despite its scalar definition, nanotechnology is represented in overtly temporal terms as future-oriented. Promised advances in nanotechnology are cast as simply a 'matter of time', whilst notions of technological change – which are typically cast as operating 'in time' rather than 'in space'– present a challenge for geographical scholarship. Massey (1999), for example, tracks the ways in which change, including technological development, has typically been cast in purely temporal terms. Technological and social change typically are represented as dependent on the development of new techniques for the manipulation of matter that are developed 'in time'.22 Notions of human evolution and progress typically have been seen as intimately tied to the development of technology. Indeed, in the development of the social and human sciences – particularly in the work of August Comte, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, Emile Durkheim and Leslie White – technology is cast as a distinctive means through which human societies 'master nature', evolve and progress (White 1947). Though the precise trajectory of its development is not prefigured, the development of nanotechnology – based on achieving 'control over the structure of matter – is cast as inevitable and the emergence of transformative nanotechnologies simply a 'matter of time' (Selin 2006). The spatiality of the nanoscale can therefore come to simply be cast as a backdrop, or an inert setting, subject to procedures of technical exploration. Reflecting on the futurity of nanoscale research Nordmann (forthcoming) suggests that, given this sense of the exploration of the quixotic world of the nanoscale, nanoscience might rather be regarded as a geographical project par excellence. Because nanoscience is defined solely in spatial terms by reference to the nanoscale – rather than by a particular issue, task or problem – he suggests that nanotechnology consists of attempts to claim, explore and exploit the nanoscale as a defined space. He, therefore, compares nanoscale research with space-travel and the attempt to extend human capacities into hitherto unexplored spaces: Aside from the image of nanoscale research as (inner) space travel and aside from a research process that moves from local tinkering to global solutions, there are numerous further indications that nanotechnology is engaged in a conquest of space. The first of these is the very name 'nanotechnology' that refers to a region of space and the intermediary realm between classical and quantum physics. For the surprises that it holds, this highly complex world has been called an 'exotic territory'. The first goal of nanoscale research was and is to find one's bearing or orientation and to act in this space. (Nordmann forthcoming) For Nordmann, the attempt to make knowable the space of the nanoscale is necessarily a geographical enterprise and the futurity and colonial spatiality of nanoscale research are folded in upon each other. The aim of this special section is, therefore, to begin to understand the complex enwrapping of spatiality and temporality that is embodied in nanoscience and technology. The overt future orientation of nanotechnology research programmes – and promises of future social transformation – has the effect of forcing social science analysis to choose between adopting an uncomfortable engagement with speculative debates about future social arrangements and a reliance on predictive or anticipatory forms of knowledge or a more limited analysis of the spatial arrangements of current nanoscale research. The forced choice is between the temporal and the spatial. The insistence of this special issue is, however, that nanotechnology is a complexly spatio-temporal phenomena – in which anticipated futures are enacted through a geographical exploitation of the space of the nanoscale.33 See Greenhough and Roe (2006) for similar geographical approaches to biotechnologies. The papers that comprise this special section therefore focus on the situated enactment of the future promise of nanotechnology. Through a case study of the performativity of modes of representing and intervening in nanotechnology futures, through anticipatory practices such as scenarios, Ben Anderson's paper Hope for Nanotechnology: Anticipatory Knowledge and the Governance of Affect maps how hopes and other affectivities become part of nanotechnoscience. Hope plays a transversal role in the enactment of nanotechnology because it resolves the paradox of how the promise of dwelling at the nanoscale affects the here and now. As such, hopes, and the ingressions of fear and anxiety that have accompanied nanotechnologies, have become governed by the state and non-state actors involved in nano. The paper argues, therefore, for a focus on the anticipatory practices that accompany nanotechnologies. Robert Doubleday's paper Organizing Accountability: Co-production of Technoscientific and Social Worlds in a Nanoscience Laboratory explores the social and political expectations built into current nanotechnology research funding and support and their implications for discussions of accountability. Through a case study of a nanotechnology laboratory, he traces the co-constitution of natural and social orders in the production of specific ethical accountabilities. The paper stresses that any engagement with nanotechnology should begin with a focus on the laboratory as a key site for nanoscience. Mathew Kearnes' paper (Re)making Matter: Design and Selection engages with the equivalence between matter and life that is central to the disclosure of the nanoscale in nanotechnologies. Here he identifies two competing modes of exploiting the nanoscale, on the one hand a modulation of life processes and on the other hand control of dead matter, and argues that the space for a normative politics of nanotechnology is in the gap between visions and practices of nanoscale research. The paper concludes by arguing for a form of normative political engagement with discursive articulations of nanotechnology futures. Whilst the three papers differ, in their conception of an ethics or politics of nanotechnology for example, what they share is an understanding of nanotechnology, and nanoscience, as modes of dwelling that disclose the nanoscale in varied ways. The special section therefore avoids the tempting, but ultimately consoling, critical gesture of simply naming nanotechnology as an exemplification of other processes. From tendencies to the molecularization of 'life itself', through to processes of miniaturization or acceleration (see Virilio 1995), nanotechnology might be understood simply as a secondary instantiation of wider social and cultural processes. Instead, by focusing on specific assemblages through which nano-technoscience emerges, the papers that comprise this special section aim to open up an analysis of the contingency of nanoscale research and its particular socio-political materializations. By posing a critique of nanotechnology's own 'present-ness'– its social, political and material situatedness, potentialities and conditionalities – this special section implies a number of questions for social science and geographical analyses of nanotechnology. Firstly, the papers question geographical modes for understanding the disclosure of matter in nanoscience. Geographical scholarship has typically understood materiality to be a product of stratified geophysical or geopolitical processes. The implication of this special issue is that the contingent fabrication of new materialities in nanotechnology necessitates a creative rethinking of the category of matter. Secondly, the papers that comprise this special issue suggest that nanotechnology is set in the context of a proliferation of performative expectations, hopes and promises. This special issue demonstrates the increasing mainstreaming of notions of anticipatory governance, embedded in current research funding, the proliferation of foresight activities and the instigation of public engagement programmes aimed at anticipating future public responses to nanotechnology. How should geographical and social science scholarship relate to the anticipatory nature of expectations that are now embedded in contemporary governances and regulation? In their response to these questions, each of the papers offers different ways of being-ethical and being-political in relation to nano-techno science. Notes 1 With notable exceptions, including Clark's (1998) work on molecular engineering, limited geographical scholarship of current nanoscience research contributes to what might be called a geography of nanotechnology innovation with embryonic analyses suggesting the significance of the physical location of nanoscience research through the emergence of 'nano-districts' and regional 'clusters of innovation'. See, for example, the Nanodistrict project (http://www.nanodistrict.org/) and the Nanostructural Analysis Network Organisation (http://www.nano.org.au). 2 Notions of human evolution and progress typically have been seen as intimately tied to the development of technology. Indeed, in the development of the social and human sciences – particularly in the work of August Comte, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, Emile Durkheim and Leslie White – technology is cast as a distinctive means through which human societies 'master nature', evolve and progress (White 1947). 3 See Greenhough and Roe (2006) for similar geographical approaches to biotechnologies. Acknowledgements The special section emerged from a one-day workshop on the Geographies of Nano-Technoscience held at the Department of Geography, Durham University on 10 February 2005 and hosted by the Social/Spatial Theory research cluster. The editors would like to thank Tee Rogers-Hayden for her insightful comments on the three papers and the other workshop participants for their contribution to the workshop. Thanks to Tara Duncan for her hard work in putting the special section together. 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