Seeing Small, Seeing the Future

Nanovision: Engineering the Future, by Colin Milburn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008, 280 pp., £17.99/$22.95.

We are entering a new era. I call it ‘the Singularity’. It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence that is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet (Ray Kurzweil quoted in Milburn 2008, p. 4).

This notion of the Singularity forms the opening of Colin Milburn's insightful new book, Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Beginning with the slogan: ‘It's coming. Or rather … it's here’ (p. 1), the book builds up a sense of inevitability by referencing futurologists and other sci-fi texts to discuss the Singularity, hypothesized by mathematicians and astrophysicists as a collapse in space-time which produces a ‘blindspot’, an inability to foresee what will happen next. In technological terms, the Singularity is envisaged to be a situation where machines and humans merge together and technical progress develops so fast that the future is rendered opaque because the humanist borders of our ‘lived realities’ will become blurred. At the heart of this predicted reconfiguration is nanotechnology, an emerging science which engineers and fabricates material at the molecular scale. Milburn argues that nanotechnology is propelling us towards the Singularity because its speculative rhetoric about atomic rearrangement opens up infinite futures that, in turn, require new ways of seeing and being. Thus, in order to see past this opacity, he suggests that only by opening up bodily boundaries can humans ‘live through’ the technological change that is taking place.

Nanovision is an engaging and worthwhile read. Posing questions about potential futures as advancements are made one atom at a time, it encourages readers to re-think the boundaries of what constitutes humans and non-humans, and what those relations might look like within a nano context. Through an analysis of various books, Hollywood films and other text assemblages, Milburn draws attention to the role of science fiction narratives in the mobilization of nano research. This is refreshing material, since there have been few texts which explore the cultural constructions of nanotechnology. Previous social science research on the topic has touched upon the circulation of particular narratives and imaginaries (for example, Gimzewski and Vesna, 2003; Hayles, 2004; Bennett and Sarewitz, 2006), but has largely focused on issues of ethics, risk assessment and public engagement (e.g. Tourney, 2004; Macnaghten et al., 2005). Thus, the strength of Nanovision lies in its careful attention to the relationship between sci-fi rhetoric and the emerging nano-culture.

While the term ‘nano-technology’ was first coined by a Japanese scientist in 1974, the ideas are often traced back to Richard Feynman, a renowned physicist who introduced the possibilities of molecular manufacturing in a 1959 Nobel Prize speech. It wasn't until the 1980s, however, when K. Eric Drexler outlined an official programme for nanotechnology in his book Engines of Creation that inspiration for research began to take flight (Drexler, 1987). Since then, nanotechnology has become a multidisciplinary field that promises advancements in areas such as medicine and materials science, and is yet mired in controversy with many scientists dismissing some of the ideas as science fiction. This includes the popular ‘grey goo’ scenario, hypothesized to be a situation where out-of-control nano machines self-replicate, covering the planet in ‘disorganized matter’. This prediction is taken up in various sci-fi texts such as Michael Crichton's novel Prey, where a military project gone awry results in a molecular cloud which reassembles into a dangerous, predatory, swarm (Crichton, 2008). Cultural examples such as these, which are outlined in Milburn's book, demonstrate how the development of nanotechnology has depended upon a combination of hypothetical rhetoric and assertions about its unpredictability and inevitability. This sense of inevitability is argued to be largely driven by a ‘consequence of humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology’ (p. 3), but also by science fiction narratives which themselves generate a sense of the ‘already here’. As Milburn goes on to explain in Chapter 1, nanotechnology depends upon imagining what has not yet come to pass, as already present.

These speculative tensions and contradictions form Nanovision's central thesis: that the production and development of this emerging field is a result of a particular way of seeing. Milburn refers to this as nanovision: ‘a perceptual apparatus endemic to the era of nanotechnology, atomizing our world only to perform its molecular reconstruction, envisioning ultimate limits only to speculate on their outside, fabricating barriers only to tunnel through them’ (p. 13). In other words, nanovision is an ‘active instrument of posthuman engineering’ (p. 51), a hybrid set of optical tools, a term for ‘thinking through’ nanotechnology which results in a metaphysical and corporeal unravelling.

This idea of nanovision makes an interesting theoretical contribution by demonstrating how a particular mode of seeing informs nanotechnology. However, Milburn's argument could benefit from more concrete examples of research to further demonstrate nanovision in practice. Nevertheless, as I outline below, the book does well to weave critical discussions about the relations between speculation and sci-fi narratives and how these tensions influence the overall culture of nanotechnology. Each of the book's four chapters attends to a different aspect of nanovision while progressively analyzing the dissolution of boundaries that are endemic to practices of nanotechnology.

Synopsis

In the first chapter, entitled ‘Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering’, Milburn sets the stage by exploring the ways that nano depends upon contradiction. To situate this tension, he provides examples of ‘nanowritings’ that speculate on achievements which have not yet occurred. These writings also construct promising narratives which present the technology as not only inevitable, but ‘already here’. These visionary writings have sparked debate amongst different nanotech communities, with some arguing that these ideas are science fiction and undermine present research. Thus for some scientists, the legitimatization of nanotechnology necessarily depends upon denouncing these writings, which include those by people like Eric Drexler and Richard Feynman, and casting their ideas into the science-fiction pot. However, Milburn argues that attempts to banish Drexler and Feynman have the ironic effect of collapsing the distinction so that nanotechnology ends up being simultaneously both ‘science’ and ‘science fiction’. In other words, the two terms negatively define one another.

Following this ‘science vs. science fiction’ debate, Chapter 2 introduces the topic of ‘seeing’ and the trope of ‘the small world’, or the idea that nano is shrinking the lived dimensions of our universe. For Milburn, ‘seeing small’ is about the collapse of distance which becomes part of the technologies that fabricate and image at the nano scale. Milburn uses the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) as a case study because it represents the material embodiment of nanovision (p. 63). This instrument effectively works by driving an electrical current onto a sample and generates an image by moving atoms around. Due to the sense of projection and of ‘being there’ while imaging with the STM, Milburn asserts that the human and the atomic are brought closer such that the outside becomes the inside, and the space between representing/intervening vanishes. In effect, the STM eliminates the distance between observer/observed, further dissolving the binaries between present/future, seeing/doing, and visualizing/making. Furthermore, he argues that the necessity of touch and the practice of physically picking up and re-arranging atoms prohibit an autonomous viewing subject.

At this point, however, I would venture to ask, what exactly counts as ‘distance’ and can one ever really be outside their scopic practices? Moreover, is nano the only practice through which we might consider a collapse between observer/observed? As STS scholars have argued, vision is itself a multiple and embodied practice (Haraway, 1999; Barad, 2007; Myers, 2008), so perhaps an alternative way to think about Milburn's argument is to consider that nano, rather than being novel in this respect, simply makes these entanglements more evident as a requirement for seeing. That is, rather than presuming to dissolve a pre-existing split between subject/object, outside/inside, it could be said that nano interweaves materials, discourses, instruments and bodies more intensely through the rendering of the atomic.

Moving on, the topic of Chapter 3 is ‘grey goo’. This brings the discussion back to the tensions between science and science fiction, where attempts to legitimize nano necessarily depend upon banishing prophecies of molecular disarray. Ironically, the supposed threat of goo undermines the notion of absolute control often associated with nano's ability to organize and manipulate atoms. Goo thus symbolizes the erasure of boundaries and Milburn argues that it is this loss of mastery which represents ‘the fundamental dissolution of the human subject as contained within its skin and its imaginary boundaries’ (p. 120). Citing science fiction texts such as Ian McDonald's Evolution's Shore (McDonald, 1995), where goo from an alien planet devours parts of Africa, he addresses a sense of horror in this self-replication. To counter this narrative, Milburn offers examples of works by other writers who position nano as a ‘hard’ science so that the ‘soft’ threat of goo is kept at a distance. These kinds of narratives are intended to legitimize nano as safe and controllable, particularly in relation to the possibility of goo as a form of biochemical warfare. Milburn presents one particular text written by Daniel and Mark Ratner, two American brothers actively involved in the nanotech industry (Ratner and Ratner, 2004). Their pop-science book entitled Nanotechnology and Homeland Security: New Weapons for New Wars frames nano as a technology of protection in the face of a wide array of threats ranging from terrorism, earthquakes, toxic spills, hidden pollutions, etc. Milburn argues that nanotechnology is positioned in these kinds of rhetorics as a preventative safeguard against a chaotic, dangerous, and invisible world.

The book's last chapter reflects on how the imaginaries surrounding molecular rearrangement alter conceptualizations of the human subject. In particular, Milburn asks the reader to consider a ‘postbiological’ future and further extends the idea of biological erasure. Central to this idea are various texts and other writings that stage what Milburn terms a ‘scene of disintegration’, or a situation where the human body will be atomically torn apart, opened up, and disassembled. The idea that humans must prepare for, and embrace a reconfiguration of bodily materiality, is described in science fiction narratives as both horrific and inevitable. Thus in his examination of how nano-discourse opens up the idea of biological disintegration, Milburn raises questions about what kinds of futures are being produced and imagined through these narratives. However, Milburn concludes that, in addressing the inevitability of nano and its potential to reconfigure the world, humans must ‘engineer the future’ by opening themselves up to the possibility of otherness. Thus, amidst the horrors arising from this ‘corporeal violence’, he draws from nanofiction and offers the reader a positive way to move through it, proposing ‘love’; the notion that giving up our bodies and not resisting is a way of encountering and unpacking the other (i.e. nanomachines). Love, he argues, is less about giving to the other, than about ‘an opening, an unpacking—that exposes itself to the encounter with difference’ (p. 183). This opening is a move towards acceptance, rather than resistance, since life becomes divisible, multiple and fragmented as human and other intersect.

Milburn refers to the discourse of otherness in nanofiction as machinic alterity, as ‘simultaneously within and beyond the comprehension of its own discourse’ (p. 182). In this case, the other is the non-human machinic form, and also the postbiological, the possibility of the human becoming different. Here, Milburn returns to the ambiguity inherent to nano and describes how in nanofiction the other is symbolically both inside and outside the human, written as both speculative and already here. Love then, becomes an imaginary way of becoming open to this intersection, raising further questions about the relations between humans and non-humans.

Ironically though, Milburn's notion of ‘love’ is perhaps not ‘open enough’ as it does not consider the idea that humans already make, and are made by, other entities in different locations and practices. Love in this case implies intentional surrender; that the human has coherent and singular boundaries that require ‘opening up’. Instead I would opt for Donna Haraway's notion of ‘becoming with’ (2008) which asserts that human/non-human do not pre-exist, but are always already multiple, partial and continuously coming into being in their relations with each other. Therefore, in the face of anxieties about the risk and ethical implications of this new technoscience, an alternative to love could be an ontology that considers that we are, in Haraway's terms, ‘already cyborg’. In this view, rather than a ‘violent dismantling’ as Milburn puts it, human/non-human entanglements will simply become more materially pronounced through practices of molecular rearrangement.

As a whole, Nanovision offers a novel perspective about how an emerging technoscience will potentially make new kinds of futures. The book will be a stimulating read for those in visual culture, sociology, and science and technology studies interested in considering the social and cultural effects of nanotechnology. However, Nanovision could be improved by analytically interweaving an examination of particular case studies since it is difficult to say how humans will be affected by this set of technologies without exploring what specific kinds of research are being carried out. While the purpose of the book is to seemingly provide a socio-cultural analysis, introducing a few cases would further investigate the ways of seeing which inform these practices and raise the possibility of multiple nanovision(s). Milburn does propose that the future is capable of accommodating several nanovision(s) at the end of his introduction, but it could be developed more. Perhaps less detail on literary texts and nanowritings would allow room for expansion on how specific practices of nanotechnology also enact their own visions.