(Re)making matter: design and selection

Abstract

For Arendt, science and culture are intimately interwoven. Science is 'anticipated in dreams'; in science-fiction writing, film and vernacular culture. This dreaming provides both the rationale and cultural and cognitive frame(s) in which to situate emerging technologies. Arendt evokes something of Benjamin's sense of the dream-state (see BuckMorss 1989) in which the imaginative and the material are complexly wrapped in the dynamic process of dreaming. Arendt's placement of the Sputnik's orbit in the wider context of popular dreams of space travel and extraterrestrial ism also addresses the temporal development of new science and the emergence of new technologies such as nanotechnology, in which 'dreams' are said to become 'reality'. For Arendt, this dreaming provides the discursive and ideological context in which such developments are positioned. New technologies are firmly rooted in, and yet challenge and potentially transform, 'the human condition'. Recently, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2005) has used Arendt's notion of the 'human condition' in a provocative call for a 'philosophical foundation of nanoethics'. Following Arendt, he suggests that 'men dream science before doing it and that these dreams . . . have a causal effect on the world and transform the human condition' (p. 6). His use of Arendt's notion of the human condition and her socio-political understanding of science and technology allow Dupuy to develop a powerful case for a non-consequential ist 'nano-ethics'. In contrast to existing teleological frameworks, in which ethical analysis is framed simply as a response to the consequences of specific 'techniques' (Luhmann 1992), Dupuy re-directs attention to the transformative potential of new technologies. Dupuy suggests that ethical analysis of new and emerging technologies should not only encompass their technical specificities but also the wider socio-political framing. That is ethical analysis should not simply focus on restricted analyses of individual scientific techniques, but rather on the deontological and normative challenge posed by the potential transformations in the human condition. In this paper I build on and extend Dupuy's account by developing what might be called a 'nonconsequential ist' politics of nanotechnology. That is, I attempt to develop a political rationale for the consideration of the normative and deontological dimensions of nanotechnologies. Despite the lively characterizations of relationship between society and new technologies in contemporary fiction writing, cinema and cultural studies, contemporary political debates concerning competing visions of the relationship between technology and society are typically limited to arguments about very specific technical questions. For example, in recent technological controversies concerning GM foods and civil nuclear power, political debate largely centred on