hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Hope for Nanotechnology: Anticipatory Knowledge and the Governance of AffectAuthor(s): Ben AndersonSource: Area, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 156-165Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40346022 .

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Hope for nanotechnology: anticipatory knowledge and the governance of affect

Area (2007) 39.2, 156-165

Ben Anderson Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE

Email: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 23 January 2007

This paper describes how hopes can be, and have been, placed in nanotechnology. Focusing on two recent UK government reports into the future of nanotechnology, by the DTI/OST and MoD, the paper describes how the disclosure of the nanoscale as a

place subject to intervention, the act that is taken to define nanotechnology, can be understood in the context of anticipatory knowledge practices that create futures. Because the object of such practices are virtualities, such as opportunities and threats, the paper argues that affect is transversal to both nano-technoscience and anticipatory governance. In conclusion, I open up a set of questions about anticipatory knowledges and argue that the ground that enables hope to be placed in nanotechnology is the event that defines nano - to simultaneously reduce 'life' to matter and to multiply 'life' into a limitless set of materialities.

Key words: matter, hope, affect, nanotechnology, anticipatory knowledge, non-

representational theory

Introduction: hope and life itself On 21 January 2000, President Clinton, announcing the National Nanotechnology Initiative at California Institute of Technology, asserted that nanotechnology would play a decisive role in bringing about 'an era of unparalleled promise'. He continued by asking his audience of scientists and industrialists to:

Imagine the possibilities. Materials with ten times the strength of steel and only a small fraction of the weight - shrinking all the information housed at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube - detecting cancerous tumors when they are only a few cells in size. (Cited in National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology 2000)

Clinton's evocation of a range of unnamed new materialities (with different properties of size, weight and strength), and a named capacity (early cancer detection), resonates with other injunctions to imagine the possibilities of nanotechnology. Injunctions

that hope for almost anything from the banal and

everyday (such as new hair-care products) to the fantastic and Utopian (such as posthuman bodily states). Simply put, despite the ambiguous, reflective, relation we may now have with science and technology, a range of Western governmental and non-governmental actors have created hope for specific nanotechnologies and for nanotechnology as a disruptive event. Potential has come to reside in nanotechnology and promise in a nano-enabled future. The task that animates this

paper is, therefore, a simple one - to understand how hope is created for nanotechnology. Hopes such as those listed in the context of US nanotech-

nology and nanoscience policy:

• The human body will be more durable, healthier, more energetic, easier to repair, and more resistant to stress, biological threats and aging processes.

• National security will be greatly strengthened by lightweight, information-rich fighting systems, uninhabited combat vehicles, adaptable smart materials, invulnerable data networks, superior

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Hope for nanotechnology 1 57

intelligence-gathering systems, and effective defence against biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear attacks . . . (Rocoand Bainbridge2002; bullet points in original)

The open-endedness of this list of just some of the

hopes named in Roco and Bainbridge's report, that is its logic of open-ended seriality, hints that the

problem that animates this paper is not simply to understand the presence of specific hopes. But, rather, to understand how hopes are accumulated for nanotechnology. Hopes that are perhaps without limit.

Nanotechnology is, of course, not the only new or emerging technology animated by the circulation of hopes in and for possible or potential future benefits. Indeed Mulkay (1993), commenting on the UK embryo debate, argues that hope has been the default mode of legitimization for new or emerging technologies in the West. Now we may want to

question this assertion given the emergence of fears and anxieties around new and emerging technolo-

gies, a point I will return to later in the paper, but

hopes still accompany the emergence of new or altered technologies to serve important functions; disrupting networks, establishing legitimacies, enroll-

ing actors, mobilizing resources, dampening dis- sents or forcing silences (see Brown 2006). Given these functions, the paper describes how hope emerges alongside the particular disclosure of the nanoscale that is taken to define the event of

nanotechnology. The first section argues that the reduction of life to 'materiality itself can only be understood within the context of a set of anticipatory practices that govern futures. Section two argues that anticipatory practices function through affect and that affect is, consequently, transversal to the

multiple processes of anticipatory governance.1 The

following two sections turn to describe how hopes have been placed in nanotechnology in UK science and technology policy, focusing on relatively early reports by the MoD (2001) and the DTI/OST (2002). The third section argues that the ground for hopes to be created for nanotechnology is the tension between the promise of an equivalence between 'life itself and matter and the promise of a multiplication of matter into an excess of new or altered materialities. It is then argued that the hopes that emerge in the midst of this tension are legitimized through the

strategic enactment of explicitly anticipatory epistemic objects that function by creating what Massumi (2005a) has termed 'affective facts'. The conclusion,

in the exploratory spirit of this paper and special section, opens up a set of questions about anticipatory knowledges and the governance of affect and offers a definition of nanotechnology based on its disclosure of materiality.

Anticipatory knowledge and nanotechnoscience

'Nano', from the Greek nanus ('dwarf), has rapidly achieved the status of a prefix - as in nano-venture capital, nano-art, nano-electronics or nano-science fiction. Until around 20 years ago it was used only as a highly specialized term describing either small amounts ('nanograms' or parts per billion in analyti- cal chemistry, for example) or small time periods (e.g. nanoseconds in laser pulse spectroscopy). 'Nano' is now taken to be a fixed measure, one bil- lionth of a metre, denoting a scale. Nanotechnology is not therefore issue or device based but, as Nord- mann (2002) argues, an attempt to inhabit this place and act on the nanoscale - to see, to move around, to move things and to initiate productive processes (see Nordmann 2004). And the nanoscale is a curious place because it is populated by nothing but matter. What exists, and all that can exist, are atoms and different relations between atoms. This reduction of life to 'matter itself unbounds human and non-human bodies by making them mere phantasms subject to the twin moves of analysis and synthesis that have long provided the formal and epistemolog- ical basis to atomism (Tiffany 2000). Life becomes matter and matter becomes its constitutive elementary parts (atoms and molecules) which are then synthe- sized into more complex structures (whether through 'molecular self assembly' (Drexler 1986) or 'bio-

nanotechnology' (Jones 2004)). Because the atomic microcosm is made the last residue of the real, internal to nano-technoscience is, therefore, a moment of radical doubt: a move that subjects matter to a dream of perfect modulation and discloses the nanoscale as a place subject to a particular sort of inhabitation - unlimited control over the structure of matter. Ultimately nanotechnology is, or so this critical story goes, another example of the instru- mentalization of life - albeit one founded on the rationalization of insensible bodies that has long characterized atomism.

Perhaps what the prefix 'nano' names, therefore, is not only a place but the reduction of life to matter and the opening up of life to control without remainder. Now this narrative is convincing, perhaps

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1 58 Anderson

a creative constitution of the future with respect to positive and enterprising dispositions of risk taking and on a corresponding stance of reasonable foresight or everyday prudence (distinct from both statistical and expert-based calculation) with respect to potential harms. (2000, 461; emphasis in original)

Anticipatory governance based upon a logic of

preemption, to give a contrasting example, can be

entangled with a 'when, then' causal logic rather than 'what if questions (Elmer and Opel 2006).

Because of these and other differences, it is worth distinguishing between anticipatory knowledge practices on a number of axes before we turn to focus in the later sections on specific practices, notably scenarios, in relation to nanotechnology. First, and most simply, anticipatory knowledges such as preemption or prevention differ in the skills and techniques that compose them and in their

logics and rationalities. Second, different anticipatory practices produce different epistemic objects through which future possibilities and potentialities are dis-

closed, objectified, communicated and rendered mobile (such as scenarios, trends, forecasts, predic- tions, signals, plans and roadmaps). For example, the Foresight Institute, the organization founded by Erik Drekler, has created imaginative scenarios of a host of 'potential applications' (nanomachines, etc.) alongside technology and social policy 'roadmaps' that aim to 'ensure the beneficial implementation of

nanotechnology' (cited at http://www.foresight.org). Third, the effect of such anticipatory practices is that immaterialities, including risks, threats, opportunities and promises, can be considered to be co-produced as part of technoscientific assemblages. Witness for

example how, in a different context to nanotechnology, post 9/11 USA governmental ity has moulded itself around the disclosure and elimination of threat (Massumi 2005b).

Anticipatory governance and 'affective facts'

Despite the odd temporal and ontological status of immaterialities such as risks and threats, poised between the virtual and actual and the present and future (Massumi 2005b), such modes of inactuality can come to take on a complex efficacy. In this section I argue that their efficacy is achieved predominantly although not exclusively through affect and that affect is, consequently, not a mere 'extra' to technoscience that can be attributed directly to indi- vidual personal feelings or vaguely to a collective

because it makes nanotechnology the culmination of the disenchantment of matter (see Bennett 2001), but it forgets the multiplicity of other ways in which the nanoscale has been, is and will be disclosed. Kearnes (2006), for example, has convincingly argued that nanotechnologies based on biomimetic under-

standings of 'life' complicate this narrative by being based on practices that 'modulate' rather than 'control' molecular processes (see Bensaude-Vincent 2006). In addition, and the focus of this paper, the

practices that establish such complex relations between life and matter are accompanied by a multitude of other practices in different spheres that make and remake the event 'nanotechnology'. Because, to put it simply, if nanotechnology can be said to currently exist it is in an odd zone poised between 'reality and dream, present and future, fact and fiction' (Hayles 2004, 11). So the two reports on nanotechnology that are the subject of this paper, by the MoD and the DTI/OST, explicitly attach

nanotechnologies to a set of risks and opportunities. Both are the result of a range of anticipatory know-

ledge practices, including Delphi exercises, horizon-

scanning exercises and simulations, that over the

past 10 years have become institutionally embedded in UK science and technology policy-making. Thus the ontological and temporal indeterminacy of

dwelling at the nanoscale is not simply a given but a practical achievement emergent from these and other practices that create, know and govern possible, potential or preferred futures (including roadmaps, future assessments, visions, simulations, scenarios and science fiction).

Given this range, how to understand how anticipatory knowledge functions? Perhaps it is worth pausing, before working through this question, to stress that different anticipatory knowledges have

long been intertwined with governing. Divination and clairvoyance were entangled with the exercise of sovereign power in ancient civilizations, whilst, from probability statements about economic cycles through to future markets, the governance of capitalism is anticipatory (Adam 2006). Because of the difference between these techniques it is a mistake to assume that anticipatory practices in relation to nanotechnology are exclusively based on a desire to alleviate future uncertainties. O'Malley, drawing on the example of the promissory logic of contract law, cautions against any one-dimensional understanding of anticipatory practices by arguing that uncertainty itself has long been a distinctive modality of governance based on both






mood but a necessary component of how anticipatory practices function.

That certain affects, notably fear, dread and anxiety, accompany the emergence of anticipatory logics of governance is now widely claimed or asserted.

Heightened concerns about a range of risks, now in almost every conceivable sphere of thought and life, are argued to have generated a 'culture of fear' (see Furedi 2002). New risks are produced and these enact fears and/or anxieties which feed back to produce societies governed by the logic of risk and conduct shaped by danger/threat. Isin, developing the implications of these claims for the subject that is governed, argues that contemporary governance now takes as its subject the citizen as an affective

being 'who governs itself through responses to anxieties and uncertainties' and is thus incited to make two adjustments to its conduct:

[o]n the one hand the neurotic citizen is incited to make social and cultural investments to eliminate various dangers by calibrating its conduct on the basis of its anxieties and insecurities rather than rationalities, it is also invited to consider itself as part of a neurological species and understand itself as an affect structure. (Isin 2004, 223)

Whether diagnosing a 'culture of fear', or attending to 'neurosis', there is an assumption that contemporary governance works through and modulates affects. However, before we get carried away with the new- ness of this situation, placing it in the context of the

emergence of a public sphere in which claims are made on the basis of affective appeals for example (Berlant 1997), two caveats are necessary. First, we should take care not to assume that the governance of affect is necessarily a new phenomena and cer-

tainly not exclusive to technoscience or a so-called risk society. Stoler (2004), for example, has traced the emergence of forms of governance in early twentieth-century India that work on the distribution of affects between 'colonial' and 'native' subjects. Second, we should remember that other practices of

governing that are not explicitly anticipatory also take place through affect. Watson (1 999), for exam-

ple, traces how UK policing is bound up with the affect of suspicion whilst Orr (2006) tracks the role of morale in cold war civil defence planning.

Given these caveats, which should cause us to

pause before identifying a single collective mood to this or any other geo/bio-political present, what is

required is an attention to how virtualities (i.e. a risk or an opportunity) function in relation to affect.

Massumi's (2005a 2005b) recent work on the logic of pre-emption offers the beginning of such a pro- cessual definition of the affect/governance relation. Pre-emption, Massumi (2005a, 7) argues, is a peculiar logic of anticipatory governance based on 'the sovereign closure of the foregone event' through which certain consequences of a future event are induced to effect the present but, and here is the twist, under conditions of the sovereign's choosing. Thus:

Rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future [i.e. prevention], preemption brings the future into the present. It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event's consequences precede it. (Massumi 2005a, 8)

So if the event is pre-empted, it is not simply pre- vented. Instead, through a sovereign action, the consequences of an event are brought into the present to be acted over. As a type of anticipatory governance preemption involves, therefore, a particular relation between the present and future and a specific relation with indeterminacy.

Now these relations will differ for the different anticipatory practices mentioned above, not all of which involve a mix of threat and alarm or encounter the future as a foregone conclusion, but attending to preemption does enable us to clarify the relation between anticipatory governance and affect/emotion. Affect is a necessary component of anticipatory governance because it resolves the paradox of how the event can remain virtual, that is 'be' a threat or an opportunity, but at the same time is real in effect, i.e. it causes some form of event in the present. Oddly, action on the future, as Massumi writes, takes as its object or site the event 'as an eventuality that may or may not occur, but does nevertheless in effect' (2005a, 9). To resolve this curious paradox, preemption relies on affect because of its capacity to self-cause as a change in a body's capacity to affect and be affected - affect 'being purely transi- tive, and not indicative or representative, since it is

experienced in a lived duration that involves the difference between two states' (Deleuze 1988, 49). Massumi uses the strikingly simple term 'affective fact' to describe the reality of such changes in the

capacity to affect and be affected:

So what is an affective fact? The mechanism is quite simple:

Threat triggers fear. The fear is of disruption. The fear is a disruption. (2005a, 36)

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1 60 Anderson

to be the default way of expressing support for tech-

nological developments, I want to turn to describe how the 'affective facts' that are named as hopes come to accumulate for nanotechnology by focus-

ing on reports by the DTI and MoD.

Hope for nanotechnology is inseparable from the

founding equivalence between the nanoscale and

matter, as discussed in the first section, but this

founding act is not expressed as a reduction but as an multiplication of what exists at the nanoscale. Both the DTI and MoD reports open by specifying a set of hopes or promises that are made sensible only as a set of new or altered possible future materialities. New Dimensions for Manufacturing: A UK Strategy for Nanotechnology stresses that:

Nanotechnology has become a topic of widespread discussion amongst researchers, in the media, among the investment community and elsewhere. While there is certainly a degree of hyperbole in some of this enthusiasm, it is no exaggeration to say that nanotechnology is set to disrupt the face of much of industry. Nanotechnology is about new ways of making things. It promises more for less: smaller, cheaper, lighter and faster devices with greater functionality, using less raw material and consuming less energy. Any industry that fails to investigate the potential of nanotechnology, and to put in place its own strategy for dealing with it, is putting its business at risk. (DTI/OST 2002, 6)

Hope is not rare or scarce because of the abundance of materialities - materialities that are distinguished not by their substantive identity but by their different

capacities ('greater functionality') and properties ('less energy', 'less raw material'). Nanotechnology: Its Impact on Defence and the MoD also names an excess of materialities and capacities:

For defence the implications could be enormous, both in terms of the opportunities it might offer to grow our own military capability, and the new threats it might lead to. The list of possibilities is long but includes: Completely secure messaging; Intelligent and completely autonomous short and long range highly accurate weapons; Improved stealth but also means to defeat current stealth techniques; Global Information networks and local battlefield systems with 'all-seeing' sensors; Miniature high energy battery and power supplies; Intelligent decisions aids; Self repairing military equipment . . . (MoD 2001, 1)

In both cases the new and altered materialities and

capacities, ranging from new vaccines to new stealth

capacities, and including many others I have not

To summarize: a threat is the cause of a fear in the sense that it triggers and conditions fear's occurrence but without the fear it creates a threat would have no actual effect. An argument we could extend, albeit with modifications, to risks or opportunities. Massumi's argument is, therefore, that affect becomes central to the operation of anticipatory power by virtue of its capacity to take place in-between orders of phenomena - in the context of this paper between the promise of nano and the present. An

argument that is dependant on giving affect a transversal status in relation to other events and states of affairs:

Affect is not just one mechanism among others. It is component of passage between mechanisms, orders of phenomena and modes of power ... It [is] central by being interstitial. A passage across the overlaps effects a gear-shifting between registers. A pause in the passage allows a co-functioning of formally distinct processes. Affect is an effective mechanism of operational linkage. (Massumi 2005a, 7)

Affect is here understood, following Deleuze (1988), as a mechanism of linkage that enables otherwise distinct processes, or events, or states of affairs to exist in relation. A definition that is very different, we should note, from its use in the literature that

diagnoses a 'culture of fear' or a 'neurotic society' where affect is predominantly understood as either an object to be governed (and interchangeable with

any other object) or an instrument to be used in

conjunction with logico-discursive reason. Instead, affects are openings onto the numerous virtual ities that populate anticipatory governance, which are

qualified in the emotions for which we have proper names (a fear, an anxiety, etc.), but also take on

dynamic, kinetic qualities so that risks 'surge', 'fade', 'fleet', 'explode', 'burst' and so on (Stern 1998).

Accumulating hope In the previous two sections I have argued that nano-technoscience is inseparable from a set of

anticipatory knowledge practices in which virtualities (threats, opportunities, risks, hazards) take on a

'complex efficacy' (Connolly 2002). Alongside the

equivalence between life and matter has, therefore, been the disclosure of a range of 'affective facts' in and through which anticipatory practices effect the present. Given the conditions of affective uncertainty in which nanotechnology now takes place, which means that hope can no longer be assumed






included here, enact the nanoscale as a place in which excessive material abundance is virtual - in Proust's sense that it is 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract' (Deleuze 1991, 96).

The ground for the very possibility of hope in

nanotechnology is, therefore, a multiplication of matter that doubles whilst confirming the reduction of life to matter. Although beyond the scope of this

paper, we should remember that this seemingly paradoxical move resonates with older traditions of atomism in which disclosing the atomic substrate as inaccessible to intuition and thus reliant on

analogies serves to enable rather than close down an expansion of human intervention (see Tiffany 2000). The accumulation of hope in nanotechnology enacts and reinforces this double origin. On the one hand, a finite set of already actualized hopes are attached to nanotechnology - that is possibilities that exist, are nameable and knowable and have all previously been attached to one or more other technologies. Consider, for example, the hopes for reduced raw material costs for manufacturing that animates the DTI report. A hope that has animated a range of

technological events, but also resonates with tendencies to try and reduce the cost of constant capital in capitalism. Nanotechnology as a technological event enables the continuation of these and other

hopes and enables the assemblages that hopes emerge from to repeat and endure. Unsurprisingly there are, therefore, numerous strategic efforts to frame and give coherence to specific hopes. Nano-

technology shares much here with biotechnologies, which since the mid-1990s have been advocated

through affective appeals (Brown 2006). On the other hand, and simultaneously, nanotechnology in

general has come to accumulate a range of quite different hopes. Unlike technologies orientated around defined promises, cancer care treatments for

example, what is interesting about nanotechnology is the abundance of hope. As in the two reports, different hopes are attached to nanotechnology in one

sphere to be replaced by strikingly different hopes in a separate sphere. This process of accumulation, where specific hopes are rendered substitutable but are not mutually exclusive, is expressed in the numerous animated descriptions of the dynamic 'potential' or 'promise' of nanotechnology as such.

Because this process of accumulating hope in and for nanotechnology can have performative effects, not least the securing of legitimacy and funding (Berube 2006), hope and the act of hoping have

emerged as explicit objects to be governed. There-

fore, in the context of nanotechnology, it is not only that fear is an element of political rule, as work on the culture of fear can imply, but that irruptions of fear or anxiety that would disrupt emerging networks have to be modulated and pre-empted.2 Espe- cially since the event of public opposition to GM foods, and how that event has been understood as offering 'lessons' for nanotechnology, various practices have aimed to generate, maintain and repair hope (and optimism) in nanotechnology. 'Public concern' functions as one of the rationales for recent 'upstream' public engagement events, for example, whilst hope and optimism are now measured, named and monitored through a range of statistical techniques and qualitative methodologies. The 2006 Eurobarometer survey includes an 'optimism index' and an 'optimism ratio' that tracks levels of optimism in EU countries for nanotechnol-

ogy, whilst 'business optimism' in nanotechnology is now measured in the context of a suite of techniques that make optimism and hope frameable and calculable as economic actants.

Scenarios and disclosing opportunities To summarize, the process of accumulating an excess of hopes has occurred in the context of both the disclosure of an excess of materialities and the disclosure of the materiality of 'life itself as a place (the nanoscale) where it is possible to dwell. This double move is the ground, therefore, that provides the conditions of possibility for hopes to be placed in nanotechnology and accumulated by the event that is nano. Yet by making hope internal to nano- technoscience, and in doing so enacting a set of conditionals (including perhaps, maybe or could), faith is placed in the possibility of nanotechnology at the same time as the future of nanotechnology is made uncertain. Given nanotechnology's indetermi-

nacy, which is one effect of the different anticipatory practices named above, the truth value of

specific hopes have, therefore, become a site of contestation within debates around nanotechnology (see, for example, the Drexler and Smalley (2003) debate on the impossibility/possibility of 'molecular assemblers'). In this section I argue that hopes are made reasonable by embedding them in a range of

anticipatory epistemic objects - such as scenarios -

that function to create what Massumi (2005a) terms 'affective facts'.

Both the DTI/OST and MoD reports predict futures, rather than prevent or pre-empt, by embedding a set

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1 62 Anderson

worth focusing on how 'scenarios' perform this

contradictory task because of their sheer ubiquity as devices for imagining possible or potential nano-

technology futures. Even though they are now

widespread in the context of nanotechnology, and

institutionally embedded alongside other anticipatory knowledge practices, it is worth noting that the use of the term 'scenario' to denote an Imagined situation' is of relatively recent provenance. 'Scenario' is a term laced with artifice as befits its origins in theatre and performance (from Scenarius 'of Stage Scenes' and L Scena 'Scene'). The term is not used in its current sense of an 'imagined situation' until 1962 by the cold war nuclear strategist Herman Kahn in Thinking about the Unthinkable. Working first at the RAND Corporation, before founding the Hudson Institute, Kahn and colleagues developed the use of scenarios alongside a range of other future techniques (including Delphi exercises and war gaming).

Scenarios as epistemic objects, and thus effects of conjuncture (Rheinberger 1997), indicate the

paradox at the heart of attempts to establish the reasonableness of the hopes that, as we saw in the previous section, are accumulated in nanotech-

nology. Kahn (1962), in one of the first published reflection on scenarios as a research technique, explicitly founds scenarios on a rejection of a certain

type of realism and an affirmation of potentialities and possibilities as appropriate objects for governance. It is worth quoting at length from a response Kahn gives in Thinking about the Unthinkable to the

objection that scenarios are 'divorced from reality' because it offers an insight into the strictly impossible task of 'future history' that a scenario aims to complete - to 'attempt to describe in more or less detail some

hypothetical sequence of events' (1962, 143):

one must remember that the scenario is not used as a predictive device. The analyst is often dealing with the unknown and unknowable future. It is hard to see how there can be a sure divorce from a reality which does not yet exist. Imagination has always been one of the principal means for dealing in various ways with the future, and the scenario is simply one of many devices useful in stimulating and disciplining the imagination. (Kahn 1962, 145)

Scenarios do not, therefore, function to establish the reasonableness of hope by according them a simple truth-value based on their relation to the current

reality. Instead, in their early origins alongside other

thinking-feeling practices of anticipation and in

of hopes within more or less detailed scenarios. Scenarios that present preferred possible futures that are plural and take two forms. On the one hand, there are new materialities that may come to exist in the form of new or altered materials, devices and machines. On the other hand, there are the new

practices, properties or capacities that such materials, machines or devices may offer. Both are embedded in more or less detailed descriptions that fold the nanoscale into different 'wider contexts'. The MoD offers a set of brief scenarios based on a

type of Delphi exercise. For example:

New forms of sensors, information processing and communication will enable small unmanned systems to have the level of performance at relatively low cost which is currently only possible in large expensive systems. Consequently autonomous weapons will carry detailed knowledge of the terrain and environment they must travel through to reach their target, the ability to adapt to unexpected changes in weather and also the ability to detect and counter threats directed at them. (MoD 2001, 5)

The basis of the DTI/OST report is a set of six more detailed scenarios based on a series of expert work- shops and a foresight process. The scenario 'Success in tissue engineering, medical implants and devices', for example, begins with the following statement:

Nanobiotechnology offers the key to faster and remote diagnostic techniques - including new high throughput diagnostics, multi-parameter, turntable diagnostic techniques, and biochips for a variety of assays. It also enables the development of tissue engineered medical products and artificial organs, such as heart valves, veins and arteries, liver and skin. (DTI/OST 2002, 66)

Each of the six scenarios addresses the UK's 'profile' in the defined sector in relation to 'challenges' (such as 'aggressive' acquisition of companies) and 'drivers of change' (such as an 'ageing population') before finishing by offering a set of 'indicators' of what 'success will look like' in each sector.3

Making hope reasonable is, though, a difficult task, since hope has long been understood to exceed a reckoning, or reason, because of its openness to what Bloch terms the 'not-yet' - hope 'does not address itself to what already exists' (1998, 341). Hope, as with affect, is therefore an unstable object of governance (see Orr 2006). Although the reports are populated by other anticipatory epistemic objects, including indexical objects such as 'trends' that embed the nanoscale in changeable tendencies, it is






current work on futures methodology, scenarios are 'devices' that disclose a relation with the 'unknown' or 'unknowable' by performing two functions. First, they exemplify that certain corporeal and cognitive capacities have been mobilized and put to use in a certain ordering of the world. Thus a 'scenario is a tool for ordering one's perceptions about alternative future environments in which one's decisions

might be played out' (Schwartz 1991, 24). Second, scenarios enable the actualization of possibilities that can then be subject to action. Scenarios therefore have a pragmatic value for how they 'stimulate our imagination ... [by bringing] less probable possibilities into focus' (Kahn 1962 cited in Ghamari- Tabrizi 2005, 1324).

Given these two functions, and the explicit denial of a predictive function, the scenarios offered around nanotechnology cannot be said to have a

simple truth value. Even if, as noted above, the

question of whether a given scenarios is possible (not whether they are probable) is a key means of

establishing the reasonableness of hopes. Instead, scenarios secure the legitimacy of hopes by giving them what, after Massumi (2005b), we could term an 'affective value' based on their status as 'affective facts'. Scenario building as a procedure emerges, we should remember, as part of the ingraining of modes of anticipation based on ever vigilant 'threat-

perception' in the networks that link think tanks and the state/military apparatus (Baxstrom et al. 2005). Defined not by their predictive value, that is a truth value based on their correspondence with reality, scenarios function by establishing 'threats' or, in the case of the two reports, a relation between 'opportunities' and dwelling at the nanoscale. The MoD

report, for example, asserts that:

for defence the implications could be enormous, both in terms of the opportunities it might offer to grow our own military capability and the new threats it might lead to. (MoD 2002, 2)

Unlike a threat, an opportunity is not indeterminate - opportunities can be known with, at least potentially, a surprising level of detail as long as they have been disclosed. Opportunity, Weber (2005) reminds us, is etymological ly linked to opening. Importantly, however, what distinguishes an opportunity is that it waits - if a threat can be said to loom over, or lurk within, the here and now and

require action to pre-empt or prevent its occurrence

then, in contrast, an opportunity requires action to

enable its realization. By demanding to be 'seized' or 'grabbed', and thus entangled in the threat that they will not be acted upon, opportunities produce promises of effective strategic action. The purpose of the DTI report, for example, is 'to help industry harness the commercial opportunities offered by nanotechnology' (DTI/OST 2002) and each of the 'scenarios' ends by setting out 'required actions' in sections entitled 'What do we need to do to make it happen'.

Conclusion: nano and anticipatory knowledges In this exploratory paper I have argued that nanotechnology is animated by anticipatory knowledge practices that function through hope and other linked affects. The affective relations that citizens, investors and consumers have with nanotechnology, in the form of hopes, enthusiasms, anxieties, apa- thies and ambivalences, have therefore emerged as indistinct, unstable objects of governance. Albeit, we should remember, alongside the deliberative management of defined stakeholder 'interests' in which such affective relations can come to be downplayed. The disclosure of the nanoscale should, therefore, be understood alongside the development of practices of anticipatory knowledge that, contrary to the redis- covery of futurity in the social sciences, produce futures that are neither absolutely aporetic nor completely calculable - or phrased differently neither Derrida nor biometrics. Such anticipatory practices are embedded in government and governing - note the

development of networks of preemption in relation to biosecurity in the case of Avian Bird Flu, for example (Braun 2006) - so their use in the case of nanotechnology is far from unique. Nor are they new, their contemporary post Second World War origins lie in the relation between think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and the US government (Baxstrom et al. 2005), yet their current ubiquity raises important questions. Questions such as: how do anticipatory practices fold into changes in governance and how have they been rationalized and legitimized in different contexts?; what body/brain/culture networks make up practices based on modes of anticipation?; how do anticipatory practices coalesce from within

materially heterogeneous, and spatially and temporally distanciated, 'communities of practice' or 'epistemic communities'?; how do anticipatory epistemic objects (such as 'trends' or 'scenarios') and/or virtualities (such as 'threats' or 'opportunities') emerge, circulate and




1 64 Anderson

achieve effects? What habits of thinking, feeling and acting could or should geographers cultivate to

engage with practices that are addressed to potentialities and thus refuse the sober objection that they are divorced from reality?

Turning to the case of nanotechnology, the paper has argued that specific hopes, and a process of

accumulating hope, are co-produced as part of the disclosure of the nanoscale as a place in which it is

possible to dwell and, thereafter, modulate. Nano-

technology is not, therefore, a stable object that hopes can be accumulated in. Rather the event of nano- technoscience, as with all technoscience, is already affective. The result is a curious paradox that speaks to the specific disclosure of a new place in nano-

technology: nanotechnology is founded upon a reduction of life to matter 'in-itself in which events and states of affairs become atoms and relations between atoms. Yet this reduction of life to a certain atomism is constantly met with the multiplication of matter 'in itself into a set of new or altered materialities that are, potentially, without limit. Perhaps what the prefix 'nano' anticipates is therefore not only a new place, and ways of inhabiting that place using certain techniques and procedures, but also an equivalence between that place and the dual event characteristic of atomism - to simultaneously reduce and multiply or, put differently, to essential ize (life as equivalent to 'matter itself) and de-essential ize (life as material abundance).

Acknowledgements

The paper draws on research undertaken as part of an RGS-IBG small grant. Thanks to Louise Amoore, Robert

Doubleday, Paul Harrison, Mathew Kearnes, Steve Hincliffe and Tee Rogers-Hayden for either comments on earlier drafts of the paper or general discussion of the ideas contained within it. The paper benefited from a set of joint Social/ Spatial Theory research cluster and Institute of Hazard and Risk Research meetings on the theme of Theorising Risk that were held in the Department of Geography, Durham

University in 2005/2006.

Notes

1 The term 'affect' is used in the paper in the Spinozist- Deleuzean sense of transpersonal 'capacities to affect and be affected' that exceed subjective emotion (see Anderson 2006; McCormack 2003).

2 There is, of course, a genealogy to the antipathy to fear based on assertions of its opposition to liberty, reason and other enlightenment values beginning, perhaps, with

Michel de Montaigne's declaration that 'the thing I fear most is fear' (cited in Robin 2004).

3 The six scenarios are: success in electronic, communica- tions and informatics; success in drug delivery systems; success in instrumentation, tooling and metrology; success in novel materials; success in sensors and actuators; success in tissue engineering, medical implants and devices (DTI/OST 2002).

4 Ghamari-Tabrizi (2005) here cites a draft, at that stage unpublished, manuscript of Kahn's dated 31 October 1 961 and entitled 'War Scenarios: War in Europe Sequence'.

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