It

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Its all about greenness - social
experimentation with nanotechnologies

• Astrid E. Schwarz

Workshop Converging technologies Some pressing
ethical issues July 22th, 2009 CAPPE, Canberra
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Its all about greenness - social
experimentation with nanotechnologies

• Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
• Converging of eco and nano ?
• Challenging pleasure and limits
• nanotechnologies and ecotechnologies
• What kind of social experimentation?
• Difference in experimental design Germany and
  the US

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Its all about greenness - social
experimentation with nanotechnologies

• If we suggest that green nanotechnology is not
  just an ephemeral or superficial societal
  phenomenon that owes its existence merely to
  campaign ploys, or advertising strategies, or the
  control of some global players
• Then it is interesting to elaborate on the
  hypothesis that deeper lying societal and
  cognitive structures are at work here

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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Processes

• - nanomaterials as catalysts for greater
  efficiency in current manufacturing processes
  (green chemistry principles)
• the use of nanomaterials and nanodevices to
  reduce pollution
• (e.g. water and air filters)
• nanomaterials for more efficient alternative
  energy production
• (e.g. solar and fuel cells)
• synthesis of nanoparticles from microbes and
  also from dead or live plants

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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Policy strategies
Green Nanotechnology Its easier than you
think Report from the Woodrow Wilson Institut
2007
Project Director D. Rejeski about emerging
technologies As instruments of sustainability
nanotechnologies can only develop further if we
promote the dissemination of green nano practices
and technologies on a broad basis
Researcher assure us that a strong marriage
between nanotechnology and green
chemistry/engineering holds the key to building
an environmentally sustainable society in the
21st century
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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Policy strategies
BARBARA KARN (US Environmental Protection
Agency, Fellow at Woodrow Wilson Institute)

• Producing nanomaterials and products without
  harming
• the environment or human health
• Nanoproducts that provide solutions to
  environmental challenge

Nanotechnology potentially is a doubly green
dream. It offers us the opportunity to make
products and processes green from the
beginning It allows us to substitute more
environmentally-friendly chemicals, materials and
manufacturing processes for older, more polluting
ones
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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Products
The project of emerging nanotechnologies -
Woodrow Wilson International Center http//www.nan
otechproject.org/inventories/consumer/
The project An inventory of Nano- technology-base
d consumer products currently on the market.

• Three criteria for selection of products
• - They can be readily purchased by consumers
• They are identified as nanobased by the
  manufacturer
• - Nano-based claims for the product
• appear reasonable

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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Green nano products?
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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Products
What makes the socks nano? What makes the socks
eco?
http//www.greenyarn.com/ - the eco-fabric
contains nanoparticles of bamboo-carbon
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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Products - Exhibition in 2007 Nanotechnology in
everyday life
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Labelling and occupying green nanotechnology
Products - Exhibition in 2007 Nanotechnology in
everyday life
Valorized socks The Greenyarn socks as museum
objects
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Convergence of eco and nano ?

• At the end of the day -
• Are eco and nano mutually exclusive cultures ?
• Or do we rather experience the convergence of eco
  and nano ?

• NANO
• - Technical innovation
• - Technological optimism,
• joining in the power of innovation
• principles of pleasure and
• transgressing limits
• - Saying yes

• ECO
• - Heuristic of caution, conservation
• Technological pessimism
• eventually alarmist outlook on the world
• principles of renunciation
• and self-control
• - Saying no

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Challenging pleasure and limits
nanotechnologies and ecotechnologies

• What ecotechnologies and nanotechnologies share
• Limits
• acknowledge limits to growth - arguments
• recommend strategies of control to disclose,
  perhaps new resources
• beyond these limits,
• recommend the precision control of flux of
  matter, of inputs and outputs,
• and thus greater efficiency
• - share the idea that, in order to preserve
  nature, we need to improve nature

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Challenging pleasure and limits
What ecotechnologies and nanotechnologies share
either Pleasure of transgressing these
limits In same time it can be also detected a
tension that comes with the very idea of an
"unlimited potential" - the limitless
opportunities for innovation ("global
abundance"), - harnessing of new energies
("hydrogen economies"), - recreation of nature
("restoration ecology"), - enhancement of
efficiency ("synthetic biology") foster excess
rather than restraint
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Challenging pleasure and limits What kind of
Pleasure in Science and Technology ?
Plaisir and Jouissance (Roland Barthes 1975) -
Plaisir simply hints at an easygoing enjoyment of
texts, more stable in its reeactment of
cultural codes - Jouissance calls up a violent,
climactic bliss closer to loss, death,
fragmentation, and the disruptive rapture
experienced when transgressing limits Truth and
Pleasure (Arne Hessenbruch 2004) Relation
between public and science described in terms of
truth. Change from a concern with truth to a
concern with research relevant ot a market
pleasure might then be an appropriate conceptual
term in addition to truth jouissance may well
resemble the feeling of exhilaration prompted by
nanohype pleasure, in all its shades, may be
found in scientific texts
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Challenging pleasure and limits What kind of
Pleasure in Science and Technology ?
Georges Bataille Control, Jouissance and
Expenditure Bataille is a thinker whose thought
is infused, , with what one branch of
psychoanalysis would call jouissance. Except that
here this term could not be simply glossed as to
come or the experience of coming or bliss,
or - least of all - enjoyment. Batailles
writing is both an anguished commentary on, and
an instance of, jouissance in so far as
jouissance can be understood as a mode of
expenditure or dépense that, pushed to the
limit of all reason, utility, morality, sense or
meaning, takes experience itself, opening what
was once oneself on to an apprehension of an
impossible totality. (Botting Wilson 1998)
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Challenging pleasure and limits
Permanent tension between acceptance and and
transgression of limits Pleasure (and not
necessity or efficiency) is the driver of excess
to push limits

• - Resource constraints AND excess of matter (or
  products)
• - Global limits to growth AND boundless spaces of
  possibilites

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Challenging pleasure and limits
The pleasure of green products - transgressing
limits Changing conceptualizations of
consumption between the 1950ies and the
1970ies shaping and being shaped by the
environmental movement From the flat culture of
the mass market and a passive consumer To the
political consumer (Ulrich Beck 2005) Consumers
with an active, self-aware global citizenship and
with a deep lifestyle To the LOHAS -
Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability www.LOHAS.
com
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Challenging pleasure and limits the pleasure of
political consumers and LOHAS
Sociologist Paul Rey (2000) The Cultural
Creatives. How 50 Million Are Changing The World.
Consumism (guiltless consumption) or Power of
Moralists (Nico Stehr) ?
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Being smart - the pleasure of political
consumers and LOHAS
LOHAS - Life Style of Health and
Sustainability a market segment focussing on
health and fitness, the environment, personal
development, sustainable living, and social
justice LOHAS companies "responsible
capitalism" by providing goods and services
using economic and environmentally sustainable
business practices LOHAS consumers Lohasians
are interested in products covering a range of
market sectors and sub-sectors, including Green
building supplies, socially responsible investing
and "green stocks", alternative healthcare,
organic clothing and food, hybrid cars,
eco-tourism etc. that is mainly
in products produced on the basis of green
technologies
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What kind of social experimentation ?
Inventing and establishing new technologies
trial and error with and within society GMO,
nuclear power plant, ecological restoration
projects - the city as a social laboratory
(Park 1929) the development of the city as an
ongoing process of collective
self-experimentation - piecemeal social
engineering (Popper 1945) the open society
and its enemies small social experiments
help us to improve our knowledge - Society as
a lab (Krohn and Weyer 1986) Extending
scientific experimentation as a model for
dealing with technical and social
uncertainties outside the narrow confines of the
laboratory. - real-world experiment (Krohn
2007) the paradox of not knowing before the
experiment whether the social and ecological
risks are acceptable.
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What kind of social experimentation ?

• Collective experimentation as governance regime
  (2007)
• EU Report Expert Group on Science and Government
  Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously
  (2007) Deliberative Experiment as Policy
• - collective experiments combine knowledge and
  ignorance
• experimental systems are open to deliberative
  design
• sensitive to interests and values
• experimentation as a viable tool to sustainable
  activities in society,
• not as a precondition of action, but as a
  result of learning

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What kind of social experimentation ? Having a
closer look into the US laboratory

• Back to the report Green nanotechnology Its
  easier than you think
• green nanotechnology is linked to green
  chemistry
• being drawn almost in the sense of a natural
  evolution
• - common aspects in institutional initiatives and
  individuals,
• but also by way of a transfer of precepts from
  green chemistry to nanotechnology
• - a model that has already been tried and tested
  and successfully established
• is transferred to a technology of the future -
  
• and thus benefits from being placed on the
  solid ground of proven experience
• pre- empting the future, as it were, by way of
  the past.
• - Just as discourse about the future is always
  simultaneously discourse about all things
  present, so too are expectations and fears of the
  future a crucial factor in decisions made in the
  present.

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What kind of social experimentation ? Having a
closer look into the US laboratory
- Thus green nanotechnology is not something
radically new or spectacularly unexpected
instead it is located in an already familiar
experiential horizon, namely that of established
green chemistry. - Products and processes that
embody this philosophy include water and air
filters, top grade catalytic converters and solar
cells. All these are established green products
that have rarely been associated with
nanotechnologies to date, or at least not
directly. However, the visibility of such real
products on the market significantly increases
trust in the greening of nanotechnology,

• emphasis on downstream measures aimed at
  regulation and control

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What kind of social experimentation ? Having a
closer look into the US laboratory
Rejeski from WWC (2007) The U.S. government
needs a strategy for encouraging and stimulating
green nanotechnology

• The strategic package contains 13 points that are
  formulated as direct recommendations.
• Just a few will be mentioned here
• strict quality control over the identity of nano
  products and methods claimed to be green
• increased support for university research in the
  area of green nano and collaboration with
  industry
• use of federal capital for supporting green
  nano products
• (such as the US Department of Defense as well
  as administration
• and the postal service)

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What kind of social experimentation ? Having a
closer look into the German laboratory

• In Germany the trend seems to be to proceed more
  along the lines of a co-evolutionary concept of
  shaping technology, though this is not made
  explicit.
• - societal significance of grüne Nanotechnologie
• potential for protecting the environment
  enablers of new technologies -
• a vote that is carried by an alliance
  consisting of politicians, business people and
  scientists
• conception of a co-evolutionary shaping of
  technology (Bijker 1987, in the science policy
  discourse Rip 2002)
• idea of mutual influence of technology and
  society
• and processes of reciprocal appropriation
• This is basically a bottom-up approach that
  prepares the actors from the start for learning
  from one another and puts its faith in reflexive
  regulation by means of open learning spaces and
  institutionalised feedback.

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Coming to an end ...
Eco- and nanotechnologies seem to share a sense
of necessity (and possibility) of monitoring and
eventually controlling every input and output of
the production system, thus pursuing the
impossible dream of production without waste,
excess, abjection this opens new possibilities
of both economic and material abundance as well
as guiltless consumption - all of them sources
and drivers of pleasure
In terms of collective experimentation aiming at
reflexive regulation by means of open learning
spaces Green nanotechnology might become a
viable and desirable scientific, technological
and political programme