Biotopology declares a constitutive allegiance to the fielding of “as many of the various scales of action that directly or indirectly contribute to an organism that person’s ability to form an architectural body and to function in all respects.” Nanotechnology will be of some interest to biotopology in this regard. What are the stakes of their potential confluence?
Biotopologists “do not desire to succeed in getting a determinative numerical fix on substances, entities, or events.” Already, discord threatens an apparently perfect union. The biotopologist reminds us that “those seeking to be truly exacting when trying to assess what is going on as bioscleave had better not forget its great ‘penchant’ for indeterminacy.” To be sure, the nanotechnologist does not forget. Immersed in and enabled by the arcana of quantum mechanics, the nanotechnologist remembers indeterminacy the better to help matter forget it. As the name of a global scientific enterprise, “nanotechnology” designates that industry which is in the business of capitalizing upon the fundamental indeterminacy of matter by integrating it into thoroughly determinate structures.
Let’s hear from an expert witness:
In engineering terms, there seems so far nothing we can do on the macroscale that we can’t do at the nanoscale….That’s not to say that nanotechnology is no more than macrotechnology writ small. Some things are very different down at the scale of molecules and cells. Fluids start to look grainy and highly viscous. Surface tension becomes a dominant force. Quantum effects come into play, and everything is buffeted by Brownian motion. But with a bit of ingenuity, all of these things can be used to advantage. (Philip Ball, “It’s a Small World,” Chemistry World 1, no. 2 [2004], 30).
In this account, the epistemological problem of what used to be called the Uncertainty Principle is obviated by “a bit of ingenuity” in the domain of design. What matter that we cannot know the position and velocity of a given particle simultaneously, if we can integrate “quantum effects” into those methods of fabrication that we mobilize in pursuit of what Harvard chemist G.M. Whitesides calls “self-assembly at all scales”? Nantochnology seeks the seamless accommodation of scalar incommensurability into the universal techne that Buckminster Fuller called “design-science.”
For reasons that I cannot properly outline here, I posit that procedural architecture is not only the unassimilable Other of design-science, but also its proper antagonist and even, if reversible destiny would have it, its undoing. If Fuller’s design-science appears to be broadly consistent with the structural principles of nanoscale engineering (to wit: the Buckminsterfullerene and its upwardly mobile offspring, the carbon nanotube), then procedural architecture can only enter into a liason with nanotechnology in order to exacerbate the inconsistencies that the latter attempts to tame in its pursuit of structural perfection. Nanotechnological pragmatics enlists the means of indeterminacy toward the ends of structural determination. Insofar as biotopology—a pragmatism without ends—insists upon the tentativeness of any holding in place, it might seek to put asunder that which nanoscale fabrication has joined together.
No luddite, the biotopologist merely asks: what if nanotechnology were a means without ends? A rigorous exploration of indeterminacy rather than its effective (operational) resolution? What if it were enlisted in the engineering of contingency, rather than the elimination of contingency through engineering? Can we address any and all scales of action—as many as we might possibly field—without manufacturing their scalar integration? We want more scales of action, not one scale of action incorporating what was heretofore a multiplicity of rigorously discrepant scalar regimes. This is why any biotopologist should also brood upon the great disputes agitating contemporary physics and cosmology concerning scalar commensurability, proliferating dimensions, supersymmetry, and dark matter. Biotopology not only sets itself against design-science and in the service of procedural architecture; it also never hesitates to flout Ockham’s razor whenever the latter conflicts with the imperatives of reversible destiny.
Cf. Nathan Brown, “Immortality by design,” forthcoming in parallax 48 (August 2008).
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