September 3, 2009
Novelty as a problem and/or concept?
This is a not-completely-thought-through attempt to provoke continued conversation here. I’m in the middle of trying to finish a manuscript on Nanotechnology and Responsibility based on the work i’ve pursued amongst this group over the last few years. Among the concepts that has emerged for me that I cannot get rid of, but cannot think without is novelty–including all its variations such as innovation, creativity, the new and the fashionable. My attempt at reasoning through why this is important in my case is the following tagline/aphorism: “Making things new, making things safe, making a career.” Unraveled, the phrase is intended to capture the way that my subjects transformed the problem of environmental and biological properties of nanomaterials (e.g. their “safety”) into a kind of problem which other scientists and engineers experienced as novel. Novel enough to merit the kinds of accolades and approbation that supposedly drive scientists–it was an attempt not just to solve a problem, but to “make” their careers (at all levels, the grad students excitement about partcipation, the interdisciplinary invention of a new thing, and the classic senior scientists struggling for power and recognition for what they did).
But I am no longer sure what I mean by novelty. At one level, this is not just about conventional novelty in science, which is often treated as an unproblematic feature of scientific research–rather, it is about the effort necessary to make something unrecognizable into something novel. It’s not just one set of scientists that needs to see something as new, but an intersection or union of multiple sets. Safety was seen by most chemists, physicists, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. The story I tell is about making safety into something “novel” enough to transcend that image.
At another level, however, novelty is so pervasive and so important today that nearly everything counts as something new. I’ve started to wonder whether it would be possible to find anyone in science who was in fact not interested in making something new, and if such a creature could ever survive? This rise to prominence of novelty as the supervalue of values renders it unstable, both as a feature of working science, and as a concept for understanding what is happening. Is novelty being decoupled from power? Is it proliferating into a bureaucratic value like cleanliness or accuracy?
Finally, there is a philosophical angle to this concern. Concerning the cultural significance of nanotechnology (those conceptual interconnection of problems of Weberian fame), the question of novelty is in the background all the time. Weber’s Tolstoyish question “how shall we live” is rendered problematic today because the way we live is changing, and quickly by most accounts, with the knowledge and things we create. Old answers don’t apply, new double binds arise, paradoxes and dangers and uncertainties which, even in the best of cases, seem unanswerable in classic philosophical terms. The twist is the contemporary concern (obsession even) with novelty: both within science and engineering and outside of it, novelty has become the single most important cultural feature of knowledge production in our world. More important than lastingness, more important than certainty, more important than utility even, the race for novelty absolutely structures and determines the lives of scientists and engineers, as well as those who observe them (journalists, funders, regulators, anthropologists and philosophers). If novelty has become so important, then it gives a twist to that classic philosophical question: how should we live now? And now? And…. now? Like that annoying mobile phone salesperson who says “Can you hear me now?” the question can be asked over and over again. How should we answer this question when things seem to be changing so fast and so constantly? According to what temporality should the problem of novelty be rendered conceptually solid?
So two questions: 1) what is the conceptual locus of this problem? Are there other concepts (and/or texts) which form the horizon of the problem? 2) Is novelty as I’ve described it above, a problem that relates science and politics (or rationality and governmentality) in ways that need to be explored? Does novelty play as central a role in the security of vital systems or in the formation of police power as it does in the generation of scientific and engineering objects?
Update:: Okay maybe three, since I forgot to include the equally problematic concept of “emergence” and “emergent forms” which I do not think helps matters all that much. It shifts the problem away from the de novo creation of things to their recombination. This is useful as a first step, but I also think there is as much “emergence” out there (and as valued) as there is novelty.