Abstract
This chapter aims to contribute to the expanding and critical discussion on technoscience, while analyzing the role of particular sociotechnical imaginaries in stimulating, directing and delimiting nanotechnology discourse. For this purpose, it traces emergent discourse on a technical object called NanospiderTM- patented technology for the manufacture production of nanofibrous materials.
Nanospider design exploits inherent properties of the available materials to accomplish specific declared goals, but it also bears a plethora of social meanings and as such it is open to critical discussion. In my chapter, nanospider is explored as a situated use of language marked by a tense interaction between mutually implicated yet contestatory tendencies between media and science.
One of the outcomes is a paradoxical view of history of nanotechnology in which nanospider sometimes appears as the vanguard of progress, but then, also a mere symptom of its context. From another perspective, this technical object rhetorically surmounts the machine to become a specimen of an entreprised up animal, a fabricated agent of technological and social change.
Exploring its altered definitions and meanings, its symptomatic implosion of dichotomies is of equal importance for our understanding of the politics of technoscience.