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The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics THE LIMITS OF FABRICATION THE LIMITS OF FABRICATION MATERIALS SCIENCE, MATERIALIST POETICS NATHAN BROWN Fordham University Press New York 2017 Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—­except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1 First edition A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org. for Cynthia Things, and present ones, are the absolute conditions. —­Charles Olson, “Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself” (1958) Blt o by Bolt Every single P art is a crown to Anatom —­Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom (2001) Work nano, think cosmologic. —­Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City (2005) CONTENTS List of Figures ix Prologue: Limits 1 Limit 1: Technoscience, 2 • Limit 2: Poetry, 4 Introduction: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics 11 From Figuration to Configuration, 16 • Signaletic Material, 22 • Method and Structure, 29 1. The Inorganic Open: Nanotechnology and Physical Being 35 The Lacuna of Biopolitics, 37 • Stone and Animal, 40 • Nanotechnology and Physical Being, 45 • The Inorganic Open, 50 2. Objectism: Charles Olson’s Poetics of Physical Being 57 Olson’s Objectism, Whitehead’s Common World, 57 • Objectism versus Organicism, 67 • Objectism versus Objectivism, 80 • Objectism versus Autopoiesis, 84 • The Congery of Particles, 88 3. Design Science: Geodesic Architecture in Nanoscale Carbon Chemistry and Ronald Johnson’s ARK 98 Buckminster Fuller, 100 • Buckminsterfullerene, 113 • “Bucky/Fullerword,” 125 • Nature Poetry, 150 4. Surrational Solids, Surrealist Liquids: Crystallography and Biotechnology in Materials Science and Materialist Poetry 153 “the proper ties of the crystal line,” 159 • From Projective to Subtractive, 164 • The Aesthetics of the Defect State, 177 • Objects That Matter, 191 • From Projective to Performative, 195 • enter DOLLY, 202 • Ambient Fish, 208 5. The Scale of a Wound: Nanotechnology and the Poetics of Real Abstraction in Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City 216 Work Nano, Think Cosmologic, 216 • Intellectual and Manual Labor, 222 • Mad Science, 228 • The Encounter, The Collective, 233 vii viii CONTENTS Conclusion: Technē, Poiēsis, Fabrication 245 Acknowledgments 249 Notes 251 Works Cited 275 Index 293 FIGURES 1. Schematic of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope 4 2. Scanning Tunneling Microscope in imaging mode 5 3. Scanning Tunneling Microscope in manipulation mode 6 4. Atomic IBM logo, 1989 7 5. Fascicle copy, Emily Dickinson’s “I cannot live with You –­” 9 6. Carbon nanotube 16 7. Carbon nanotube array 17 8. Page from Steve McCaffery’s Carnival, The Second Panel: 1970–­1975 27 9. Nano skin 47 10. Different morphologies of nanostructured vanadium oxide 64 11. Annotations in Charles Olson’s copy of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality 87 12. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College, 1949 102 13. Buckminster Fuller attempting to raise the first geodesic dome 103 14. Generation of the vector equilibrium from closest packing of spheres 110 15. Projection of 31 great-­circle planes in an icosahedron system 111 16. Buckminster Fuller and students hanging from “necklace dome” 112 17. Tensegrity hemisphere, ca. 1959 113 18. Ouroboros encircling the atomic structure of the benzene molecule 115 19. Buckminster Fuller’s Expo Dome 116 20. Drawings of radiolaria by Ernst Haeckel 117 21. Geodesic dome under construction 118 22. Buckminster Fuller pointing to pentagonal centerpiece of dome prototype 119 23. Structure of the Buckminsterfullerene (C60) 120 ix x FIGURES 24. Structure of a capped single-­walled carbon nanotube (or “Buckytube”) 121 25. The concentric cosmos of “design” 125 26. Cover art from Ronald Johnson’s Valley of the Many-­Colored Grasses, 1969 129 27. Quantum corral 142 28. Stages in the construction of a quantum corral 143 29. “Crystals,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 162 30. “Crystals,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 163 31. “Crystal Lattice,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 165 32. “Lattices,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 166 33. “Snowflakes,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 167 34. “A photomicrograph of the letter Y,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 168 35. “K-­Fractal,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 169 36. “Diamonds,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 170 37. “Diamonds,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 171 38. “Emeralds,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 174 39. “Emeralds,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 175 40. “The declensions of geometric grammar,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 176 41. “L. A. Necker,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 180 42. “L. A. Necker,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 181 43. “A table of crystal systems for classifying letters of the alphabet on the basis of axial symmetry,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 183 44. “Diamonds,” from Christian Bök, Crystallography 185 45. Letter grid, from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 186 46. Letter grid, from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 187 47. “Cogs,” from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 188 48. “Fats,” from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 189 49. “Gas,” from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 190 50. Ink blot, from Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom 193 51. Hans Bellmer, Untitled, 1934 204 52. Hans Bellmer, Untitled, 1934 205 53. Caroline Bergvall, “Green Nip” 209 54. Hans Bellmer, Untitled, 1934 212 55. Screenshot from Caroline Bergvall, Ambient Fish, 1999 213 FIGURES xi 56. Screenshot from Caroline Bergvall, Ambient Fish, 1999 215 57. “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” 219 58. The concrete definition of “abstract,” Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City 235 59. Cover of Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City 238 THE LIMITS OF FABRICATION PROLOGUE: LIMITS In the class-­A clean room of the National Nanofabrication Laboratory in the heart of Silicon Valley, under the ultrahigh-­ magnification AFM (Atomic Force Microscope), I thumbed through every page of the whole collection of poetry books stolen from the Public Library, and I found only dots, dotted straight lines, dotted arcs. Abstract geometrical entities banging my dilated eyeballs. —­Shanxing Wang, Mad Science in Imperial City (2005) A scene of reading: in the nanofabrication laboratory, we study the contents of the library. Our protocols of reading are materialist, empirical. Flipping through volumes of poetry, we examine their pages through the mediation of an Atomic Force Microscope: a device capable of nanoscale resolution, enabling the inspec- tion and characterization of materials at molecular and submolecular scales of less than one-­billionth of a meter. Not only the words and their referents but also the graphemes themselves, the ink of which they are composed, the fibers of the paper on which they are inscribed give way before our eyes onto “dots, dotted straight lines, dotted arcs.” Concrete inscriptions give way onto “abstract geometrical entities,” which themselves turn out to be obtrusively material, “banging my dilated eyeballs.” At this scale, concrete things and abstract signs are indiscernibly entities, and it is the objectifying gaze of the laboratory tech- nician that is accosted by the materials under inspection, not the other way around. Reading and writing, observation and fabrication, ideality and materi- ality encounter one another through the mediation of organs and instruments that magnify the fact of their complicity. In Shanxing Wang’s 2005 volume of poetry, Mad Science in Imperial City, “nano” is a prominent signifier of that 1 2 PROLOGUE complicity, a prefix that appears 17 times across the 132 pages of the volume. In my epigraph from Wang’s book, the nanofabrication laboratory is a site in which close reading is at once a scientific and a critical practice, in which poetic form becomes a matter of material structure, in which the materiality of the signifier is situated in the larger field of materiality per se. Nanotechnology is the orga- non of this situation. Taking our epigraph as a guide, let’s begin to explore the situation it describes by following Wang’s reader into the laboratory, the library.1 LIMIT 1: TECHNOSCIENCE In a famous 1959 address to the American Physical Society, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Richard Feynman posed what he called “the final ques- tion” facing materials fabrication: “whether, ultimately—­in the great future—­we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!”2 Feynman’s “invitation to enter a new field of physics,” in which he addressed “the
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