Productive Disagreement

I'm in the processing of preparing a paper for a conference that came up pretty much at the last minute. Those of you who also write conference papers on short notice know what I'm going through - the great idea, the anguish of trying to translate that idea into words, the endless search for the right way (or at least a good way) of expressing those ideas. Sometimes it gets a bit frustrating trying to translate those thoughts into words that would make sense to other people.

The argument is pretty basic. The abstract I sent in outlines it:

The futuristic (Nano)visions of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber

Most visions of human technology of the future extrapolate the technological developments of the current moment to suggest that development will continue to penetrate human existence, enabling humanity to accomplish more while it also becomes more reliant upon those technologies. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber begins on such a world, a world penetrated by nanotechnology to such an extent that the humans living on Toussaint feel it gives them a “sixth sense” even if it really is only a “crutch” (Hopkinson 328). However, as the action of the novel switches to New Half-Way Tree, it ultimately reveals that the interconnectedness that the “Granny Nanny” web of nanomites provides a poor account of the diversity of human experience without the stories and the relationships that also make up the life of humans.

As a technology, the nanomites of Hopkinson’s novel envision one way that the nanotechnologies under development in contemporary technoculture might affect human lives. In Nanovision: Engineering the Future, Colin Milburn suggests that nanotechnology is built on such promises, writing that, “the possibilities opened by the capability to restructure and rearrange matter at the nanoscale are immense…. the world itself can be transformed, our lived realities made completely malleable, guaranteeing that the future will be radically and immeasurably different from the present" (6). Milburn further argues that this vision of the transformative nature of nanotechnology is closely affiliated with the imagination, so that writing about nanotechnology is science-fictional in nature.

What makes Hopkinson’s novel unusual is that it counters the technophillic adulation of nanotechnology often presented within science fiction texts. Like Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, Midnight Robber suggests that enabling technologies do not need to be machinic or divorced from the biological reality of human life. Adopting a Caribbean patois language and attitude, the text provides a refreshing alternate to the masculine, hard science fiction that characterizes writing about nanotechnologies. At the same time that the novel valorizes hard work, relationships, forgiveness, and storytelling over reliance on technology to manage the business of everyday life, the ending suggests a role for nanotechnology that does not unduly intrude or cause dependence for the humans of New Half-Way Tree.

I was doing a good bit of flailing with this one - there's only about a page written so far - so I did what any other writer trying to put together an argument does when stalled: more research! In this case, I found a paper on the same text - Midnight Robber, slightly different idea - web of communication rather than nanotechnology, but still pretty close.

The great thing about reading this paper is that I disagreed with so much of what the writer was arguing. We agree on a number of points, but I felt like this particular writer ignored the entire last half of the book. Which got me thinking about the last half of the book in ways that I hadn't before. And I actually thought some interesting (at least to me!) thoughts about that half of it.

So, I feel reinvigorated for writing this thing. It still needs to get written, and there will be plenty of staring at the screen, tugging at hair, wandering around the house while trying to work out the argument, but I've got a jumping off point now, which is what I really needed.

Productive disagreement, indeed!