ABSTRACT
If we look at the EU’s research programme for nanotechnology, only an estimated 5 per cent of total funding is being spent on examining the
environmental, social, and ethical dimensions of these technologies. That certainly doesn’t inspire confi dence. (Prince Charles par. 5)
It is not, of course, unreasonable to warn or build safeguards against such a scenario-nobody really wants to be dissolved into a fl uid gray messand indeed, the purpose of my study here is not to determine the likelihood of a gray goo scenario.1 My focus is on its representations in fi ction: what can be uncovered in fi ctional depictions of the gray goo scenario are wider concerns about the homogenizing effect of global capital and an ensuing total obliteration of difference itself-but with the latter “blamed” upon the bodies of marginalized subjects. In other words, anxieties about literal corporeal dissolution into a continuum of matter are symptomatic of fears of a capital-driven global assimilation of all subject positions into transmissible, digitally encoded, abstracted, commodifi ed ciphers-and yet, within these narratives, the perceived source of this disastrous global sameness is, ironically, displaced away from capital and onto exoticized representatives of difference itself. This is to say that while the leveling of difference, by the transcription into what Donna Haraway terms the “common language” of (digitized) capital in those considered “other,” is desirable for the agents of capital itself (particularly in the drive to create new market demographics), there is a lingering risk that that obliteration of difference will overspill into the agent coded as active; the subject in charge could lose control and human(ist) exceptionalism could be eroded or erased (Haraway 164).2 The scapegoats for this rampant dissolution become the putatively inadequate bodies of those traditionally coded as other to the lingering normative subjects of Western discourse: those who are non-male, non-white, nonheterosexual, et cetera.
