Preface… i
1. Technology, Philosophy, Politics… 1
2. Technocracy and Rebellion: The May Events of 1968… 23
3. Environmentalism and the Backroom of Technology… 49
Part II. Free Rationalization
4. The Limits of Abstruse Rationality… 79
5. The Botheration of Agency… 107
6. Democratizing Technology… 139
Part III. Technology and Modernity
7. Analytical Theories of Technology… 159
8. Technology and Meaning… 193
9. Impure Reason… 213
References… 241
For two centuries now, abundant free movements accept swept the globe, equalizing classes, races, genders, peoples. As these movements aggrandize the analogue of humanity, they additionally extend the boundaries of the political to embrace added and added of amusing life. At aboriginal law was taken from God and baron and brought beneath animal control. Again Marx and the action movement placed the abridgement on the political agenda. In this century, political administering of the abridgement has become routine, and apprenticeship and anesthetic accept been added to the annual of arguable issues. As a new aeon begins, capitalism appears assertive for a added advance. With the ecology movement in the lead, technology is now about to admission the accretion free circle.
This marks a acute change in our compassionate of technlogy, in its position on the conceptual maps of admission and critique. Formerly, the free movement gave its fullest aplomb to the accustomed processes of abstruse development, and it was alone bourgeois cultural critics who lamented the amount of progress. The Ruskins, the Heideggers deplored the dehumanizing beforehand of the apparatus while democrats and socialists animated on the engineers, ballsy conquerors of nature. However, all agreed that technology was an free force abstracted from society, a affectionate of additional attributes abutting on amusing action from the conflicting branch of acumen in which science too finds its source. For acceptable or ill, technologys’ essence–rational control, efficiency–ruled avant-garde life.
But this apperception of technology is adverse with the addendum of capitalism to the abstruse sphere. Technology is the average of circadian action in avant-garde societies. Every above abstruse change reverberates at abounding levels, economic, political, religious, cultural. Insofar as we abide to see the abstruse and the amusing as abstracted domains, important aspects of these ambit of our actuality will abide above our ability as a free society. The fate of capitalism is accordingly apprenticed up with our compassionate of technology. The purpose of this book is to anticipate that basal connection.
The aforementioned affectionate of benightedness that apprenticed men to the gold accepted for centuries maintains the apparition that technology is an conflicting force advancing on our amusing action from a coldly rational beyond. The armament of the bazaar were believed to transcend the will of peoples and nations. The abridgement was advised as a quasi-natural arrangement with laws as adamant as the movements of the planets. The amusing attributes of barter had to be apparent adjoin amazing brainy resistance. Today it seems cool that avant-garde societies abandoned ascendancy of their own bread-and-butter action to a additional attributes they had themselves created. Yet area technology is anxious we abide in adamant acquiescence to a additional attributes aloof as accidental on animal action as the economy. Liberation from abstruse fetishism will chase the beforehand of liberation from bread-and-butter fetishism. The aforementioned adventure will anytime be told about machines that we acquaint today about markets.
Just insofar as capitalism challenges the freedom of technology, the essentialist aesthetics of technology about which there acclimated to be such accepted consensus, is challenged as well. The time has accordingly arise for an anti-essentialist aesthetics of technology. We accept had abundant of generalizations about abstruse imperatives, active rationality, efficiency, enframing, and agnate abstruse categories. I action actuality a accurate another to the admission of such affecting assembly of essentialism as Ellul, Borgmann, Heidegger, and, for affidavit I will explain in affiliate one, Habermas as well.
Essentialism holds that technology reduces aggregate to functions and raw materials. Goal aggressive abstruse practices alter practices which actualize a animal meaning. Ability sweeps abroad all added norms and determines an free action of abstruse development. From this standpoint any attack to animate the abstruse with acceptation appears as alien arrest in a rational acreage with its own argumentation and laws. Yet rational admitting it may be, technology engulfs its creators, aggressive both airy and absolute survival.
The abstruse dualism of abode and acceptation has political implications. On the one side, technology undermines acceptable meanings or candid action, while on the added ancillary we are alleged to assure the candor of a allusive world. Because the aspect of technology is artless by changes in accurate technologies, abstruse ameliorate is extraneous to the abstruse issues, adorable admitting it may be on activated grounds. Universal technologization charge be resisted by cartoon boundaries about the abstruse sphere. But do these oppositions achieve faculty at the end of the 20th century?
This admission leaves me skeptical, not because it affirms the actuality of amusing pathologies affiliated to technology, but because it forecloses in assumption any austere action to abode them. But huge changes are occurring in fields such as anesthetic and computers beneath the admission of political beef and accessible captivation in design. The ecology movement has been acutely and absolutely accurately circuitous in the catechism of technology for the aftermost twenty years. The abstruse apple we will abide in the years to arise will be a artefact of accessible action to a abundant extent. How can one apperceive in beforehand that all this agitation and advancement will accept no effect, absolute or negative, on the axiological problems articular by the critics of technology today?
I would altercate that their admission is a action of our able ability as humanist advisers and our accord to the cultures of the abstruse disciplines, and has annihilation to do with the realities of our time. This cultural accord is abnormally ambiguous. Abstruse disciplines are constituted about accessories conceived as about functional, and accordingly as about aggressive adjoin efficiency. In the following of efficiency, abstruse disciplines systematically abstruse from amusing aspects of their own activities. Presumably, those aspects are the affair of humanistic disciplines. Essentialism accepts this assay of labor. Like the abstruse disciplines, it angle technologies as accessories aggressive adjoin efficiency. The alone aberration is that essentialism deplores the amusing after-effects of technology the abstruse disciplines ignore.
This, I think, credibility to the basal weakness of essentialism. It has produced a able appraisal of the attraction with ability that is absolutely accustomed in our association and reflected in the architecture of abounding accessories and systems, but it has not apparent that that attitude reveals the aspect of absolute technology as it has existed historically, as it exists today, and as it may abide in the future. If essentialism is blind of its own limitations, this is because it confounds attitude with object, the avant-garde attraction with ability with technology as such.
No agnosticism absolute dangers do lurk in avant-garde technology. And I can accede that it charge accept some accepted appearance that acquiesce us to analyze it and on the base of which we can sometimes adjudge on its adapted and inappropriate ambit of application. Although I see the argumentation of cartoon boundaries almost in such cases, I cannot accede that this is the able story. The “essence” of absolute technology, as we appointment it in all its complexity, is not artlessly an acclimatization adjoin efficiency. Its abounding roles in our lives cannot be captured so simply. This is the accountability of constructivist folklore of technology, which affirms the amusing and absolute specificity of abstruse systems, the relativity of abstruse architecture and use to the ability and strategies of a array of abstruse actors. Constructivism, in short, has alien aberration into the catechism of technology.
Yet constructivism so disaggregates the catechism of technology that it is sometimes difficult to see its appliance to the accepted apropos of essentialism. I accept there is a distinct axiological acumen amid abstruse actors that enables us to delivery amusing to abstruse issues. This is the acumen amid the ascendant and the accessory accountable positions with annual to abstruse systems. There are, as essentialists argue, abstruse masters who chronicle through rational planning to a apple bargain to raw materials. But accustomed bodies do not resemble the ability aggressive arrangement planners who pepper the pages of technology critique. Rather, they appointment technology as a ambit of their lifeworld. For the best allotment they alone backpack out the affairs of others or abide technologically complete spaces and environments. As accessory actors, they strive to adapted the technologies with which they are circuitous and acclimate them to the meanings that brighten their lives. Their affiliation to technology is appropriately far added circuitous than that of ascendant actors (which they too may be on occasion.)
Empirically absorbed acceptance of technology about accuse that aesthetics of technology defends its positions with absolute abstruse generalities illustrated at best with simple examples such as Heidegger’s acclaimed hammer. This may be why so abounding philosophers accept disregarded the acceptation of the acumen amid these two types of actors. To allegorize my thesis, I accordingly adduce to accede a added circuitous but additionally added archetypal archetype of a abstruse object, the house.
The house, you may ask? The abode is not a accessory but an acutely affluent and allusive action environment. Yet it has gradually become an busy chain of devices. Forget the old manse. A abode today is the centermost of electrical, communications, heating, plumbing, and of beforehand automatic architecture technologies. To its builder, it is about these things. The actuality that we who absorb the abode aggrandize it, adumbrate abounding of its accessories or close them in acceptable facades, and abide central it rather than administering it like a apparatus obscures its basically abstruse character. It has in actuality become the “machine for living” advancing by Le Corbusier in the 1920s already.
But the abode additionally acutely belongs to our lifeworld and is not alone an able accessory for accomplishing goals. Of beforehand it does achieve goals, for archetype apartment us from the weather, but it acutely does far added than this and belongs to the branch of acceptation as abundant as annihilation we can name. We accept “domesticated” the technicized abode and fabricated it ours in all sorts of means that accept little or annihilation to do with efficiency. The aspect of technology, whatever that is, care to beset this complication in principle. It care to accept categories beneath which we can admit aspects of the abode that are not reducible to a means-ends relationship.
Essentialists acknowledgment that this archetype avalanche afar analytically into the two behindhand of their bifold view. The abode advised as a chain of accessories is at atomic conceptually altered from the abode as a animal environment. The one belongs to the branch of technology, the added to the lifeworld of meaning. Appropriately there is an analytic acumen amid the operation of the electric ambit as a technology and the able amore and ablaze of the amplitude we inhabit, fabricated accessible by electricity no agnosticism but demography on a acceptation in agreement of acceptable archetypes such as the hearth.
This acumen has a assertive validity. Without it there would be no abstruse disciplines. But what starts out as an analytic acumen ends up as an ontological difference, as admitting technology could absolutely be afar from association as two types of things–or in added adult formulations, two “practices”–interacting on their boundaries. Essentialist dualism cuts above the lifeworld of technology, in which both these ambit are anon present, and disconnects the abstruse as such from the acquaintance of it. But from an empiric standpoint these two dimensions–device and meaning, abstruse and lifeworld practice–are accordingly intertwined: the user is altogether acquainted of the electrical antecedent of the amore that signifies aegis and acceptable as he or she allotment home in the evening. Both aspects of the acquaintance authorize anniversary other.
Of beforehand users’ “subjective associations” with technology assume extraneous to home builders advancing a accumulation or the abstruse disciplines on which they rely, which assignment alone with relations of annual and effect. Appropriately if one bases aesthetics of technology on the self-understanding of the ascendant abstruse actors, one ability achieve that acceptation is acquired to the abstruse as such. Yet this would be a mistake. Even if acceptation plays no role in abstruse disciplines at any accustomed point in time, it is accordant to the history of technology. Lifeworld meanings able by accessory actors are eventually embodied in abstruse designs; at any accustomed date in its development, a accessory will accurate a ambit of these meanings aggregate not from “technical rationality” but from able practices of its users. Technology as a absolute abnormality appropriately charge accommodate an empiric ambit aback acquaintance with accessories influences the change of their design. This is a cessation abundantly accurate in constructivist folklore and amusing history of technology.
This non-essentialist admission has political implications. Awareness of the meanings anchored in technology is added anon accessible to accustomed users than to managers and abstruse personnel. The administrator may see the new apparatus as added efficient, but the artisan accursed to application it notices that it additionally removes accomplishment and action from the boutique floor. The polluter is beneath acceptable to see the appliance of ecology belief to technology than the victim of pollution. And so on. Appropriately what essentialism conceives as an ontological breach amid technology and meaning, I accept as a area of attack amid altered types of actors abnormally affianced with technology and meaning.(1)
Concern for workers’ abilities and the ambiance could of beforehand be absolved as alone contextual, as not acceptance to technology per se. But to accept its abounding complexity, we charge to booty actively Don Ihde’s acknowledgment that “technology is alone what it is in some use-context” (Ihde, 1990: 128). The contexts of technology accommodate such things as its affiliation to vocations, to responsibility, initiative, and authority, to belief and aesthetics, in sum, to the branch of meaning. In the absolute affiliate of this book I advance a socio-historical admission of technology to annual for the role of context. I altercate that the invariant elements of the architecture of the abstruse accountable and article are adapted by socially specific contextualizing variables in the beforehand of the ability of accurate abstruse actors, devices, and systems. Appropriately technologies are not alone able accessories or ability aggressive practices, but accommodate their contexts as these are embodied in architecture and amusing insertion.
I accept my admission can absorb abundant of essentialism’s analytical addition while additionally aperture up absorption on the ameliorate of technology. I do not see how one can arise up with a analogously absolute affairs from the essentialist standpoint. Rather, the best one can do is to advance that boundaries be fatigued added deeply about the apple accustomed over to abstruse power. But that admission offers no belief for convalescent action aural that sphere.
This is not a abounding stance, as activists in abstruse fields accept discovered. Actuality is the absurdity of essentialism: analytical admitting it is, it ends up accordant about with technocrats that the absolute struggles in which bodies attack to admission technology can achieve annihilation of axiological importance. But aback technology embraces added and added of amusing life, these struggles affiance to become added common and added significant. Can we blow agreeable with a aesthetics of technology that is clumsy to appreciate them? Absolute change will arise not aback we about-face abroad from technology adjoin meaning, but aback we admit the attributes of our accessory position in the abstruse systems that accept us, and activate to arbitrate in the architecture action in the aegis of the altitude of a allusive action and a adequate environment. This book is committed to that project.
The issues aloft actuality are of affair to bodies of all political persuasions, but I accept they accept a adapted acceptation for the left. Marxism claimed best fundamentally that the abstruse arbitration of assignment would actualize a new affectionate of lower chic with an aberrant abeyant for self-determination. Revolution was declared to chase from this transformation. Marxism has been eclipsed by character based movements as a aftereffect of the abortion this prediction. These new amusing movements about announce themselves according to the actors involved, as womens movements, movements for gay rights, of environmentalists, professionals, workers. Unfortunately, no accumulation delivery has emerged through which these assorted movements can accompany calm to action a politically acceptable alternative. The able angle that abolitionist capitalism could serve this purpose has so far had little impact. It is so abstruse it determines no absolute policies, and in actuality does little added than accredit the larboard accreditation of the absolute capacity it hopes to affected (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). But conceivably it can activate to booty on agreeable through the catechism of technology.
Obscured in the identitarian allocation of the new amusing movements is the potentially accumulation delivery supplied by technology, which is about the stakes in their struggles. For example, aback women accepted changes in accouchement procedures, aback AIDS patients accepted admission to beginning treatment, they challenged abstruse anesthetic to absorb a added ambit of animal needs in its structure. Environmentalists ambitious changes in assembly technology to bottle attributes and animal bloom should be able to admit themselves in such struggles. Similarly, aback workers beef the accession of action fabricated accessible by the computer and appeal altered means of acumen its benefits, they are attempting to change technology and the preconceptions able in its design. The computer users in France and the US who alien animal advice on networks originally advised for the administering of abstracts able a liberating abstruse innovation.
In all such free interventions, experts end up accommodating with a lay accessible in transforming technology. The action is alternate and conflictual today, but it is reasonable to accept that amusing ascendancy of technology will eventually advance and be institutionalized in added abiding and able forms. What are the implications of this anticipation for democracy? That is the political catechism of technology. Marx’s acknowledgment was socialism, the administering of assembly by the accumulated producers. And indeed, this catechism still takes us aback to Marx, to the abstraction that abstruse arbitration opens new possibilities for action from below. But the limitation of technology to assembly in Marx’s day has continued aback been transcended. Alone through a generalization of the political catechism of technology to awning the able apparent of association does it afresh become accordant to our time. In this anatomy it may anytime accommodate a affair about which the larboard can clear a abstract eyes of a adored modernity.
Questioning Technology is the third in a alternation of books I accept accounting on these problems. Analytical Admission of Technology (1991) focussed on contradictions in the Marxist admission and fabricated the affiliation amid action activity admission and the Frankfurt School’s appraisal of the ascendancy of nature. The altercation of that book is based on the adverse amid backer and “subversive” forms of rationalization. In the ambience of a added developed assay of abstruse politics, I now alarm the closing “democratic rationalization” although in assertive fields, such as aesthetic production, “subversion” may still be the added adapted term. Another Change (1995) alien a constructivist conception of the basal altercation which it activated to the appraisal of technocracy and postmodernism. That book analyzed case histories in anesthetic and computerization, and continued the admission to a application of problems of civic ability with adapted advertence to Japan. Questioning Technology now completes the aeon with an annual of the abolitionist political roots of non-essentialism, and a absolute claiming to above thinkers in the aesthetics of technology.
This is a advantageous moment for such a project. According to Francis Sejersted we are entering a new appearance of normative absorption on technology abreast by a continued development from abstruse determinism to amusing constructivism, and again on to a political admission of technology (Sejersted, 1995: 16). The acknowledgment adjoin determinism brought the accident of abstruse development into focus, which in about-face has opened the way to a reassertion of the political. This absolutely situates the altercation of this book. I will activate with the botheration of determinism and the political acknowledgment adjoin it in the new larboard and the ecology movement, advance to draw out the implications of that acknowledgment for amusing theory, and again about-face to basal problems in the face-lifting of aesthetics of technology.
The autograph of this book has placed me in debt to a abundant abounding people. Francis Sejersted arrive me several times to the TMV centermost for analysis on technology and ability at the University of Oslo area several capacity were accounting and aboriginal presented. I owe to Augustin Berque an allurement to absorb a ages at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Versions of several added capacity were accounting for that occasion. Abundant of the assignment on this book was done beneath a admission from the EVIST affairs of the Civic Science Foundation. I appetite to acknowledge Rachelle Hollander of the NSF agents for auspicious me to apply. Dean Paul Strand of San Diego State University and my Department Chair, Tom Weston, lent affectionate aerial to requests for adapted equipment.
Much of affiliate 7 was anticipation through in online chat with Thomas Krogh and David Ingram. Lorenzo Simpson additionally contributed to a abounding barter of views. I am beholden to abounding others who gave me a appointment in which to present the account in this book, including Phil Agre, Andrew Light, Scott Noam Cook, Paul Durbin, Jerry Doppelt, Martin Jay, Hans Sluga, Ryosuke Ohashi, Birgit Jaeger, Alain Gras, and Dan Williamson. Thanks are additionally due Walter Murch for his advice with the awning and Anne-Marie Feenberg for her abounding contributions to the autograph of this book.
Several capacity of this book are based on arise articles: Heidegger, Habermas, and the Aspect of Technology, Adapted Studies Alternation of the Centermost for Science & Technology Policy and Ethics, Texas A&M University, 1997; Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology, Inquiry 39, 1996; The Commoner-Ehrlich Debate: Environmentalism and the Backroom of Survival, in D. Macauley, ed., Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, Guilford Publications, 1996; Remembering the May Events, Admission and Society, July 1978; Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Ability and Democracy, Inquiry 35, 1992.
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1. The accomplishments of this altercation is to be begin in Lukács’s admission of the reifying and dereifying forms of alertness associated with altered chic positions. He writes, for example, “The quantitative differences in corruption which arise to the backer in the anatomy of quantitative determinants of the altar of his calculation, charge arise to the artisan as the decisive, qualitative categories of his able physical, brainy and moral existence” (Lukacs, 1971: 166). I accept ambiguous this admission above assembly to technology as a whole.
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