Quotes from Chapter 1: Technology, Philosophy, Politics

"Common sense instrumentalism treated technology as a neutral means, requiring no particular philosophical explanation or justification" (1).

• As always, I find myself wondering what he means by "technology"...what's included in this overdetermined term?

"By the end of the 19th century, under the influence of Marx and Darwin, progressivism had become technological determinism. Following the then common interpretation of these materialist masters, technical progress was believed to ground humanity's advance toward freedom and happiness" (2).

• This doesn't seem to take into account humankind's overhwhelming greed. A look at today's deplorable economy, where more and more machines are taking the place of thousands of laborers and the fat cats at the top of corporations continue to get richer, seems to contradict the view that technological progress leads to humanity's freedom and happiness. Quite the contrary, actually.

"In Heidegger's view, we encounter our world in action as a concrete whole, revealed and ordered in a definite manner that belongs to our epoch. Technology is such a mode of 'revealing,' a way in which what is appears. As the mode of revealing of our time, technology is no mere instrumentality. It forms a culture of universal control. Nothing escapes it, not even its human makers. They, like the things they appropriate technically, are reduced to raw materials through the technological revealing. Everything loses its integrity as a part of a coherent world and is leveled down to an object of pure will" (3).

"Essentialism holds that there is one and only one 'essence' of technology and it is responsible for the chief problems of modern civilization" (3).

"By 'technocracy' I mean a wide-ranging administrative system that is legitimated by reference to scientific expertise rather than tradition, law, or the will of the people" (4).

• Certainly this is bad, but what about the polar opposite. That is, when tradition, law, or the will of the people overrules scientific evidence?
  

"Both Marcuse and Foucault agree that technologies are not just means subservient to independently chosen ends but that they form a way of life, an environment. Whether it be an assembly line or a panoptic prison, technologies are forms of power" (7).

"Regardless of these differences within the critical tradition, the notion of technology as ideology has definite political implications. If one can loosen up the public vision of technology, introduce contingency into it, technical elites will have to be more responsive to a democratically informed public will" (8).


"Constructivism breaks with the standard view according to which society conditions the pace of progress but not the nature of technology itself. Constructivists argue that many paths lead out from the first forms of a new technology. Some are well-trodden while others are quickly deserted. The 'principle of symmetry' holds that there are always viable technical alternatives that might have been developed in place of the successful one. The difference lies not so much in the superior efficiency of the successful designs, as in a variety of local circumstances that differentiate otherwise comparable artifacts" (10).

"Before closure is achieved, it is obvious that social interests are at stake in the design process. But once the black box is closed, its social origins are quickly forgotten. Looking back from the later stand-point, the artifact appears purely technical, even inevitable. This is the source of the deterministic illusion" (11).

"The basic problem is essentialism. Heidegger and Habermas claim that there is a level at which instrumental action in modern societies can be considered as a pure expression of a certain type of rationality. However, as such, it is merely an abstraction. Real action always has a socially and historically specific context and content" (17).

• Seems to be setting up the tension in his book. Seems to be aligning himself here more with the constructivists. What is he saying that's new? He's set up this chapter as an outline of the current trends in critical theory on technology, but I don't see him taking a stance anywhere. Maybe in the above-mentioned quote?
  

"I argue, as Habermas himself once did, that the design and configuration of technology does more than merely accomplish our ends; it also organizes society and subordinates its members to a technocratic order. Only by including technology in the media theory can we arrive at an adequate account of what Habermas calls the 'technization' of the 'lifeworld'" (17).

"[My] 'instrumentalization theory' attempts to embrace the wide variety of ways in which technology engages with its objects, its subjects, and its environment. A social account of the essence of technology enlarges democratic concerns to encompass the technical dimension of our lives. It offers an alternative to both the ongoing celebration of technology triumphant and the gloomy Heideggerian prediction of technocultural disaster" (17).

Notes from Questioning Technology -- Preface

"The Ruskins and Heideggers deplored the dehumanizing advance of the machine while democrats and socialists cheered on the engineers, heroic conquerors of nature. However, all agreed that technology was an autonomous force separate from society, a kind of second nature impinging on social life from the alien realm of reason in which science too finds its source. For good or ill, technology's essence--rational control, efficiency--ruled modern life" (vii).

"Insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, important aspects of these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society. The fate of democracy is therefore bound up with our understanding of technology. The purpose of this book is to think that vital connection" (vii).

"I offer here a concrete alternative to the approach of such influential represtatives of essentialism as Ellul, Borgmann, Heidegger, and, for reasons I will explain in chapter one, Habermas as well" (viii).

"Essentialism holds that technology reduces everything to functions and raw materials. Goal oriented technological practices replace practices which embody a human meaning. Efficiency sweeps away all other norms and determines an autonomous process of technological development. From this standpoint any attempt to infuse the technical with meaning appears as external interference in a rational field with its own logic and laws. Yet rational though it may be, technology engulfs its creators, threatening both spiritual and material survival" (viii).

"On the one side, technology undermines traditional meanings or communicative action, while on the other side we are called to protect the integrity of a meaningful world. Because the essence of technology is unaffected by changes in particular technologies, technological reform is irrelevant to the philosophical issues, desirable though it may be, on practice grounds. Universal technologization must be resisted by drawing boundaries around the technical sphere" (ix).

"This, I think, points to the basic weakness of essentialism. It has produced a powerful critique of the obsession with efficiency that is indeed prevalent in our society and reflected in the design of many devices and systems, but it has not shown that that attitude reveals the essence of real technology as it has existed historically, as it exists today, and as it may exist in the future. If essentialism is unaware of its own limitations, this is because it confounds attitude with object, the modern obsession with efficiency with technology as such" (x).

"There are, as essentialists argue, technological masters who relate through rational planning to a world reduced to raw materials. But ordinary people do not resemble the efficiency oriented system planners who pepper the pages of technology critique. Rather, they encounter technology as a dimension of their lifeworld. For the most part they merely carry out the plans of others or inhabit technologically constructed spaces and environments. As subordinate actors, they strive to appropriate the technologies with which they are involved and adapt them to the meanings that illuminate their lives. Their relation to technology is thus far more complex than that of dominant actors (which they too may be on occasion.)" (x-xi).

"Lifeworld meanings experienced by subordinate actors are eventually embodied in technological designs; at any given stage in its development, a device will express a range of these meanings gathered not from 'technical rationality' but from past practices of its users" (xii).

"Thus what essentialism conceives as an ontological split between technology and meaning, I conceive as a terrain of struggle between different types of actors differently engaged with technology and meaning" (xiii).

"I argue that the invariant elements of the constitution of the technical subject and object are modified by socially specific contextualizing variables in the course of the realization of concrete technical actors, devices, and systems. Thus technologies are not more efficient devices or efficiency oriented practices, but include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social interaction" (xiii).

"Real change will come not when we turn away from technology toward meaning, but when we recognize the nature of our subordinate position in the technical systems that enroll us, and begin to intervene in the design process in the defense of the conditions of a meaningful life and a livable environment. This book is dedicated to that project" (xiv).

"The process is intermittent and conflictual today, but it is reasonable to suppose that social control of technology will eventually spread and be institutionalized in more durable and effective forms" (xv).