Quotes from Ch. 5: The Problem of Agency

Despite occasional resistance the design of technical institutions disqualifies modern men and women for meaningful political participation. The division of labor becomes the model for the division of society into rulers and ruled. [. . .] Expertise legitimates power in society at large, and "citizenship" consists in the recognition of its claims and conscientious performance in mindless subordinate roles. The public sphere withers; a literal reign of silence is instituted as one-way communication replaces dialogue and debate throughout society. (101)

The fundamental problem of democracy today is quite simply the survival of agency in this increasingly technocratic universe. (101)

This chapter will attempt to explain the nature of the democratic rationalizations that undermine technocracy from within. (102)

How is the efficiency of a technocratic order translated into legitimacy, in other words, how does technocratic ideology silence opposition to the technical processing and control of human beings? (102)

Social cohesion depends on the technical prescriptions since traditions, laws, and verbal agreements are insufficient by themselves to hold together a complex society. Thus the social bond is mediated by technical objects as well as by human communication, and that mediation supports a sui generis form of normativity. (102)

The technical choices that establish roles are simultaneously normative choices that are imposed on everyone who chooses to belong to the organization. To find out the meaning of good work, look at the technical requirements of the assembly line: it not only paces work on management's terms, it also defines good work as keeping up with the pace it sets. (103)

• Wondering about how people (workers) manipulate this system to gain agency. Thinking of my father as he worked at PPG loading bags of chemicals. The quota each night was 600 bags, and workers would regularly ban together to subvert "good" workers who strove to go above and beyond this quota (gluing bags together, slitting bags open when the over-achiever was on break, etc.). These men stuck together to maintain their ground...sometimes even gaining ground. Not sure Feenberg is accounting for this kind of subversion as he accounts for agency in technology.

Technocracy is the use of technical delegations to conserve and legitimate an expanding system of hierarchical control. (103) *See my note above.

Once a system of centralized administration is established, it is difficult to imagine working any other way, and those in charge must perpetuate it as the condition of their own effectiveness. Thus actors in command of technically mediated institutions . . . subordinate their technical choices to the implicit meta-goal of reproducing their operational autonomy. (103)

It is this which ultimately explains why despite diminishing educational and cultural inequalities, social evolution continues on an authoritarian track. (103)

We have come to recognize politics in smaller interventions in social life, sometimes called "micropolitics," a situational politics based on local knowledge and action. Micropolitics has no general strategy and offers no global challenge to the society. It involves many diverse but converging activities with long-term subversive impacts. This approach is particularly relevant in the technical sphere where it is difficult to conceive totalizing strategies of change. (104)

What we have learned is that even if no totalizing approach makes sense, the tensions in the industrial system can be grasped on a local basis from "within," by individuals immediately engaged in technically mediated activities and able to actualize ambivalent potentialities suppressed by the prevailing technological rationality. (105)

• Privileging individual change over large social change. That is, he seems to be arguing that more effective change can be enacted through local, individualized efforts rather than larger social revolutions (has me thinking of the criticisms of the expressivists...wondering whether focusing on the individual's power/agency is not always a bad thing).

In the new technical politics, the social groups so constituted turn back reflexively on the framework that defines and organizes them: "we," as patients, users of a domestic computer system, participants in a division of labor, neighbors of a polluting plant, are the actors. It is this sort of agency that holds the promise of a democratization of technology. Technical politics foreshadows a world in which technology, as a kind of social "legislation" affecting every aspect of our lives, will emerge from these new types of public consultation. (105)

I have proposed the term "democratic rationalization" to signify user interventions that challenge undemocratic power structures rooted in modern technology. With this concept I intend to emphasize the public implications of user agency. (108)

In modern societies, however, power becomes detached from individual persons and even institutions. It is embodied now in practices that are in some sense prior to and founding for the subjects who wield it in empirical interactions. This agonistic conception of society transposes some of the pathos of subjectivity to practices, patterns of action that do the work human actors perform in traditional social theory. Practices organize, they control, they proliferate, and they even "subjectify"--stimulate the production of subjectivity in human being submitted to them. (110)

Practices designed to discipline human beings, to turn them into productive agents, must impose themselves on unwilling bodies through repetition, reward and punishment. (110)

[A system of power] opens a certain angle of vision and defines a corresponding realm of objects. This foundational work of power does not contradict the pursuit of truth but makes it possible by orienting research in a specific direction. Regimes of truth are power-dependent epistemic horizons that characterize particular periods and disciplines. Modern hegemonies are rooted in truth in this sense, and not in violence and display in the manner of the old sovereign powers. (111)

To regimes of truth correspond subjugated knowledges that express the point of view of the dominated. Subjugated knowledges are "situated" in a subordinate position in the technical hierarchy. They lack the disciplinary organization of the sciences, and yet they offer access to an aspect of the truth that is the specific blind spot of these sciences. A critique of the panoptic order of modern society emerges from the subjugated standpoint of its victims. (111)

De Certeau found games to be a useful model of society. Games define the players' range of action without determining their moves. As we will see, this metaphor can also be applied to technology, which sets up a framework of permitted and forbidden "moves" in much the way games do. The technical code is the most general rule of the game, biasing the play toward the dominant contestant. (112)

The claim that the technical base of the society is ambivalent means that it can be modified through tactical responses that permanently open the strategic interiority to the flow of subordinates' initiatives. This implies changes in the strategies encoded in the division of labor and technology. (114)

[According to Latour,] technical objects are not "things" in the usual sense, but nodes in a network that contains both people and devices in interlocking roles. Actor network theory argues that the social alliances in which technology is constructed are bound together by the very artifacts they create. Thus social groups do not precede and constitute technology, but emerge with it. (114)

Latour argues that just as authors and readers meets on the printed page, so the builders and users of machines are joined in the application. (114)

Callon notes that networks are constructed by "simplifying" their members, that is, by enrolling them under a definite aspect that serves the program while ignoring other aspects that do not. (115)

As we have seen, the notion of a technical system implies near total control from a center, a place of power. (116)

Systems, as self-reproducing wholes, are fragile subsets of much more loosely organized complexes of interacting elements that may support several overlapping systemic projects. I call these larger complexes "networks." (118)

But among the elements of the networks are human beings whose participation has a symbolic as well as a causal dimension. They are capable of representing the system and acting on it from out of a lifeworld it does not encompass. They may prey on the system and destroy it like bacilli in the bloodstream, but they are also capable of reorganizing the network in conflict with system managers and producing a new configuration of the resources it contains. They are, in other words, involved in a way that makes nonsense of the organic metaphor of living creature and environment. (118)

Democratization of modern technically mediated organizations is not fundamentally about the distribution of wealth nor even formal administrative authority, but concerns the structure of communicative practices. (120)

To be a citizen is to be a potential victim. This is why information plays such a critical role in environmental politics: the key struggles are often decided in the communicative realm by making private information public, revealing secrets, introducing controversy into supposedly neutral scientific fields, and so on. Once corporations and government agencies are forced to operate under public scrutiny, it becomes much more difficult to support dangerous technologies such as nuclear power. (120; emphasis added)

On the one hand, technocracy brings expertise to bear on the problems, but on the other hand, monopolizing information offers a cheap alternative to actually solving them. Technocracy is thus not the boon to technical advance it claims to be, but on the contrary is often guilty of obstructing the innovations needed to solve problems that it does its best to hide. (122)

Even as technology expands its reach, the networks are themselves exposed to transformation by the individuals they enroll. Human beings still represent the unrealized potential of their technologies. Their tactical resistances to established designs can impose new values on technical institutions and create a new type of modern society. Instead of a technocracy in which technology everywhere trumps human communication, we may yet build a democratic society in which technical advance serves communicative advance. (128)