Quotes from Ch. 9: Impure Reason

In what follows, I will define the essence of technology as the systematic locus for the sociocultural variables that actually diversify its historical realizations. On these terms, the essence of technology is not simply those few distinguishing features shared by all types of technical practice. Those constant determinations are merely abstractions from the socially concrete stages of a process of development. It is the logic of that process which will now play the role of the essence of technology. (201)

The essence of technology has not one but two aspects, an aspect which explains the functional constitution of technical objects and subjects, which I call the "primary instrumentalization," and another aspect, the "secondary instrumentalization," focused on the realization of the constituted objects and subjects in actual networks and devices. (202)

To reconstitute natural objects as technical objects, they must be "de-worlded," artificially separated from the context in which they are originally found so as to be integrated to a technical system. The isolation of the object exposes it to a utilitarian evaluation. [. . .] Nature is fragmented into bits and pieces that appear as technically useful after being abstracted from all specific contexts. (203)

The undetermination of technological development leaves room for social interests and values to participate in this process. As decontextualized elements are combined, these interests and values assign functions, orient choices and insure congruence between technology and society. The essence of technology thus includes a secondary level that wokrs with dimensions of reality from which the primary instrumentation abstracts. (205)

The subject is just as deeply engaged as the object--Newton is vindicated--but in a different register. The doer is transformed by its acts. . . . These human attributes of the technical subject define it at the deepest levels, physically, as a person, and as a member of a community of people engaged in similar activities. "Vocation" is the best term we have for this reverse impact of tools on their users. (206)

The technical always already incorporates the social in its structure. Technology responds to social demands not through regression but through another type of change essentialism overlooks. In this process, design internalizes social constraints, condensing technical and social relations. We can still make an analytic distinction between, for example, the aesthetic form and the technical function of a streamlined vehicle, but no real distinction exists, any more than in the case of Heidegger's famous chalice. This is not a question of mere packaging or extrinsic influences; the design and functioning of the device is affected. (210)

In everyday practical affairs, technology presents itself to use first and foremost through its function. We encounter it as essentially oriented toward a use. Of course we are aware of devices as physical objects possessing many qualities that have nothing to do with function, for example, beauty or ugliness, but we tend to see these as inessential. (211)

It is obvious that a fuller picture of technology is conveyed by studying the social role of the technical object and the lifestyles it makes possible. That picture places the abstract notion of "function" in its concrete social context. Then it becomes clear that what we describe in functional language as a device is equally describable in social language as the objectification of a norm or of a symbolic content. (212-3)

To reduce technology to a device and the device to the laws of its operation is somehow obvious, but it is a typical fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Just as the parts of a clockwork mechanism lack true independence as such, even though they can be disassembled and identified as separate things, so technologies are not truly independent of the social world. That would is not merely an external environment; it traverses them with meaning. (213)

A general return to craft labor is impracticable, but is deskilling the last word in technical progress? It turns out that work can be redesigned to take advantage of human intelligence and skill. There is a theoretical tradition going back to Marx to which Simondon also belongs, which argues that technological advance can integrate human and machine, drawing on the full range of workers' intellectual as well as physical capacities. (219)

• Thinking of advances we've made in the past 150 years because we didn't have to spend all our time farming.
  

Once social constraints are internalized in this way, there is a tendency to lose sight of them. Technical devices are then seen as pure of social influences, which are conceived as essentially external, as values, ideologies, rules. The internalized social constraints concretized in design are read off the reconfigured device as its inevitable technical destiny. The concretizing process is thus a technological unconscious, present only in the sedimented form of technical codes that appear asocial and purely rational. (220)

The theory of concretization offers a better account of the bias of technology than substantivism. This bias is not determined once and for all by the essentialized primary instrumentalization but also has a complex social dimension. To be sure, technology may enframe and colonize; but it may also liberate repressed potentialities of the lifeworld that would otherwise have remained submerged. It is thus essentially ambivalent, available for very different types of development. (222)

To Marx, overcoming capitalism meant not just ending economic injustices and crises, but also democratizing technical systems, bringing them under the control of the workers they enroll. This change would release technology from the grip of capitalist imperatives to a different development. Whatever our view of Marxism, a conception of technology open to a wider range of values remains essential to any real break with "technological thinking." (224)

But unexpected struggles over issues such as nuclear power, access to experimental treatment, and user participation in computer design remind us that the technological future is by no means predetermined. The very existence of these struggles suggests the possibility of a chance in the form of technical rationality. They prefigure a general reconstruction of modernity in which technology gathers a world to itself rather than reducing its natural, human and social environment to mere resources. (224)

In that future technology is not a fate one must chose for or against, but a challenge to political and social creativity. (225)