Quotes from Introduction to Critical Theory of Technology

Social critics claim that technical rationality and human values contend for the soul of modern man. This book challenges such cliches by reconceptualizing the relation of technology, rationality, and democracy. My theme is the possibility of a truly radical reform of industrial society. (3)

I argue that the degradation of labor, education, and the environment is rooted not in technology per se but in the antidemocratic values that govern technological development. (3)

At the highest level, public life involves choices about what it means to be human. Today these choices are increasingly mediated by technical decisions. What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. (3)

The design of technology is thus an ontological design fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is the underlying cause of many of our problems. (3)

[Instrumental theory] is based on the common sense idea that technologies are "tools" standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is deemed "neutral," without valuative content of its own. (5)

Substantive theory, best known through writings of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, argues that technology constitutes a new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control. This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic which ultimately mediates every pretechnological enclave and shapes the whole of social life. The instrumentalization of society is thus a destiny from which there is no escape other than retreat. Only a return to tradition or simplicity offers an alternative to the juggernaut of progress. (7)

The issue is not that machines have "taken over," but that in choosing to use them we make many unwitting cultural choices. Technology is not simply a means but has become an environment and a way of life: this is its "substantive" impact. (8)

Despite their differences, instrumental and substantive theories share a "take it or leave it" attitude toward technology. [. . .] In neither case can we change it: in both theories, technology is destiny. Reason, in its technological form, is beyond human intervention or repair. (8)

Finally, the very project of bounding technology appears suspect. If we choose to leave something untouched by technology, is that not a subtler kind of technical determination? (10)

Defenders of the instrumental view sometimes draw comfort from the conjunction of democratic reform with the decision of Westernization. Ordinary citizens appear to have refused the trade-offs required to sustain traditional or future-oriented values in competition with well-being in the present. The conquest of society by technology is not due to any occult power of the "technical phenomenon"; rather, technology, as a domain of perfected instruments for achieving well-being, is simply a more powerful and persuasive alternative than any ideological commitment. (12)

But critical Marxism argues, on the contrary, that an alternative may yet be created on the basis of workers' control, requalification of the labor force, and public participation in technical decisions. If the Japanese and Soviet experiments failed, this is because they rejected the democratic path for one convergent with authoritarian industrialism. (12)

But, with the notable exception of Marcuse, these Marxist critics of technology stop short of actually explaining the new relation to nature implied in their program, and none of them come close to meeting the demand their work elicits for a concrete conception of the "new technology" they invoke. (13)

• This is my criticism of Feenberg's Questioning Technology. Curious whether he'll provide a more concrete view of the democratization of technology in this book.

In choosing our technology we become what we are, which in turn shapes our future choices. (14)

Critical theory rejects the neutrality of technology and argues instead that "technological rationality has become political rationality." The values and interests of ruling classes and elites are installed in the very design of rational procedures and machines even before these are assigned a goal. (14)

[The dominant form of technological rationality] stands at the intersection between ideology and technique where the two come together to control human beings and resources in conformity with what I will call "technical codes." (14)

The most significant such distinction is the power differential between those who command and those who obey in the operation of technical systems. That power differential, organized through a variety of institutions, is one of the foundations of the existing technological civilization in both its capitalist and communist forms. Since the locus of technical control influences technological development, new forms of control from below could set development on an original path. (15)

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)

Quotes from Ch. 8: Technology and Meaning

Heidegger claims technology turns everything it touches into mere raw materials, which he calls "standing reserves." We ourselves are now incorporated into the mechanism, mobilized as objects of technique. Modern technology is based on methodical planning which itself presupposes the "enframing" of being, its conceptual and experiential reduction to a manipulable vestige of itself. (183-4)

Instead of a world of authentic things capable of gathering a rich variety of contexts and meanings, we are left with an "objectless" heap of functions. (184)

All these forms of techne let things appear as what they most profoundly are, in some sense, prior to human willing and making. For Heidegger, the fundamental mystery of existence is this self-manifesting of things in an opening provided by man. (184)

[Heidegger] claims that once we achieve a free relation to technology, we will stand in the presence of technology's hidden meaning. Even though we cannot know that meaning, awareness of its existence already reveals the technological enframing as an opening, dependent on man, and disclosing being. If we can receive it in that spirit, it will no longer dominate us and will leave us open to welcome a still deeper meaning than anything technology can supply. (185)

We could restate his main point as the claim that technology is a cultural form through which everything in the modern world becomes available for control. Technology thus violates both humanity and nature at a far deeper level than war and environmental destruction. To this culture of control corresponds an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller, a narcissistic degeneration of humanity. (185)

Borgmann would willingly concede the usefulness of may devices, but the generalization of the device paradigm, its universal substitution for simpler ways, has a deadening effect. Where means and ends, contexts and commodities are strictly separated, life is drained of meaning. Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values. (188)

I would prefer to consider a more narrowly philosophical implication of Heidegger's conception of the thing. This is the break with substance metaphysics it implies. The jug is not primarily a physical object which has gathering relations. It is these relations and is merely released to its existence as such by production, or known in its outward appearance by representation. (195)

The world only reveals itself as [a network] to a reflection that knows how to get behind cognition to a more primordial encounter with being. Such phenomenological reflection places us inside the flux of significance in which the world as network consists. This is not a collection of objective things, substances, but a lifeworld in which we actively participate and which only comes to light insofar as we understand participation as the most fundamental relation to reality. (196)

These promising innovations are the work of human beings intervening in the design of the technical objects with which they are involved. This is the only meaningful "encounter between global technology and modern man." This encounter is not simply another instance of the goal-orientated pursuit of efficiency, but constitutes an essential dimension of the contemporary struggle for a humane and livable world. (199)

Quotes from Ch. 7: Critical Theories of Technology

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) [Adorno and Horkheimer] argue that instrumentality is in itself a form of domination, that controlling objects violates their integrity and distorts the inner nature of the dominating subject. If this is so, then technology is not neutral, and simply using it commits one to a valuative stance. (151)

Reform technology is the concern of a second approach which I call design critique. Design critique holds that social interests or cultural values influence the realization of technical principles. (152)

For some, it is Christian or masculinist values that have given us the impression that we can "conquer" nature, a belief that shows up in ecologically unsound technical designs; for others it is capitalist values that have turned technology into an instrument of domination of labor and exploitation of nature (White, 1972; Merchant, 1980; Braverman, 1974). (152)

The question I address here is: what can we learn from Marcuse and Habermas assuming that we are neither metaphysicians nor instrumentalists, that we reject both a romantic critique of science and the neutrality of technology? (153)

Marcuse proposes a new disclosure of being through a revolutionary transformation of basic practices (Dreyfus, 1995). This would lead to a change in the very nature of instrumentality, which would be fundamentally modified by the abolition of class society and its associated performance principle. It would then be possible to create a new science and technology that would place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. Nature would be treated as another subject instead of as mere raw materials. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing nature's inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for the sake of power and profit. (154)

While [Habermas] too is concerned about the technocratic tendencies of advanced societies, he attacks the very notion of a new science and technology as a romantic myth; the ideal of a technology based on communion with nature applies the model of human communication to a domain of strictly instrumental relations. (155)

Apparently, a new and better society can be had by tinkering with the boundaries of technical action systems. So long as technical action remains limited to merely facilitating the complex interactions required by a modern society, it poses no threat. Indeed, to criticize technization in its proper place is anti-modern and regressive. (156)

Marcuse does advocate relating to nature as to another subject, but the concept of subjectivity implied here owes more to Aristotelian substance than to the idea of personhood. He does not recommend chatting with nature but, rather, recognizing it as possessing potentialities of its own with a certain inherent legitimacy. That recognition should be incorporated into the very structure of technical rationality. (156)

As a general rule, formally rational systems must be practically contextualized in order to be used, and as soon as they are contextualized in a capitalist society, they incorporate capitalist values. (160) *Marcuse's critique of Habermas's theory that "science and technology are essentially indifferent to interests and ideology and represent the objective world in terms of the possibilities of understanding and control" (159-60).

The real difference between [Habermas's and Marcuse's] views lies along a different axis. The issue is not, as Habermas thinks, whether to revive a philosophy of nature; it concerns our self-understanding as subjects of technical action. (164)

Habermas distinguishes between system, media regulated rational institutions, such as markets and administration, and lifeworld, the sphere of everyday communicative interactions in which such functions as child rearing, education, and public debate go on. (167)

According to Habermas, the central pathology of modern societies is the colonization of lifeworld by system. This involves the overextension of success-oriented action beyond its legitimate range and the consequent imposition of criteria of efficiency on the communicative sphere. The lifeworld contracts as the system expands into it and delinguistifies dimensions of social life which should be mediated by language. (167)

In fact technology has several different types of communicative content. [. . .] In any transportation system, technology can be found organizing large numbers of people without discussion; they need only follow the rules and the map. Similarly, workers in a well organized factory find their jobs almost automatically meshing through the design of the equipment and buildings--their action is coordinated--without much linguistic interaction. (168)

But a critical theory of technology cannot ignore design. Whether the issue concerns child labor, medical research, computer mediated communication, or environmental impacts of technology, design has normative implications and is not simply a matter of efficiency. (173)

As Marcuse had already argued, the research shows that modern technological rationality incorporates domination in its very structure. Our technical disciplines and designs, especially in relation to labor, gender, and nature, are rooted in a hegemonic order. (178)

Consider, for example, the passage from craft to industrial production: productivity increased rapidly, a quantitative change of great significance that appears purely technical, but just as importantly, secondary instrumentalizations such as word design, management, and working life suffered a profound qualitative transformation. These transformations are not merely sociological accretions on a presocial relation to nature, or unintended consequences of technological change, but are essential to industrialization considered precisely in its technical aspect. They result from a technical code that privileges deskilling as a fundamental strategy of mechanization from Arkwright down to the present. (179)

The essence of technology can only be the sum of all the major determinations it exhibits in its various stages of development. That sum is sufficiently rich and complex to embrace numerous possibilities through shifts of emphasis among the primary and secondary instrumentalizations. (179)

Pure technical principles do not define actual technologies. They must be concretized through a technically realized conception of the good which particularizes them and establishes them systematically in the life process of a society. Every instantiation of technical principles is socially specific, just as Habermas claims of law. (180)

Quotes from Ch. 6: Democratizing Technology

Technology is power in modern societies, a greater power in many domains than the political system itself. (131)

The legislative authority of technology increases constantly as it becomes more and more pervasive. But if technology is so powerful, why don't we apply the same democratic standards to it we apply to other political institutions? By those standards the design process as it now exists is clearly illegitimate. (131)

Nevertheless, the argument for direct democracy is simple and compelling: representatives substitute themselves for the "people" and pervert their will. True personal freedom and independence can only be realized through active participation. Representation, even at its best, diminishes the citizens by confiscating their agency. (133)

• Not to mention career politicians who are more interested in serving their personal interests (of having a job once their term ends or they're voted out of office) over those of the people they represent. Corruption!!!

The fact that such a [lively] public sphere is, in the context of representative theory, an informal requirement of full democracy leads to a peculiar ambiguity: the constitutional conditions that make public participation possible also protect the privately owned mass media which everywhere substitute themselves for discussion and social action. (133)

Despite its obvious defects, representation is required wherever distances and large populations conspire against direct face-to-face deliberation. (133)

Sclove argues for adjusting technological design to the requirements of strong democratic community. (135)

• Wondering how this would affect technological development. In the abstract, it seems like a good idea--that an informed populace would have an opportunity to offer input on major technological designs that greatly impact their lives. However, does this process occur for all technological innovations? For example, would the new version of the iPhone have to pass democratic approval before it moved forward? Would we vote on prototypes? How would this work?

[Sclove and I] agree that where the public is involved in technological design, it will likely favor advances that enlarge opportunities to participate in the future over alternatives that enhance the operational autonomy of technical personnel. (135)

Popular action in the technical sphere always presupposes a background of accomplishments embodied in specialized knowledge and technical leadership. Technical experts are not chosen by the people, but achieve their position through training and administrative procedures. Past popular action informs their traditions and culture, and insures that they serve many interests in carrying out their professional tasks, but present public participation generally comes from outside technical institutions. (137)

Representation is organized around territorial units which are small enough to reflect common interests that engage the concern and animate the discussions of local citizens. The representative is the bearer of these local concerns, responsible as an individual to the citizens. The representative's duty is to carry a message, to testify for the constituents, either for their real will or the ideal will postulated by the representative on moral or other grounds. (138)

• In an ideal world, yes. But the "ideal will postulated by the representative" is often self-serving, I worry, and this limits how well represented the people actually are.

Design comes to reflect a heritage of properly technical choices biased by past circumstances. Thus in a very real sense, there is a technical historicity; technology is the bearer of tradition that favors specific interests and specific ideas about the good life. (139)

The differentiation of specializations gives specialists the illusion of pure, rational autonomy. This illusion makes a more complex reality. In reality, they represent the interests which presided over the underdetermined technical choices that lie in the past of their profession. The results are eventually embodied in technical codes which in turn shape the training of technical personnel. (139)

Where the individuals deliberate and act in these "local" technical settings, they reenact in the technical domain the very sort of populist participation so prized by advocates of strong democracy when it appears in local geographical settings. True, that deliberation may be highly mediated, and the action may be unexpected from a traditional standpoint, as in the case of consumer boycotts, but these interventions are the equivalent for a technologically advanced society of geographically local action in earlier times. (140)

• "local" technical settings = technological affinity groups?

As Hans Radder writes, "What is at least as important [as 'moral choices, 'adverse side effects,' and 'costs and benefits'] in a normative evaluation of (proposed) technologies is the quality of the natural, personal, and sociocultural world in which the people involved will have to live in order to successfully realize the technologies in questions." (141)

Expertise has historically served class power. The bias in favor of representing the interests of a narrow ruling group is strongly entrenched. An undemocratic technical system can offer privileges to its technical servants that might be threatened by a more democratic system. (143)

The most important means of assuring more democratic technical representation remains transformation of the technical codes and the educational process through which they are inculcated. (143)

Technical decision-making, like state administration, often goes well beyond mere questions of efficiency to shape the social environment and life patterns of the citizens. It too has normative implications and requires legitimating mechanisms based on public inputs if it is to be incorporated into the framework of a modern democracy. These mechanisms must assure its representative character and remove the suspicion that decisions arise in pure arbitrariness or covert interests. (145)

We have other less ambitious models than strong democracy of alternatives to technocratic control, such as the collegial organization of certain professionals. These collegial forms of organization of teachers and physicians have distant roots in the old craft guilds. Like vocational investment in work, collegiality has been replaced by capitalist management practically everywhere and survives only in a few specialized and archaic settings such as universities and hospitals. Even there it is increasingly threatened. Not the essence of technology but the requirements of capitalist economics explain this outcome. (145)

It is not surprising that board membership is ineffective in a society where technical relations in production are uncontested. Indeed, the absence of such contestation is probably a condition for achieving board membership under capitalism. What is perhaps more worrisome is the lack of pressure to democratize public technical institutions in which everyone has a large stake, institutions such as utilities, medicine, and urban planning that are only loosely controlled by elected officials today, if at all. (146)

• What seems to be missing in this chapter is any elaboration on what the democratizing of technology would look like/achieve. Ideally, he seems to be implying that the interests of the masses would be served by technology should it be democratized, but even in these examples he's provided here, I'm not sure I see how giving people a voice in the production of these technologies would make them any better. What kind of voice is he envisioning for people? And what kind of expertise is needed in order to have any understanding of the issues surrounding these various examples? What would democratization look like? What purpose would it serve?

But as Dewey foresaw, the dispersion of the technological citizenry, combined with a privatized culture and a media-dominated public process account for the passivity of a society which has not yet grasped how profoundly affected it is by technology. Only as that realization dawns are citizens likely to demand electoral checks on the policy-making bodies in control of technology. (146)

As distinct from "strong" democracy, I will call a movement for democratization "deep" where it includes a strategy combining the democratic rationalization of technical codes with electoral controls on technical institutions. Such a deep democratization would alter the structure and knowledge base of management and expertise. (147)

• How?

Instead of popular agency appearing as an anomaly and an interference, it would be normalized and incorporated into the standard procedures of technical design. (147)

• How?

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)

Quotes from Ch. 4: The Limits of Technical Rationality

According to Weber, modernity is characterized by the increasing role of calculation and control in social life, a trend leading to what he called the "iron cage" of bureaucracy. (75)

This notion of enslavement by a rational order inspires pessimistic philosophies of technology according to which human beings have become mere cogs in the social machinery, objects of technical control in much the same way as raw materials and the natural environment. (75)

While this view is overdrawn, it is true that as more and more of social life is structured by technically mediated organizations such as corporations, state agencies, prisons, and medical institutions, the technical hierarchy merges with the social and political hierarchy. (75)

Modern societies experienced real crises in the late 1960s that marked a turning point in the willingness of the public to leave its affairs in the hands of the experts. (76)

The crux of [my] argument is the claim that technology is ambivalent, that there is no unique correlation between technological advance and the distribution of social power. The ambivalence of technology can be summarized in the following two principles.

1. Conservation of hierarchy: social hierarchy can generally be preserved and reproduced as new technology is introduced. This principle explains the extraordinary continuity of power in advanced capitalist societies over the last several generations, made possible by technocratic strategies of modernization despite enormous technical changes. (This principle explains why there can be no technical "fix" to fundamental social and political injustices.)
2. Democratic rationalization: new technology can also be used to undermine the existing social hierarchy or to force it to meet needs it has ignored. This principle explains the technical initiatives that often accompany the structural reforms pursued by union, environmental, and other social movements. (76)

Faith in progress has been supported for generations by two widely held deterministic beliefs: that technical necessity dictates the path of development, and that that path is discovered through the pursuit of efficiency. (77) I will argue that here that both beliefs are false, and that, furthermore, they have anti-democratic implications. (77)

Determinism thus implies that our technology and its corresponding institutional structures are universal, indeed, planetary in scope. There may be many forms of tribal society, many feudalisms, even many forms of early capitalism, but there is only one modernity and it is exemplified in our society for good or ill. (78)

Thus economic choices are necessarily secondary to clear definitions of both the problems to which technology is addressed and the solutions it provides. But clarity on these matters is often the outcome rather than the presupposition of technical development. For example, MS DOS lost the competition with the Windows graphical interface, but not before the very nature of computing was transformed by a chance in the user base and in the types of tasks to which computers were dedicated. A system that was more efficient for programming and accounting tasks proved less than ideal for secretaries and hobbyists interested in ease of use. Thus economics cannot explain but rather follows the trajectory of development. (79)

• Wonder how this argument is complicated by the fact that Windows runs on top of MS DOS. It's not as though Windows did away with MS DOS...it just made MS DOS invisible...and used in less direct ways than it once was.

Constructivism argues, I think correctly, that the choice between alternatives ultimately depends neither on technical nor economic efficiency, but on the "fit" between devices and the interests and beliefs of the various social groups that influence the design process. What singles out an artifact is its relationship to the social environment, not some intrinsic property. (79)

But what if the various technical solutions to a problem have different effects on the distribution of power and wealth? Then the choice between them is political and the political implications of that choice will be embodied in some sense in the technology. (80)

Determinism ignores these complications and works with decontextualized temporal cross-sections in the life of its objects. It claims implausibly to be able to get from one such momentary configuration of the object to the next on purely technical terms. But in the real world all sorts of attitudes and desires crystallize around technical objects and influence their development. Differences in the way social groups interpret and use the objects are not merely extrinsic but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. (80)

In a society where determinism stands guard on the frontiers of democracy, indeterminism is political. If technology has many unexplored potentialities, no technological imperatives dictate the current social hierarchy. Rather, technology, is a site of social struggle, in Latour's phrase, a "parliament of things" on which political alternatives contend. (83)

• Determinism seems just as political--ignoring the human agency in the development of technologies allows for social injustices.

Perhaps the prevalence of such tendentious definitions explains why technology is not generally considered an appropriate field of humanistic study; we are assured that its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a hermeneutically interpretable meaning. At most, humanistic methods might illuminate extrinsic aspects of technology, such as packaging and advertising, or popular reactions to controversial innovations such as nuclear power or surrogate motherhood. Of course, if one ignores most of its connections to society, it is no wonder technology appears to be self-generating. Technological determinism draws its force from this attitude. (83; emphasis added)

These three points thus establish the legitimacy of applying the same methods to technology that are employed to study social institutions, customs, beliefs, and art. With such a hermeneutic approach, the definition of technology expands to embrace its social meaning and its cultural horizon. (84)

Technical design responds not only to the social meaning of individual technical objects, but also incorporates broader assumptions about social values. The cultural horizon of technology therefore constitutes a second hermeneutic dimension. It is one of the foundations of modern forms of social hegemony. As I will use the term, hegemony is domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to those it dominates. One might also define it as the aspect of the distrubution of social power which has the force of culture behind it. (86)

When one looks at old photos of child factory workers, one is struck by the adaptation of machines to their height (Newhall, 1964: 140). The images disturb us, but were no doubt taken for granted until child labor became controversial. Design specifications simply incorporated the sociological fact of child labor into the structure of devices. The impress of social relations can be traced in the technology. (86-7)

Technological regimes reflect this social decision unthinkingly, as is normal, and only social scientific invenstigation can uncover the source of the standards in which it is embodied. (88)

Why aren't we more aware of the public interventions that have shaped technology in the past? Why does it appear apolitical? It is the very success of these interventions that gives rise to this illusion. Success means that technical regimes change to reflect interests excluded at earlier stages in the design process. But the eventual internalization of these interests in design masks their source in public protest. The waves close over forgotten struggles and the technologists return to the comforting belief in their own autonomy which seems to be verified by the conditions of everyday technical work. (89)

But in reality technical professions are never autonomous; in defending their traditions, they actually defend the outcomes of earlier controversies rather than a supposedly pure technical rationality. Informal public intervention is thus already an implicit factor in design whatever technologists and managers may believe. (89)

• Is this always the case? Does all technology necessarily stem from these controversies?

If [technologists] have succeeded in incorporating public concerns in the past, why reject participation on principle today? However, even if the democratic position is granted this much, it is still possible to argue that participation has unreasonable costs. Thus the autonomy thesis still has another leg to stand on. This is the notion that technical rationality can supply the most efficient solution to economic problems when it suffers the least interference. (92)

Many would [claim] that public involvement in technology risks slowing progress to a halt, that democratization and environmental reform are tantamount to Luddite reaction. (92)

But it is a good question where the "irrationality" lay, in the government and utility industries which pushed for impracticable goals or in the public which called them to account out of unverified fears. (93)