[Contribution to a conference on Technology and Modernity, Univeristy of Twente, Nov. 1999, modified Feb. 2000]
Andrew Feenberg
Science of Society and History of Science
Theories of modernity and technology studies have both made great strides in recent years, but remain quite disconnected despite the obvious overlap in their concerns. How can one expect to understand modernity without an adequate account of the technological developments that make it possible, and how can one study specific technologies without a theory of the larger society in which they develop? These questions have not even been posed, much less answered persuasively, by most leading contributors to the fields. The first issue I would like to address is the why and wherefore of this peculiar mutual ignorance.
Before I enter into my theme, I should add that I do not intend here to survey all the activity in these two very active fields. In particular, I am leaving out of my account the many theorists who work on concrete problems with a range of tools drawn from both. My justification for this oversight is twofold: first, I have not yet found among these crossovers a satisfactory theoretical mediation between the two fields; and second, the most influential figures writing theory in these fields are not seeking such a mediation but on the contrary ignore or exclude each others' contributions. Clearly, this situation deserves treatment on its own terms at the theoretical level.
The writings of Marx are surely the single most influential source of theories of modernity down to the present day. If there is any one figure who has played a comparable role for contemporary technology studies, it is Thomas Kuhn. His innovations in historiographic methods transformed science studies and subsequently influenced the technology studies that grew out of science studies in the 1980s. Of course neither Marx nor Kuhn are followed slavishly by contemporary scholars, but we should not be surprised to find that many background assumptions derived from their thought are still at work in the most up to date contributions to the fields they helped to found. I would like to begin by considering several such assumptions that may help to explain the gap between modernity theory and technology studies.
At the core of Marx's thought there is an intuition he shared with his century, the notion that a great divide forever separated premodern from modern forms of social organization. All later contrasts of Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft, organic vs. mechanical solidarity, traditional vs. post-traditional society, and so on, owe something to Marx's canonical formulation of this idea in texts such as the Communist Manifesto.
As has often been noted, Marx's political vision flows from his confidence in the growing rationalization of society, not only in the sense of technical progress but also in terms of the self-understanding of the lower classes. Thus the sense of radical discontinuity present in these texts involves more than a theory of society; it also implies a certain way of being an individual in the society it explains. As the tectonic plates of culture are thrown into movement by the market, the individual is freed from naïve faith to an ironic sense of the gaps between ideals and realities. Critical social theory is founded not just on cognitive hypotheses but on the existential irony of the modern individual. Its method is therefore fundamentally reflexive and demystifactory as well as analytic, and links these two core ideas: on the one hand, technical progress based on rational methods raises productivity and supports the transition to the new society; on the other hand, a scientific understanding of social reality supports a new form of individuality freed from ideology and religion.
Kuhn writes somewhere in the long shadow cast by Marx, like all modern historians and social theorists, as can be deduced from the place of "revolution" in the title of his major book, but his take on historical discontinuities is quite different from Marx's. The demystificatory impulse is still present, but now it is directed at the significance granted in modern times to the "great divide" that characterizes modernity itself. Kuhn did not reject the idea of radical discontinuities in history which, on the contrary, continues to shape his vision of the past. But where Marx took for granted the existence of a sort of rationality gradient underlying the concept of modernity, Kuhn deconstructed the idea of a universal standard of rationality capable of transcending particular cultures and ordering them in a developmental sequence. Now the ironic glance turns back on itself, undermining the cognitive self-assurance implied in the stance of the naive ironist.
Kuhn's method had momentous consequences for technology studies as we will see. He showed that the evolutionary notion of scientific development is an illusion, that in fact there is no one continuous scientific tradition but a succession of different traditions each with its own basic assumptions and standards of truth, its own "paradigms." The illusion of continuity arises from glossing over the complexities and ambiguities of scientific change and reconstructing it as a progress leading straight to us. If we go back to the decisive moments of scientific revolution and examine what actually occurred from the standpoint of the participants, their competing positions, their arguments and experimental results, we will discover that the case is by no means so clear.
This practice-oriented approach is neatly captured in Latour's suggestion that science resembles a Janus looking back on its past in an entirely different spirit from that in which it looks forward to the future (Latour, 1987: 12). Science, Latour suggests, is a sum of results which "hold" under certain conditions, such as repeated experimental tests. But the backward glance shows us nature confirming the results of science, while the forward glance presents a very different picture in which the results which hold are called "nature." Looking backward one can say that the conditions of truth were met because the hypotheses of science were true. Looking forward one must say rather that meeting the conditions defines what scientists will use for truth. The backward glance tells of a necessary evolutionary progress of knowledge about the way things are independent of science; the forward glance tells of the sheer contingency of the process in which science decides on the way things are. The theorist who studies this Janus-faced monster is no longer a scientist but has become the narrator of a story.
I doubt if Kuhn would appreciate this Nietzschean twist on his original contribution, from which unfortunately he retreated in subsequent writings. But the point is really not so much to offer an interpretation of Kuhn as of his significance on the maps of theory. From that standpoint, it is clear that Kuhn is in some sense the nemesis of Marx, and the harbinger of what has come to be called "postmodernism." And to the extent that technology studies derives from Kuhn's methodological innovations, it too bears a certain elective affinity for postmodernism, or at least for a "non-modern" critique of Marx's heritage. Yet what is preserved across these theoretical divides is also important: the idea of the theorist as demystifying appearances and restoring the rightful names of things in a this-worldly accounting of what is real and what is merely ideological self-delusion. That is an inherently progressive idea which implicitly affirms freedom and individuality whatever the euphemistic terminology and political skepticism that accompanies it in post- or non-modern formulations. These theoretical adversaries thus share something on which to build a shaky bridge between traditions.
Kuhn's interests were sufficiently different from Marx's that at first the contrast between their positions went unnoticed. Nowhere does Kuhn discuss economic systems, class relations, state forms, and Marx's rather sparse remarks on science add up to a theory only in the overheated constructions of the old Soviet diamat and Althusser. Kuhn certainly had no intention of commenting on issues beyond his field, the history of science, but a critique of Marx is implied in his notion of scientific revolution insofar as the latter did believe that his own work was scientific and, more deeply, that scientific rationality characterizes the modern. Thus just because Kuhn undermined the pretensions of science to access transhistorical truths, his work also undercuts Marx's theory.
The implicit conflict came to the surface in various formulations of postmodernism but it seemed still a mere disagreement between abstract epistemological positions. Things have changed now that it has emerged inside the ill matched couple we are considering here, modernity theory and technology studies. Since no fully coherent account of modernity is possible without an approach to technology, and vice versa, the tension itself must finally be theorized. It is no longer just a matter of one's position on the great question of realism vs. relativism but concerns basic analytic categories and research methods.
Consider the implications of technology studies for the notion of progress in modernity theory. If Kuhnian relativism has the power to dissolve the self-certainty of science and technology, then what becomes of the notion of a rationalized society? In most theories of modernity, rationality appears as a spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once customary and ideological obstructions are removed. On the contrary, the contingent scientific rationality of science studies can only gain a grip on society at large through the concrete practices in which it is, as Latour would say, actively "exported" out of the laboratory and into the farms, streets and factories (Latour, 1987: 249ff).
The theorists export their relativistic method as they trace the movements of its object. They dissolve all the stable patterns of progress into contingent outcomes of processes of "scaling up" or controversy. Institutional or cultural phenomena no longer have stable identities but must be grasped through the process of their construction in the arguments and debates of the day. This approach ends up eliminating the very categories of modernity theory, such as universal and particular, reason and tradition, culture and class, which are transformed from explanations into explananda. One can neither rise above the level of case histories or talk meaningfully about the essence and future of modernity under these limitations.
Modernity theory suffers disaster on its own ground once it encounters the new approach. If no determined path of technical evolution guides social development toward higher stages, if technical evolution could take different paths reflected in different types of modern society, then the old certainties of the theory collapse. One can no longer be sure if such essential dimensions of modernity as progress, rationalization, and democratization are actually universal tendencies of modern societies or just local consequences of the peculiar path of Western development. Unless it squarely faces the difficulties, the theory of modernity must become so abstract this kind of objection no longer troubles it, with a consequent loss of usefulness, or cease to be a theory at all and transform itself into a descriptive and analytical study of specific cases.
Here are two examples which show the depth of the problems.
Practice or System
The Logic of the Local
Andrew Pickering's interesting book The Mangle of Practice offers an illustration of the limitations of science studies as it attempts to understand central problems of modernity. Pickering firmly adopts the point of view of the forward looking Janus. His "mangle of practice" is the process in which subjects and objects of action are "emergently transformed and delineated in the dialectic of resistance and accommodation" (Pickering, 1995: 23). Nothing escapes the mangle. No stable prior conditions determine how it operates since everything present in the environment of practice is "mangled" in the course of each exercise. Patterns emerge, which Pickering claims have explanatory power, but these are extremely generalized structures of practical action rather than the more concrete categories of social theory.
Pickering's account of various problems in natural science is intriguing, but eventually he turns to social questions, confident that his "mangle" operates in the realm of technology no less than in that of science. Here my problems with Pickering begin. The case he takes up is the automation of the machine tool industry, analyzed in a classic study by David Noble (1984). Noble had shown how class interests shaped the innovation process. In his account, the complicated twists and turns of the story were due to unexpected limitations of the technology and worker resistance, but throughout management was guided by a constant goal: the maintenance of class power. Pickering challenges this interpretation of events.
According to Pickering, Noble fails to show that there are any constraints operating on the system of practice in which the new technology is developed and applied. "The interest of management…should thus be understood as itself within the plane of practice, transformed and reconstituted there as part of the complex flow of resistances and accommodations already described" (Pickering, 1995: 172). Noble's appeal to something external to the situation, and supposedly constraining for it, is characteristic of traditional social theory, which protects its basic assumptions from the contingencies of social life by treating them as prior conditions of practice. But this will not do. In the course of explaining any given case, the limits are constantly bent into whatever shape the mangle leaves them, without acknowledgement that they were never really effective qua limits in the first place. Pickering objects that knowledge of limits is always "retrospective," and so "this past endurance tells us nothing about what will happen tomorrow." Hence "there is no especially informative pattern to be discovered about what changes and what does not" (Pickering, 1995: 207). "To be precise, appeal to them [constraints] is vacuous unless their contours can be specified in advance of whatever episode is to be explained. And this is, at minimum, an exceedingly difficult requirement to meet" (Pickering, 1995: 175).
Difficult indeed! This astonishing argument would gratify David Hume but it makes mincemeat of social knowledge. No sensible social theorist has ever hoped to fulfill Pickering's "minimum" condition for "constraint talk" for the simple reason that society is far too complex for its future configuration to be predictable in any detail. But nevertheless reference to constraints is inescapable in the real world where wealth, power, laws, markets, control of resources and the sanction of technical experts usually weigh far more heavily on choices over far longer periods than other factors such as democratic public debate, moral values, and the interests of the weak and disenfranchised. This is surely true, or anyway what we must use for truth, however uncertain our knowledge and even as the relative influence of various factors is tested in case after case. Pickering's interesting epistemological critique of objectivism ends up justifying an implausible social ontology. That seems a defect in his argument rather than a recommendation. One would like to be able to draw on practice-oriented studies without paying such a steep philosophical price.
This is not to say that everything identified as a constraint really is constraining. There are often alternatives that get around apparent constraints. This fact refutes old-fashioned technological determinism and the social policies that depend on it. Is voluntary poverty the only alternative to nuclear power? Must we use dangerous pesticides or go hungry? Of course the answer is "no" and the arguments in favor of the negative response can be laid out persuasively (Feenberg, 1999: 91ff). But that is hardly a reason to deny the very existence of constraints! Such a radical skepticism with regard to constraints leaves no room for social knowledge beyond the combination of narrative accounts and the highly abstract description of the "mangle" Pickering offers.
A similar problem with the "export" of science studies methods to society occurs around the supposed opposition of local and global analyses. A purely local analysis extended to ever wider reaches is said by many in science studies to suffice in the study of society without the need for falsely global categories. This is to be sure a puzzling dichotomy. If the local analysis is sufficiently extended, does it not become nonlocal, indeed theoretical? Why not just generalize from local examples to macro categories and theories? We have already seen one reason in the discussion of Pickering's Humean skepticism regarding constraints. Latour has equivalent arguments of greater generality.
For Latour, the analysis of networks suffices, and the introduction of macro-social terms would simply mask the activities of the underlying actants which establish them in the first place. "[S]i je ne parle pas de 'culture', c'est parce que ce nom est rJservJ B l'une seulement des unitJs dJcoupJes par les Occidentaux pour dJfinir l'homme. Or, les forces ne peuvent être partagées en 'humaines' et 'non-humaines', sauf localement et pour renforcer certains réseaux" (Latour, 1984: 222-223). Latour continues in this passage to similarly reduce the terms "society" and "nature" to local actions.
But this stance has conservative political implications since in any conflictual situation the stronger party establishes the definition of the basic terms, culture, nature, and society, and no appeal to a prior essence is available to the defeated to validate their claims quand-même. Law's well known network analysis of Portuguese navigation is thus widely criticized for ignoring the fate of the conquered peoples incorporated into the colonial network. Hans Radder argues that Actor Network Theory contains an implicit bias toward the victors (Law, 1989; Radder, 1996: 111-112). I have argued elsewhere that without a global social theory, it is difficult to establish what I call the "symmetry of program and anti-program," i.e., the equal analytic value of the principal actors' intentions and those of the weaker parties they dominate (Feenberg, 1999: chap. 5). Thus although the empiricist preference for the local sounds innocent enough, truly rigorous localism excludes all reference to the traditional categories of social theory, such as class, culture, the state, and as a result blocks even-handed study of social conflict.
I owe a considerable intellectual debt to Latour, but I cannot follow him all the way to a pure localism of this sort. Why, one would like to know, is the simple act of generalizing taboo? Denying all validity to the generalities of traditional philosophy and social science reminds me too much of the positivism I resisted in my youth, a point highlighted in Joseph Rouse's most recent book (Rouse, 1996: chap. 4).
Now it is true that there is no intrinsic reason why science studies should seek to explode the framework of social theory, and not all science studies approaches lead to such radical consequences. Yet the tendency to do so is clearly quite influential in science studies circles. I call attention to it because it takes to the limit a consequence of certain original methodological choices applied to technology and through technology to modern social life. The results, I have argued, are unsatisfactory.
Modernity as Differentiation
Let me turn now to the corresponding problems on the side of social theory. Heidegger most famously developed a radical critique of technology for its power to "de-world," that is, to strip its objects of their inherent potentialities and reduce them to mere raw materials. In the next section I will turn to Heidegger's approach, but not in its original form. His theory of technology is unremittingly negative but some of his followers have attempted to modify it interestingly. I will discuss one of these innovative applications of Heidegger to the problem of technology and attempt to carry it further, well beyond the bounds of Heidegger's own thought. However, my own attempt tells us little about the current state of modernity theory which on the whole either continues to ignore technology or acknowledges it in an outmoded deterministic framework.
More revealing is the extreme but instructive and influential case of Jurgen Habermas. Habermas is one of the most important social theorists today. His influence is widespread and the rigor of his thought admirable. Yet he has elaborated the most architectonically sophisticated theory of modernity without any reference at all to technology. This blissful indifference to what should surely be a focal concern of any adequate theory of modernity requires explanation, especially since Habermas is strongly influenced by Marx for whom technology is of central importance.
The basis of Habermas's approach is his theory of rationality, derived from Weber. According to this theory, modernity consists essentially in the differentiation of the various "cultural spheres." Religion, the state, law, the market, science, technology each become distinct social domains with their own logic and institutional identity. Under these conditions, science and technology take on their familiar post-traditional form as independent disciplines. Rationality in its scientific-technical form is purified of religious and customary elements. Similarly, markets and administrations are liberated from the admixture of religious and feudal prejudices and family ties that bound them in the past. They emerge as "systems" governed by an internal logic of equivalent exchange. What I will call the differentiation theory of modernity holds that the spread of such rationalities is the foundation of a complex modern society. However contestable this account of the phenomenon of modernity, something significant is captured in it. Modern societies really are different, and the difference seems closely related to the quasi-automatic functioning of institutions such as markets and administrations, which organize vast impersonal systems.
At first Habermas argued that rationalization threatened technocratic intrusions into the lifeworld of communicative interaction, and this reference to techno-cracy seemed to link his theory to the technical development of modern societies (Habermas, 1970). However, his mature formulation of the theory ignores technology and focuses exclusively on the spread of markets and administration. Habermas identifies these as rational "systems" which organize most action coordination under modern conditions (Habermas, 1984, 1987).
The effect of Habermas's reformulation of Weber's differentiation theory is to neutralize rational systems by identifying them with rationality as such. In many of Habermas's formulations, for example when he considers workers' control, it seems that critique would be irrationalist if it went to the social construction of these systems. He thus offers no suggestions, at least in The Theory of Communicative Action, for reforming markets and administrations and instead suggests limiting the range of their social influence. In the case of science and technology this puzzling retreat from a social account of rational systems is carried to the point of caricature. Habermas claims that science and technology are based quite simply on a nonsocial "objectivating attitude" toward the natural world. This would seem to leave no room at all for the social dimension of science and technology, which has been shown over and over to shape the formulation of concepts and designs. Clearly, if scientists and technologists stand in a purely objective relation to nature, there can be no philosophical interest in studying the social sources of their insights. On Habermas's view, it is difficult to see how a properly differentiated rationality could incorporate social values and attitudes except as extrinsic goals governing "use." This implies too a strange methodological dualism in which phenomenological accounts of the lifeworld coexist with an objectivistic systems-theoretic explanation of "systems" such as markets and administrations.
The effect of this approach is to liberate social theory from all the details of sociological and historical study of actual instances of rationality. No matter what story sociologists and historians have to tell about a particular market, administration, or, afortiori, technology, this is inessential with respect to the philosophically abstracted forms of differentiated rationality. The real issue is not whether this or that contingent happening might have led to different practical results, for all that matters to social theory is the range of rational systems, the extent of their intrusions on the proper terrain of communicative action (Feenberg, 1999: chap. 7).
Could it be that the most important differentiation for Habermas is the one that separates social theory from certain sociological and historical disciplines, the material of which he feels he must ignore to pursue his own path as a philosopher? But when the results are compared to earlier theories of modernity, it becomes clear what a tremendous price Habermas pays to win a space for philosophy. Marx had a concrete critique of the revolutionary institutions of his epoch, the market and the factory system, and later modernization theory foresaw a host of social and political consequences of economic development. But Habermas's complaints about the boundaries of welfare state administration seem quite remote from the main sources of social development today, the revolutions in global markets, in technically mediated communications and other technologies that are transforming the planet. In his work the theory of modernity is no longer concerned with these material issues but operates at a higher level, a level where, unfortunately, very little is going on.
Of course other social theorists have made contributions to the theory of modernity that do touch on technology interestingly, sometimes under the influence of other aspects of Habermas's theory. I have tried to work toward such a reformulation of Habermas's position to take technology into account in my most recent book (1999: chap. 7).
Ulrich Beck has proposed a theory of "reflexive modernity" in which the role of technology is explicitly recognized and discussed in terms of transformations in the nature of rationality. Beck starts out from the same concept of differentiation as Habermas, but he considers it to be only a stage in the development of modern societies, a stage he calls "simple modernity." Simple modernity creates a technology that is both extremely powerful and totally fragmented. The early Marxist Lukács already identified this plausible outcome of differentiation as a consequence of "reification." According to Lukács, capitalist society is characterized by the rationality of the "parts"—individual enterprises for example—and the irrationality of the whole, leading to recurrent crises. The uncontrolled interactions between the reified fragments have catastrophic consequences in Beck too. He argues that today a "risk society" is emerging, especially noticeable in the environmental domain. "Risk society…arises in the continuity of autonomized modernization processes which are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats. Cumulatively and latently, the latter produce threats which call into question and eventually destroy the foundations of industrial society" (Beck, 1994:5-6).
The risk society is inherently reflexive in the sense that its consequences contradict its premises. As it becomes conscious of the threat it poses for its own survival, reflexivity becomes self-reflection and the way is open to new kinds of political interventions aimed at transforming industrialism. Beck places his hope for an alternative modernity in a radical mixing of the differentiated spheres that overcomes their isolation and hence their tendency to blunder into unforeseen crises. "The rigid theory of simple modernity, which conceives of system codes as exclusive and assigns each code to one and only one subsystem, blocks out the horizon of future possibilities….This reservoir is discovered and opened up only when code combinations, code alloys and code syntheses are imagined, understood, invented and tried out" (Beck, 1994: 32).
This revision of modernity theory is daring and suggestive, but it still rests on a notion of differentiation which would surely be contested by most contemporary students of science and technology. The major thrust of much of the work since Kuhn has been to show that "differentiation,"—Latour calls something similar "purification"—is an illusion, that the various forms of modern rationality belong to the continuum of daily practice rather that isolating themselves in a separate sphere (Latour, 1991: 81).
Yet the main phenomena identified by the theory of modernity do certainly exist and require explanation. A puzzling impasse is reached in the interdisciplinary relationship around this problem. Practice-oriented accounts of particular cases cannot be generalized to explain the systemic character of modernity, while differentiation theory appears to be invalidated by what we have learned about the social character of rationality from science and technology studies. A large part of the reason for this impasse, I believe, is the continuing power of disciplinary boundaries which, even where they do not become a theoretical foundation as in Habermas, still divide theorists and researchers. Far from weakening, these boundaries have become still more rigid in the wake of the sharp empiricistic turn in science and technology studies, and the growing skepticism in these fields with regard to the theory of modernity in all its forms.
Splitting the Difference
Interpretation and Worldhood
In this second part of this paper I want to suggest one of several possible lines of argument leading to a partial resolution of the conflict between modernity theory and technology studies. The key point on which I will focus is the role of interpretation in the two strands of theory we have been discussing. Interpretative understanding of society is an alternative to deterministic accounts. Where society is not studied as a law governed realm of causal interactions, it is usually considered to be a realm of meaning engaging interacting subjects of some kind, for example, subjects of consciousness or of language. In this context, hermeneutics appears as an explanatory model more suitable to society than the nomological model derived from physical science. As we will see, this is the case with both modernity theory and technology studies.
The place of interpretation in technology studies should be obvious from the Kuhnian critique of the myth of the given. Data do not speak unambiguously for Kuhn but must be interpreted, and interpretation calls into play the very theories the data are supposed to verify. This hermeneutic circularity is translated into social ontological terms when a similar approach is applied to technology.
Pinch and Bijker's famous analysis of the bicycle highlights the role of "interpretative flexibility" in the evolution of design (Pinch and Bijker, 1989). At the origin the bicycle had two different meanings for two different social groups. That difference in interpretation of a largely overlapping assemblage of basic parts yielded designs with distinctive social significance and consequence. They conclude that "different interpretations by social groups of the content of artifacts lead by means of different chains of problems and solutions to different further developments" (Pinch and Bijker, 1989: 42). But this means that there is no stable, pregiven telos of technological development because goals are variables, not constants, and technical devices themselves have no self-evident purpose. Clearly, we are a long way here from the old deterministic conception of technology in which changes in design follow from the technical logic of innovation. Meaning is now central.
Interpretation also plays an important role for modernity theorists such as Habermas and Heidegger. Both thinkers rely on a contrast between scientific-technical rationality and another type of thinking that articulates human experience. Their phenomenological approach privileges everyday understandings as an original realm within which human identity and reality are encountered more profoundly than in science and technology. Interpretation rather than law prevails in the study of this realm.
Of course there are major differences between Habermas and Heidegger. Habermas is not critical of scientific-technical rationality and considers the "lifeworld" of communicative interaction to coexist alongside science and technology as a more fundamental but independent sphere. This approach confines hermeneutics to communicative interactions and social institutions, seemingly exempting science and technology. On the other hand, Habermas's conception of strategic action, with its notion of distanced, manipulative subjectivity, is an essential complement to Heidegger's analysis of engaged action. Clearly, both dimensions of subjectivity are at work at different levels in technical practice.
Heidegger has a far more developed concept of the lifeworld that suggests more interesting hermeneutic perspectives. These have been brought out recently by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus in a book entitled Disclosing New Worlds (1997). As we will see, the major focus of this book is on social interaction rather than technology, but this turns out to be a correctable error of emphasis. Their starting point in any case is the very interesting notion of world disclosure which lies at the center of Heidegger's thought.
For Heidegger and his followers, worlds are realms of meaning and corresponding practices rather than collections of objects as in conventional usage. The Heideggerian term more nearly resembles our metaphoric concept of a "world of the theatre," or a "Chinese world" than the literal meaning. A world is "disclosed" according to Heidegger in the sense that the orientation of the subject opens up a perspective on reality that takes on a coherent form. Here interpretation is no specialized intellectual activity but the very basis of our existence as human beings.
Heidegger offers many fairly obscure considerations on the nature of disclosure which we can pass over for now. The main intent of his notion is to square the philosophical circle inherited from Kant. Kant was the first constructivist, arguing for recognition of the constitutive activity of the subject in perception. But he also admitted the finitude of the subject as a being cast amidst beings in the world. How can the finite subject constitute the totality of experience? The apparent contradiction between an epistemology emphasizing human power and an ontology emphasizing human weakness has haunted philosophy ever since.
Hegel suggested a solution which influenced Heidegger and no doubt lies in the background of the book Disclosing New Worlds. Where history rather than nature is identified as the fundamentally real, the finitude and constitutive power of human subjects can be reconciled. History is clearly a human product even though humans are also just as clearly objects within the historical world they construct. Here the notion of "disclosure" as the simultaneous constructing of and openness to reality makes sense.
Disclosing New Worlds takes up this basic concept in the context of a theory of what it calls history-making practices. The problem to which the book is addressed is how disclosive activities actually change the world we live in, opening us to new or different perspectives and reorganizing our practices around a different sense of what is real and important. The book reviews three main types of history-making disclosive practice corresponding to three main types of historical actors.
"Articulations" refocus a community on its core values and practices. This is primarily the task of political leaders. As an example, the authors cite John Kennedy's ability to generate enthusiasm for the space race around themes such as the new frontier. "Cross-appropriations" weave together values and practices from diverse domains of social life in new patterns that alter the structure of our world. This is the work of successful social movements, such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) which transposed ideas about responsible behavior from the domain of work into the domain of leisure. Finally, and most significantly, Disclosing New Worlds describes "reconfiguration" as the process in which a marginal practice is transformed into a dominant practice. Entrepreneurs are the agents of reconfiguration, which they accomplish through introducing new products that suggest new patterns of life. However, the focus of Disclosing New Worlds is not on the products but on the entrepreneurs. Yet it is clear from the examples in the book that, as the authors write explicitly, "it is the product or service, not the virtuous life-style of the entrepreneur, that makes the world change..." (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 45).
Although technology studies are not mentioned, the examples illustrate nicely the theme of interpretative flexibility. Gillette's successful introduction of the disposable razor is a texbook case. The traditional straight razor belonged to a world in which men cared for and cherished finely made objects. Gillette sensed the possibility of a redefinition of the masculine relation to objects in terms of control and disposability and furthered that change with a new type of razor. Inotherwords, Gillette did not just serve a pre-existing need for sharper razors. "The entrepreneurial question was, What did his annoyance at the dullness mean? Did it mean that he just wanted a better-crafted straight-edge razor that kept its edge longer? Or did he want a new way of dealing with things? We shall argue that genuine entrepreneurs are sensitive to the historical questions, not the pragmatic ones, and that what is interesting about their innovations is that they change the style of our practices as a whole in some domain" (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 42-43). Style is a very general feature of worlds relevant to the design of artifacts. In this case the change in style involves the transition from a respectful to a controlling attitude toward objects. We find more precise tools for discussing the reconfigurative work of artifacts in the notions of "actors" and "scripts" in technology studies.
In particular the multiplicity of actors identified in many case histories offers a useful corrective to the book. The bias toward the heroic disclosive power of poets, philosophers and statesmen, presumed to be in touch with "Being," has been noted in Heidegger and his followers before. Perhaps the over-emphasis on entrepreurs is a modest expression of that bias. In any case, the failure adequately to deal with the role of technology confirms the tendency of modernity theories to abstract from the world of things. But this time there is a difference: for once a modernity theory lends itself to a shift in emphasis to take technology into account because in fact technology is there already at the core of the theory. "A world, for Heidegger," the authors write, "...is a totality of interrelated pieces of equipment, each used to carry out a specific task such as hammering in a nail. These tasks are undertaken so as to achieve certain purposes, such as building a house. Finally, this activity enables those performing it to have identities, such as being a carpenter" (Spinosa, et al., 1997: 17).
Instrumentalization Theory
We now have two complementary premises drawn from the two theoretical traditions we are attempting to reconcile. On the one hand, the evolution of technologies depends on the interpretive practices of their users. On the other hand, human beings are essentially interpreters shaped by world-disclosing technologies. The dual movement of disclosure is here confirmed: human beings and their technologies are involved in a co-construction without origin.
This preliminary conclusion is encouraging for our project, but to be applied it must be concretized in terms of the fundamental insights of modernity theory and technology studies. We need a way of understanding the central role of technology in modern life as both technically rational in form and rich in socially specific content. I have proposed what I call "instrumentalization theory" to show how the hermeneutic focus makes possible a synthesis at this level.
According to this theory, technology has a specific character, its "technicity," which, as it mediates more and more of the social process, comes to characterize the culture of its society. That specifically technical dimension of technology is often identified in modernity theory with what Heidegger called "technological thinking," or Habermas, the "objectivating success oriented attitude toward nature." Such characterization lead to the familiar complaint about modernity's obsession with efficiency and control. That obsession may well deserve criticism, but it cannot be immediately identified with actual technology. The connection must be worked out in particular cases, and, as we will see, technicity is not reducible to an ideology.
This reservation is supported by technology studies, which have shown that there is no disembodied essence of technology floating above society and controlling its destiny. Perhaps technology studies go too far toward disaggregating their object when they hold that there are only technologies in the plural, deeply embedded in various social institutions, ideologies, and practices. Nevertheless, this is a useful corrective to essentialism if we can just recapture what makes technologies technical on social terms. Then we would be able to show that, whatever else it may be--rational, reified, etc., the specifically technical character of technology expresses itself in social forms that also embody non-technical values of all sorts. This then is the program: to explain the cultural impact of technicity in a technological society without losing track of the concrete social embodiment of actual devices and systems. Here is where the concept of world disclosure can be helpful, on the condition that analysis be pursued not just in terms of the question of style, but more specifically in terms of the practical constitution of technical objects and subjects.
In actuality, "disclosing new worlds" involves a complex process of de-worlding which is inherent in technical action. The materials engaged in technical processes always already belong to a world which must be shattered as they are released for technical employment. The specific de-worlding effect of technical action touches not only the object but also the subject, as Habermas argues. The technical actor stands in an insulated, external position with respect to the lifeworld in which appear the objects of technical action. We thus distinguish a manipulative dimension in the technical relation to reality from the reciprocal relations of everyday communication. It is this aspect of technology which is highlighted in Heidegger's later critique of "enframing." De-worlding is the basis in the lifeworld of theoretical procedures such as quantification which make technical disciplines possible.
The mistake of most modernity theory is to identify this de-worlding with the essence of actual technology. These theorists fail to recognize that, at the practical level, the de-worlding associated with technology is necessarily and simultaneously entry into another world. Logging offers a particularly graphic example of the idea of de-worlding, but even such a violent technical intervention does not consist merely in uprooting and destroying. To be sure, the world of the forest ceases to exist when the trees are cut down, but logging is already adjusted to a function in another world, a world of human construction. Thus the logs are stripped and sliced to form boards that will soon stand in dwellings of one sort or another. By their shape and size, the boards already belong to the human world they will build. Similar considerations apply to the detachment of the technical subject. Although the logger is indeed indifferent with respect to the tree he fells, and certainly ought to be well protected from the violent process he initiates, he does not stand beyond all worlds like some Cartesian cogito in pursuing his vocation. On the contrary, he gains an identity in a world, as a logger, from the detached activity in which he engages.
It is the duality of technical processes, as both de-worlding and world disclosing, that is reflected in the split between moderntiy theory and technology studies. De-worlding is a salient feature of modern societies, which are constantly engaged in disassembling natural objects and traditional ways of doing things and substituting new technically rational ways. Focussing exclusively on the negative aspect of this process yields the dystopian critique we associate with thinkers like Weber and Heidegger. But de-worlding is only the other side of a process of disclosure which must be understood in social terms. It is obvious that the construction process and the builders belong to a society in which family size, profits, specifications, safety regulations, and so on regulate every aspect of technical activity. Technology studies emphasizes this aspect of the process. The antinomy results from the inherently dialectical character of technical action, misunderstood unilaterally in each case.
Instrumentalization theory characterizes this dialectic as a two level process. De-worlding involves a process of functionalization in which objects and subjects are torn out of their original contexts and exposed to analysis and manipulation. Modern societies are unique in de-worlding human beings in order to subject them to technical action--we call it management--and in prolonging the basic gesture of de-worlding theoretically in technical disciplines which become the basis for highly complex technical networks. Disclosing involves a complementary process of realization which qualifies functionalization by orienting it toward a new world involving those same objects and subjects. The two processes are analytically distinguishable, but in practice bound together in a unity.
I have represented these relations in a chart which I reproduce here to give an indication of how I view the systematic interconnection of the two instrumentalizations at the level of both social objects and social subjects.
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Chart I (1999: 208)
Functionalization Realization
Objectification decontextualization systematization
reduction mediation
Subjectivation autonomization vocation
positioning initiative
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Without going into the details of these categories, I want to emphasize their correlation in the structure of technical practice. There is no decontextualization without systematization, no reduction without mediation, and so on, and all these correlations become clear when technologies are studied from a practical standpoint.
Let me conclude now by returning to my starting point briefly. I began by contrasting the theoretical revolutions of Marx and Kuhn and promising to bring them together with a method of analysis that would reconcile modernity theory and technology studies. Can a phenomenology of technical worlds do the job? Recall that Marx emphasized the discontinuity introduced into history by what has come to be called "rationalization," the emergence of modern societies based on markets and technology. This view seemed to imply a universalism erasing all cultural difference. Kuhn, by contrast, subverted the notion of progress implied in Marx's vision of an increasingly rational social process and offered us a history subordinate to culture.
According to the approach I have developed here, rationalization describes the generalization of a particular type of de-worlding involved in technical action. That such de-worlding uproots nature and traditional worlds is clear. But on this account, rationalization no longer stands opposed to culture as such but appears as a creative expression of it. In practice this means that there may be many paths of rationalization, each relative to a different cultural framework. Rationality is not an alternative to culture that can stand alone as the principle of a social order, for better or worse. Rather, rationality in its modern technical form mediates cultural expression in ways that can in principle realize a wide range of values. The poverty of the actual techno-culture must be traced not to the essence of technology but to other dimensions of our society such as the economic forces that dominate technical development, design, and the media. This insight challenges us to engage in what Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores have called "ontological designing," the self-conscious construction of technological worlds supporting a desirable conception of what it is to be human.
The point I would like to make in conclusion is that we can fruitfully combine modernity theory and technology studies in an empirically informed, critical approach to important social problems. The triviality that threatens a strictly descriptive, empirical approach to such humanly significant technical phenomena as experimentation on human subjects, nuclear power, or the development of the automobile, can be avoided without falling into the opposite error of apriori theorizing. The alternative—global condemnation, narrow empiricism—is not exhaustive. There are ways of recovering some of the normative richness of the critique of modernity within a more concrete sociological framework that does allow entry to a few facts. Concepts like "rationality," which technology studies have set out to demystify, can be employed in a new way, and the implicit emancipatory intent of that demystification brought to the surface as an explicit goal. Perhaps someday soon the disciples of Marx and Kuhn will be able to lie down together in the fields of the Lord.
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