Technoculture

The Key Concepts

Debra Benita Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000190052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

We live in a world where science and technology shape the global economy and everyday culture, where new biotechnologies are changing what we eat and how we can reproduce, and where email, mobiles and the internet have revolutionised the ways we communicate with each other and engage with the world outside us.Technoculture: The Key Concepts explores the power of scientific ideas, their impact on how we understand the natural world and how successive technological developments have influenced our attitudes to work, art, space, language and the human body. Throughout, the lively discussion of ideas is illustrated with provocative case studies - from biotech foods to life-support systems, from the Walkman and iPod to sex and cloning, from video games to military hardware. Designed to be both provocative and instructive, Technoculture: The Key Concepts outlines the place of science and technology in today's culture.

1 INTRODUCTION: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL REALITIES

In his book Profiles of the Future, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke set out three laws that, he suggested, should always be considered when we are told that something is impossible. The third of these – ‘[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1999: 2) – is often quoted but it deserves some scrutiny not least because it begs several questions. To whom, for instance, is his statement addressed? What does he mean by ‘advanced’? What does he mean by ‘magic’? What, even, does he mean by ‘technology’? This last question has, perhaps, the most straightforward answer. When we speak about technology we are referring to the set of tools or ‘techniques’ that serve the requirements of any given culture. In the developed West, for instance, our working lives are constructed around the use of the internal combustion engine and data transfer devices such as the telephone and computer. We not only, in most cases, use some form of motor transport to travel to and from our places of work and some form of data transfer device to communicate with others when we arrive there, but the goods and services that many of us are engaged in producing require at least one of these methods of transportation if they are to be economically viable. Furthermore, outside of work, we tend to organize our activities similarly. In the early days of the rave scene in Europe in the 1980s, you absolutely required a telephone (preferably a mobile) and a car or van if you wanted to attend one of the illegal parties that were held at secret locations in the green belt around large cities, the details of which were available only by phoning a particular number at a particular time. So, in this regard, to speak of contemporary cultures as technocultures makes obvious sense. This bit isn’t rocket science (although in some cases, actually, it is – a point to which I’ll return in Chapter 5). But what of the magic?

Being a science fiction (SF) writer, Clarke was involved in the art of extrapolation. This is a term that refers to estimates about the future based on known facts and observations but it has been adopted by SF academics to describe the thought process which SF writers employ in constructing future and alternative worlds. Science fiction is never really about the future but it makes use of the future to extrapolate from the cultural conditions of the author’s time and place. It is a projection of what might be, given the current state of society and, perhaps more importantly, it takes for granted that social conditions are structured by, and a fundamental structuring element in, the development of new technologies. Although all cultures are, to a certain extent, technocultures, some, arguably, are more so than others. So, what is one person’s mundane, thoroughly familiar, sometimes irritating but always ubiquitous, tool for getting the job done is, from another’s point of view (in another part of the world, another time, an alternative dimension), simply magic.

This is not to say that there is a hierarchy of places or times where ‘progress’ or ‘development’ marks out some cultures as more advanced or more technologically literate than others. Anyone who has seen the British Channel 4 TV programme Time Team will be aware of how attempts to reconstruct technologies from the distant past cause problems for contemporary engineers who no longer have access to the skills to manipulate materials that have long fallen into disuse. And, of course, the so-called ‘wonders’ of the ancient world like Stonehenge or the Pyramids at Giza are wonderful because the method of their construction is a mystery to us; they also are indistinguishable from magic.

In a similar sense, technology often appears to be magical in its operation and application because the development of new technologies increasingly overtakes the ability of lay persons to understand the principles of their functioning. We live daily with technologies that we take for granted but cannot repair, nor, even if we know how to replace parts, do we know the minutiae of the manufacturing process that produces those parts. Furthermore, the factory workers that put the parts together may not understand the construction of the whole or even, perhaps, how the part that they are skilled at manipulating contributes to the overall function of the machine. For that, we must rely on ‘experts’; engineers, technicians, designers, programmers whose understanding of the machine on a conceptual level, as well as the relationship of parts to whole, is highly valued. The value placed on these persons reflects the importance of technology in the economic and social structure. Equally, it reflects a collective confidence in the continuing effectiveness of the production of new technologies. Technology is thus, perceived as ‘magic’ in yet another sense: it is expected to change our lives for the better. The question that needs to be addressed, then, is whether this is the case. Do ‘labour-saving’ devices really ‘save’ labour or do they just create different kinds of work? Do we all benefit equally from the speeding up of production and the ability to mass-produce goods and services? Do entertainment and communications technologies enrich our social lives or do they impoverish imagination and creativity? What kinds of power are mobilized by science and technology and how do they structure our politics?

The science fiction critics Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove have written about how, after the Second World War, the genre reflected a growing ambivalence about the power of technology following the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the writers ‘did not question the basic value of technology. . . they were secure in the belief that more massive, more organised doses of technology would take care of the problem’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 1988: 276) and, in Dora Russell’s opinion, ‘the mass of the population in America, Europe and Russia, were well satisfied with their machine god’ (Russell 1983: 209). The historical and epistemological period of world history that we now refer to as modernity could, arguably, be understood as largely shaped by worship of the machine god and the conflicts of the modern era as contests for technological superiority.

Although, of course, tool use has been part of the definition of human from prehistory, the late modern period is most clearly characterized by accelerated social change driven by technological innovation. In other words, from the late eighteenth century onwards, social structures in the developed West have to be understood as organized according to the development of new technologies that changed patterns of work and social life and influenced cultural institutions and their expression in art forms like painting, architecture, dance, drama and literature. The arts that we produce not only provide us with enjoyment but also provide us with a focus for working through our responses to cultural change and can be read as representing the state of knowledge about the world in any given historical period or in any given culture. Thus certain cultural artefacts can be analysed as instrumental in both structuring and reflecting responses to the impact of technologies on social organization and everyday life.

One famous example is the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which caused a sensation at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. The painting is in the Cubist style but, rather than showing the same object from multiple points of view simultaneously, Duchamp’s ‘nude’ is captured at different moments in time. The descent of the staircase is imaged as a set of overlapping repetitions, which suggest movement and speed. Duchamp later produced Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 3 which is a copy of No. 2 but painted on a photographic negative. While No. 2 is rendered in warm tones and evokes, not so much the flesh tones that would be expected in the depiction of a nude but the wood in which a marionette might be crafted, No. 3 is in shades of grey and thus makes reference to the photographic process that has originated the copy. Cinema was still very much in its infancy when Duchamp began his series (No. 1 was a more simplified execution, sketched in oils on cardboard) but the influence of experiments with movement and photography by, for instance, Eadweard Muybridge, in the mid-nineteenth century, is undeniable. Thus a new form of art emerged, abstracted from the dynamics of the body in motion, which owed much to the technology of cinema and the way in which a series of still frames is resolved into continuous movement when they are fed through the projector. What Duchamp helps us to understand is that, as much as new technologies have an impact on everyday life, so they also, inevitably, call into question much wider questions to do with how we experience the world, the representation of these experiences and their impact on how we construct society and the environment.

The Swiss architect, Le Corbusier was also excited by the advent of cinema because he believed that it would allow us to ‘enter into the truth of human consciousness’ (Le Corbusier 1988: 113) by revealing the way in which psychological states are expressed at the level of the body. For Le Corbusier, psychology is important because he was concerned to ‘make the true destiny of the machine age a reality’. He had no doubt that the architect, guided by both a rational understanding of the body and a clear idea of the future requirements of industry and commerce, would be instrumental in providing for an environment in which a ‘new kind of consciousness’ (1964 [1933]: 93) would flourish. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the observation of the body alone can produce a reliable psychology, we can see that what emerges from the invention of cinema is not only a new form of entertainment but a profound questioning of previous assumptions about the body and its disposition in, and occupation of, space.

I use the example of cinema here because it is another of the technologies, like cars and data transfer devices, which we now take for granted but which has had a profound influence on the contemporary world. Visual culture is currently an important field of academic study, not only because cinema and television are ubiquitous but because we recognize that any diagnosis of contemporary conditions must take into account the widespread influence of these technologies and their effects on all other aspects of culture, including the way that we experience ourselves and what this implies for the structure of societies.

We can therefore describe the study of technoculture as an enquiry into the relationship between technology and culture and the expression of that relationship in patterns of social life, economic structures, politics, art, literature and popular culture. It is also a quintessentially post-modern study in that it is a reflexive analysis from within, as it were, the belly of a beast that has grown to monstrous proportions. Postmodernism has been described in many ways and, in general, it tends to be a catch-all term used to describe the sense in which we live in a global culture, mediated by technologies of vision and computer networks, suffused by a popular culture that does not recognize previous distinctions in taste and class, such as between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and in which the boundaries between previously distinct categories of ideas have become fluid and unstable. There are disagreements as to when, or even if, we can reliably speak about a break between modernity and postmodernity. It is perhaps more helpful to think about postmodernity in terms of what one of the primary philosophers of postmodernity, Jean-François Lyotard (1989: xxiv) refers to as ‘incredulity regarding metanarratives’. Metanarratives are discourses that legitimate what comes to be accepted as truth. For instance, since at least the mid seventeenth century, the scientific method had been lauded as the human endeavour that would deliver us into utopia. Objective knowledge about ourselves and the universe would furnish the foundation for understanding how we could provide for ourselves the best of all possible worlds. Science was understood as an inherent good that would bring nature under the control of human beings. Thus science is a metanarrative that guarantees the legitimacy of propositions and practices that come under the general rubric of ‘improvement’ or ‘progress’.

When the director of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, witnessed the first nuclear test at Alamogordo, New Mexico he quoted from the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘I have become death – the shatterer of worlds’ (Thorpe, 2006: 3). Oppenheimer was treated with opprobrium for what was seen as his cowardice in the face of a technology that was heralded as the end to all wars but he was merely the first to give expression to the anxiety that would pervade the developed world when the knowledge that we could, indeed, destroy the planet had sunk in. What Oppenheimer’s statement brings into focus is the realization that what might, on the one hand, deliver us from disease, hunger and toil might, on the other, plunge us into nuclear winter and eventual extinction. This ambivalence towards science and its products is what distinguishes postmodern ‘incredulity’ while, at the same time, we are dependent upon technology to an intensifying degree.

I am writing this book using word-processing software on a computer that also allows me access to the World Wide Web where I am able to research my subject and order books from libraries. When it is complete, I will email it to my publisher. From typescript to finished edition, it will use other data processing, as well as printing and transport technologies. Finally, it will be available for sale, not only in bookshops but through booksellers on the Web, paid for by means of electronic fund transfer systems, the same method by which I will receive my royalties. In other words, when I define myself as a writer, that definition must include my relationship with the tools that enable me to perform that function and the fact that my use of those tools is coextensive with the economic and industrial processes of postmodern technocultures. I cannot extricate myself from this set of relationships because to do so would be to deny myself the means of making a living. Neither can you. But the ambivalence with which we approach our technologies continues to define our relationships with them. The complexity of these relationships mobilizes anxieties connected to how we understand what it means to be human, how we define the limits of the social world and how we structure acceptable and unacceptable expressions of gender, race and sexuality. What this book will explore is under what terms we inhabit the technocultural universe and the ideas and methodologies that have significance for our understanding of it. It will address the kinds of questions that arise when we consider the role of technology in determining culture and the role of culture in structuring how we use, produce, define and relate to the technologies with which we effect change in the world and which, in turn, effect changes in our understanding of ourselves.

MACHINES AND MODERNITY

Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times opens with a full screen shot of a clock face, which introduces a long sequence in which Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ gets into all sorts of trouble trying to hold down a job as a production line worker in a factory. The film is very funny but it is also a rather bleak analysis of the dehumanizing effects of factory work. The Tramp is subjected to a mechanical feeder, which, inevitably, slaps him in the face with a custard pie and, when he leaves the production line, his body continues to dance to the repetitive movements of the job: tightening nuts on an endless succession of metal plates. Finally, no longer able to distinguish between the processes of the job and the routine interactions of everyday life, he has a nervous breakdown. The clock is important because, as Lorenzo C. Simpson (1995: 23) points out, ‘[a] central goal of technology is to “stop the clock,” to de-realize time. . . to minimize the time necessary to realize a given goal’. What he is referring to here is the shift from agrarian or rural time, dictated by the rhythms of the seasons and the day as measured by sunrise and sunset, to the segmentation and regulation of time demanded by factory work following the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, the factory itself is a giant machine, which, to be efficient must operate like clockwork, with each component completely and continually integrated, but the Little Tramp is unable to conform and ends up out of work and homeless.

In a similar but more politically ambiguous film Metropolis (1927), director Fritz Lang imagines a future world where the idle rich languish in pleasure gardens high above the city while the workers and the machines, to which they must attend or die, are hidden deep underground. Two of the most enduring images from the film are the beautiful robot, Maria, symbol of the duplicity of advanced technology, and the giant clock, whose hands must be physically restrained at all times to prevent the machines from overheating and exploding, symbol of the workers’ enslavement. Like Chaplin, then, Lang was critiquing technological determinism or the sense in which the requirements of machines dictate the rhythms and structure of both personal and social life. The irony, of course, is that, outside the fantasy world of the movies, at the time that these films were made, industrial capitalism had already produced a world (at least in the developed West) where the needs of the population could not be met other than by mass production. While Chaplin’s tramp and the gamin (street child, played by Paulette Goddard) that he has befriended agree that they will ‘get along’ without conforming to the strictures of modern times, Lang’s solution is to bring together the ‘hand, brain and heart’ of mental, physical and caring labour. However, these happy endings could not so readily be applied to the real world.

Lang’s film was released just before, and Chaplin’s just after, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the near collapse of the Austrian banking system in 1931, the world was plunged into economic chaos. In the US, ‘[u]nemployment climbed from under two million in 1929 to five million during the course of 1930’ (Brendon, 2000: 70). The historian, Piers Brendon, writing about the conditions of the new urban poor, refers to ‘nameless families squatting in doorways or bivouacking over hot-air gratings or building tar-paper shacks on waste ground or dredging through trash cans and refuse dumps for food’ (Brendon 2000: 72). Modern Times rehearses this catastrophe in the plight of the Tramp who, determined to find work so that he and the gamin can set up home together, finds the factories closed and abandoned while the gamin’s unemployed father is killed in a street riot and she and her sisters are left at the mercy of the seemingly brutal childcare authorities.

Economic historians are divided over the causes of the Depression but the start of the c...