Technoculture and Critical Theory
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Technoculture and Critical Theory

Simon Cooper

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eBook - ePub

Technoculture and Critical Theory

Simon Cooper

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About This Book

The author explores the work of major thinkers and cultural movements that have grappled with the complex relationship between technology, politics and culture. Subjects such as the Internet, cloning, warfare, fascism and Virtual Reality are placed within a broad theoretical context which explores how humanity might, through technology, establish a more ethical relationship with the world.
Examining the philosophy of writers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, Lyotard, Virilio, and Zizek, and cultural movements such as Italian Futurism, this book marks a timely intervention in critical theory debates. The broad scope of the book will be of vital interest to those in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, politics and communications.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2003
ISBN
9781134506903
Subtopic
Popkultur
Edition
1

1 Introduction
In the service of the machine?

the problem is knowing whether the Master–Slave conflict will find its resolution in the service of the machine.
(Lacan 1977: 27)
Lacan’s ‘problem’ encapsulates the ambivalence most of us register towards technological progress. While technology allows humanity to develop more constructive ways of engaging with the world, it also extends the capacity for domination – whether it be nature or simply those who are different. Technology can allow us to realise our needs; however it can also reconstruct those needs so that aspirations towards human progress realise themselves within a technocratic, antihuman paradigm – in the ‘service of the machine’. This book is about how to come to terms with this ambivalence.
Implicitly, we all recognise that technology occupies an increasingly central role in our lives. Whether we look at the Internet, the possibilities for human cloning, the rise of high-tech global markets or any number of other examples, there seems to be scarcely any part of our lives that is not in some way technologically mediated. Popular culture registers this phenomenon of an increased technologisation of the lifeworld by simultaneously welcoming the change and contradictorily creating narratives revolving around a peculiar ‘paranoid’ sensibility. Cyberpunk fiction, television shows like the X-Files and Nowhere Man, and movies such as The Matrix tap into our fears of the increased capacity of technology to affect our lives, whether through more pervasive surveillance mechanisms or through the manufacture of powerful technological illusions. At one level, the increased popularity of paranoia as a cultural fantasia registers our ambivalence towards the effects of this ever-increasing technological mediation of our lives. At a deeper level, paranoia might be an implicit recognition of how technology works subtly, and behind our backs, to reconstruct the mode of our being human. This is the central concern of this book: how technology-in-use works to reconstitute our mode of being in the world, both directly and indirectly. Through an examination of how twentieth-century theorists and cultural movements have understood technology, the book attempts to articulate a position through which to engage with technology in the contemporary era.
This book explores the possibilities for a critical theory of technology. It does so by examining the work of various modern and postmodern thinkers and movements for whom the question of technology has been central. In the first part, the modernists Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and the Futurist movement are considered. The second part examines Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Virilio and more recent forms of ‘Cyberculturalism’ as analysed through psychoanalytic theory. The book thus proceeds by way of a comparison of earlier modes with contemporary postmodern writers. Through examining the work of these theorists and movements, it aims to show, in both a descriptive and more distinctively theoretical sense, how technology impinges upon and reconstructs social and cultural meaning. I will argue that analysing this process enables us to reflect upon the conditions where on the one hand this transformation might be welcomed. On the other hand, however, it also allows us to make an argument about the need to set limits to the nature of technological mediation, an argument unavailable to theories based around a concept of neutrality, or to those that understand technology empirically. It is the aim of this book to engage theoretically with writings on technology in a manner which will enable us to go beyond the mere recognition that ‘something’ changes whenever it is technologically mediated.
Our relations with technology are often marked by a deep ambivalence. Intuitively, many people feel uneasy about the rate of technological change, yet can find no base from which to transform their feelings into a broader social critique. Such ambivalence can also be seen in the thinkers and movements examined in this book. Heidegger painted an overwhelmingly negative portrait of the baleful effects of modern technology. Yet even he always maintained that he was not simply against technology, that it was possible to say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to technology, and that technology contained its own ‘saving power’. Benjamin both celebrated the technological destruction of ‘aura’ and lamented the loss of historical modes of experience that occurred through the technological reconstitution of human experience. Lyotard warns against the capacity of technology to lead to greater ‘terror’ and has noted the way that it colonises our notion of time, yet he looks to the techno-sciences and the information revolution to grant us access to a postmodern form of heterogeneous and libratory social relations. Virilio writes with both fascination and horror of the impact of technological change. Culturally, the Futurists hoped for a future based upon technological transcendence, yet their hopes were co-opted within a fascist aesthetic. Psychoanalytic approaches to cyberculture tend to either celebrate the subjective freedoms made possible through virtual environments or claim that such environments close off the possibility of meaningful subjective action. It is one of the aims of this book to examine the contradictions that emerge in the work of these theorists and movements, and to outline a social practice based in cultural reflexivity, which might move some way towards resolving, or at the very least responding productively, to some of these contradictions and tensions.
Given the Janus-faced nature of technology observed by all these writers, it becomes necessary, in formulating a critical theory of technology, to move beyond any sort of technological determinism. Determinism considers technology as a purely autonomous force that mysteriously shapes our way of being outside any socio-cultural context. We can see such determinism in narratives both of cultural pessimism and utopianism. Writers such as Ernst JĂŒnger, Jacques Ellul, Baudrillard, and at times Heidegger, Virilio and ĆœiĆŸek, portray a world totally enframed by technology that precludes any alternative mode of engagement outside of its dictates. Such determinism also fuels the utopian sensibilities of the Futurists and many cyberculturalists, who argue that technology propels us towards a new evolutionary stage. Such sensibilities accept the existence of a unitary logic behind technology that drives us, for good or ill, towards an irrevocable future. This book rejects such determinism, arguing, alongside the best aspects of Heidegger, that we can say a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ to technology.
To reject technological determinism, however, does not mean that we can simply approach technology instrumentally. The instrumental understanding of technology is based on the idea that it operates as a mere tool according to the subjective wishes of its users. Now while this common-sense notion may contain some truth, its truth must be radically circumscribed. This theory ignores the transformative role technology plays in reshaping and reconstituting subjectivity, embodiment and the social realm. To attempt a critical approach to technology from this position is all too often self-defeating, because it assumes that choices can be made from social and subjective positions which may themselves have been subject to a reconstitutive process. To say this is to acknowledge the manner in which technological mediation can frame social meaning in a necessarily different register. An example might be the way the Internet reconstitutes the social meaning of communication. As we all know, the Internet increases the sheer range of communicative possibilities by providing access to a wide scope of users. An instrumental approach stops at this point, regarding technology as simply extending the human capacity to communicate. This approach will only intervene in the case of a directly perceived possibility of harm, such as the availability of pornographic or other violent material. Yet one can go further, to note how the Internet constructs communication in a very specific manner. We can distinguish the sheer fact that communication is possible across greater extensions of space from the various qualitatively different modalities through which the meaning of that communication unfolds. While an instrumental approach will only consider the Internet empirically, I hope to consider such technology as part of a broader phenomenon that shapes the social in a new way. What does it mean if the social is increasingly constituted within a technologised setting, where the tangible presence of the other is no longer a structural necessity? In this context, we can consider the increasing phenomenon of Internet addiction, where subjects using the Internet are ‘addicted’ to sociality. What might it mean to be addicted to the social in this sense? An instrumental approach cannot ask these deeper questions about why something like Internet addiction occurs, because it fails to distinguish the qualitative differences between different modalities of the social.
One can think of numerous other examples in relation to emergent technologies: IVF reproduction, the possibility of human cloning, organ transplants. In each case, the instrumental approach only considers the technology in relation to the perceived harm or benefit to the individual. Broader social and ontological questions, such as the meaning of motherhood, the construction of human identity, the meanings of our own bodies, are ignored. These technologies are regarded as simply furthering already existing human capacities, the ability to create life, for example. The question of whether the meanings of these human capacities are reconstituted through the operation of a technological framework is not considered. This book will argue that this question is in fact crucial, and that understanding technology’s capacity to reconstitute human meanings and activities within different constitutive frameworks provides the condition for determining whether we might say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology.
How, then, are we to understand technology in a manner that will allow us to reflect usefully upon its relation to broader social and ontological questions and thus to move beyond an instrumental or empirical approach? Drawing upon the diverse points of view considered in this book, we can commence from the point that technology acts as a means of reconstituting the settings through which individual, social, and cultural meanings unfold. In other words, rather than simply furthering a particular capacity for action or representation, technology works to alter the grounds on which meaning attaches to any action or representation. Certainly, all the work considered here focuses upon how technology is able to alter historically embedded social and cultural meanings: Heidegger’s Gestell, Benjamin’s aura, Lyotard’s postmodern condition, and Virilio’s speed all concern themselves in some essential way with the recon-stitutive capacity of technology. Similarly, the utopian fantasy that underlies the rhetorics of both Futurism and aspects of contemporary cyberculturism is driven by this very prospect of a technological reconstitution of our being.
However, it is possible to go further and to examine a common element that relates to this process of reconstitution. As a general proposition, I want to argue that technology enables a more constitutively abstract mode of engagement with the world.1 What follows is a brief outline of how I employ the concept of abstraction, and how this provides the theoretical framework that will enable us to determine the grounds for a critical theory of technology.
The concept of abstraction relates both to the realm of ideas and to material processes. Intellectual practice functions, for example, through being able to stand outside a particular social and cultural setting. Intellectuals in their capacity as intellectuals interpret the world from a more abstract vantage point than people who live predominantly at the level of practical consciousness. That is, intellectuals work through abstract ideas, and, just as importantly, the mode of their work depends on being abstracted from what they are trying to take apart. To speak of abstraction in this way does not entail an essential dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete: even if all thinking is in some basic manner abstract, we can still distinguish, following Sharp, between levels or degrees of abstraction. For instance, in the realm of ideas we can say that Newtonian scientific thought is more abstract than its Aristotelian predecessor, and that quantum theory is more abstract again in relation to its object (Sharp 1985: 54). Abstraction as a material process is perhaps more difficult to comprehend.
Before elaborating the theoretical framework through which I employ this term, some initial examples may help to elucidate the basic idea of abstraction as a materially lived relation. Marx provides the example of commodity exchange, where relations are carried out in a more abstract setting than in historically prior forms such as barter or reciprocal exchange. Commodity exchange functions so that the specific identity of the participants is no longer a structural necessity, unlike in earlier forms of exchange. In other words, commodity exchange abstracts from the particularities of the participant agents and involves a material abstraction of value. Similarly, the technological practice of writing constitutes a more abstract form of intellectual exchange than an exchange framed within the modalities of a face-to-face relationship. With writing, an individual’s ideas and impressions are able to be conveyed despite their physical absence. This more abstract relation allows for certain possibilities to emerge, for instance that one’s ideas can be taken out of context, quoted without permission and more easily misunderstood than in a situation not framed by co-presence. The case of writing on the Internet allows a further elaboration of this process, since one is free here to construct multiple personae that bear no concrete relation to a physical or historical identity. As a final example we can think of the technological process of in-vitro fertilisation, which enables the process of childbirth to occur in a more abstract setting, without the necessary presence of bodies, emotions, or even the identity of the participants.2
However, it is important not to proceed too hastily. I want to elaborate upon how Sharp’s conception of ‘constitutive abstraction’ will be employed in this book. If I have already spoken of levels or degrees of abstraction, the meaning of these terms has not yet been sufficiently elaborated. The constitutive abstraction argument is generally explored in relation to two broad theoretical categories: modes of social integration and ontological categories of existence. These categories reveal, first, how technology comes to mediate and extend the means through which social relations are carried out and, second, how technology enables the reconstitution of the various categories of social being.

Modes of social integration

Social integration can occur at various degrees of abstraction, though it is important to emphasise from the outset that no social formation is constituted entirely at a single level. Following the work of Paul James, I have analytically distinguished three levels of social integration: namely the face-to-face, the agency-extended and the disembodied (James 1996: 19). These do not exist as pure forms: however it is important for the argument presented within this book to understand the means by which some levels work to contradict, reconstitute, extend, or erode practices that occur at other levels.
To speak of the face-to-face is to outline a mode of social integration which emphasises the importance of mutual and embodied co-presence. Historically, this mode is dominant in tribal and peasant society, where social existence is largely defined by tangible relations of co-presence. The face-to-face thus indicates a level of integration where embodied co-presence forms the dominant structuring principle around which social life is gathered. It is not defined by the nature of interaction. Under conditions where face-to-face relations predominate even actions or interactions carried out at a distance are governed by the sense of the presence of the Other. James writes that:
[i]n this sense the modalities of co-presence bind absence. For example kinship based upon the existential significance of being born of a particular body into extended lines of blood relation is a key social form of face-to-face-integration. In social formations where kinship is fundamental to social integration a person is always bound by blood or affinity even after the dramatic separation brought by death.
(James 1996: 24)
The face-to-face is the oldest and most basic form of social integration. More abstract modes of integration draw upon the meanings and experiences derived from this prior level. This is not to posit the face-to-face level of social integration as an idealised essence, but rather to recognise its historical and cultural embeddedness within social life. As Sharp puts it:
a recognition of mutual presence as an irreducible ontological and ethical reference point is indispensable. The actual values concerned with this ‘essence’ are primarily a social construction: which, while relative to the degree to which it could have been engendered, is nevertheless the only essence our history and culture offers us. As a reference point it therefore carries with it a powerful imperative which cannot be totally renegotiated and certainly cannot be ignored
(Sharp 1996: 6)
Similarly, when Heidegger asserts that Being-with-Others is a primordial relation (this is discussed in Chapter 2), and when Benjamin describes aura as the anticipation of another’s gaze (Chapter 3), they are, I suggest, revealing the binding qualities of this mode of integration. In relation to technology, we can say that under conditions of the dominance of face-to-face integration, techniques and technologies enable people to engage with the world as an elaboration of the hand and the eye; and that they do so without fundamentally changing the nature of the world.
More abstract modes of integration draw upon, mediate and extend relations conducted at the face-to-face level. For instance, agency-extended relations, such as those made possible through institutions such as the church or state, or though practices such as commodity exchange, alter the context through which we engage with the Other. The Other becomes more universalised: a multiplicity of persons or things can function as a ‘corporate’ body in a particular structural location. However, despite this process of universalisation, under conditions of the dominance of agency-extended integration, techniques and technologies are used to extend the possibilities of human interrelation while still being bound by the limitations of embodied exch...

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