Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, August 01, 2010

"Universal Emancipation"

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

A few days ago I posted the prompts for the final essay I have assigned students in the summer intensive critical theory course I am teaching. One of the prompts attracted some comment.
The conviction that technoscientific development might achieve a level through which universal human emancipation might finally be accomplished keeps re-appearing in a number of the texts we have read over the course of the term -- from Wilde, to Marx, to Solanas (and you may well think others). The conviction that technoscientific development has arrived already at such a level but that its emancipatory promise has been diverted to the service of unjust ends re-appears in a number of others -- from Adorno, to Benjamin, to Debord, to Klein (and you may well think others). In still others -- in Barthes, again, in Adorno, in Arendt, in Fanon, in Latour, in Lewis (and you may well think others) -- we discern the concern that framing human emancipation in the instrumental terms of technoscientific development in the first place fatally deranges our grasp of and hopes for such emancipation. Through a comparison of two pieces from the course that seem to offer up conflicting views on the question, or through a reading of a single text that seems to you to exhibit ambivalence on this question, make a case that the text(s) provide an essentially progressive or an essentially reactionary view of technoscience (or instrumentality) in relation to emancipatory politics.

Reader "Mitchell" wanted to know:
How do you define "universal human emancipation" - no-one has to work for a living? No-one has to follow orders? Something less than that?

My reply to him contained a more general discussion:

How do you define "universal human emancipation"? Me, personally? I don't know that I have a definition of universal emancipation, and in any case it wouldn't be relevant if I had -- the question is about that idea as it plays out in the specific texts under discussion in the class. The different things the authors might differently mean by "emancipation" -- even minute differences -- could easily loom large in a student's analysis.

However, to return to my personal beliefs -- and I haven't actually testified to these in the class itself, I do not think it would really make much sense to do so -- I believe in a politics of ongoing democratization, which is a matter of struggling to enable ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them, and ever more and ever easier nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, a process that I think is almost certainly experimental and interminable and, hence, probably, not strictly speaking finally universalizable at all. (Why? Both because every generation will rightly want to experiment for itself, in its own circumstances, in the institutionalization of democracy, and also because part of the work of nonviolence must be the determination of what nonviolence consists, a determination in which a permanent possibility of doing violence inheres, come what may.)

I also champion -- like every good radical democrat should -- the equity-in-diversity of consensualization, the implementation and celebration of the scene of actually informed and non-duressed consent, and so of cultural/prosthetic self-determination, peer-to-peer. This latter commitment to substantial consent -- rather than, say, the superficial consent of duressed contract that so regularly prevails in the current context of corporate-military-consumer capitalism -- entails in my view ongoing struggles for access-to-social-security and access-to-knowledge, struggles eventuating in principle in universal basic income, universal basic healthcare, universal guaranteed housing, universal lifelong education, therapy, and training, and reliable information available for all -- all of which, taken together, might amount in your view to "no-one has to work for a living? No-one has to follow orders?" or to "Something less than that" after all, I cannot be sure.

I should add, that unlike many of the figures to whom I refer in the examination prompt -- many, not all, of whom share in the aftermath of Marx a measure of technological determinism and autonomism, and a few even a measure of scientistic reductionism -- I don't personally hold the "conviction that technoscientific development might achieve… [or] has arrived already at… a level… through which universal human emancipation might finally be accomplished" simply because I believe political ends (freedom, civility, reconciliation, persuasion, influence, rivalry, display, intrigue, prestige) are achieved through political efforts, and that politics are not to be inferred from technoscience so much as that technoscientific vicissitudes are taken up by agitation, education, and organization and opportunistically turned to political ends. The investment of an already fallaciously generalized "technology" with agency -- and hence displacement from the agency that always and only arises in the equity-in-diversity of a plurality of people, peer-to-peer -- via technofetishism and scientism, determinism, autonomism, reductionism, not to mention, too often, a triumphalism and utopianism enabled by these, do in my estimation an enormous amount of damage to sensible discussion of technodevelopmental struggle, problems, histories, and hopes.

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