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

Friday, July 08, 2005

The Heteronomous Character of Technological Development

A reader has asked just what do I mean when I write that "'technological development is the last remaining historical force abroad in the world that could plausibly be described as potentially revolutionary.' What kind of revolution?"

He goes on to elaborate this question in interesting ways, wondering "are you arguing that technology is an autonomous force? And if so, are you saying that it acts upon society?" He continues: "When you say that 'technological development' is an 'historical force' it seems that you are holding to the idea that technology has an existence separate from its social context and that it determines society in a substantive way. Is that true?"

Finally, he recalls my attention to Murray Bookchin, who argues, in this reader's formulation, "that technology gets its meaning from the social matrix within which it develops. It would be slightly too simplistic, but roughly accurate to say that he switches the determination of society by technology to technology by society. It's not a one-way causation, but a shift in emphasis from modernist epistemology of science and technics. I think this position still denies not only that technology doesn't have its own autonomous meaning from society, but also that society does not have any 'natural' or 'pristine' meaning apart from its technology. Any thoughts?"

I have responded in e-mail to these great questions and provocations, but I wanted to blog some of them as well, for the more general audience that throngs hereabouts. I will begin with the last point here and work my way backward to the first one.

I think of technology as the elaboration of human agency and maintain that such agency is always a matter of improvisation within constraint. I feel the force of this formulation of Bookchin's point about the social matrix in which the meaning of technology always arises, but I would say that this "matrix" is always at once enabling but underdeterminative. Neither the agentic acts of improvisation nor the constraints themselves from which they derive their legibility are absolute themselves. Some agentic performances cite norms, some subvert them, and all in various measures. Further, what Bookchin would presumably refer to here as "the matrix" is of course really more a matter of matrices, some overlapping, some incompatible, some in contestation, some developing out of one another, etc.

And so, I have no truck with claims about technological autonomy nor with the arguments that typically result from such claims which assume either some particularly dreaded or desired developmental outcome is "inevitable" because it is "written in" somehow into the technologies themselves, apart from the human practices in which technologies are always invented, tested, used, distributed, marketed, discussed, applied, made meaningful, etc.

It would indeed appear inevitable that a number of emerging and converging technological developments confront humanity with the key possibilities and dangers that will define our generation -- but just which developmental configuration, just when, in just what forms is radically up for grabs. That is to say, few of the crucial or really interesting details are anything like "inevitable" themselves.

It should be noted that on pages 154-156 of Re–Enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell, 1995) Bookchin actually claims:
The notion that science and technology are ‘autonomous’ of society, that they themselves are controlling factors in guiding society is perhaps one of the most insidious illusions of our time. That science and technics conduct lines of research and open visions toward new developments is certainly true, but these developments are rigorously guided by the prevailing market society rather than the other way round ... technology is a heteronomous or dependent phenomenon ... to emphasise its autonomy from society and the mystique of a ‘technological imperative,’ crudely obscur[es] the profoundly social factors that promote or inhibit technological innovation.

I agree with this formulation wholeheartedly, and think that Bookchin does not invert or replace developmental "autonomy" with social determination at all here, but proposes a considerably more nuanced developmental heteronomy to which far more technocriticism should be sensitive.

And so, when I describe technological development as a plausible source for revolutionary transformation, what do I mean if I do not mean to imbue development with autonomy or freight it with such inevitabilities, then?

I simply maintain that the technoconstituted transformation of human capacities via emerging and converging digital networked information and communication technologies, biomedicine, neuroceuticals, automation, and nanoscale manufacturing uniquely confronts our generation in history with a host of occasions for an opportunistic re-ordering of social institutions in either more congenial or more disastrous forms. Technological development is never just a matter of the indifferent accumulation of facts and toys in a kind of heap. "Development" is always a matter of social struggle. This is why technoprogressives insist that progress always has both instrumental and political dimensions. But the circumstances of social struggle, and the specific opportunities it affords and dangers it confronts from moment to moment are significantly contingent. This is the furthest thing from a suggestion that development is socially autonomous. I will have more to say about what I mean when I go on to suggest such developmental struggles can be revolutionary in a later blog post.

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