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

Sunday, July 02, 2006

A Quick Note on Alienation

Classical alienation in its Marxist/postmarxist construal refers to the ways in which any authoritarian co-ordination of the terms of the basic metabolism of human beings with their environment facilitates the exploitation of laborers/workers by marshalling and reapportioning the productive forces arising out from this metabolism to the disproportionate benefit of elites who control the means of that co-ordination of force. No doubt, we also need to attend to the ways in which any authoritarian co-ordination of the terms of the ethical encounters between human beings with one another (what Hannah Arendt would call the situation of "visibility" or "public happiness" and Michel Foucault would call the situation of "power/knowledge" or "reversability") facilitates the violation of the dignity and integrity of citizen-subjects by substituting for democratic deliberation and political contestation the verdicts of elites who disproportionately control the terms through which norms are inculcated (whether through outright duress or the pseudo-democratic manufacture of consent).

Peer-to-peer formations seem to me to be radically democratizing and anti-authoritarian to the extent that they reconnect people to the material terms of their intelligible metabolism with their environments (labor disalienation) and their imbrication in the ritual artifice of normative culture (democratic disalienation).

You know, I don't really see prostheses as Marshall McLuhan is commonly said to do. That is to say, I don't see prostheses so much as extensions but as ongoing (re)constitutions of human bodies in their legible "humanness." It also sometimes seems to me that this is a point that simply never really sits well with people, even many who claim to take its truth for granted. This in turn suggests to me that the "human-machine" distinction is often simply a proxy discourse for the ways we work through the deeper, much more fraught distinction of "the familiar" from "the unfamiliar" -- with all its evolutionary baggage in tow, no doubt.

And so, suppose we call "technology" just those disturbing emerging or imagined prostheses that seem to us especially promising or threatening, while habitual, familiar, or familiarizing prostheses (language, clothes, medicinal practices after one generation's use, etc.) are depoliticized as "natural." (For a little more on this see my Subject, Object, Abject.)

On this understanding, "technology" is inherently a discourse of alienation in a broad sense, simply because it bespeaks the alienness and threat/promise of prostheses that have not yet managed to be naturalized, familiarized, and so humanized, through "use" (the ritual artifice of normative culture).

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