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TECHNICAL AGENCY AND SOURCES OF TECHNOLOGICAL PESSIMISM

Fernando Broncano Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain Keywords: Technical Agency, Critical Theory of Technology, Technical Civilization, Modernization, Technological Determinism Contents 1. Contemporary Experiences with Technology 1.1. Modernization 1.2. The Age of Machines 2. Mechanization and the Origins of Technological Pessimism 2.1. Criticisms of Technical Civilization 2.2. Critical tradition and criticism of technology 3. The Idea of Technical Agency and Power Related Chapters Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary Technological pessimism was an understandable reaction to the modernization processes suffered by the societies in the beginning of the twentieth century. The artifacts were more and more invading the circles of the daily life. It produced a generalized sense of exclusion that was reflected in many writings of the moment. Particularly, it was a deep motivation for philosophers as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul that adopted a perspective a looking back to more humanistic contexts. A second tradition was the Critical Theory from Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas. In this tradition, pessimism assumes the form of a theory about the role that technology plays in modern societies as a justification of the domination relationships. Many of the pessimist arguments spring from an experience of machines as a paradigmatic case of ways of industrialization. Notwithstanding, other forms of organizing technology inside societies are available, among other reasons because industrialization and mechanization is only an historical way of technology. 1. Contemporary Experiences with Technology 1.1. Modernization Modern technology really began its influence on civilization through the industrial revolution. This was possible due to the convergence of various different elements. Not all these elements were of a technical nature, although some of the most important ones were. The first of these was the possibility of there being a representational platform of objects using the language of design, which permitted two converging possibilities: the
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creation of machines, and the standardized reproduction of machine parts. These two activities form the basis of this industrial transformation. Industries were configured as organic production structures based on enormous machines making standardized products. In fact, large numbers of men, women and children were converted by industry into appendices of machines; new modern conurbations were created along with an urban rather than rural culture; cities and the landscape were filled with machines, the new technological objects. Industrial civilization became a new source for the asymmetry of power between nations. War machines were created through the industrial civilization itself. New nations exercised their power by militarizing their industry, and by showing that they had, not more military value, but rather more capacity for producing machines of destruction. Ever since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (where the French defeat was such a surprise that it provoked the forming of the Paris Commune), followed by the Boer War and the First World War (which again caused revolutions in the defeated countries Germany and Russia), and the dreadful end to the Second World War (with the concentration camps, massive bombing raids on the civilian population in Germany and the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), passing through the build up of industrial and military might that we know as the Cold War, industrial civilization is the first and most important historical experience of contemporary culture. Contemporary culture and thinking would be incomprehensible without knowing the way in which industry has developed. The individual as opposed to the mass, awareness and causality, the crisis of science determined by technology, political and financial policies being based on functions, solitude in the face of history and many other subjects, which formed part of the philosophical world in the first half of the 20th Century, are just some of the ways in which industrial civilization can be seen. These experiences from the industrial revolution help to explain how technology has been lived and elaborated conceptually as uneasiness, on occasions, as surprise, on others and as the sinking and defeat of individual will on many more occasions. The increasing awareness of human frailty and of the limits or finite nature of human autonomy or self-regulation was at the heart of philosophy during the 20th century. At the centre of this experience was the reflection that technology was a collective form of agency, a modern way of expressing autonomy, after Bacon and Descartes, no longer as a contemplation of the order of the world, but rather as the transformation of reality guided by knowledge. There was a time at beginning of the 20th century when the increasing power of technology was a cause for surprise: industry, transport, civil construction, the military machine, all of these had become excessively large, with a performance beyond comprehension and unintelligible from the human standpoint. Products and processes had become distanced from the human measurements of things, space and time. This is the crepuscular experience of The Ballad of Cable Hogue by Sam Peckinpah (1970). The pioneer, who has managed to forge a home from the desert and who has survived its dangers, dies by being run over by a car. This is the experience of a time in which we are victims, not of nature itself but of the works that were designed to dominate the threatening destiny of nature. From this standpoint, technological pessimism has been one of the essential constants of what has been considered a revision of modernity in response to this experience of fragility; or rather this is our thesis, as a way of thinking of the modern proposal under the categories of the finite and of contingency. Technological pessimism is a way of looking at the world as a ruin caused by the invasion of technology. The world can no longer be seen as a place in which human activity gives rise to progress, but rather as the disastrous consequence of progress.

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The most importance cause of pessimism that we are going to consider is modernization, understood in the sense defined by Max Weber as a change that involves all layers of society, from religion to the different forms of political legitimization, including, naturally, the new form of capitalist economy which Weber defined as a process of rationalization. However, what we wish to refer to is not modernization itself, but the social and everyday experience of modernization, a complex experience that ranges from the melancholy of a crepuscular world to the shock caused by the new forms of domination. This is the experience that was undoubtedly behind technological pessimism. The first event which showed the limits of modernization was the First World War, given that it saw the massive entry of technology in military strategy. The experience of the war caused an ambiguous reaction, which amongst German intellectuals ranged between fascination and horror, and sometimes both attitudes were mixed within the same ideology. Spengler or Jnger are paradigmatic cases of this ambiguous way of endeavoring to explain the defeat of the Germans by the superiority of American technology. German fascism incorporated this complex attitude into its complex ideology, and we can also see this in a speculative way in the new Soviet culture where constructivism looked upon technology as both a new threat and salvation at the same time. The Leninist motto that Communism is Socialism plus electricity, the figure of the worker drawn by Jnger as the new subject of history, but also the policies of the New Deal to respond to the crisis of 1929 are examples of this mixture of horror and fascination. What is at the heart of this experience, which like all experiences is necessarily ambiguous until it has been elaborated conceptually and until it has become philosophy, is the fatalist experience of technological determinism. From Weber to Horkheimer, from Spengler to Heidegger, it becomes a diagnosis: politics has been invaded, colonized and dominated by technology. The impact of this experience was present throughout the philosophy of technology until a new kind of pessimism became apparent at about the same time as the green movements, and other social movements, which began in the 1960s and 1970s. The philosophy and sociology of science departments, created in the 1960s, with the express purpose of extending scientific mentality in the University, had become focal points of a systematic criticism of science and technology, which was then being seen as just another field of the exercising of power. Science was studied by feminists, ecologists, members of the radical left and even religious militants who used many historical essays to show that scientific results and technological products were no more than social constructions. The critical attitude towards the scientific-technological phenomenon had imperceptibly but substantially changed its strategy. If the critics at the beginning of the century had accepted the existence of a special logic in science and technology, a kind of instrumental rationality, to which they opposed a kind of deliberative rationality, which included reasoning on ends and values, the new wave of criticism resorted to tu quoque: arguing that science and technology were in themselves a product of political negotiation, open results from the structures of the scientific communities and the hidden exercises of power. If technology invaded politics in the elaboration of the experience of modernization, it was now thought that technology was invaded by the social, constructed by social facts. This is a more sophisticated kind of pessimism. Technology is a social construction which reinforces the same social facts as those which go to make it up. In this pendular movement between technology (including science as technology of truth) and politics, society had accepted the idea that technological (and scientific) knowledge was the most
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important transformational force (or productive force, to use Marxs term). The emphasis on the richness and quantity of production changed over a period of a hundred years to a new emphasis whereby the richness of a society was measured by socially distributed technological and cognitive capacities. The ability of societies to adapt to the problems and challenges of an economy based on permanent innovation and on the planetary extension of financing, production and market networks lies in these capacities. The essential theme of the new social symphony is the placing of expert knowledge in politics and the order of society. This pendular movement shows two forms of the new fear of the growing power of technology: it is either invading politics and, therefore, it is suspected of hiding social relations from us in an unintelligible cloud of arguments and artifacts, or, more recently, it is itself the new face of a power which is disguised as technology, but which is really no more than the mask of the negotiated power of the elite that controls the details of the city. In both cases, technology has replaced nature as the source of all fears. If traditional morals were built to avoid the entrance of nature, the instinctive and the biological, in the field of correct conduct, in the new society of knowledge, critical philosophers like new moralists were and are moving the contention wall to the separation between technology and politics. 1.2. The Age of Machines The closest impact of technology concerns the experience of extending machinery to all areas of existence over the course of a couple of centuries. Machines progressively filled up the spaces and places of existence: geographical spaces and intimate spaces, geological spaces and even the virtual space of informative relations which had previously been limited to communicative human signals. Simple machines were already being studied by the engineers of Alexandria, like Ktesibios, who gave them basic classifications: screw, lever, plane, wheelWhen we speak of machines in the modern sense, the elementary parts are combined and generate quasi-organisms. These are complexes of subsystems with specific functions which, in turn, are combined to create a global system, precisely what we identify with the machine, artifact or technology par excellence. Machines, although widely used by armies and occasionally in industry, changed their nature with the invention of the new mechanisms of watch making at the end of the Middle Ages. The modern age metaphysics were constructed under the influence of the metaphor of these new objects, the paradigm of which was the clock with clock weights. "Mechanicism", the name that we give to that philosophy of nature, was a product of the cognitive exploitation of a metaphor, the world as a clock. This was followed by the metaphor of organisms as automata, the body as a machine inhabited by the conscience. The metaphor was not purely metaphysical, it was a spring that drove all scientific research programs. Medicine stopped being alchemy and "medical matter" (pharmacy) and became physiology through the theatrical dissections practiced in new scenarios where corpses were shown to a curious public. At the same time as medicine, the other sciences began to explore the new territory of physiological mechanisms where discovery was translated into the unveiling of the machine underlying living functions. Discovery became a synonym of disenchantment, of revealing that the mystery of life was no greater than the mystery of the clock. But at the same time, in the opposite direction, nature began to be thought of as the artifact of an unknown artisan god. The machine had become the shape of conscience, the mirror of the human and the divine. From the 19th Century it was also the punch bag used to exhaust all the complaints against technology. Later on, the machine became the paradigm of dehumanization, the frontier which definitively separated craftsmanship tolerated by the pessimists, from

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technology, which was definitively linked to industrialization and the proliferation of machines. Let us consider one kind of machine which proliferated during the 1950s and which justifiably caused amazement amongst certain historians and philosophers. I am referring to the assembly lines in new factories for cars and industrial vehicles. These were machines composed of numerous other machines and control systems which became icons of the new age of automation. The new worker did not need "practical knowledge" any more, still less the blind, automatic patterns and compulsive movements shown by Chaplin when playing an industrial worker in the film "Modern Times". Technology definitively abandoned its state of craftsmanship or, worse still the assembly worker, to become the controller of automatic controls, watchman, supervisor and, occasionally, maintenance worker for the automatic machine. Two decades later, computers and the so called new technologies replaced automatisms in its role as an icon. They certainly added new elements in the scale of control and autonomy (expert systems, artificial intelligence,). A machine differs from a utensil in as much as it acquires and develops its own meaning regardless of the hand which guides it. A machine does not require humans more than in the periphery of its existence, before or after, as one more means of support in its relationship with its surroundings. But it can no longer be defined by its relationship with a movement of the body, as a hammer, a spade or a plough is. A turbine, a combustion engine or a primitive steam machine are self-contained systems which do not require human care. The machine becomes alienated from the body. A machine is a complex of self-sustained and self-meaning functions. It differs from a utensil in as much as it acquires its own meaning as a result of the complexity of the materials, shapes and functions of its components. A hammer is only a hammer in the hand of the person hitting something with it, but an aircraft maintains its essence even without a pilot. When it takes off, the automatic pilot, a component of the machine, takes control and takes the aircraft to its destination and it is only in the last moments of landing when it is piloted again. The new pessimistic attitude stems from this experience of the frontier between humans, living beings and machines. Humans, from this perspective, had elevated themselves illegitimately to the same level as the creative gods of life, and their own stupidity had led them to manufacture monsters. It is this pattern of collective thought that coincides with the romantic vision of new technology and which continues on in the thesis of autonomous technology totally out of control. The original experience of agency, of an intentionally directed action, is the experience of basic actions such as reaching for a glass of water or kicking a ball. Craftsmens technical actions belong to this kind of primitive agency: repairing a tap, playing the guitar, dribbling round a defender. Technical experience in a world peopled by machines displays different characteristics from this primitive experience. In these cases, the action does not continue on into an immediate result, but rather a result controlled by yet more complex functions, which have nothing to do with the sensorial-motor control of the agent. This is the origin of a dialectic where there is a kind of alienation of the agency and a later assimilation whereby the agent becomes a new type of cyborg. We program and put on the washing machine, and then a process begins which is beyond our control. This ends when the machine stops and we take out the clean and maybe even dry clothes. We switch on the computer and the experience may now have a certain continuity, but we know that the machine is carrying out electronic operations that we are forbidden to access. The first experience with automatic machines is an

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experience of alienation and vulnerability, similar to the feelings we get when we tentatively begin to drive a car for the first time. It is an experience that tenses our bodies and wears us out. Later, when the car has become an extension of our body, the experience of fragility becomes, unfortunately sometimes, a feeling of domination and skill which can be a serious threat to human life, but regardless of this, the car will have become a utensil, a part of the hand-dominated-world. However, many other components of the machine world will remain threatening and will continue to provoke a sense of fragility, distance and risk. This interaction with machines has been seen by technological pessimism as a fracture of human identity. For these thinkers, techniques can still be divided into "human" and "inhuman" techniques. However, experience speaks to us at the same time of our nature, the nature of machines and the nature of our mutual interaction. Because it is not true that the experience of alienation should be considered to be definitive in itself, as a destiny or form of existence, but rather the opposite, as a dialectic process of constituting human agency in a technological environment where this agency itself forms a constitutive part of its hybrid nature. 2. Mechanization and the Origins of Technological Pessimism 2.1. Criticisms of Technical Civilization The standard way of understanding contemporary technology has been to use the concept of alienation. Technology alienates the worker when it is within the framework of the productive apparatus, thus making the worker a slave to the machine. It alienates people and turns them into consumers, placing them in a virtual reality through powerful mass media, making dictatorship unnecessary. It alienates critical thought itself, which becomes no more than a slave to an episteme of production. It alienates, in fact, society by transferring the categories of technological thought to politics and building a new form of authoritarianism based on the reverse adaptation to "technological reasons". In this consideration, the technological field must be understood as an "environment" which brings about the forming or transforming of the human and which usurps the place previously held by nature as a kind of destiny. Variations in this subject are complicated and subtle. The author has already mentioned the effect that the appearance of "management" had on the intellectuals of Europe, the application of techniques that had originated in the Ford car factories to social groups, and which then became a mechanization of social actions. Jacques Ellul, perhaps the most radical of the pessimists, understood this process as an extension of the machine to society: "Technology integrates the machine into society, making it social and sociable". According to Ellul, it is not a matter of merely adapting man to machine, but rather the appearance of a new form of action governed by new laws: "the mechanization that results from technology is the application of this superior form to all domains which do not involve machines". For Ellul, technology is a medium that has become independent, an authentic reality that shapes existence, orders everything it reaches, to such an extent that it can only be resisted by means of a re-conceptualizing of human agency and rationality as essentially passive in the face of the activism of many pro-technologists. S. Giedion was a historian of architecture who undertook a global meditation on the phenomenon of contemporary technology in the years of the Second World War. In Mechanization takes Command he looked at how historically certain aspects of daily life

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were invaded by mechanization. Giedion managed to see the progressive substitution of craftsmanship complicated by industrial manufacturing, and he saw this as an interpretation of the technical phenomenon. What happens-Giedion asks himself-when mechanization comes across an organic substance? Giedion offers a historical narrative of his idea in which the mechanical substitutes basic functions, it invades the human medium. As a result of the arrival of moving photography, movement can be visualized as purely mechanical and therefore reproduced in assembly lines and converted into a mechanical exercise. Difference disappears as a result of standardization and the possibility of substituting parts. Combined harvesters change the symbolic character of bread into an industrial product. Death is transformed into the meat industry in the great slaughterhouses of Paris and Chicago with their disassembly lines. Giedion held that the process of mechanization began as a way of eliminating unnecessary movement and work but soon reached craftsmanship which it substituted for industrial production, and later organic products (agriculture), and finally it reached into homes and substituted housework. Since then it has constituted our way of life and dominates our lives. Giedion spent many hours in the patent office in the United States studying a large number of mechanisms, which he describes in his book, from a machine for slaughtering cows (developed in Chicago) to an aluminum bath tub. In the end the argument is the reconstruction of history itself, which leaves us with the feeling that this process is inevitable. Along the same lines, Lewis Mumford, an American engineer and historian, extrapolated machinism as a figure of existence in technical civilization. According to Mumford megamachines have their origins at the very beginning of technology. He stated that there have always been techniques that had as their working function the submission of a community to an order based on technical functions. The complex system of the totality of society-artifacts constitutes what Mumford calls megamachines. His favorite example are the pyramids, whose construction would have been impossible without the high level of authoritarianism demanded by social engineering for the mobilization and organizing of workers for construction on such a scale as to produce these huge monuments. Megamachines were a way of organizing civilization which would destroy the self-sufficient, self-managed alternatives of the peasant. In this way, technology became an agent. It became a system which shaped the social order. Craftsmanship and industry do not represent specific periods of history, but rather ways of understanding the technology that was always present in all civilizations: "democratic", small, self-sustaining and unambitious technology and megamachines which join people and artifacts together in (strictly) ostentatious works. The machine is, more than anything else, the machine of power. With a bleak glance at human history, Mumford quantifies the balance between the benefits and harm caused by technology and decides that the harm far outweighs any of the benefits, and even cancels out whatever occasional value that might have been produced by technology. Technology as a social form is the basis for what Mumford calls mankinds "negative creativity": "the two poles of civilization are work, organized mechanically, and organized destruction and extermination. In general terms, the same forces and the same methods of operation were applicable to both areas". For Mumford, mechanization is, in fact, a deviation from the anthropological course of humanity. The machine is a degradation of potential in the service of power. Machinism is, then, a historic force of evolutionary and cosmic dimensions. To sum up, Ellul, Giedion and Mumford are dissident technicians who become prophets

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preaching dark omens for our civilization. Their books are, and were, read by many of those taking part in social movements opposing specific technologies (nuclear power plants, DDT, etc.) and they have inspired a fair amount of ecological thought in the field of technology. All three of them display a certain amount of determinism. They conceive of mechanization as an irreversible path that is destroying the vestiges of human existence. Technology is a civilizing force, it is not the sum of policies and specific decisions which permit a critical reflection. They have created a way of looking at the technological environment which constitutes one of the ways of elaborating the technological experience in a contemporary context. Their judgments, made during the decades of the technological boom in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, are now part of the common language of the mass media. They have become part of the daily discourse expressing concern with technology in contemporary existence in what we now call the risk society. The determinism they speak about with regard to technological development, however, has a much deeper influence on social conscience, and reaches levels where elements which are almost anthropological appear, such as the ancestral fear of indeterminism, even when the future leaves a door open for hope. On the other hand we have a humanist and philosophical meditation on the phenomenon of modern technology. Ernst Jnger and Heidegger create different figures which coincide in the same idea of mankind being shaped by fear of technology. Both use Nietzschean categories when thinking of modern technology, as forms or figures of the will to power. In the case of Jnger, an initially pro-technological conservative, the worker as a figure represented the will to use technology to the end, as a way of completely mobilizing society, of converting war into an industrial matter rather than a fight between people. Heidegger does not share Jngers optimistic vision but he does share his vision of technology to a certain extent. In Being and time he developed an instrumental notion of technology as part of the world that was ending and responds to the hand, a theory, in fact, which showed the way of existence of dasein as being essentially technical in as much as it is open to being. But technology is something else and, according to Heidegger, something monstrous. It is the application of a calculating way of thinking, a way that darkens thought, a way of thinking of the objectivated world as a "reservoir of energy" or, as he would write more acidly, a "large petrol station". "The revealing that rules he states in "The question concerning technology", in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such". This is the basis of his well-known comparison of the bridge and the dam on the Rhine as two forms of technological existence. If pre-technological technology could still be seen as an unveiling, technology is gestell, installation or armor determining our existence in the world. Thus, Heidegger continues, the more we think in technological terms, the more we are trapped by this way of thinking. Resistance, if it is possible at all, will only be possible by letting go. Ellul had considered the difference between active and passive civilizations "human groups that have turned to the exploitation of the land, to war and conquest (...) and groups that have turned to themselves, working just enough to survive, concentrating on survival". This attitude, which was significantly revived by all the movements of malaise from the famous 1970s, leads towards a form of indifference regarding decisions, where no one is responsible for the circumstances, which combines the desire to not be responsible with an undeniable irresponsibility in the face of situations that might have been changed with a reasonable public attitude. There are various points that should be examined in this pessimistic approach to technology conceived as the hubris of domination over nature. In the first instance, the

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author should like to point out that the criticism of this approach obviously does not include the correct diagnosis of the problems created by this or that technology. An honest attitude towards this trend in the philosophy of technology should weigh up the critical capacities of its empirical studies with distance and sympathy. Neither does the criticism have anything to do with a greater or lesser closeness to the expressions of cultural malaise that are explicitly seen or intimated in most of these studies. When we read Heidegger, once we have managed to accept his curious way of expression, many of his warnings are rapidly identified as an unquestionable part of our cultural heritage. Finally, the criticism has nothing to do with the vague ecologist claim that adorns the edges of his texts. The incorporation of the ideas of prudence and sustainable development into contemporary public policies is due to a large extent to criticisms of technology, but it is more the result of the movements of social criticism against the society of excess and consumption. Concern with technological malaise comes rather from the inability to obtain interesting distinctions in the analysis of technological systems. In this way, we are sometimes led to believe that capitalism is merely a product of technology and not the relations of ownership, and the same can sometimes be said of the forms of asymmetric power as though technology were the essence and not just a specific form of exercising dominating relationships. However, the basic discrepancy arises when we examine a political and non-metaphysical vision, to use Rawls terms, of the controversies and debates on the technological phenomenon in general and on its specific forms. To explain this crudely, and at the risk of making something of a caricature of this approach, if we take on a civilizing perspective, the possibility of a critical attitude is given to us and, at the same time, it is taken away. Whereas the effects and consequences of contemporary technology are carefully examined, the diagnosis is so general that it can give no better advice than a change of attitude, a change of civilization, etc. When we examine, as we are doing here, the relationships between technology and democracy, between engineers and the general public, these attitudes do not permit a shared concept of justice that is, at the same time, embracing and robust and that allows us to embrace such different points of view as those that go to make up our civilization which, we should not forget, is, at the same time, a civilization of risk and desire where each step forwards, each new innovation is received with both fear and incontinent greed. 2.2. Critical tradition and criticism of technology Let us look back at the other great tradition that, during the 20th century, represented a careful approach to technology. Here the reference is to political philosophy in general and, more specifically, to: Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and the like. Critical tradition originated as an extension (or, if you like, a more detailed examination) of Marxism to the strata of social reality that had been hidden or simply ignored in the Marxist tradition: subjectivity, culture, the social structure itself, the state and politics, morals and art, etc. The critical approach to all these fields was undertaken following a Kantian canon: the general and the universal versus the specific, categorical imperatives as opposed to hypothetical imperatives. The critical tradition (I shall not enter into discriminations here) stems from the conviction that capitalism represents a social fabric where the specific illegitimately replaces the universal. The relations of ownership, production and reproduction, and marketing invade the very entrails of the social field, from the subjectivity of individuals to their moral and ethical judgments. The critical tradition does not limit itself to stating that capitalism is responsible for this situation, rather that, according to Weber, capitalism and civilization are seen from a primordial perspective: the theory of modernization. Continuing with this underlying tone, the
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theory of modernization is understood as a dynamic that should not be referred historically to a moment or a space, but rather to a kind of force or alternative that we can already find in Ancient Greece, in the myths of the Odyssey, for example. It is a cultural division between instrumental rationality and evaluating rationality, between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, a division which passes through all aspects of culture. The theory of modernization considers that the forming of modern societies is a product of processes of rationalization: the forming of all the areas of existence under the force of instrumental rationality. Capitalism and technology are no more than forms of instrumental rationality applied to the spheres of economics and technology. The original price of modernization is the escape of instrumental rationality beyond its natural limits, invading the fields of morality (utilitarianism), of epistemology (positivism), of political philosophy (liberalism), etc. On the other hand, the critical project is presented, as its name indicates, as a critical impulse, which endeavors to remember, always and in all areas, the transcendental demand of private interests to become universalizable and legitimating. The public space of discussion and debate is becoming progressively narrower beneath the forces of technocratic judgment which causes an increasing depoliticization of all spheres, beginning, naturally, with technology itself, and converting it into an ideology of concealment. Under capitalism, technological development necessarily produces a concentration of power and control which is geared essentially towards a masked authoritarianism that endeavors to prevent any other possible society. In fact, it was Habermas who developed the positive consequences of this approach with extraordinary philosophical complexity and led it towards the more specific terrain of contemporary society. Whereas critics like Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse adopt a stance of totalitarian rejection in which they place instrumental rationality, science, technology, capitalism, culture (perhaps excluding "high culture" which would be saved due to its critical and transgressing potential: radical critical theory is not incompatible with a sort of aesthetic elitism which has more than a few followers in academic circles) in the same bag, Habermas distinguishes spheres with a certain autonomy: natural sciences form a space which, so long as they dont invade the neighboring gardens, have their own domains of validity and truth. But this does not mean that his criticism is less abrasive, given that the processes of modernization have invaded all spheres under the disguise of functionalist rationality, which is mere technocratic thinking. As is well known, his most important philosophical idea is the theory of communicative action, where he presents the conditions for legitimating any instance that endeavors to be sustained in the social terrain. Habermas argues that all actions are built against the background of the world of life, a philosophical figure that reminds us of Wittgensteinian forms of life and that can be interpreted as the fact that we always come from forms of social interaction with others subject to rules, controversies, etc. What a philosopher should do is make proposals of order about how it is possible to build legitimizations. When applied to technology, the critical apparatus lights up technocracy in all its splendor. Contemporary technology has been built, as Weber feared in his analysis of bureaucracy, on a system that exceeds its own sphere and transfers its rationality to the general public, invading moral and political judgment with universal pretensions which are no more than extrapolated instrumental judgments. Critical theory as a theory of modernization offers a valuable framework for studying the relationships between technology and democracy, but it has a defect which is not unlike other critical traditions: its illegitimate reduction of technology to instrumental rationality, its vision of
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a social phenomenon as proof of a rationality which becomes a kind of force of destiny. And which perhaps only works rhetorically to underline the other pole, value rationality. But the division between instrumental rationality and value rationality, in the fist place is impossible to transfer to the terrain of artifacts, which are, and thus they are interpreted, explained and understood, like objects which have many dimensions and which cross over the two forms of rationality, as I have mentioned before. In the second place, critical theory gives rise to proceduralism which refers to the processes of agreement and consensus in social controversies rather than their results. To use terms from the theory of controversies, any closure of a controversy is legitimate if it respects the standards of universalizing construction. But this vision leaves the conditions of the real achievements of human agency in the dark. It does not matter whether it works or not, whether or not it achieves the ends sought by the robust procedures of human agency, consensus is enough to legitimate it. As Russell says, the modern scandal is not whether the world exists or not, but whether we have to accept that a person who thinks he is a hard boiled egg is mad merely because she is in the minority. And this is precisely the sin of critical tradition, that, having divided the two forms of judgement as an essential component of modernity, and having decided that the processes of legitimization can fall only on one side, technological success has got nothing to do with legitimization. In the third place, critical theory as a theory of modernization ignores or seems to ignore at least all the critical tradition of technology that comes from studies referring to specific aspects, or from specific identifying perspectives. There are no references to history, sociology, studies of science and technology in the framework of critical tradition. It is true that the lack of knowledge and disregard that the new currents of cultural study seem to show critical tradition is no less serious, but this does not diminish the feeling that critical tradition has a vision of the technological world which is closer to that of an intellectual, shut away in a library, than the vision of a normal member of the public, the user of a technological environment through which her daily life not only passes, but so does her imagination and vital expectations. It is more than surprising that we find cross references between the two critical traditions we are looking at. To sum up, then, critical tradition, like the technological pessimism we looked at previously, takes us to an external space, as though we could analyze technology in the same way as a doctor analyses our body from the outside with knowledge of our ailments or even functions that, as patients, we cannot have. Furthermore, it is precisely in this privileged place where we find the pessimism and criticism of the sin of political and public asymmetry which causes as much malaise as technology itself, as if the critical intellectuals were claiming to be placed in the place of the very technocrats they are criticizing. 3. The Idea of Technical Agency and Power The normative space of technology is essentially built in two dimensions and we use these to determine whether this or that artifact is a human achievement in a particular situation and context. These dimensions are novelty and efficiency. The first condition has to do with one of the dimensions of freedom, which goes together with the imagining of desirable alternatives. However, regardless of how necessary it is, the dimension of the opening of reality qualifies only one part of human agency. The second dimension is the one which allows us to qualify the agency properly as agency: the capacity of the

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artifact to effectively carry out what it was designed to do. This is the normative dimension that is behind what is generally understood as technical efficiency. Efficiency is generally understood, in the first instance, as economy of means with regards to ends. This was especially popular with the critics from the school of Frankfurt. In the second instance, it is understood as being the greatest power achieved with the least possible effort. They are neither of the two insignificant elements of technical design, but they do not constitute the normative nucleus of technology. The essential normative nucleus, which is present in a different form in the previous values, and in general determines the weight of all deliberations, is the level of control over an aspect of reality that new technology make possible. The normative force of this criterion derives from its being an element constituting human agency. It establishes the level of metaphysical dependence between the plan or representation of the action and the result obtained. The idea of control has been interpreted as the original sin of technology, as the manifesto of human arrogance and its disdain for a nature degraded for the good of consumption. From pessimist critics of technology to modern feminist thinking about technology, it has been understood that control is a will for power, domination and pillage. We do not deny, on the contrary, that it is an integral part of the logic of capitalism. We do not deny that in the society of desire there is a point of madness and blindness to the consequences of lives and a civilization founded on senseless consumption. Neither do we deny that in the logic of those most powerful who are overcome by the symbolic force of technological trappings, disdain for anything that is not pure adoration for the artifact is the rule for many technological alternatives: the biggest, most powerful, most brilliant trapping whatever the cost and whatever the result. But this is not what we wish to defend in our presentation of the normativity of technology. Quite the reverse, the control of agency is, or should be, a supposition prior to all these specific historical situations and concerns how a specific civilization is ordered. Control is rather something that is located in the deepest layers of human action, it is a condition of the possibility (partial) of any agency. Morality itself presupposes the control of action. Duty implies power, something that is often forgotten in the purely intentional considerations of morality. And power, in this sense, is the power to do and not just power full stop. The word "power" is insidiously ambiguous, (not only in Spanish), as it allows for three different meanings and the confusion between these meanings is the origin of a good number of the debates on the legitimization of many institutions and on skepticism with regards to standards. In the first place, "power" is "power to", the capacity of agency; in the second place, "power" can mean asymmetry in the control of reality and, especially, asymmetry in human relationships. Power in this second sense is power over others, power based not on free reflexive consent, but threat and discipline. Finally, "power" sometimes means the same as authority. Authority, as opposed to power in the previous sense of domination/submission is a freely accepted asymmetric relationship through which some people assign the capacity of control to others, and they do so in a reflexive, consenting and trusting way. A bus driver does not have power over the passengers on the bus, but authority. The passengers could rise up as an assembly and replace the driver if necessary as a result of lack of trust, but meanwhile, the normal relationship is authority with regards to a specific action: the act of driving the bus. Of course, relationships with authority involve the assigning of restricted control to a specific area of action. We give a teacher authority to teach us what she knows, to tell us what to do or to curtail our sexual behavior. The idea of controlling what is real, normatively understood as a dimension of human
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agency, belongs to the first sense of the idea of power, in other words, to the capacity to be able to do something. Technical action, like any other human action, acquires social significance when it is capable of transforming something whilst being at the same time formed by the social relationships of power2, in the sense of control over others. However, in as much as technical action can only form a part of relationships of power2, if it is previously understood as technical action in the first sense of the word power. A doctor and a shaman may both have a certain domination over others, both may hold similar positions in their discursive relationships and their voice may have similar effects on their patients or on the members of their tribe. Looking at the situation in this way, both have power2 without this meaning that they have it or have acquired it through the same reasons or causes. The conditions for the success of the actions of one or the other depends on their capacity not for purely discursive relationships, but rather their effective control of what is real. It would be more than madness, a crime of social blindness, not to consider the social dimensions of technical action, but it is also a conspicuous crime of technical blindness to make things out of the social relationships of asymmetry. Relationships of power imply subjective relationships of submission, technological relationships of control imply ontological relationships of dependency between what we want and what we achieve. It is a difference in the conditions of success which does not have to imply any thesis of political neutrality or technological morals. No human action is neutral in this sense. But neither are moral and political actions exempt from the normative conditions of the effective capacity of the agency. However, this is not the only way, nor indeed the most correct way, of thinking about technology. Thinking about technology requires a rethinking of those experiences which made Heidegger doubt that we are yet capable of thinking about technology. It is to think about the conditions of technological normativity without losing sight of the way technological products become embedded, moving from industrial civilizations to globalizations, societies of knowledge and post-industrial societies. To go back to this situation would be cause for surprise, beyond the mere presentation of the "chaos" of the technological threat or fracas as the only justification for anti-technological activism which has, perhaps, no greater depth than academic annoyance. It is to think about technology as a normative condition of social action, which demands both legitimization and despair in reaching an acceptable concept of technological civilization as a social form of our contemporary culture, which is stable and backed by consensus. It means, more specifically, the considering of technology as a dimension of our concept of justice and an ordered society. It is, finally, also a moment of reflection on the cultural challenge posed by the so-called "new technologies". Consequently, to think about technology normatively is to make a kind of criticism of practical reasoning that does not consist of imperatives but rather a careful examination of the conditions under which human agency becomes a reasonably virtuous agency, of the factors which condition the quality of the agency. If the subject (personal or social) appears in this criticism, it will not be as an assumption a priori that exercises control over external factors. However, we can also begin by looking at the experience of a cyborg existence, of biotechnical beings that transform themselves transforming the world. The subject would be there as a result of control over reality, not as a justification of the control of reality. The subject will become itself as a contingent result and not as a necessary assumption. In many trajectories the subject becomes diluted in a desiring or frightened mass, in a consumer society or risk society. In many other trajectories it appears as a diminished subject, as a subject of cultural malaise, and in others, the least common and least complicated, it appears as the result of a well-ordered society in

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which human beings have learnt to bear the weight of their responsible existence. If we focus things in this way, technological pessimism that has dominated thinking on technology over the 20th century appears in a new light and its errors and correct decisions can be seen with greater clarity. The idea of control as domination, as the degradation of the environment into a "reservoir of energy", to use Heideggers term, is supported by a dual notion of a subject separated from nature and possessing a will for power through which it has been converted into an "object", something inanimate which no longer has any destiny other than that of being manipulated. However, little note has been made of the primitive idea that the subject/object partition does not correspond to this division between the agent (intentional) and the patient and the passive (physical). Neither does this idea of control correspond to the technological reality of what the systems of control are, nor the biological reality of homeostasis, both essential constituents of complex technological systems and living systems respectively. The rejectable idea relates control with a who that is controlling a what. Here we should remember how modern metaphysics is determined by the metaphor of the watch and the watch-maker, the metaphor of a machine and the ghost in the machine. A machine governed only by geometry, chance, passivity, as opposed to the ghost which is pure activity, pure spontaneous will. But in reality, a system of control is something else, a sort of quasi-biological function. It is a kind of automatic, cybernetic reaction to the stimulus. The old idea of subject/object refers us to the practical experience of the modern philosophers of primitive machines, automata: watches, ornamental toys, etc. It is a reality which is as primitive as it is clumsy. Modern machines incorporate self-control mechanisms, mechanisms which are based on a secondary use of energy, that are no longer exclusively a support for movement and have become a means of transmitting information. One of the central points of systems of control is that they may consist of increasingly more complex layers. It is precisely the complexity that transcends from the cybernetic machine to the computer. Would it not be possible to conceive of the conscience, communicative actions, and the public sphere as moments of emergency processes in a reflexive modernity that at the same time as it modifies technology, also modifies itself thus creating or revealing new worlds? In a way, critical theory has been exporting the Cartesian frontier of uncontaminated conscience to the world of complex social interactions. This is, in turn, the counterpart of a vision of the living as a machine, as a pure machine, and of social systems as pure exercises of mechanical rationalization. Up to a point, critical theory also continues to be a prisoner of the Augustan origins of the disappearance between a mechanical-living world and a conscience. The appearance of cybernetic systems has brought about a new ontological class: adaptive systems, systems that transform the medium whilst the medium transforms them. These are cybernetic systems that cannot be studied outside of their environment: they are located systems. All living beings belong to this class of system. But so do many technological and many social systems, and, of course, so do many socio-technological systems (a hospital, a factory, etc.) They are systems that transform the environment whilst transforming themselves and creating new environments where the dialectic continues. However, what is essential about adaptive systems is not what they change, but what they preserve. The central idea of control resides in the preservation of properties. We do not control systems, we control the properties, states and processes that are important to us. Control is always the preservation of something that is important, the elevating of

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a property to a value. A thermostat does not control a room; it keeps the temperature steady, the Watt governor, the speed of a steam engine, quality control, the perfection of parts, etc... The idea of control now becomes a central characteristic of adaptive systems. A control system is the bearer of the identity of the system. It determines what is important, what the system should care for. So, finally, if we eliminate dualist ontology from the idea of control, what we have left is something very similar to a notion of control as a "cure" or caring for what is important. It thus becomes an essential dimension of the quality of the agency and, as far as we are concerned, a condition of satisfaction in what we could call technological success. To control an action is to preserve the intention, to achieve what we are looking for, to make the interaction with the medium preserve a certain state, design or plan. The emotional human system, considered as a passive part of the mind, "passions" in Baroque terminology, tends to be understood now as a system for alerting and controlling the appropriate development of our plans for life. The world that we live in is now definitively shaped by human action. Industrialization, together with an increase in population (it is curious how common it is to speak irreflexively about "super-population", as if we already knew how many human beings could be considered admissible), has produced this strange world injured in its processes and basic systems by the waste and depredation of human beings. Whilst there is nowhere in the world that can now escape from technology, everywhere could be saved by technology. It depends what we want to preserve, what objects, species, processes, climates, CO rates, resources, etc. are considered to be valuable. It could be said that this is a wicked way of thinking, that it is not up to Man to decide what is valuable or not, that it was exactly this way of thinking that led to the disaster of industrialization. But it is also true that only by taking stock of the world that surrounds us will we be able to save it from ourselves, by controlling life and controlling ourselves. The experience of natural parks is no less technological than that of factories and nuclear or thermal power plants. In a natural park, life is carefully controlled to preserve it in itself and to preserve it from human beings. In the future, natural parks will not be a tourist curiosity for making documentaries, but rather the heart of an experience of humanized and naturalized technology. In a natural park, all the systems are hybrids, they all interact with each other, and they all become indicators of the general functioning of the park as a whole. The entire park is configured as a process for controlling what it is really worth preserving. The response to technological pessimism can and should be given in the same terms. The deepest root of the argument is a metaphysical position, an accusation: the will for power in technology which makes it a world, a reality, which is absolutely foreign and uncontrolled. The response should accept that the origin of the malaise can be found in a metaphysical description that could be classified necessary and in an ontology of a totally pessimistic future. Technology becomes a destination, a "reality" as Ellul would say. If we adopt possibilist thinking and if we accept the simultaneous existence of possibilities that human beings have in their heads, of their specific cultures and of objective possibilities that are brought about with technological capacities, a response is possible that can reach all the depths of technological pessimism. There are all kinds of possibilities, some terrible, others acceptable, some imaginary, others real. But distancing ourselves from determinism we can save the possibilities. They are not guilty of anything; they are the way we are in the world, our existence which has a causal and intentional nature. Furthermore, what ties both natures together is not any Cartesian
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relationship of reflection or correspondence, but a much more Spinozan mixture of realizable capacities and impulses. We live amongst a mixture of possibilities. Which are close and which are distant depends, in turn, on our capacities and our reality. The expansion of possibilities depends on the demands of the technological context. But to reach this depends on whether or not it is really an achievement, on its being a result that depends on action. Technology, then, has less to do with instrumental rationality as with the project of human autonomy, which has its genesis in the philosophical question as to why we should act. Related Chapters Click Here To View The Related Chapters Glossary Critical Theory of Technology : The Critical Theory is a philosophical tradition originated in the Frankfurt School focusing in the social asymmetries that are behind the cultural practices. This style of thinking has been very productive in a critical exam of the relationship between technology and contemporary society. Modernization : Modernization is a term of Sociology that characterizes the changes a society suffers as a consequence of the processes of rationalization of the forms of social managing as well as of the impact that technological change causes on this society, especially in the way of life of the people, social expectations, etc. Technical : In the context of Science and Technology Studies, a technological Agency action, as for example a particular case of spreading an innovation, takes part of a social practice that imposes some normative character to this action. An action in this case is said that possesses agency, i.e. that the agent is submitted to a social context of interpretation and evaluation of such action. Technological : The forces shaping a society are of diverse nature, but the Determinism technological determinists contend that technology is the main factor responsible for the changes suffered by the institutions, ways of life and expectations of a society. Technological determinism may assume the form of a strong thesis, when is the only, or an overwhelming, causal factor, and a weak form, when postulates technology among other diverse historical factors.

Bibliography Adorno, Th, and M. Horkheimer (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans J. Cummings. New York: Herder and Herder. [A well-known representative work of the first moments of the Critical Theory] Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Harper & Row. [A pioneering work on the coming globalization.] Castells, M. (2000) The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture: 1st volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, revised edition 2000); 2nd volume, The Power of Identity (1997); 3rd volume, End of Millennium (1998, revised edition 2000). London: Blackwell. [An insightful analysis the technologysociety relationships]

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Ellul, J. (1960) La technique ou lenjeu du sicle, Reed. Paris: Econmica (1990). [The best known work on technological pessimism] Giedion, S. (1948) Modernization takes command. Oxford, Oxford University Press. [A well documented history of the progressive invasion of technology in daily life.] Habermas (1970) "Technology and Science as Ideology" in Toward a Rational Society, Trans. J.Shapiro. Boston: Beacon. [A critical approach to the technocracy] Heidegger, M (1977) (1954) The Question Concerning Technology, trans. W. Lovitt. New Cork: Harper and Row. [A deep analysis on the relationship between technology and human being] Jnger, E. (1992) Worker: Dominion and Gestalt: And, Maxima-Minima : Additional Notes to the Worker. New York: State of New York University Press. [A literary approach to the new industrial states on the beginning of Twentieth Century] Lilley, S. (1957) Automation and Social Progress. New York: International Publishers Co. [A first moment defense of the automation] Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon. [It was a leading essay in the 1970s and a mature work of the Critical Theory] Mumford, L. (1967) The Myth of the Machina. Technics and Human Development . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. [Mumford represents the spirit of American Trascendentalism in a critical perspective on technology] Sismondon, G. (1989) Du mode dexistence des objects techniques. Paris: Aubier. [A useful introduction to the ontology of technical devices]

Biographical Sketch Fernando Broncano is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Doctorate on Philosophy on the Universidad de Salamanca (1981). His research is mainly centered on the concept of rationality in daily as well in scientific and technological concept. Works: Mundos Artificiales. Filosofa del cambio tcnico. Mxico: Paids, 2000. Saber en condiciones. Madrid: Antonio Machado, 2003. Entre Ingenieros y Ciudadanos. Filosofa de la tcnica para das de democracia. Barcelona: Montesinos, 2006. To cite this chapter Fernando Broncano, (2009), TECHNICAL AGENCY AND SOURCES OF TECHNOLOGICAL PESSIMISM, in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, [Eds. Pablo Lorenzano, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Eduardo Ortiz, Carlos Delfino Galles], in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, Eolss Publishers, Oxford ,UK, [http://www.eolss.net] [Retrieved August 1, 2011]

UNESCO-EOLSS

Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems

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