In Technics & Civilization, among Mumford’s other work, he develops a rich historical account of technological development. Being “the last generalist,” I would imagine unfamiliar readers today might be surprised by Mumford’s ability to eloquently transcend disciplinary boundaries among sociology, anthropology and history. He was particularly skilled at conveying nuance and the important interactions among environment, artifacts, techniques, human organization, labor, infrastructure and so forth. Additionally, Mumford articulates an approach to ‘social construction’ that avoids the solipsistic idealism now popular. Instead, technics and society are constantly engaged in remaking one another – and confining and constraining one another. Certain innovations are either promoted with vigor and others stalled or abandoned because technics serves the worldview and values of the society that shapes it. Simultaneously, existing technics transform how we see and relate to ourselves, one another and our environment. This process is shaped by values, as specific paths are chosen among others because they fit the ethics and motives of those steering innovation, but also as the material, machinic and organizational demands of existing technics. Winner’s discussion of autonomous technology carries a similar theme to the latter point, addressing specifically how existing technical systems create demands of their users and the society in which they are embedded. Social reproduction in a highly complex technological society generates a considerable momentum for increasing the role of technology in social and individual life, an apparently out-of-control juggernaut. Mumford demonstrates that this has deep historical roots, particularly over the last 1,000 years. This is not the experience of industrial society, but the experience of civilization in toto.
Mumford addresses the psychic effects caused by (and causing) our interaction with “the machine.” In doing so, he provides a distinctly materialist alternative to Heidegger. Still centrally important is the conception of space and time, how modern science and technology incrementalize, measure, and regiment it. This is not only a sensual reality, though, but also an assemblage of material and social relationships. The disenchantment and rationalization of the world has impacted the most basic levels of human exchange and been perverted especially through the system of capitalism. Mumford rightly considers Veblen at this juncture to demonstrate the symbolic quality of the capitalist economy, and the virtuality of valuation that consider anything but use-value (and perhaps aesthetics). It is technics that dematerializes the world, turns all life to dead matter – Heidegger’s “standing reserves” – to be considered in their abstract quantities and qualities as though modern physics and classical economics can describe the essence of reality best. In such a worldview, “Nature existed to be explored, to be invaded, to be conquered, and, finally, to be understood” (Mumford 2010: 31). Here we see the feedback between values and technics: the machine needs us to think like a machine, and our interaction with the machine further encourages the machinization of the psyche. “If mechanical thinking and ingenious experiment produced the machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: the social process worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the new technics” (Mumford 2010: 41). Likewise, “By his consistent metaphysical principles and his factual method of research, the physical scientist denuded the world of natural and organic objects and turned his back upon real experience…” (Mumford 2010: 51).
In Winner’s discussion of the autonomy of technique, he considers mainly the political process by which technological society is reproduced and its technical power (over humans and the rest of nature) enhanced. He asks the critical question as an alternative to “Who governs?,” instead asking “What governs?” (1977: 173). This requires that one critically examine the technical structure of society using conceptual tools that Winner elaborates: one ought to consider artificiality, extension, rationality, size and concentration, division, complex interconnection, dependence and interdependence, the center and apraxia (see 1977: 178-187). In the case of modern technology, critics of technology see that “man overcomes his bondage to economic necessity only by submitting to bondage of a different, but equally powerful sort. The conquest of nature is achieved at a considerable price – an even more thorough conquest of all human and all social possibilities” (Winner 1977: 187). Through complexity of technical systems, we have lost agency. Not even the engineers themselves often understand a system in its entirety – nor could they.
But “the machine” that exists does not give us the luxury of seeing it as an immutable juggernaut: it is making our habitat psychically, socially and materially unsustainable. Technological systems are constantly remade, reproduced and relegitimized by our engagement with them. “Choice manifests itself in society in small increments and moment-to-moment decisions as well as in loud dramatic struggles; and he who does not see choice in the development of the machine merely betrays his incapacity to observe cumulative effects until they are bunched together so closely that they seem completely external and impersonal” (Mumford 2010: 6). Winner provides useful terms for assessment and methodology (see 178-187; 325-333) both to understand and to change the technical and organizations structure of our society that transfers autonomy to political actors, and fosters democracy. This process would surely require the radical transformation or elimination of many existent complex technologies and systems, and points toward a more human- scaled and centered community (elaborated in greater detail by Mumford in the close of Technics & Civilization in which he shared much with Schumacher’s “small” society and Illich’s “convivial society”). This is often seen by technophiles – and the common STS scholar – as an impossible move backward. Winner writes that:
This idea of moving ‘backward’ is a fascinating one. At work here is a quaint, two-dimensional, roadlike image … One moves, it seems forward (positive) or backward (negative). Never does one move upward and to the right or off into the distance at, say, a thirty-four degree angle. No; it is forward or backward in a straight line. What is understood, furthermore, is that forward means larger, more complex, based on the latest scientific knowledge and the centralized control of an increasingly greater range of variables. (1977: 240-241)
We have choices. And Winner’s closing chapter gives us some political terms for technological assessment and democratic principles for engaging technology. Thoreau wrote :
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, who it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. (1927: 39)
I would like to think, as Winner, that we have more choices than to choose slavery or death. Thus far, most have chosen the former.
Works cited:
Mumford, L. Technics & Civilization (Reprint Edition). University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Thoreau, H.D. Walden. Dover, 1927.
Winner, L. Autonomous Technology. MIT Press, 1977.
Wow this is a powerful piece.
This is a really great piece.