A perennial debate in technology studies is over the question of agency and determinism. Does technology drive history? Is technology socially constructed? Who or what exercises agency in sociotechnical development? In this blog, I summarize and analyze the ideas that have emerged from this debate that I find most useful. Specifically, I touch on the work of Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner.
For Ellul, “when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance.”[1] Donna Haraway has taken this point to the extreme, suggesting that humans are cyborgs, inextricably linked to their devices, not only to participate in social life, but in their conceptions of self.[2] “This transformation, so obvious in modern society,” wrote Ellul, “is the result of the fact that technique has become autonomous.”[3] By autonomous, Ellul meant that “technique pursues its own course more and more independently of man.”[4] Humans are directed to technical ends by their reliance upon its means for every aspect of their lives, whereby humans are “reduced to the level of a catalyst…”[5] It is not technology alone that requires this relationship, but the role of technology in society. “When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result.”[6] This characterization has led some to dismiss Ellul’s philosophy as “technological determinism.” Winner rejects that Ellul commits to determinism, and finds utility in this approach – that of autonomous technology – when he presents Ellul’s vision “that technology is somehow out of control by human agency.”[7] In this view, “far from being controlled by the desired and rational ends of human beings, technology in a real sense now governs its own course, speed, and destination.”[8] Ellul argued that “there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy.”[9]
Winner asks the critical question as an alternative to “Who governs?,” by instead asking, “What governs?”[10] Technologies are forms of life that reshape the social, which “tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit…” Winner argues that “technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations.”[11] The actual artifacts, their arrangement in organizations and systems, the overarching physical infrastructures of a society, and so on govern social life as fundamentally as laws and their systems of enforcement, and in many senses are even more rigid and unforgiving. As a result of “manifest social complexity” and “concealed electronic complexity,” “the plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child …” yet in contemporary technological civilization people “are less fortunate than children” for they “never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report.”[12] Through complexity, there is a loss of agency:
The technological society contains many parts and specialized activities with a myriad of interconnections. The totality of such interconnections – the relationships of the parts to each other and the parts to the whole – is something which is no longer comprehensive to anyone. In the complexity of this world, people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them. They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate experience.[13]
Without the ability to make sense of the technical aspects that impact one’s life, it becomes difficult or impossible to engage those elements in a meaningful way. It would be an error to derive from this a “naïve technological determinism” (Winner 1986: 21), but this argument effectively establishes the ways in which technology impinges upon human agency.
Technological determinism is a label applied by critics, who dismiss authors like Mumford, Ellul and Winner for assigning agency to artifacts and technological systems. However, determinism is an inappropriate label for these thinkers. Latour argued “the ‘autonomous’ thrust of a technical artifact is a worn-out commonplace made up by bleeding-heart moralists who have never noticed the throngs of humans necessary to keep a machine alive.”[14] This is a mischaracterization of Ellul and Mumford. For them, the machine cannot be extracted from social life once introduced, and the humans – who cannot extricate themselves from it – become part of the machine. Certainly, they keep the machine alive, but that relationship is symmetrical: the machine keeps social reproduction running along. Like Latour, Feenberg assumes nearly infinite plasticity in technologies, a view which he inherits from Marcuse,[15] when he argues that technology “is socially contingent and could therefore be reconstructed to play different roles in different social systems.”[16] Feenberg caricaturizes Ellul, Mumford and Winner as determinists – without references, mind you – that claim “technologies have an autonomous functional logic that can be explained without reference to society.”[17] Of course, even a cursory reading of these authors would demonstrate the social and political take central roles in their politics of technology. Such a representation is not only false, but also irresponsible and unprincipled. Ellul’s argument is that it “is not the sovereignty of the commonwealth, fashioned by a single omniscient creator, but the autonomy of technique generated within the interlocking parts of a complex structure built in bits and pieces over the years by millions of intelligent hands.”[18] One could imagine Latour making a similar argument in a different vocabulary.
Ellul, like Heidegger, resigned in many senses, to the autonomy of technology. Depending on which text one refers to among Mumford’s works, one would find varying degrees of submission.[19] Winner, however, argues that “the concept of determinism is much too strong, far too sweeping in its implications to provide an adequate theory. It does little justice to the genuine choices that arise, in both principle and practice, in the course of technical and social transformation.”[20] For him, “any society that hopes to control its own structural evolution must confront each significant set of technological possibilities with scrupulous care.”[21] His “luddism as epistemology”[22] and Richard Sclove’s Democracy and Technology (1995) present terms by which those in technological civilization may assert their agency in liberating new ways.
Ultimately, the question of agency is to ask what would be required to refuse a technology that currently impacts one’s life. This is the question that demonstrates the totalitarian nature of much of the technologies of contemporary society. If there is no escaping the effects of a technology (for instance, one cannot escape the exposure to the human-generated toxin PFOA anywhere on earth), or if one must disengage from all social life in one’s community, the option of refusal is not available. In this sense, human agency is rather constrained by technology, much of it already occupying the social and physical landscapes into which we were born.
[1] Ellul, 1964, p. 6.
[2] Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, 1997; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Philosophy of Technology edited by R. Scharff and V. Dusek, 2003.
[3] Ellul, 1964, p. 6.
[4] Ibid., p. 135.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 138.
[7] Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology, 1977, p. 15.
[8] Ibid., p. 16.
[9] Ellul, 1964, p. 138.
[10] Winner, 1977, p. 173.
[11] Winner, 1986, p. 29.
[12] Winner, 1977, p. 285-6.
[13] Ibid., p. 284.
[14] Latour, 1992, p. 251-2.
[15] He also inappropriately attributes this to Foucault, who would have argued that many technologies that function properly in a culture in which domination was the primary order would seem unintelligible in a radically different setting.
[16] Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 1999, p. 7.
[17] Ibid., p. 70.
[18] Winner, 1977, p. 281.
[19] Technics & Civilization (2010) being among his more optimistic and The Pentagon of Power (1964) the more pessimistic.
[20] Winner, 1986, p. 10.
[21] Winner, 1986, p. 54.
[22] Winner, 1977, pp. 325-35.
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