CAPÍTULO II: MARCO TEÓRICO
2.5. Cinética de secado
At the root of the McLuhan/Williams debate lies the question of whether it is a machine’s users that are in control of what they are using, or whether the machine in some sense deter- mines its uses. In the first case, a more or less free human agency governs all historical processes, so that any event that takes place can be traced back to the actions of groups and individuals holding a certain view of things. Thus how we use technology is the only question we need ask of it, creating a gulf between the technology itself and its uses: it is as if technology simply does not exist until it is used. We tend, therefore, not to ask what a tech- nology is, but what purposes it serves. That a technology is used in a particular way (the bomb to kill, television to reproduce the ideological status quo) is an accident of the views held by the controlling group. Therefore the point of studying the uses of a technology is not to study the technology but to analyse and contest the governing ideology that determines its uses. On this view, every technology is a tool.
McLuhan’s critical element is often left out. He is not arguing, as do Adorno and
Horkheimer (1996), for example, that popular media are formally repetitive and therefore a cultural evil, but that, materially, their effects constitute a violent alteration of the sensory environment humans inhabit
While such a view works well for individual technologies (especially for isolated commu- nications technologies – consider the displacement of the military ARPANET system into the Internet), it works less well if we consider the extent to which technology becomes environ- mental. In other words, there are quantitative changes in the scale of the work that can be accompished in the shift from the tool to the machine, but as a consequence there are also fundamental qualitative shifts that alter the relation of human and machine. Rather than being reducible to tools for human purposes, when technology becomes environmental it can no longer be localised, isolated from the networks it forms the material basis of. This is the point from which McLuhan begins. Moreover, ‘the medium is the massage’ indicates the physical basis of the effects of technology: it is less concerned with a specific or isolated medium in the classical media studies sense (television, radio, film, etc.) than with the sense in which technology becomes the medium we inhabit. Thus, ‘the new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature’ (McLuhan 1969: 14). Accordingly, we need pay less atten- tion to the content of a medium than its physical effects (hence ‘massage’ rather than message). These are effects principally on the body, since, beginning from the same tool- based conception of technology as does Williams, McLuhan famously views technology as ‘extensions’ of human capacities and senses. Technology therefore becomes a physical medium that alters the physical capacities of the human body. What therefore has tradition- ally within media studies been disparaged as technological determinism turns out merely to be taking the physical constitution and effects of a technologically saturated civilisation or cul- ture seriously.
We have thus returned to the point from which section 1.6.4began: the view that tech- nology is an ‘extension’ of human capacities, senses, labour, and so on, a view that has such a long history in how human cultures have conceived their technologies. If, however, we seem merely to have come full circle, we need to re-examine what we have found out along the way. Thus we see that this definition of technology poses increasingly complex questions as technology itself becomes more complex. It is worth reiterating the points at which technol- ogy has become more complex:
1 Materially: the relation between biological and technological things (between humans and machines) gives rise to several questions. Have our interactions with technology become so all-pervasive as to produce hybrids of biological and technological components, thus unsettling the distinction between the natural and the artificial, or do they result in large- scale actor-networks that resist reduction either to biological or technological bases? 2 Causally: if biology is becoming increasingly inseparable from technology (as for example
in the case of the Human Genome Project), what sort of causality is involved in technol- ogy producing effects? If in a determinist sense, then how? Does technology now, or will it, possess or acquire agency? If so, of what kind?
3 We have seen that conceiving of technology in this way constitutes a critique of human- ism, which imagines the agent as separable, isolable from his/her/its physical, causal environment. If we do not thus imagine the agent, then in what sense is technology reducible to an ‘extension of man’, and at what point does it begin to become ‘self- extending’?
4 We therefore see that studying the question of technology in culture entails opening ques- tions regarding what culture is, and whether it is isolable from its physical environment and the forces therein, as Williams insists it is.
1.6.4 The many virtues of Saint McLuhan
If we answer (4) in the negative, then we see how the question of technology opens onto the question of the physical basis of culture. It also therefore opens onto scientific and, in the strictest sense, metaphysical issues. One such metaphysical issue, which has enormous consequences in the sciences, is causality. We have seen that some forms of determinism (of the sort that Williams accused McLuhan of holding) presuppose a linear causality (of the sort that McLuhan argues so strenuously against). For Williams, it is essential to pose the prob- lem of technological effects on culture in this manner if what he called ‘cultural science’ is to be separable from physical science. A second such problem concerns realism and nomi- nalism. Generally speaking, nominalists argue that general terms such as ‘technology’ constitute nothing more than collective names to designate the totality of actually existing technological artefacts. This view is called nominalism because it believes that general terms such as ‘technology’ are nothing but names for collections of specific individuals. When nom- inalists talk about technology itself (or when they spot others talking in this way), then they say this amounts to nothing other than talk about empty names. Some nominalists suggest that such terms therefore be eradicated, voided of all but numerical or grammatical sense; others accept this lack of reference to the real world as an inescapable condition of human knowl- edge, since it is linguistically mediated, and the reference of a term is merely a structural artefact. Realists, by contrast, argue that ‘technology’ as such has characteristics not nec- essarily instantiated in all or even in some individual and actual artefacts. Many things are technological: not only mechanical, steam, electrical or digital machines, but also social struc- tures or ‘soft technologies’ as Jacques Ellul calls them (Ellul [1954] 1964). Moreover, the realist may include in the concept of technology things that do not have any actual instanti- ation, but that remain real in some other form or function (a good example here is Babbage’s Difference Engine, which was not fully constructed until 1991: prior to that date, did such technology really exist?). The crucial difference, however, is that realists need not view lan- guage either as simply naming things, or as a screen that either frames or obscures the stuff and matter of things and forces: physics.
Both these issues come clearly into focus when we consider history in general, and the history of technology in particular. Before moving on to a discussion of these topics, which pick up from sections 1.4and 1.5, we must also note the consequences of another aspect of the extension thesis as regards technology: that is, that as technology becomes simulta- neously less massive and more environmental, deterministic consequences become correspondingly more likely. This is something McLuhan missed, but that Lyotard picks clearly up on. This position, known as ‘soft determinism’ (determinist consequences resulting from indeterminate causes; see 5.2.4), recognises the difference in outcome of introducing a new tool into an agrarian culture, a new power source into an industrial culture, or a new pro- gramme into a digital culture. Such considerations give rise to the view that technological determinism is not a historical constant (as hard determinists, if they exist anywhere, would argue), but is historically specific to a degree of technological complexity in a given cultural frame. Moreover, it poses the question of what it is that is thus extended: is it the human sen- sorium, will, muscles, or bodies, as Aristotle, McLuhan and Marx say, or is it technology itself, as Ellul and Lyotard argue? If the latter, is there any such place as ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ that remains exempt from the actions of technology, or do we require, as Latour demands, a new constitution for the actor-networks, neither reducibly human nor machinic, but instead, bio- socio-technical?
What then are the consequences of taking the physical effects of technology seriously? First, as we shall see in Part 5, it entails that we can no longer separate physical from cultural processes, or matter from meaning. We can thus see how in attempting to answer the
For example, cloning, xenotransplantation, increasingly technological reproductive therapies, genetic engineering, artificial organs, genomics in general and the human genome in particular: the biosciences or biotechnologies seem to produce precisely such hybrids, but the possibilities go further. Cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, for example, recently conducted a year-long experiment using subcutaneously implanted microchips in his own body. Do such technologies extend or alter biological bodies?
1.4 What kind of history? 1.5 Who was dissaatisfied with old media?
5.2.4 Determinisms
5 Cyberculture: technology, nature and culture
question ‘what is technological determinism?’ we are led to pose questions that carry us nec- essarily from the sphere of culture to those of technology and, finally, nature.