From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: towards a critique of technological reason Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 08:04:17 -0500 Steve, I don't know if you are familiar with Michael Moorcock's fantasy hero Elric or not, but he is one in the great tradition of nomadic warriors like Conan the Barbarian. His distinctive feature is that he has a sword named Stormbringer, which is actually a etheric vampiric entity that requires blood for sustenance. This weapon makes Elric the greatest swordsman of his age, but it also requires that he ultimately becomes a kind of servant for Stormbringer, serving up deeds to meet it dark needs. Such a relationship makes a perfect metaphor for discussing technology. I think you would agree at least partially with me that technology gives the human subject autonomy over nature, which allows it to at least partially shape and control it for its own ends. At the same time, however, this very technology itself is partially autonomous, and leads to the social domination and control of the human subject as it devastates the very ecological matrix from which it emerges. I don't want to make a fetish out of Kant, but I find it interesting that many of the philosophers I admire who wrote about technology such as Benjamin, Adorno and Lyotard were also very interested in aesthetic issues that stemmed from Kant "Critique of Judgment". >From my perspective, technology is not merely nuts and bolts, an external piece of hardware or machinery. It is much closer to a second skin, a prosthetic which creates as well as enhances our very perception of the world. I think much of the difference between us on the cyborg issue comes down to the fact that you see it prospectively and question whether or not it can work from an engineering standpoint, while I see it more retrospectively. For me, technology is the entire manifold of aesthetic, conceptual, and social complexes that enfold the very machinery, thus making it palatable for humans. Thus we humans have always been cyborgs whether we know it or not. What separates the inhuman, the infans from the human, what we otherwise call the process of acculturation, is in fact the traumatic retrofitting required to become a socially well-adapted functioning adult. The implants used to plug into the machine shown in the movie The Matrix is a good metaphor for this process. I think that the conceptual tools for understanding this situation of being-technological are more likely to be found in the aesthetic/teleological realm described in the Critique of Judgment than in the epistemological realm of the Critique of Pure Reason or the ethical realm of the Critique of Practical Reason. Certainly, I agree with you he needs to be supplemented and am slowly warming to the Hegelian line as one of these necessary supplements. I suggest, however, if the unregulated neo-liberal anarchy of contemporary society needs to be brought under the rule of law, then the late political essays of Kant offer us a interesting perspective that remains relevant today. I also think the Critique of Judgment needs to be re-read as book, ultimately, not so much about art as it is about technology and nature. Finally, the critical perspective of entering into maturity that Kant offers remains one of best ways to see through the gaze offered us by the rose colored 'spectacles' of technology during late-nite capitalism. eric
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