From: Michael Current <mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net>
Subject: Re: The technological "we"
To: technology-AT-world.std.com
Date: Sat, 21 May 1994 13:13:31 -0500 (CDT)


Malgosia Askanas writes:
> 
> > "The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and 
> > machine.  Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always
> > the ghost in the machine.  [...]   [Now] Our machines are frighteningly 
> > alive, and we ourselves frighteningly`inert."
>                      (from Michael Current's quote from Haraway)
> 
> I have a fascination with the use of the words "we" and "our" with
> respect to technology.  In what sense are machines "our" machines?  When 
> a cratfsman invents a machine to make his job easier, it is in some
> simple sense _his_ machine.  It directly serves his goals.  But in
> our case, this is mostly not what happens.  Instead, somebody other
> than the craftsman invents a machine to make the craftsman's job 
> obsolete.  If the craftsman now didn't have to work, one could still
> say that he has benefitted.  But this is not the case: even though 
> there are more and more machines around, there seems to be no change
> in the social arrangements which forces people to work in order to
> make a living.  If the craftsman is lucky, he will get retrained
> and thus, through no choice of his own, learn to adjust to a means
> of production which he did not help create.  If he is unlucky, he may
> have to endure the humiliations of unemployment.  Yet it is common to
> talk about technology as "our" technology, as if "we" (who?) 
> could be thought to represent a cohesive, unified set of interests in 
> this context.
> 
> 
> - malgosia 

The context of Haraway's quote indicates the she is using the words "our"
and "we" in the most generic of senses here - refering to no more than
sentient organic beings.  (Although that category, as she is quick to
pointed out, is not an "untroubled" one at this point).

That does not make Malgosia's observation any less valid, however.  Again,
we face the great postmodern dilemmas - how to use that technology is used
for the betterment of humanity or living beings as a whole.  To date, the
record has been very mixed on that score - with so many of the technological
advances that are lauded by Haraway and others for their liberatory potential
having been developed originally for military interests - the Net itself falls
into that category.  And of course, military and industrial technology has
often not been people or planet-friendly.  The production of silicon chips,
as Haraway points out, is done mostly by underpaid women workers in Asia,
and the process still produces a great deal of environmental toxins.

And we have not seen the kind of evolution of the economy due to advanced
technology that Marxist theory predicted.  Using its categories for a 
moment, it seems clear that _in general_, labor has not been de-alientated,
but simply displaced into new economic sectors - the replacement of skilled
laborers by machines, and the concomitant growth of the "service economy."
I think especially of jobs the consist of an entire shift spent in front
of a CRT doing word-processing or data entry - feeding the machines in
the interest of Capital.  (I do think that some less "alienated" work
situations have been spawned by advanced technology - the ability of some
folks to use the Net to work from home or no fixed location at all; the
fairly casual, creativity-rewarding jobs in parts of the technology
sector itself.  But yes, these are the minority at the moment).

The idea that advanced technology could lead to a society in which machines
served humanity, fostering the transformation of "work" into "eros" or
"play" that Marcuse at his most optimistic was so skilled at conjuring has
obviously not been a consideration for our economic planners.  Marcuse was
not really very optimistic that it would be.  He was quite concerned about
man ending up in the service of machines which in turn served the interests
of an ever more condensed corporate capitalist locus of power.

Haraway acknowledges all of this.  She writes, "The main trouble with cyborgs,
of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and
corporate capitalism, not to mention state socialism."

The positive note in all of this lies, of course in what Haraway would
call the technology's "potentiality," or its possible "becoming" to use
Deleuze and Guattari's term.  (Marx and the Western Marxists like Marcuse
would refer to its "nature" or "essence," but Haraway's point is that
the cyborg stands radically outside of the "origin," "wholeness," 
"unity" narratives - it is the ultimate challenge to traditional
epistemology.  "In short, the certainty of what counts as nature - a
source of insight and promise of innocence - is undermined, probably
fatally.  The transcendant authorization of interpretation is lost, and
with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology.")

Haraway sees the cyborg as "a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality."
As she says, "who cyborgs will be is a radical question."  To return to the
passage quoted above on cyborgs as the 'illegitimate children' of capital,
Haraway concludes, "But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly
unfaithful to their origins.  Their fathers, after all, are inessential."
Our challenge and our hope, in Haraway's view, is to find ways to theorize
and to realize the full radical potential of the cyborg in its fluid
illegitimacy.

I guess I am preaching Haraway here :)  I am re-reading her works to great
benefit, and would love to discuss - with all of their many problems -
further.

Michael



-- 
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
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Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
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