Boston University Do Articles Have Politics Article Discussion In clear, simple language, explain the significance of each topic. Be sure to define terms a

Boston University Do Articles Have Politics Article Discussion In clear, simple language, explain the significance of each topic. Be sure to define terms and to identify key arguments relevant to the topic. Also offer some kind of critical perspective that further clarifies what is at stake in the topic, strengths and weaknesses of the arguments surrounding it, etc.

Topics:

1. Langdon Winner’s analysis of ways that artifacts may “have politics” (that is, may alter the balance of power within the society that produced the artifacts), using concrete examples

2. Herbert Marcuse’s view of advanced technological societies as promoting an uncritical, “one-dimensional” kind of thinking among their citizens

3. The main features of “disciplinary” institutions, as Michel Foucault uses this term (refer to the “Panopticon” prison plan that Foucault uses as a model of a disciplinary institution)

4. Ellen Lupton’s analysis of the electric carving knife as an artifact whose design and marketing reveals changes in popular understandings of “appropriate” gender roles in the mid-20th Century United States.

Articles are attached: 2
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
DO ARTIFACTS HAVE
POLITICS?
N 0 IDE A I S more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures,
and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged
not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity
and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but
also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of
power and authority. Since ideas of this kind are a persistent and
troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.
Writing in the early 1960s, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that “from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two
technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other mancentered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” 1 This
thesis stands at the heart of Mumford’s studies of the city, architecture, and history of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other
nineteenth-century critics of industrialism. During the 1970s,
antinuclear and pro-solar energy movements in Europe and the
United States adopted a similar notion as the centerpiece of their
arguments. According to environmentalist Denis Hayes, “The
increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible
only in a totalitarian state.” Echoing the views of many propo19
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
A Philosophy of Technology
nents of appropriate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes
contends that “dispersed solar sources are more compatible than
centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural
pluralism.” 2
An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of largescale, high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters has
insisted that the biggest and best that science and industry made
available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and
social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, space program, and of course nuclear power
have all at one time or another been described as democratizing,
liberating forces. David Lillienthal’s T. V.A.: Democracy on the
March, for example, found this promise in the phosphate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was bringing to
rural Americans during the 1940s. 3 Three decades later Daniel
Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology extolled television for “its
power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole
new democratic world-democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America.” 4 Scarcely a new invention comes along
that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation ofa free society.
It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various
kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern poli-
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
tics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, war-
fare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed
the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. But to
go beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves have political properties seems, at first glance,
completely mistaken. We all know that people have politics;
things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of
steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the
like seems just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice
and of avoiding the true sources, the human sources of freedom
and oppression, justice and injustice. Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when it comes
to judging conditions of public life.
Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with
the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What
matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim, which in a number of
variations is the central premise of a theory that can be called the
20
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Do
ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?
social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom. It
serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically
upon such things as “the computer and its social impacts” but
who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. This
view provides an antidote to naive technological determinismthe idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal
dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds
society to fit its patterns. Those who have not recognized the
ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic
forces have not gotten very far.
But the corrective has its own shortcomings; taken literally, it
suggests that technical things do not matter at all. Once one has
done the detective work necessary to reveal the social originspower holders behind a particular instance of technological
change-one will have explained everything of importance.
This conclusion offers comfort to social scientists. It validates
what they had always suspected, namely, that there is nothing
distinctive about the study of technology in the first place.
Hence, they can return to their standard models ofsocial powerthose of interest-group politics, bureaucratic politics, Marxist
models of class struggle, and the like-and have everything they
need. The social determination of technology is, in this view,
essentially no different from the social determination of, say,
welfare policy or taxation.
There are, however, good reasons to believe that technology
is politically significant in its own right, good reasons why the
standard models of social science only go so far in accounting
for what is most interesting and troublesome about the subject.
Much of modern social and political thought contains recurring
statements of what can be called a theory of technological politics, an odd mongrel of notions often crossbred with orthodox
liberal, conservative, and socialist philosophies. 5 The theory
of technological politics draws attention to the momentum of
large-scale sociotechnical systems, to the response of modern
societies to certain technological imperatives, and to the ways
human ends are powerfully transformed as they are adapted to
technical means. This perspective offers a novel framework of
interpretation and explanation for some of the more puzzling
patterns that have taken shape in and around the growth of modern material culture. Its starting point is a decision to take tech21
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
A Philosophy of Technology
nical artifacts seriously. Rather than insist that we immediately
reduce everything to the interplay of social forces, the theory of
technological politics suggests that we pay attention to the characteristics of technical objects and the meaning of those characteristics. A necessary complement to, rather than a replacement
for, theories of the social determination of techndlogy, this approach identifies certain technologies as political phenomena in
their own right. It points us back, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s
philosophical injunction, to the things themselves.
In what follows I will outline and illustrate two ways in which
artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in
which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in the
affairs of a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. Second are cases of what can be called “inherently political technologies,” man-made systems that appear to require or
to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more
troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By the term
“politics” I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within
those arrangements. For my purposes here, the term “technology” is understood to mean all of modern practical artifice,
but to avoid confusion I prefer to speak of “technologies” plural,
smaller or larger pieces or systems of hardware ofa specific kind. 6
My intention is not to settle any of the issues here once and for
all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.
Technical Arrangements and Social Order
ANYONE WHO has traveled the highways of America and has
gotten used to the normal height of overpasses may well find
something a little odd about some of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of clearance at the
curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it.
In our accustomed way of looking at things such as roads and
bridges, we see the details of form as innocuous and seldom
give them a second thought.
22
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Do
ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?
It turns out, however, that some two hundred or so lowhanging overpasses on Long Island are there for a reason. They
were deliberately designed and built that way by someone who
wanted to achieve a particular social effect. Robert Moses, the
master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works
of the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, built his overpasses according to specifications that would discourage the presence
of buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by
Moses’ biographer, Robert A. Caro, the reasons reflect Moses’
social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-owning whites
of “upper” and “comfortable middle” classes, as he called them,
would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks, who normally used public transit,
were kept off the roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could
not handle the overpasses. One consequence was to limit access
of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach,
Moses’ widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure
of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island
Railroad to Jones Beach.
Robert Moses’ life is a fascinating story in recent U. S. political history. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents;
his careful manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the
press, and public opinion could be studied by political scientists
for years. But the most important and enduring results of his
work are his technologies, the vast engineering projects that
give New York much of its present form. For generations after
Moses’ death and the alliances he forged have fallen apart, his
public works, especially the highways and bridges he built to
favor the use of the automobile over the development of mass
transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people
that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape.
As New York planner Lee Koppleman told Caro about the
low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, “The old son of a gun had
made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned
parkways. “7
Histories ofarchitecture, city planning, and public works contain many examples of physical arrangements with explicit or
implicit political purposes. One can point to Baron Haussmann’s
broad Parisian thoroughfares, engineered at Louis Napoleon’s
23
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
A Philosophy of Technology
direction to prevent any recurrence of street fighting of the kind
that took place during the revolution of 1848. Or one can visit
any number of grotesque concrete buildings and huge plazas
constructed on university campuses in the United States during
the late 1960s and early 1970s to defuse student demonstrations.
Studies of industrial machines and instruments also turn up interesting political stories, including some that violate our normal expectations about why technological innovations are made
in the first place. If we suppose that new technologies are introduced to achieve increased efficiency, the history of technology
shows that we will sometimes be disappointed. Technological
change expresses a panoply of human motives, not the least of
which is the desire of some to have dominion over others even
though it may require an occasional sacrifice of cost savings and
some violation of the normal standard of trying to get more
from less.
One poignant illustration can be found in the history of
nineteenth-century industrial mechanization. At Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago in the middle
1880s, pneumatic molding machines, a new and largely untested
innovation, were added to the foundry at an estimated cost of
$500,000. The standard economic interpretation would lead us
to expect that this step was taken to modernize the plant and
achieve the kind of efficiencies that mechanization brings. But
historian Robert Ozanne has put the development in a broader
context. At the time, Cyrus McCormick II was engaged in a
battle with the National Union of Iron Molders. He saw the
addition of the new machines as a way to “weed out the bad
element among the men,” namely, the skilled workers who
had organized the union local in Chicago. 8 The new machines,
manned by unskilled laborers, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. After three years of
use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time they
had served their purpose-the destruction of the union. Thus,
the story of these technical developments at the McCormick
factory cannot be adequately understood outside the record of
workers’ attempts to organize, police repression of the labor
movement in Chicago during that period, and the events surrounding the bombing at Haymarket Square. Technological history and U. S. political history were at that moment deeply
intertwined.
24
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Do
ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?
In the examples of Moses’ low bridges and McCormick’s
molding machines, one sees the importance of technical arrangements that precede the use of the things in question. It is
obvious that technologies can be used in ways that enhance the
power, authority, and privilege of some over others, for example, the use of television to sell a candidate. In our accustomed way ofthinking technologies are seen as neutral tools that
can be used well or poorly, for good, evil, or something in between. But we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given
device might have been designed and built in such a way that it
produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to
any ofits professed uses. Robert Moses’ bridges, after all, were used
to carry automobiles from one point to another; McCormick’s
machines were used to make metal castings; both technologies,
however, encompassed purposes far beyond their immediate
use. If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and
uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded
to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.
.
Because the point is most easily understood in the light of
particular intentions embodied in physical form, I have so far offered illustrations that seem almost conspiratorial. But to recognize the political dimensions in the shapes of technology does
not require that we look for conscious conspiracies or malicious
intentions. The organized movement of handicapped people in
the United States during the 1970s pointed out the countless
ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use-buses, buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and
so forth-made it impossible for many handicapped persons to
move freely about, a condition that systematically excluded
them from public life. It is safe to say that designs unsuited for
the handicapped arose more from long-standing neglect than
from anyone’s active intention. But once the issue was brought
to public attention, it became evident that justice required a
remedy. A whole range of artifacts have been redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate this minority.
Indeed, many of the most important examples of technologies that have political consequences are those that transcend
the simple categories “intended” and “unintended” altogether.
These are instances in which the very process of technical devel-
25
Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor : A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986. Accessed April 17, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from newschool on 2020-04-17 17:24:17.
Copyright © 1986. University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
A Philosophy of Technology
opment is so thoroughly biased in a particular direction that it
regularly produces results heralded as wonderful breakthroughs
by some social interests and crushing setbacks by others. In
such cases it is neither correct nor insightful to say, “Someone
intended to do somebody else harm.” Rather one must say that
the technological deck has been stacked in advance to favor certain social interests and that some people were bound to receive
a better hand than others.
The mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device perfected by researchers at the University of California from the
late 1940s to the present offers an illustrative tale. The machine
is able to harvest tomatoes in a single pass through a row, cutting the plants from the ground, shaking the fruit loose, and (in
the newest models) sorting the tomatoes electronically into large
plastic gondolas that hold up to twenty-five tons of produce
headed for canning factories. To accomm…
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