Postmodern Theory of Technology: Agendas

Abstract

From the standpoint of today's cultural studies, three central texts for postmodern theory of technology are Heidegger's essay Question Concerning (1953), Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), and Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985). Each illustrates that the postmodern moment in the philosophy and history of technology arrives when pressing ethicopolitical questions erupt about collective well-being, freedom, security, and sustainability. This postmodern rupture comes in the wake of mounting postwar critiques of modern scientific technology for its faults, especially its frenzied utilitarianism; its reification of life; its abetting of social domination; its nondemocratic mode of operation; and its dangerous transformation of human rationality into instrumental reason. The standard definitions of technology include the utilitarian, anthropological, and social constructionist ones.1 In the first, technology is regarded as an instrument, a neutral means to an end. In the second, it is conceived as an inventive activity inherent to human beings. And in the third, it is construed sociohistorically as communally constructed, involving numerous agents and constraints. Technology in ordinary conversation evokes equipment, tools, machines (things manufactured and used) as well as artif actual solutions to problems and needs. Yet, following Foucault and Haraway, the body (notably the docile body) is a technology, an unsettling notion that collapses the conventional binary opposition organism/ machine and that renders the meaning and extent of technology undecidable. By common consent modern technology starts during the Enlightenment period when the widespread scientization of technology and technologization of science occur. Heidegger, Foucault, and Marx, particularly in the latter's memorable chapter on Machinery and