Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism ed. by Yaron Ezrahi, et al

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 533 and Jacques Ellul (none of whom is ever given a first name), but only the third is included in the bibliography. “Conviviality” is a major touchstone, but reference to the ex­ tended work of Ivan Illich is no more than a single bibliographic citation of Toolsfor Conviviality. (In his discussion of technology and equity, it is amazing that Sclove completely ignores Illich’s Energy and Equity.) Conversations with other major interlocutors, such as Albert Borgmann and Kristin Shrader-Frechette, are reduced to footnotes. Finally, any book of this length and complexity should include a full table of contents, notjust a skeleton of chapter titles. Carl Mitcham Dr. Mitcham, a member of the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, recently served as the Hennebach Visiting Professor in Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines. His most recent book is Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism. Edited by Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard Segal. Amherst, Mass.: Univer­ sity of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. 216; notes. $14.95 (paper) This book originated in a 1992 conference held in Israel. Despite its title, few of the essays seriously engage recent theorists of post­ modernism. It is not a tightly unified group of essays but a confer­ ence volume with weak or nonexistent links between many of the contributions. Apparently due to page limitations, these tend to be either surveys of large topics or summaries of focused research. The topics range from the Renaissance to the present and deal with the United States, Britain, and Germany. Four authors focus on intellectual history. Gabriel Motzkin de­ votes thirteen pages to Heidegger and the complex relationship be­ tween our construction of historical time and technology’s inelucta­ ble role in that process. Jeffrey Herf expands his earlier work on the “reactionary modernism” of Nazi Germany (which rejected the Enlightenment but embraced technology) by surveying conservative intellectuals. He concludes that the defeat of Nazism was crucial to the emergence of technological pessimism on the Right. Robert B. Pippin examines “the notion of technology as ideology” from Karl Marx’s false consciousness to Heidegger’s argument that technology provides a pretheoretical “horizoning of experience,” to Lukacs’s “reification.” He argues that “ideology critique seems inevitably linked either to some controversial account of origins ... or to the notion of some sort of structural encroachment by one domain or ‘world’ over another.” (p. 105) Pippin then examines Habermas and calls for a more broadly conceived historical and contextual ap­ proach to the project of “ideology critique,” one that would be 534 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE more responsive to the claim that “modernity and its technological implications” maybe “legitimate.” (p. Ill) Only Leo Marx’s excel­ lent “The Idea ofTechnology and Postmodern Pessimism” focuses on postmodernism. He questions the legitimacy of the affinities be­ tween the “new conceptions of power favored by influential post­ modern theorists” (Lyotard and Foucault) “and the functioning of large technological systems.” He concludes that the postmodern outlook “in effect ratifies the idea of the domination of life by large technological systems” and promotes a “shrunken sense of the self” that denies human agency and fatalistically accepts technological domination. Three interesting papers deal with earlier time periods. Klaus Reichert examines Joseph Glanvill’s interest in witches and appari­ tions as an example of what was suppressed by the triumph of the 17th-century mechanist world picture. He could have done more to engage postmodernism, however, than quickly refer to Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault in the final paragraphs. Ido Yavetz ex­ amines a British controversy in the 1880s about lightning protection as a measure of one’s commitment to the idea of progress and then turns to a series of examples of pessimism about technology, from Carlyle to Kelvin; he concludes by asking if current pessimism is any­ thing novel, or “are we just continuing a well-established tradition of assimilation by criticism of new technologies?” (p.72). Based on archival newspaper sources, Menahem Blondheim provides a lucid account ofthe early diffusion ofAmerican telegraphy and its shifting public image, as it ceased to be a sublime...