But this analysis of the distinctiveness of the device is still deficient, and the deficiency can be brought into relief through two objections. Is not, one may ask, the concealment of the machinery and the lack of engagement with our world due to widespread scientific, economic, and technical illiteracy?33 And quite apart from one’s level of education, is not everyone in his or her work directly and explicitly engaged with the machinery of devices?
We can approach the first point through one of its companion phenomena, people’s alleged unwillingness and inability to maintain and repair technological devices.34 How well-founded is this allegation? One way in which commodities are made available is that of making them discardable. It is not just unnecessary but impossible to maintain and repair paper napkins, cans, Bic ball points or any of the other one-way or one-time devices. Another way to availability is that of making products carefree. Stainless steel tableware requires no polishing, plastic dishes need not be handled carefully. In other cases maintenance and repair become impossible because of the sophistication of the product. Microcomputers are becoming increasingly common and influential as devices that free us of the tasks of allocation, record keeping, and control. The theories and technical processes that underlie the production of microcircuits are too complicated and too much in flux to be known in detail by more than a handful of people. And the microcircuits themselves are realized at a functional level so minute and dense that it does not permit the intrusions necessary for repairs even if structure and functions are fully understood.35 Finally, microcomputers are being used more and more widely because they are becoming “friendly,” i.e., easy to operate and understand.36 But such “friendliness” is just the mark of how wide the gap has become between the function accessible to everyone and the machinery known by nearly no one. And not only lay people are confined to the side of ignorance of this gap, but so are many, perhaps most, of the professional programmers.37
Still, education in engineering and in the natural and social sciences would make much of the machinery, i.e., of the context, of technological devices, perspicuous. But even if such education were to become more common, the context of functions and commodities would remain different from the world of things for two reasons. First, the presence of that context would remain entirely cerebral since it increasingly resists, as we have seen, appropriation through care, repair, the exercise of skill, and bodily engagement. Second, the context would remain anonymous in the senses indicated above. The machinery of a device does not of itself disclose the skill and character of the inventor and producer; it does not reveal a region and its particular orientation within nature and culture. In sum, the machinery of devices, unlike the context of things, is either entirely occluded or only cerebrally and anonymously present. It is in this sense necessarily unfamiliar.
The function of the device, on the other hand, and the commodity it provides are available and enjoyed in consumption. The peculiar presence of the end of the device is made possible by means of the device and its concealment. Everyone understands that the former rests on the latter, and everyone understands as well that the enjoyment of ends requires some kind of attention to the means. Only in magic are ends literally independent of means. The inevitable explicit concern with the machinery takes place in labor. But labor does not in general lift the veil of unfamiliarity from the machinery of devices. The labor process is itself transformed according to the paradigm of the device. This is a thesis that will be worked out in Chapter 17.
10
The Foreground of Technology
In the preceding chapter we have obtained a more sharply outlined picture of the device paradigm. But the picture is partial and limited as well. It has shown us how the pattern is instantiated here and there and in detail. What about the global effect of the paradigm? That question has several aspects. Of these I first want to consider the way in which the employment of technological devices has resulted in an ensemble of commodities. This is a privileged dimension of the universe of technology. Commodities and their consumption constitute the professed goal of the technological enterprise. I use the term “foreground” to point up this peculiar side of technology and also to pinpoint a systematic difficulty that besets any attempt to offer a clear view of normal technological reality. The foreground of technology normally comes closest to the fore under such headings as leisure, consumption, or the standard of living. Though these topics constitute the spoken or unspoken concern of most of our public debates, they fail to keep the foreground of our lives in focus. The discussions inevitably drift into the political and economic background. There are confident and forceful public discussions on armament and national security, but very little is said publicly about the kind of life that we typically lead within the horizon of security. Great attention and respect are paid in the business sections of newspapers to the people who direct transportation systems and chemical concerns. But these papers rarely raise the question whether or why so many people should so often want to move from here to there or what kind of world is finally composed by all the plastics, drugs, and chemicals. There are some scholarly descriptions and critiques of the technological foreground of our lives, but we will be in a better position to appraise them after we have delineated that foreground in terms of the device paradigm.
The device paradigm does not just help us somehow to discover the foreground; the very formulation of the paradigm amounts to a sharp delineation of the foreground from the background, of the commodity a device procures from the machinery on which the function of a device rests. How commodities coalesce into a distinctive foreground I want to show in two steps. First I want to illustrate more clearly how pervasively and subtly the device paradigm has been at work in dividing traditional things into commodities and machineries. Then I take up the question of the way the foreground comes to our attention purely and fully.
The distinction between machinery and commodity is most easily made in regard to technological machines. But things of nature and culture and social relations too are being transformed according to the pattern of the device. Wine can serve as an example. In this instance, the division between machinery and commodity is to be found not only between the implements that are used to produce wine and the product, namely, wine. There is rather a fissure running through wine itself. It is turned into a device with a machinery and a commodity. Let us follow some observations that have been made by Judson Gooding.1 Putting his points in terms of the device paradigm, we can say that the machinery of wine consists in its chemical constituents, and the function of this machinery is seen as procuring a commodity, an aggregate of certain tastes and colors. The taste is to be pleasantly grapey, smooth, light, fruity, and soft. In visual appearance the wine should be clean, clear, limpid, and free of sediments. This is what technologically transformed wine provides. It also provides it much more assuredly than did traditional wine, i.e., with less risk of unpleasant and pleasant surprises. Further, it is more commodious in that is is less fatiguing to drink and more easily afforded. Even its foreign name is made easy to pronounce. As wine becomes a device, the commodity it procures becomes severed from its context, or, speaking more precisely, the world that is opened up in wine as a thing is closed off when it becomes machinery and commodity. Technological wine no longer bespeaks the peculiar weather of the year in which it grew since technology is at pains to provide assured, i.e., uniform, quality. It no longer speaks of a particular place since it is a blend of raw materials from different places. All this holds not only of the common American wines but also of the middle-range quality wines imported from France of which Gooding speaks. It is their development from which the illustrations above are drawn.
The example of wine also allows us to see that the emergence of a technological foreground is, in relation to science, a development in its own right. Modern science, to be sure, is a necessary factor in the advancement of technology. The illustration of the paradigm in terms of television, given earlier, makes the role of scien
ce quite plain, too plain in fact. Without important advances in the scientific understanding of electronics in general and of semiconductors in particular, the progress of television would have been impossible. The obvious necessity of scientific insight may, however, conceal the insufficiency of science for the advancement of the device paradigm. In the case of wine, too, technological transformation requires scientific insight into the effects of chemical substances and physical processes on the taste and visual appearance of wine. But it is not as though there were a division with science and the technological foreground on the one side, and the nostalgia for “the majestic, more solid wines that were long considered the kings of the cellar” on the other.2 For we can tell scientifically what distinguishes a majestic and solid wine from a light and fruity one; we know which of the 170-odd constituents of traditional wine have been lost, just how they got lost, and how constituents, thought to be desirable in technological wine, were increased or introduced. Scientific insight renders phenomena perspicuous and opens up possibilities. But a pattern of procedure is required to act on that insight and to take advantage of the possibilities; the device paradigm constitutes the pattern.
Toward the end of his observations, Gooding raises “the key philosophical question of whether the public’s taste has changed and has forced winemakers to change with it, or whether winemaking has changed and forced wine drinkers to follow.”3 Such a question, as argued in Chapter 9, will open up philosophical insights if it is taken as a request for the determination not so much of the origin of this development as of the nature of the change at issue. What must be noted first then is that the development that rightly troubles Gooding is not a change of taste from one thing to another but the switch from a taste for things to one for commodities. One can taste or experience mere warmth only when, through a central heating plant, warmth has been stripped of its pretechnological interwovenness with culture, nature, and community and has been secured merely, i.e., as a commodity. In leisure and consumption, the origin and context of commodities is taken over and concealed in the technological machinery. Commodities are available individually, and we take them up without invoking or enacting a context. The change of taste that Gooding notes is the emergence of the characteristic way in which one moves in the foreground of technology. Gooding himself registers this wider implication. “For better or for worse,” he says, “the changes in the world of wine seem to coincide strikingly with changes in the way people live, and in their tastes.” He finds three major features in these changes: mobility, standardization, and “a general shift toward lightness.”4 These are clearly traits of a commerce with reality where the rootedness in the depth of things, i.e., in the irreplaceable context of time and place, has been dissolved.
But before we consider more fully the question how citizens in the technological society appropriate the characteristic foreground of their lives, we must ask how and where that foreground comes most clearly into view. Cartoons at times act as a divining rod in alerting us to phenomena that are close to the surface though not yet generally and readily visible. There is a cartoon where a middle-aged woman stands in front of a chest of frozen dinners in a supermarket, holding up two packages, looking a little puzzled; and she says to her husband:
For the big day, Harv, which do you want? The traditional American Christmas turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, oyster dressing, cranberry sauce and tiny green peas or the old English Christmas goose dinner with chestnut stuffing, boiled potatoes, brussels sprout and plum pudding?5
Harvey looks skeptical and a bit morose. The world of bountiful harvests, careful preparations, and festive meals has become a faint and ironical echo. Mabel is asking Harvey whether on December 25th he would rather consume this aggregate of commodities or that. To consume is to use up an isolated entity without preparation, resonance, and consequence.6 What half dawns on Mabel and Harvey is the equivocation in calling the content of an aluminum package a “traditional American Christmas turkey dinner.” The content, even when warmed and served, is a sharply reduced aspect of the once full-bodied affair.
To engage us, the vision of a cartoon must remain within hailing distance of reality. If the scene of the cartoon above were in color and took up an entire page, if Mabel were young, slim, and pretty, and her speech just a little more cheerful, no further changes would be needed for a standard promotion of technological food. There is in fact an advertisement headlined: “We’ve just brought a world of good eating a lot closer.” That world consists of
Beef Chop Suey with Rice
Swedish Meatballs in Gravy with Parsley Noodles
Linguini with Clam Sauce
Chicken Paprikash with Egg Noodles
Chicken Cacciatore with Spaghetti
Beef Teriyaki with Rice and Vegetables.7
It is presented in color on two full pages, each dish shown on a distinctive plate and table or tablecloth, suggesting the richness and variety of this “world of good eating.” But this world of course has no depth and context. We are not invited to enter rural Sweden or teeming Shanghai. These dishes are made available to us “in speedy cooking pouches, so they’re ready after just 15 minutes in boiling water.”
It is no accident that one is led to advertising in delineating the foreground of technology. In advertising, the foreground comes most sharply and prominently into focus. It receives equal time, space, and attention with the political and economic discussions of the background of technology. There is an impartial alternation of news, commentary, and advertisement in the communications media. Daniel J. Boorstin recognizes its central role in a technological society. He puts it this way:
If we consider democracy not just as a political system, but as a set of institutions which do aim to make everything available to everybody, it would not be an overstatement to describe advertising as the characteristic rhetoric of democracy.8
The availability of commodities comes to the fore in advertising. But the relation between availability and advertising requires further analysis. It is certain that advertising serves limited utilitarian purposes such as supplying information and increasing sales. But this is a partial explanation of the phenomenon since the informative content of advertisements is low and the competitive struggle in advertising should lead to a standoff.9 Thus it has been argued that advertising has a broader and more fundamental function in a technological society. One argument is to the effect that advertising as a whole generates the required demand for consumer goods. Required by whom? For Stuart Ewen it is profit-seeking capitalism at the stage of mass production. To perpetuate its reign, so Ewen argues implicitly but clearly, the capitalist class needs consumers, and it consciously sets out to reeducate the often unwilling working class toward consumptive habits.10 For John Kenneth Galbraith the class at the leading edge of the transformation of society is larger and more complex, comprising business executives, engineers, research scientists, and others, collectively called “the technostructure.” The technostructure is at pains to secure its position nationally and globally, and the management of demand by advertising is a vital part of this enterprise.11 The legitimation of technology is the topic of a later chapter. By way of anticipation, let me say that Galbraith seems nearer to the mark than Ewen. But we must get closer yet. The consumer culture, at bottom, is not the effect of advertising at all. Universal consumption of commodities is the fulfillment of the promise of technology. Consumption by all was anticipated as soon as that promise was formulated. It was clearly announced in the middle of the nineteenth century. The tie that Boorstin sees between democracy and consumption has deep historical roots.12
Advertising does not create the consumer culture but regulates it. And it does more than that. It brings it to the fore and makes it palpable. Boorstin calls advertisement a rhetoric. That term carries connotations of superficiality. Rhetorical language contrasts with the discourse of inquiry, explanation, and justification. Thus rhetoric is a fitting vocable. The commodities of technology
have surface character. They are in fact mere and opaque surfaces which permit no insight into their substructure, i.e., their machinery. Advertising remains true to this dimension and refrains by and large from breaking into the technologial background and from presenting analyses and arguments which presuppose and manifest expertise. Stephen Kline and William Leiss have very nearly captured the peculiar ontological status of commodities as it emerges in advertising. They say:
. . . with the increasing implicitness and ambiguity in advertising imagery, the commodity seems to become a “projective field” in which human states of feeling achievable in consumption are fluidly superimposed upon the non-human, physical-sensory aspects of the commodity. Stretching the metaphor for a moment, the mask of the fetishized commodity, having incorporated the abstract qualities of promised human satisfaction, has more recently still become mirrorlike, reflecting back the vague and distorted images of well-being to be achieved in consumption.13
In two regards the account needs to be taken further. First, commodities do not merely seem to be projective fields, wearing mirrorlike masks; they are nothing but opaque surfaces, i.e., narrowly defined aspects of what used to be things of depth. Therefore the picture of commodities, as presented in advertising, heightens rather than distorts their character. Accordingly, the devices on which the commodities rest do not just allow us to take them as commodity bearers; they force us to take them as such and thereby conceal themselves, leaving us with the commodities. It is not the case that a stereo set may be interpreted as a music generator but could also be taken as an embodiment of Japanese virtues or as a display of delicately contaminated silicates. Of the indefinitely many “non-human, physical-sensory aspects” that stereo equipment displays, a very narrow and well-defined set counts as the commodity, namely, the sounds that it emits. Kline and Leiss point out that stereo sets belong to a small class of commodities where some background information is still included in advertisements.14 And correspondingly, there is some background awareness in the operation of stereo equipment. But even here that awareness is rudimentary and trails off quickly. In sum, what makes something a commodity is not interpretation or projection (a psychological matter) but its structure and construction (an ontological matter). To be sure, the production and use of devices in turn rest on an agreement and understanding about the dominant way of taking up with reality. Thus the ontological matter may have a social foundation. But even granting that, devices, commodities, and their characteristics are so firmly and implicitly understood that the daily commerce with commodities requires nothing like a case-by-case interpretation or projection of feelings.
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