In spite of the firmness of this understanding, Kline and Leiss are correct, I believe, in sensing an ambiguity and fluidity in our dealings with commodities.15 This brings us to the second point of clarification. A term is ambiguous, as remarked before, if it conveys a plurality of senses. Every term is ambiguous in isolation, but normally ambiguity is resolved in context. This linguistic point can be generalized. A sound, a patch of color, a taste in one’s mouth mean something in the context of one’s world. If that background is distorted or impoverished, the meaning of something becomes open to question. In a setting where all I see is a patch of blue, I cannot tell what it means. Is it a piece of sky, a velvet curtain, a bit of deep water, or a projection on a screen? In the case of a commodity, as we have seen, the background is by design taken over and hidden by the machinery of a device. Kline and Leiss allude to this state of affairs. They call it “the obfuscation not only of the social labour ‘hidden’ in the product, but of the material resources as well.”16 Commodities are contextless in their various ways and thus ambiguous. But this ambiguity is, within the framework of technology, a positive trait. It is a mark of the freely disposable character of commodities, of the absence of commitments a context would exact, and of the possibility of combining commodities with few restraints. The ambiguity and fluidity are contained within a common understanding of technology and are therefore well handled by the consumer. Elsewhere Leiss had talked of “the individuals who search for the satisfaction of their needs in the jungle of commodities.”17 But what evidence is there that people are seriously and manifestly disoriented or lost in the consumer culture?
Kline and Leiss point out that advertisements place commodities in settings that have typical formats.18 These settings are not contexts in the traditional sense but collages of different commodities. A typical example is the automobile advertisement that presents “the man who does everything.” Leaning on his car in front of his garage, he is surrounded by a skateboard, hang glider, surfboard, waterski, motorboat, snow skis, dirt bikes, bicycles, snowmobile, backpack, and all the implements required for a suburban lawn.19 In such pictures, the foreground of technology is stylized in vague allusions to traditional stations of life, e.g., that of the country squire. There are others such as the man of the world, the caring housewife, the jeunesse dorrée, the rugged Westerner. Alvin Toffler, in his breathless way, has outlined the great variety of life-styles that are being assembled.20 The scaffold from which these life-styles are suspended is part tradition and part technology. Many of the assemblages of commodities are still arranged and located by tradition. The cities are in the places that pretechnological people had found favorable. Suburban homes mimic villas, mansions, or ranches. But the traditional settings are affected by what may be called the structures or the middle ground of technology which serve the storage and transportation of commodities. Thus there arise supermarkets, high-rise buildings, expressway systems, and airports. The skeleton of the middle ground in many cases displaces traditional settings and assigns new places to the foreground.
In the interplay of tradition and technology, the latter now has the upper hand. Tradition is being reduced in part to machinery where it provides the substructure for the overlay of commodities and consumption. So it is with the traditional family and with historical downtown centers that are converted into shopping and amusement malls. In part, tradition is used as a resource, i.e., as raw material that lends some of its shapes, colors, and tasks to commodities equivocally called by a traditional name. “Grande Marque Red Bordeaux” and “Chicken Paprikash with Egg Noodles” are examples.21 But since the absorption of the traditional culture by technology has not been total, we are bound to our world by some traditional ties and not merely by those of consumption. Moreover, many people move daily into and out of the background of technology in labor, administration, and research. Our relations to the technological universe are complex. In contrast, the universe of advertising is entirely one of commodities and consumption. It distills the foreground of technology ideally and thus presents the technical and distinctive side of our age. In this way it has superseded art as the archetypical presentation of what the epoch is about. In advertising, the promise of technology is presented both purely and concretely and hence most attractively. Problems and threats enter only as a background to set off the blessings of technology.22 Thus we find ourselves archetypically defined in advertisements. They provide a stabilizing and orienting force in the complexity of the still-developing technological society.
This brings us to the final point in the discussion of the foreground of technology. It concerns the ways in which we are coming to terms with the universe of commodities. How evident and certain does the meaning of the foreground appear to us? If there is a deep-seated ambiguity, it regards not the multiplicity of senses within the foreground of technology but the sense of the foreground itself. Ambiguity is mirrored and recognizable in ambivalence. And there are two major ways in which we are ambivalent about the foreground of technology. The first concerns the question: How far can we push the attenuation of our experiences?23 Or to explicate the problem: How thin and disembodied, i.e., superficial, can commodities become before the tie is ruptured that connects them with the things from which they are derived and from which their significance continues to draw nourishment? Simulated environments and experiences have received much attention, but most of it is focused on technical feasibility and economic efficiency.24 There is great and often implicit confidence about a central and defensible equivalence of real and simulated experiences. The more striking illustrations are drawn from experimental and future settings, and the extreme case is the experience that is induced by direct manipulation of the brain. It is extreme because here the commodity has reached its ultimate attenuation; it is no longer even a physical aspect of a thing or event, however thin and partial. It is equivalent to the thing only in its effect on the brain. What is outwardly present is the machinery of the stimulation device only; the commodity has become one with the brain. But it seems that at the point of greatest outward dissimilarity between the thing and the device, there is also the possibility of a perfect match of the effects of thing and device. It is merely a matter of scientific and technical sophistication, so it seems, to produce by electronic stimulation, for instance, an experience of the wilderness which has all the intensity and nuances of the real experience.
I believe that the structure of the brain is so minutely organized that direct stimulation, i.e., stimulation that bypasses the sense organs, will of necessity be crude and hence global and relatively inarticulate and disorganized. This is of course an empirical matter. What is philosophically remarkable and evident even now is that there is a widespread and easy acceptance of equivalence between commodities and things even where the experiential differences are palpable. People who have traveled through Glacier Park in an airconditioned motor home, listening to soft background music and having a cup of coffee, would probably answer affirmatively and without qualification when asked if they knew the park, had been in the park, or had been through the park. Such people have not felt the wind of the mountains, have not smelled the pines, have not heard the red-tailed hawk, have not sensed the slopes in their legs and lungs, have not experienced the cycle of day and night in the wilderness. The experience has not been richer than one gained from a well-made film viewed in suburban Chicago.
There are countless other cases that show how far we have gone in settling for and in the foreground. But precisely when we consider cases of the greatest ease with the foreground, we are also reminded of a growing uneasiness with it and a corresponding desire to recover things in their depth. These reactions appear under such headings as voluntary simplicity, back to basics, self-care in health, running, neoconservatism, arts and crafts, and others. They will require more attention later on. The point here is to note them as evidence of one kind of ambivalence that is felt about the foreground of technology. Another kind is manifest in our estimation
of the foreground relative to its background. Although the consumption of commodities is the avowed end of technology, there is something playful and slightly disreputable about life in the foreground. The playboy and the housewife spend their entire lives in the foreground, and neither is highly respected. The typical figures of technology that we look up to are engaged in the background of technology, in research, business, or politics. It seems that we are more confident of our means than of our ends.
11
Devices, Means, and Machines
We now have an intuitive grasp of the pattern of technology and of its distinctive features. We have examined clear and concrete instances of the paradigm, and we have considered one aspect of its global effect and some of the social issues bound up with that aspect. But before we pursue these broader concerns, it is desirable to give the intuitive and descriptive account of the technological pattern a measure of systematic firmness and clarity. This is the task of the present chapter and of Chapter 12, and these two will bring the explicit account of the pattern of technology to a first conclusion. I begin the task of systematic explication by considering in this chapter what competing approaches to the paradigmatic analysis of technology there are. In the next chapter I examine the methodology of paradigmatic explanation directly.
First then we should look at alternative models and perspectives that have been employed in attempts to clarify the common hopes and misgivings regarding the technological transformation of our world. The most common symbol of the powers and perils of technology has been the machine, and the most common critique of technology alleges an unhappy imbalance of technological means and ends.
Modern technology begins with the introduction of the steam engine in mines, factories, and for transportation. Early capitalism had developed organizational technologies, financial devices, division of labor, and mass production. Inventors had begun to automate water-driven milling systems. But there were inherent limits to the strength of draft animals and human beings, and to the location and availability of wind and water power. Ingenious machines had existed since Antiquity. But it was only when steam engines came on the scene as prime movers that machines became a striking and tangible power of transformation and the symbol of a new age.1 Among the steam-driven machines, it was the locomotive on the railroad that had the strongest effect in changing the face of the land. There was awe at the speed, power, and range of the locomotive. It was welcomed as the great servant whose labors would fulfill the promise of technology.2 It was also feared and detested because of its ugliness and its omnivorous irreverence. Thus the machine served as a focal point of the ambivalence with which the new age was greeted.3 In the nineteenth century the terms “machinery” and “mechanism” were employed much in the same way in which we now use “technology” to characterize the modern era.
The controversy about the status of the machine from the start revolved about the means-ends distinction. Very early the critics of the machine made their point by saying that the machine had emancipated itself from the position of a servant or means to that of a master or an end. More than a century ago, Emerson put it in these lines:
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled,—
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.4
Though the machine lost its preeminence as the symbol of the new age toward the middle of this century, the question of means and ends has persisted as a pivot of the critique of technology.
The first question is whether the means-ends distinction applies at all to modern production and consumption. Hannah Arendt thinks of ends as those human achievements that are firm and enduring and provide humans a secure and common dwelling place.5 Works of art establish such a place, and the great words and deeds of political action fill it with lasting significance. To the stability of work and action there is opposed labor, the production of the necessities of life that are consumed without an enduring accomplishment. In modern technology, the production and consumption of labor grows cancerously and all but devours work and action. Although labor has escaped from privacy and attained social prominence, it has not gained stability. The question whether within the life of production and consumption comfort has on balance increased must be subordinated, Arendt argues, to the realization that the world of machines has begun to destroy the world of genuine ends and is unable “to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves.”6 Arendt tries to support this central thesis through more detailed observations on machines and means. The work of homo faber, the artisan, is guided by an end that engages the worker and guides and organizes the ensemble of tools and materials.7 In the case of the machine, on the other side, especially in its advanced and automated state, there is no play between means and ends. The machine is designed to yield one product, and the necessity of production also encompasses humans and forces them into its productive rhythm. Thus Arendt uses the means-ends distinction to illuminate the difference between the world of modern labor or technology on the one side, and the world of traditional work and action on the other; the fluidity and instability of the one, the firmness and security of the other. The question arises here whether the distinction as Arendt works it really serves her purpose well and whether it would not have been more fitting to an analysis of features within technology. Arendt’s answer, particularly to the second part of the question, is emphatically negative:
Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.8
But surely this is said from an abstract and distant viewpoint. The testimony of laborers clearly shows that most consider labor a necessary evil, a mere means, and that “the means of consumption” is the end of their labor. As will be urged in Chapter 17, it is the reduction of work to a mere means that has led to its degradation, and it is a certain understanding of the means-ends distinction that sanctions that degradation. Much is to be learned from Arendt’s analysis of the vulgar and disorienting aspects of technology as a system devoted primarily to production and consumption. But I am not sure that Arendt’s notion of labor reveals them unambiguously. Technology shows its force most disturbingly as it dissolves the tradition of cooking and the celebration of family meals, both ferial and festal. The helpful distinctions here are not between fluidity and stability, labor and work, since both technology and the culture of the table fall on the side of fluidity and labor in Arendt’s scheme. The first appropriate distinction is rather between disburdenment and engagement, the disburdenment procured through convenience foods and the engagement provided in the culture of the table; and that distinction requires elaboration in terms of the peculiar means-ends distinction the device paradigm embodies.
In fact most critics of the machine and technology have employed the distinction of means from ends within and to the object of their concern. Thomas Carlyle was among the first to use the notion of machinery for a comprehensive critique of his time of which he says in 1829:
It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends.9
Timothy Walker who replied to Carlyle in a “Defense of Mechanical Philosophy” found it hard to see anything objectionable in the adaptation of means to ends. “What would the writer have us do?” Walker asks. “Pursue ends without regard to means?”10 Carlyle’s answer is implicit at best. His statement about the Age of Machinery quoted above continues this way: “Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance.”11 Elsewhere he says: “Everyth
ing has its cunningly devised implements, its pre-established apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.”12 The suggestion in such remarks is not that once having chosen ends we should be indifferent about means but that we do violence to things and events when we divide them into means and ends. The rule of instrumentality, in Langdon Winner’s expression, allows us to take possession of things and to overpower them.13 But in the process we extinguish the life of things and lose touch with them. Carlyle distinguishes from the mechanical approach to things, the dynamical which considers “the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all of which have a truly vital and infinite character. . . .”14
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