How we approach the question of inter-cultural communication depends largely on how we view science and technology, these great modern institutions that have conquered ever more cultural terrain in the last two centuries. If they are seen as rational universals, what is left of culture becomes merely a random collection of particular contents in the surviving non-technical, symbolic domains. In this case, communication between cultures would cross epistemological boundaries, and pose special problems, only in these domains. There would only be serious obstacles to inter-cultural communication as between modern societies and pre- or anti-modern societies that fall outside the scientific-technical consensus.

The dark side of this process of convergent globalization would be the loss of cultural specificity. As technology affects more and more of social life, less and less remains outside the consensus to constitute a cultural difference. Perhaps the Japanese and the Americans will disagree on the relative merits of sushi and hamburgers for generations to come, but if that is all that remains of cultural difference it has really ceased to matter very much.

In this talk I intend to challenge the widely held view that all modern societies are converging on an identical civilizational model. This position is shared by Heidegger and Habermas, two of the most influential philosophers of modernity. For both modernity is characterized by a unique form of technical action and thought which threatens non-technical values as it extends itself ever deeper into social life. I call this position "substantive theory of technology" because it holds that technology is not neutral but has a substantive value bias. The tools we use shape our way of life in modern societies where technique has become all pervasive. How we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human. Both thinkers hope that something--albeit a very different something--can be preserved from the homogenizing effects of the radical extension of technical systems, but neither gives us much reason to share their hope.

I could challenge this rather pessimistic view of modernity by simply denying that technical action has the broad significance attributed to it by Heidegger and Habermas, but I will not do so because on this point I believe they are right. I could also offer examples of culturally specific differences in the technical sphere, but these could easily be dismissed as due to cultural lag or temporary local circumstances. The problem is to show how such differences might be of fundamental significance and not merely minor accidents certain to be effaced by the further course of progress. I will therefore argue that cultural difference can appear in the structure of modern technology itself, distinguishing peoples not only symbolically but also technically.

If I am right, inter-cultural communication must have a technical as well as a symbolic dimension. And we should not be surprised if the communication problems we experience in symbolic domains appear increasingly in technical ones as well. Thus in exchange for the promise of a more diverse future we must accept the greater opacity of modern culture that results from my conclusion.

Let me begin now to present my argument with a brief reminder of Heidegger and Habermas's approach.

Dystopian Modernity

Heidegger

Heidegger claims that technology is relentlessly overtaking us. We are engaged, he argues, in the transformation of the entire world, ourselves included, into "standing reserves," raw materials mobilized in technical processes. The essence of this technology is the methodical planning of the future. Planning operates on a world tailored conceptually at the outset to the exercise of human power. An "objectless" world of functions replaces a world of "things" treated with respect for their own sake as the gathering places of our manifold engagements with "being."

This critique gains force from the actual perils with which modern technology threatens the world today. But my suspicions are aroused by Heidegger's tendentious contrast between the pious work of the Greek craftsman making a chalice and the destructive appropriation of the Rhine by a modern dam. The craftsman brings out the "truth" of his materials through the symbolically charged reworking of matter by form. The modern technologist obliterates the inner potential of his materials, "de-worlds" them, and "summons" nature to fit into his plan. Ultimately, it is not man, but pure instrumentality that holds sway in this "enframing" [ Ge-stell]; it is no merely human purpose, but a specific way in which being hides and reveals itself through human purpose.

No doubt Heidegger is right to claim that modern technology is immensely more destructive than any other. And it is true that technical means are not neutral, that their substantive content affects society independent of the goals they serve. Thus his basic claim that we are caught in the grip of our own techniques is all too believable. Increasingly, we lose sight of what is sacrificed in the mobilization of human beings and resources for goals that remain ultimately obscure. If there is no sense of the scandalous cost of modernization, this is because the transition from tradition to modernity is judged to be a progress by a standard of efficiency intrinsic to modernity and alien to tradition. The substantive theory of technology attempts to make us aware of this. The issue is not that machines are evil nor that they have taken over, but that in constantly choosing to use them over every other alternative, we make many other unwitting choices.

So far so good. But Heidegger situates his argument at such a high level of abstraction he literally cannot discriminate between penicillin and atom bombs, agricultural techniques and the Holocaust. All are merely different expressions of the identical enframing, which we are called to escape through the recovery of a deeper relation to being. Surely this lack of discrimination indicates problems in his approach

Habermas

While Heidegger proposes a quasi-historical account of modern technology, Habermas offers a theory of the transhistorical essence of technical action in general. As Thomas McCarthy writes, "Habermas's own view is that while the specific historical forms of science and technology depend on institutional arrangements that are variable, their basic logical structures are grounded in the very nature of purposive-rational action."At first Habermas argued that "work" and "interaction" each have their own logic. Work is "success oriented;" it is a form of "purposive-rational action" aimed at controlling the world. On these terms, technological development is a "generic project" consisting in the substitution of mechanical devices for human limbs and faculties. By contrast, interaction involves communication between subjects in the pursuit of common understanding.

In his later work, Habermas reformulated his approach in system-theoric terms. This "media" theory supports a more concrete critique of welfare capitalism. Habermas distinguishesbetween system, media regulated rational institutions, such as markets and administration, and lifeworld, the sphere of everyday communicative interactions. The central pathology of modern societies is the colonization of lifeworld by system. This involves the over-extension of success oriented action beyond its legitimate range and the consequent imposition of criteria of efficiency on the communicative sphere. Habermas follows Luhmann in calling this the "technicization of the lifeworld." But in fact technology as such drops from the discussion even though Habermas's analysis of system rationality continues to be shaped by the original model of technique as purposive rationality.

From this standpoint, Habermas criticizes Weber and by implication Heidegger as well for identifying the rationalization process exclusively with the extension of technical control. He argues for the possibility of a communicative rationalization that would enhance human freedom, but which has been partially blocked in the course of modern development. While this seems right, the indifference of the later Habermas to actual technical issues marks a significant regression. He seems content to tinker with the boundaries of the technical sphere while denying the all too obvious valuative bias of what goes on within that sphere.

Essence and Bias

The comparison between Heidegger and Habermas reveals several interesting complementarities, but also some common problems. Both emphasize the reification of the object of technical action, its degradation to a lower plane of being than the subject which acts on it. Heidegger emphasizes the reduction of the object to a decontextualized, fungible matter cut off from its own history. This reduction is value charged, or more precisely in Heideggerian terms, it brings "value" into being by cancelling the intrinsic potentialities of the object and delivering it over to alien ends. From the side of the subject, Habermas argues that the value implications of technical action appear where it interferes with human communication. For example, approaching others with strategic intent rather than as equal partners constitutes a value choice.

Both these dimensions of technique are of course significant. But after twenty years of increasingly critical history and sociology of technology, it is no longer possible to argue that by themselves they represent the "essence" of the technical phenomenon. From a contemporary point of view there is far more to be said about the nature of modern technology, but here these two thinkers let us down by failing to develop a properly historical conception of technology.

While Heidegger represents modern technology as a particular stage in a quasi-historical development, that development is contingent on a mysterious revealing of being rather than on human action. Furthermore, he seems to allow no room for a future evolution of modern technology which remains fixed in its eternal essence whatever happens next in human history. This essentializing tendency cancels the historical dimension of Heidegger's theory.

Habermas's notion of history is less idiosyncratic, but for him the culturally variable nature of technical action is not a question of rationality; he treats it as a minor sociological issue of the sort from which he routinely abstracts. Habermas's alternative thus offers an avowedly non-historical conception of technical rationality which effaces any fundamental difference between culturally distinct forms of technology. As a result the variability of technology, and with it technology itself, disappears as a theme from his work.

In Heidegger and Habermas, modernity is governed by a very abstract concept of the essence of technical action. I call this view "essentialist" because it interprets a historically specific phenomenon in terms of a transhistorical conceptual construction. Of course technical action systems and rationalities must have some core of common traits that enable us to distinguish them from other relations to reality. But these thinkers want to get too much--a whole social critique--out of the few abstract properties belonging to that core.

The essence of technique in the broadest sense is not simply those constant distinguishing features identified in Heidegger and Habermas. Technique includes those constant features in historically evolving combinations with variable ones. Those few determinations shared by all types of technical practice are not an essence prior to history, but are merely abstractions from the various historically concrete essences of technique at its different stages of development. In the remainder of this paper, I will attempt to offer a philosophical alternative that takes account of what we have learned about the history and sociology of technology in recent years.

Against Essentialism

Primary Instrumentalization

Heidegger and Habermas offer insight only into what I will call the "primary instrumentalization" of the technical object by which a function is separated from the continuum of everyday life. Primary instrumentalization characterizes technical relations in every society, although its emphasis, range of application and social significance varies greatly. It can be summarized as four reifying moments of technical practice:

1. Decontextualization

To reconstitute natural objects as technical objects, they must be "de-worlded," artificially separated from the context in which they are originally found so as to be integrated to a technical system. Once isolated they can be analyzed in terms of the utility of their various parts, and the technical schemas these contain can then be released for general application. For example, an invention such as the knife takes the sharpness of some natural thing, such as a rock, and releases it as a technical property from the role it plays in nature. Technology is constructed from such fragments of nature that, after being abstracted from all specific contexts, appear in a technically useful form.

2. Reductionism

Reductionism refers to the process in which the de-worlded things are simplified, stripped of technically useless qualities, and reduced to those aspects through which they can be enrolled in a technical network. I will call these latter "primary qualities," primary that is from the standpoint of the technical subject for whom they are a power base. These are the dimensions of the object which can be reorganized around an alien commanding interest, while "secondary qualities" are vestiges of untransformable stuff tying the object to its pretechnical history and its potential for self-development. To the extent that all of reality comes under the sign of technique, the real is progressively reduced to these primary qualities.

3. Autonomization

The subject of technical action isolates itself as much as possible from the effects of its action on its objects. This suggest a metaphoric application to society of Newton's third law: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." In mechanics, actor and object belong to the same system and so every effect is simultaneously a cause, every object simultaneously a subject. This is not a bad description of ordinary human relations. But technical action autonomizes the subject through dissipating or deferring feedback from the object of action to the actor. The subject is largely unaffected by the object on which it acts, thus forming an apparent exception to Newton's law. The autonomization of the subject has momentous social implications under capitalism, where subject (manager) and object (worker) are human beings.

4. Positioning

Francis Bacon wrote that "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." The technical subject does not modify the basic "law" of its objects, but rather uses that law to advantage. The law of gravity is present in the clock's pendulum, the properties of electricity in the design of the circuit, and so on. In dealing with complex systems that cannot be reduced to artifacts, such as workforces and markets, Baconian obedience means adopting a strategic location with respect to the object. In a sense all technique is navigation, falling in with the object's own tendencies to extract a desired outcome. By positioning itself strategically with respect to its objects, the technical subject turns their inherent properties to account.

Secondary Instrumentalization

This list of primary instrumentalizations does not exhaust the meaning of technique. Technique also has integrative potentialities that compensate for some of the reifying effects of the primary instrumentalization. Here technical systems turn back on themselves and their users as they are embedded in their wider social and natural context, reappropriating some of the dimensions of contextual relatedness and self-development from which abstraction was originally made in establishing the technical object relation.

On the basis of this concept of integration, I argue that technique is fundamentally social. Its "essence" must include what I call a "secondary instrumentalization" that works with dimensions of reality from which abstraction is made at the primary level. This level of technique includes the following four moments:

1. Systematization

Isolated, decontextualized technical objects must be combined with other technical objects and re-embedded in the natural environment in order to function as an actual device. Systematization is the process of making these combinations and connections. The underdetermined character of the final product of any technological development leaves room for social interests and values to intervene in the process of systematization. As decontextualized elements are combined, these interests and values orient choices and insure congruence between technology and society at the technical level itself. The process of systematization is central to designing the tightly coupled networks of modern technological societies but plays a lesser role in traditional societies where technologies may be more loosely related.

2. Mediation

In all societies, ethical and aesthetic mediations supply the simplified technical object with new secondary qualities that seamlessly reinsert it into its new social context. The ornamentation of artifacts and their investment with ethical meaning is integral to production in all traditional cultures. Only modern industrial societies distinguish production from aesthetics through indifference to the social insertion of their objects, the substitution of packaging for an inherent aesthetic elaboration, or aesthetic functionalism. From this results the artificial separation of technique and aesthetics characteristic of our societies. Ethical limits too are overthrown in the breakdown of religious and craft traditions. In any case, however marginalized, mediations remain an essential aspect of the technical process.

3. Vocation

The autonomization of the technical subject is overcome in the recognition of the human significance of vocation, the acquisition of craft. In vocation, the subject is no longer isolated from objects, but is transformed by its own technical relation to them. This relation exceeds passive contemplation or external manipulation and involves the worker as bodily subject and member of a community in the life of its objects. The idea of vocation or "way" is an essential dimension of even the most humble technical practices in some traditional cultures, such as the Japanese, but tends to be artificially reserved for professions such as medicine in most industrial societies.

4. Initiative

Finally, to positioning as the basis of strategic control of the work process and the consumer there corresponds the praxis of voluntary cooperation in the coordination of effort. In precapitalist societies, such cooperation was often regulated by tradition or paternal authority. Collegiality is an alternative to bureaucratic control in modern societies with widespread if imperfect applications in the organization of professionals such as teachers and doctors. Reformed and generalized, it has the potential for reducing alienation through substituting self-organization for control from above. In the sphere of consumption, informal coordination often appears as the users of products appropriate them for unintended purposes.

Reflexive Technology

Secondary instrumentalizations support the reintegration of object with context, primary with secondary qualities, subject with object, and leadership with group through a reflexive meta-technical practice that treats technical objects and the technical relationship itself as raw material for more complex forms of technical action.There is of course something paradoxical about this association of reflexivity with technology; in the framework Heidegger and Habermas share technical rationality is supposed to be blind to itself. On this account, one could still admit the existence of something like the secondary instrumentalizations described above, but they would be extrinsic social influences on technology rather than a dimension of its essence. Isn't this a more plausible approach than the one taken here?

Plausible it may be, but it also contradicts what we know of technology from a wide range of recent research. The social is far more deeply implicated in technology than the essentialist concept of extrinsic "influence" admits. That concept accounts (rather poorly) for only half a story which actually has two parts.

In the first place, primary and secondary instrumentalizations may be more or less differentiated depending on the stage of technical and social development. For example, in a premodern society there may be no very clear distinction between narrowly conceived technical ends and aesthetic mediations. The shape of a pot or the color of an arrow's feathers are not ornamentation in our sense, but belong integrally to the design of the artifact. In our society, on the contrary, these different aspects of technical work are not only clearly distinguished but often embodied in different institutions. Habermas has taken such differentiation to be the essence of modernity and the proof that the social and the technical are fundamentally separate, but this overlooks a second aspect of technical development.

In both premodern and modern societies secondary instrumentalizations often shape devices through cleverly conceived designs that also optimize efficiency. In such cases we can still make an analytic distinction between, for example, the aesthetic form and the technical function of a streamlined vehicle, but no real distinction exists. Here the social is not differentiated from the technical but merged with it.

In sum, a technological design may embody a social constraint or that constraint may operate through external regulation. In the first case technical and social relations are condensed in the design of the device. Here the distinction is purely analytic and corresponds to no specifically technical or social structures. In the second case the distinction is a real one: on the one side there is a device and on the other a law, regulation, or social demand which determines its employment. But in both cases, even in the case where no external regulation is apparent, society is implicated in technological design.

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CHART I

concretization <-------------------------------------------- primary instrumentalization secondary instrumentalization

decontextualization systematization

reduction mediation

autonomy vocation

positioning initiative

---------------------------------------------->

differentiation

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The fact that primary and secondary instrumentalizations are sometimes only analytically distinguishable while at other times they are institutionally differentiated has given rise to considerable confusion. The confusion is compounded by the fact that there is a constant transition from the second case to the first through the development of what the French philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon, called more "concrete" designs. (See Chart I.) Simondon's concept of concretization refers to the condensation of various functions in a single technical structure oriented toward efficiency. Technologies are adapted to their multiple milieux by concretizing advances: a car's metal skin must protect it from the weather while also reducing air drag to increase effective power; the base of a light bulb must seal it for operation within a certain range of temperatures and pressures while also fitting in standard sockets. All developed technologies exhibit more or less elegant condensations aimed at achieving compatibilities of this sort. Concretization is the discovery of synergisms between the various functions technologies serve and between technologies and their various environments. Here the functionalization of the object is reconciled with wider contextual considerations through a special type of technical development.

Where that context is social, I will refer to a specifically social form of concretization. Such social concretization is a special case of what Bruno Latour calls the "delegation" of a social rule to a device; it reorders the internal structure of the device to optimize its functioning even as it fulfills a social demand. Here a value is not merely assigned to a device as a function, but actually becomes technically productive in a positive sense. Once a social constraint is internalized in this way, there is a tendency to lose sight of it. Technical devices are then seen as pure of social influences, which are conceived as essentially external, as values, functions, ideologies, rules. The internalized social constraints concretized in more advanced designs are confounded with a supposedly pure technical rationality.

With these concepts in mind it is possible to give a better account of the bias of technology. This bias is not only a consequence of the structure of the primary instrumentalization as Heidegger and Habermas believe, but has also a complex social dimension. The social bias of technology must be studied both in analytic and in real terms. The analytic level reveals the realization of abstract technical principles in particular configurations in accordance with social constraints. Here technically underdetermined aspects of the device are resolved by reference to the social level. This is what I have called the "technical code." The real level of analysis concerns the relation between those configurations, i.e. actual devices, and external social constraints. This is the only form in which the essentialism recognizes social influences on technology.

Technology as World

Essentialist theories of technology define the technical in terms of the primary instrumentalization alone. At that level it seems possible to abstract technology from society, while the secondary instrumentalizations are transparently social, with the exception of some types of systematization. They lie at the intersection of technique and the other action systems with which it is inextricably linked insofar as it is a social enterprise. As a result, socially specific configurations of the secondary instrumentalizations are as variable as the contexts to which technique is integrated, subject to transformations corresponding to distinct eras in the history of technical systems and technical rationalities. For example, a dimension of technology such as vocation may be central to technical life in one era and eliminated as much as possible through deskilling in another.

From this anti-essentialist standpoint, our form of modern society cannot be the untranscendable horizon of technical possibilities, defining for modernity in general. But neither can we conceive of a general deglobalization of modern societies, a splitting up of modernity into incommunicable varieties. The shared technical heritage will always provide what might be called a "practical universality" that has imposed itself on a planetary scale. No modern society can forego basic technical discoveries such as antibiotics, plastics or electricity, and none can withdraw from worldwide communication networks. The cost of an entirely independent path of development is just too high. But both in the advanced and the developing countries, significant innovations are possible with respect to what has been the main line of progress up to now.

The terrain of practical universality is accessible from many standpoints for many purposes. It is not a destiny, but the place on which destinies can be worked out. It first emerged in the capitalist West around a particular panoply of technologies and rational systems. These intentionally deemphasized most secondary instrumentalizations with consequences we now experience as cultural homogenization, social anomie and environmental crisis. Democratic interventions appear likely to play an increasingly significant role in modifying that inheritance, and as industry spreads in the non-Western world, the different requirements of the various cultures that have adopted modern technology may provide contexts within which to reopen lost roads to progress or to discover new ones in the search for locally adapted alternatives.

This conclusion invites us to consider the possibility of an alternative form of technical rationality that would integrate the secondary instrumentalizations more fully into technical practice through new concretizations. On this basis, I have argued elsewhere for a reform of modern technology to incorporate workers' skills and environmental limits into its very structure. Similar arguments could be made with respect to the possibility of culturally specific technological configurations. It is a question worth considering whether or not something like this has not begun in Japan, largely unnoticed because of the subordinate position of that country in the world cultural system.

The scope and significance of such change is potentially enormous. Technical choices establish the horizons of daily life. These choices define a "world" within which the specific alternatives we think of as purposes, goals, uses, emerge. They also define the subject who chooses among the alternatives: we make ourselves in making the world through technology. Thus fundamental technological change is self-referential. At issue is becoming, not having. The goal is to define a way of life, an ideal of abundance, and a human type, not just to obtain more goods in the prevailing socio-economic model.

Technological creativity is a form of imaginative play with alternate worlds and ways of being. On this basis a democratic and multi-cultural politics of technology is possible; it would pursue elegant designs that reconcile several worlds in each device and system. To the extent that this approach is successful, it prepares a very different future from the one projected by Heidegger and Habermas. In that future, technology is not a fate one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end.

References

Feenberg, Andrew (1991). Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford.

--(1995a) Gijutsu: Kuriteikaru Seorii (Critical Theory of Technology). M. Fujimoto, trans. Tokyo: Hosei University Press.

--(1995b). Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

--(1996). Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology, in Inquiry, 39, 1996.

Feenberg, Andrew, and Hannay, Alastair, eds. (1995). Technology and the Politics of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Habermas, Jurgen (1970). Technology and Science as Ideology, in Toward a Rational Society, J. Shapiro, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jurgen (1984, 1987). The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, T. McCarthy, trans. Boston: Beacon.

Heidegger, Martin (1971). The Thing, in A. Hofstadter, trans., Poetry, Language, and Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

Heidegger, Martin (1977). The Question Concerning Technology, W. Lovitt, trans. New York: Harper and Row.

Latour, Bruno (1992). Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, in Bijker, W. and Law, J., eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

McCarthy, Thomas (1981). The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Simondon, Gilbert (1958). Du Mode d'Existence des Objets Techniques. Paris: Aubier.

Keywords: TechnologicalReform, Technology, Habermas, Heidegger

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