Carlyle’s essay is important because it conveys a sense of the new technological approach to reality; Carlyle is relentless in showing its all-pervasive character:
We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our time; in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favors and its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its politics, arts, religion, morals; in the whole sources, and throughout the whole currents, of its spiritual, no less than its material activity.15
The new approach is already so well entrenched, however, that it resists Carlyle’s attempts at an incisive critique. Where Carlyle describes its pattern concretely, Walker, the defender of mechanism, finds unintended praise.16 Where Carlyle attacks machinery, Walker is mildly puzzled and able to dismiss the attacks as mysticism.
More recently, arguments have been developed that might give Carlyle’s intuitions sharper contours. They too depart from the means-ends distinction and begin with the general claim that our technological means have somehow outrun our ends.17 Laurence Tribe approaches this phenomenon through a critique of policy analysis, the predominant mode of appraising technological problems.18 He argues that such appraisals reduce in fact, if not necessarily, the fullness of things to relatively few quantitative criteria.19 Winner puts the point more strongly. The available techniques of measurement, he says, often determine what gets to be measured.20 This is a case of what he calls “reverse adaptation—the adjustment of human ends to match the character of the available means.”21 But in this form, Tribe’s first point seems to conflict with his second, which says that policy analysis fixes our attention on end states thus suppressing the process of implementation through which we define ourselves as much as through the choice of end results.22
Although policy analysis fixes its gaze on final values, it has no way to judge or justify them. They enter the process of assessment as brute givens. What is analyzed and evaluated are various strategies of implementation. But even in the area of its professed and admitted competence, in the attention to means, policy analysis is haunted by its inability to comprehend ends. Tribe points out that certain technologies such as genetic engineering and electronic stimulation of the brain, “although pursued largely as means, have the effect of significantly altering the ends,—and indeed the basic character—of the individuals and the communities that choose them.”23 In response to these predicaments, Tribe calls for “constitutive rationality,” i.e., a kind of principled discourse through which we can constitute our values rationally and publicly.24 Tribe stresses the tentative character of this proposal.25 But it can be furthered only, it seems to me, if we first analyze more incisively the character of technological instrumentality to which constitutive rationality is to respond.
To begin with that task, we must recognize that the reduction of the fullness of phenomena in technological measurement and assessment is no more alarming than the common attenuation of the depth of things to commodious surfaces, and the former cannot be challenged without a challenge to the latter. One who has accepted television as a definition of entertainment will likely agree that a rise in income constitutes an improvement of life. Social scientists who are proponents of quantitative analysis will concede that it is impossible to measure everything. But as long as the reductive tendency that is intrinsic to the technological procurement of commodities remains unchallenged and to the extent that sociologists know themselves to be in procedural and substantive agreement with the technological paradigm, they will be undisturbed.
That paradigm also sanctions commodities and their consumption as ends. So sanctioned they are beyond dispute. There may be disagreement about what commodity should get preference. But such disputes are resolvable within the framework of technology. As the work of the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies shows, these matters are not without principle and significance. But their investigation will not reach “the sources of the vague unease” of which Tribe speaks.26 He says correctly that our discontent is independent of how certain exotic technologies are used. The mere fact that they are used makes us uneasy. But we should not, with Tribe, restrict this profound if hidden tranformative significance “to the overall movement of technology, and to certain critical technologies, rather than to most day-to-day incremental changes—which may be quite properly regarded as essentially instrumental.”27 It is the pervasive transformation of things into devices that is changing our commerce with reality from engagement to the disengagement of consumption and labor. Only if we envision and challenge this inclusive pattern can we, in agreement with Tribe’s demand, discern how we redefine ourselves in the process of implementing the values of technology. The character of technological implementation can be ignored by policy analysis as long as the device paradigm determines its general outline and provided there is, in accordance with the paradigm, an acceptance of the way in which we reshape our dealings with reality and so ourselves. Concentration can then be restricted to the determination of the course of action that will best render commodities available.
Tribe’s writings are evidence that the common agreement on the paradigm of technology is being infected with uneasiness. But doubts about the paradigm will always be deflected and perhaps coopted if they are directed toward these ends or those means of technology. The entire and distinctive means-ends structure of technology must be grasped and exposed. Winner’s notion of reverse adaptation implies that in technology means sometimes determine ends and thus people become enslaved by their servant. But what is gathered under the heading of reverse adaptation belongs into three different categories. Certain such imbalances are due to common human traits such as egotism, laziness, and apprehension which, when strongly exemplified by bureaucrats in large organizations, seem to put the cart before the horse. But the problems that so arise are intelligible and in principle manageable within the framework of technology. Disclosure of information, sunset laws, efficiency considerations—all are tools of technology to diagnose and remedy ills of technology. A second and more significant imbalance of means and ends stems from the diffidence about the significance of the ends of technology, i.e., commodities and consumption. There is a deep-seated suspicion, as suggested in Chapter 10, that a life of consumption is not an end worthy of human beings. But the reign of the technological paradigm as a whole is in such instances so powerful that a reorientation is possible only within it. Fulfillment is then sought and often found not in leisure and consumption but in labor and the procurement of commodities. The disappointment with the ends yields to a fascination with the means. Finally and most profoundly there is a sense of impoverishment and impotence in technology which expresses itself as the experience of an insensitivity and impersonality of the technological machinery to the desire for self-determination.28 The instruments have arrogated the definitions of ends. Winner puts it this way:
Abstract general ends—health, safety, comfort, nutrition, shelter, mobility, happiness, and so forth—become highly instrument-specific. The desire to move about becomes the desire to possess an automobile; the need to communicate becomes the necessity of having telephone service; the need to eat becomes a need for a refrigerator, stove, and convenient supermarket.29
But as Walker reminded Carlyle, ends are always tied to means. The sense of powerlessness that Winner discusses comes into focus only when more attention is paid to the peculiarity of the technological tie between means and ends. In technology, the ends emasculate humans more subtly and consequentially than the means. Commodities allow no engagement and atrophy the fullness of our capacities. This they would do even if they could be entirely severed from their supporting machinery. To be sure, the machinery of devices resists engagement too, not just in consumption, when it is inaccessible, but also in labor, as we will see in more detail later. In paraphrasing Ellul, Winner remarks:
The original ends have atrophied; society has accepted the power of technique in all areas of life; social decisions are now based upon the validity of i
nstrumental modes of evaluation; the ends are restricted to suit the requirements of techniques of performance and of measurement.30
But what are the original ends? If they are understood as vaguely as the blessings of which the promise of technology speaks, then the rise of technological instrumentality is their unobjectionable if ironical companion. If the original ends are the engaging forces that used to center and sustain life in a pretechnological setting, their atrophy was destined with the rise of the device paradigm no matter how pliant that device might ever have seemed. Thus to do justice to the experience of debility in the face of technology, its entire means-ends context must be addressed.
This same point holds when Winner raises the question of responsibility relative to technological systems. “One finds that it is sometimes very difficult,” he says, “to locate praise or blame for events that occur within massive aggregates of men and machinery.”31 Again there are cases of traditional modesty or cowardice that appear in a new technological guise. But one must recognize that responsibility within technology is narrowly circumscribed, and the call for radical responsibility is misplaced if the recipient of the call is expected to exercise responsibility individually and within the system. We think of executives of large firms and of nationally prominent politicians as powerful. But their range of options is very constrained. Their power is contingent on their adherence to the technological paradigm. They can exercise power only in maintaining and advancing the availability of commodities. If one were to become dissatisfied with this paradigm and decided to steer matters in a different direction, one could call a press conference, speak one’s mind, and that would be the end of one’s power and the last we will hear of that person. It is not the case that people in technology hide in the maze of means and refuse responsibility for the ends. As long as technology as a whole is generally sanctioned, there is no need or possibility to adopt responsibility for this or that part of technology. People do accept, as a rule, responsibility for technology as a whole. What form this assumption of responsibility takes is a further concern, and so is the question of what openings there are today for taking responsibility in a radical and critical way. It must also be said that, although the question of responsibility can be decisively raised only about and not within technology, there are important matters of responsibility within technology which pertain, e.g., to the safety of products or the efficiency and honesty of service. But being located within the paradigm, these problems are fairly clear and tractable.
Machinery is a means, of course, and it is a mere means. But the import of that mereness is often overlooked both by the critics and the defenders of technology. Since machinery is merely a means, so the proponent of technology reasons, it will serve whatever ends and not constrain our choice of ends. If there is a problem of technology, it is remedied by considerations that concentrate on the clarification and selection of our ends. But as argued in Chapter 9, this view overlooks the fact that the rise of mere means is a revolutionary event and transforms from the ground up what now can count as an end. The critics of technology, as we have seen, sense that the very means-ends distinction in technology is problematic. But this crucial intuition is often misexpressed and confused when it is held that the solution of the problem consists in reducing the machinery to its supposedly proper sphere of being a mere means. This move, if made consistently, misleads the initial discontent and insight. Machinery as a mere means is paradigmatically embodied in the technological device, and a device typically procures commodities and calls forth the life of consumption and disengagement which troubles the more radical critics of technology. The semblance of the innocence of means in technology has a corollary in the equally misleading semblance as though there could be independent or guiding ends or final values for technology. As already suggested, the technological paradigm gives a radically new meaning to goals, values, or ends. If this is overlooked, an examination of technology by way of “raising the value question” will almost always be ensnared within the framework of technology and fail to be radical. This problem will be worked out in Chapter 13.
There is a view of technology, however, which seems to be a radical alternative to the critical and affirmative schools sketched just now and to the paradigmatic characterization as well. It presents machinery as an end as well as a means. Though Walker in the main defends machinery as a means, he also alludes to it as an embodiment of harmony, regularity, and beauty, and in this sense the universe itself is in essence machinery.32 Quite generally in the middle of the nineteenth century, the machine became a symbol of a new age.33 But the general praise was as little focused as Carlyle’s criticism. In the first half of this century, however, the machine was characterized as the embodiment of a new moral and aesthetic order whose steward was the engineer.34 Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris) set off the new aesthetics against the old.
The Engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression.
The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony.35
Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work. Our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish.36
Le Corbusier at length discusses ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles as paradigms of this new order. It seems plausible to see in the International Style of which Le Corbusier was a founding father, in its rigor, purity, and resourcefulness, a consistent reflection of the engineer’s order. But there are also indications in Le Corbusier’s theoretical work of a flaw in this order. By and large, Le Corbusier does not downgrade architecture in principle. Engineering is more properly a challenge to architecture than a final goal. Moreover, when today we look at Le Corbusier’s exemplars of the new order in the relentless and iconoclastic spirit that Le Corbusier himself promotes, we recognize these ancient ships, cars, and planes as awkward, inconsistent, poorly thought out, naive, and touching at best. They are already antiques as we say, some not only in construction and execution but in their very conception. The order of engineering constantly surpasses and degrades its creation.
If one is inclined to grant the creations of the International Style an adequacy and beauty that has weathered the decades, this eminence is not due to engineering ingenuity. One may indeed claim that the International Style has not only failed to advance or enrich the engineering order but has thoroughly misunderstood it. Buckminster Fuller has so argued and said:
The “International Style” . . . demonstrated fashion-inoculation without necessity of knowledge of the scientific fundamentals of structural mechanics and chemistry.
The International Style “simplification” then was but superficial. It peeled off yesterday’s exterior embellishment and put on instead formalised novelties of quasi-simplicity, permitted by the same hidden structural elements of modern alloys that had permitted the discarded Beaux-Arts garmentation. It was still a European garmentation. The new International Stylist hung “stark motif walls” of vast super-meticulous brick assemblage, which had no tensile cohesiveness within its own bonds, but was, in fact, locked within hidden steel frames supported by steel without visible means of support. In many such illusory ways did the “International Style” gain dramatic sensory impingment on society as does a trickman gain the attention of children.37
In response, Fuller designed his Dymaxion houses, one of which in 1929 was conceived as “of light metals and plastics, planned radially around a core of mechanical services.”38
The house is suspended from a central mast, using the superior tensile strength of steel; it is hexagonal, that is, its members are triangulated because of the stability of this form. . . .
It can be assembled from its parts in twenty-four hours, as well as be carried through the air en bloc. It is designed for a specific long
evity and it is to be then turned in for an improved model. Thus it involves the minimum of commitment to site, fixity, and tradition.39
Again one may find honesty, rigor, beauty, and resourcefulness exemplified in this design. A model is in fact on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has become a museum piece in more senses than one. It now merely marks a course of which a still later stage is represented by Reyner Banham’s and Francois Dallegret’s Un-house (1965). It is “the ultimate in throwaway living where all the products including clothing are dispensed with and the artifacts—such as they are—come through the electric media under an inflatable dome. . . . the standard of living package plus inflatable dome push mobility and transience towards their extreme limit.”40
What has happened to the engineer’s order? The engineer reduces a problem to its essential functions and realizes the latter in the most efficient way possible. Such isolating of functions seems to be a purifying, liberating, and rational affair. It eliminates the ballast of tradition, site, commitment, and fixity. But ends cannot be kept firm when means are relativized, nor can problems remain articulate when their context is erased. Ends and problems so treated are attenuated to commodities until they almost disappear and there is nearly nothing.
A final challenge to the clarifying force of the device paradigm comes from reflections of David P. Billington. We can connect them with the preceding issues by paying attention to the fact that the instability of the machine and hence its inability to serve as an end and focus of orientation for technology becomes so dramatically apparent in architecture when we look at utopian proposals where the spirit of technology can take its course without regard to economic and political circumstances. One might say however that the merely utopian character of the architectural examples is not an accident and that it is a fundamental mistake to think of a house as “a machine for living.”41 Billington urges a distinction between structures and machines. He says:
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