Technological Determinism and Postmodern Theory

Historically, networks have been a fundamental human trait, civilization itself being the product of our need to make connections. We have been networked since the invention of language, if not before. Still, while we could understand all human history or, for that matter, modernity from the standpoint of the network-in terms of rapid forms of ocean and surface travel coupled with the telephone and the telegraph-something else is happening now. The network, Castells observes, is now the dominant means of social organization, the morphology of society. ^[1] Corporations, universities, even governments, not only embrace the network, they adopt it as an organizational model.

Where Castells's observations are primarily socioeconomic, with a side interest in culture, my ambition is to look at culture, which played a particular, crucial role in postmodernity. Postmodernism, for Jameson, is the cultural logic of late capitalism: capital colonized art as cultural technologies spread in industry. Postmodern artists reacted by abandoning the modernist project of autonomy and instead set out to blur the boundaries between high and low.[2] Under network culture, however, any distinction between high and low is leveled utterly. Contemporary art dismisses the populist projection of the audience's desires into art for the incorporation of the audience's desires into art and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. ^[3] Today whether a cultural artifact is cool or not matters more than its status in high and low (indeed, today unless the object is first cool, styling it as high ensures that it will be understood as kitsch). ^[4]

Beyond this kind of direct transaction between culture and the socioeconomic, my theoretical project is indebted to the Regulation School's understanding of how culture acts to regulate individuals and groups, allowing them to come together in a manner of behavior that keeps the regime of accumulation, or economic system going. Religion, class relations, family life, and habits of consumption all play a role in affecting the economic behavior of individuals. Employing the concept of culture as a form of regulation allows us to understand that subjectivity and desire have a crucial impact on the economic realm even if they are not directly determined by it.[5] In other words-and this can't be stressed enough-if technology and economy are key factors in shaping culture, they are shaped by culture as well.

Economic determinism is one danger for a project like this, but in stating that the network is the cultural dominant of our age, I can't avoid conjuring up the specter of technological determinism, the reduction of history to a product of the tools available to a society. But the error of technological determinism is not just that it reduces progress to technological developments, it's that it extracts technology from society. Technology is a social product, constituted by-and constituting-society: the acceptance and use of a given tool is dependent on a social milieu and in turn technological tools are necessary to produce society. As an explanatory model, neither social nor technological determinism is sufficient. And yet, the real lesson here is an epistemological one; network culture often understands itself as technologically determined. We are obsessed with technology as perhaps never before and thus more prone to think of it as a historical cause.

Modernism has a more mixed relationship with regard to technology and change. In Marshall Berman's summation: "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are…" [6] From the celebration of the technological destruction of tradition by the Futurists to the scientific understanding of vision at the Bauhaus to the machine aesthetic and technologism of Le Corbusier in the 1920s, many modernists embrace social, political, and technological change. Others, such as Paul Klee, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, and even the late Le Corbusier set out against the threat of unrestrained progress, declaring what Berman describes as a "decisive 'No!'" to aspects of modern life.

Postmodernism is more resolutely post-technological, dissatisfied with technology and rejecting the Utopian promises of modernization. With nuclear weapons a constant threat and a reminder of the dangers of science, the energy crisis, the end of the Apollo missions to the moon, the bankruptcy of modernist urbanism, the collapse of the modernist project in art, all lend postmodernism the sense of lateness, the mood of an era of limits. Under postmodernism, technology is regarded with wary pessimism. As late as the early 1990s, historian of science Leo Marx writes"'Technological pessimism' may be a novel term, but most of us seem to understand what it means. It surely refers to that sense of disappointment, anxiety, even menace, that the idea of 'technology' arouses in many people these days."[7] Marx observes that the Enlightenment ideal of progress toward a just society shifted toward first to the idea that technology was a key means to help achieve that aim, then to the belief that technology was itself the basis of societal progress. Disillusioned by a series of technological disasters (oil spills, environmental pollution, an out-of-control arms race, and so on) and the failure of a better society to come about due to technological advance, people became much more gloomy about its prospects. Generally seeing postmodernist skepticism as healthy, a cause for optimism, Marx also raises a flag of caution: "What many postmodern theorists often propose in rejecting the old illusion of historical progress is a redescription of social reality that proves to be even more technocratic than the distorted Enlightenment ideology they reject." That new technocratic narrative is none other than the network. [8] Marx observes that for two of the most important theorists of postmodernism, Lyotard and Jameson, the new global telecommunications networks are analogous to late capitalism, their flows of data thoroughly permeating society. This concerns Marx, since he feels that this too is a technologically determinist position even as the fatalism of the postmodernists strikes him as disconcerting. [9]

If theories of the network are latent in postmodernism, they are still unformed. The network's future role is unclear. Even in the early 1990s when Marx is writing, networks and media had hardly changed in a half-century. Television had acquired color, cable, and videotapes, but the mass media of the 1980s was structurally little different than the mass media of the 1950s, only marginally more differentiated. Television still dominated a media system in which signals flowed top-down from a relatively small number of producers to a vast body of consumers. For postmodern theorists, media is all but equivalent to the television, the networked computer being either an abstract idea derived from secondhand knowledge about mainframe technology or, alternatively, an enhanced television (for passive reception) more than anything else.

The network, then, is the limit of the postmodern. Sensing the network's all-pervasive nature, the postmodern theorists are unable to dwell fully within it or see past its horizon and instead are forced to describe it only as an analog for capital, a vague conflux of mass media.