Dr Nesta Devine, University of Waikato,
Hamilton
Presented to the University of
Sydney/University of Waikato Research symposium, December 2002
(See abstract)
Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and
the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.
(Heidegger, The Age of the W orld Picture, QCT, p 116)
This
question was triggered for me by a Department meeting we had a year or two back in which
the proponents of ICT were enthusiastically, even evangelistically, expounding their
cause. The claimed that 1. Teaching by ICT was no different from what lecturers normally
did, and 2. ICT would bring education to people in distant bays and islands who normally
had no access to tertiary education. I could not help but notice both the contradiction in
these claims, and also, the analogy with nineteenth century imperialism - the absolute
conviction in the rightness of spreading the Word, together with the confidence that the
barbarians/ heathens of the bays and islands needed the Word. Rangi Walker prefers, to the
terms imperialism or colonialism a concept of the expanding grip of metropolitanism, and
it seems that this is exactly what we are talking about here.
Yet,
even as I voiced resistance to this evangelism I was struck by a contrary objection to my
position: to deny education via ICT to the inhabitants of the East Coast or the Pacific
Islands is to indulge in some kind of romantic fascism: they have as much right to
refashion themselves in the model of consumer or educated man as much as anyone else. To
force upon them a kind of Historical Edifice categorisation is to deprive these peoples of
agency. So, driven by these contradictions I reread Heidegger’s The Question
Concerning Technology. This is the
primary work of philosophy on technology.
This
paper is not really perhaps in line with the kind of Hegelian notion of perpetual advance
signalled by the title of this research symposium: rather it is about examining the
assumptions of our work in relation to this question of advancement. We assume, and it is deeply embedded
in Western philosophy, that we are going somewhere, and that where we are going we will
get to faster through work and research. In this paper I have written called I have tried
to call this assumption into question by thinking about Heidegger’s paper on
technology. – The Question Concerning
Technology. There is a general assumption that technology is the harbinger of advancement, and
moreover, that it is politically neutral. Heidegger
wrote The Question Concerning Technology in the
shadow of the A-bomb as it were, and he calls attention to the danger inherent in technology. At the same time he
romanticizes forms of technology like bridges and roads which are products of the past.
This produces a contradiction in his work which I have tried to examine.
At
the same time, because technology is generally thought to be scientific, not political,
there has been an endeavour on the part of some to reconceptualise political questions as
technical questions which can be solved by working out objective answers. My position is
that this is nothing more than an attempt to make certain political standpoints invisible
– and pervasive – by concealing them as ‘science’ or technology.
What
has this got to do with education? We are in a period when the pressure on us to use
technology is intense: we are even under pressure to believe that the salvation of the
country lies in the preparedness of educators both to use and to teach the use of
technology. I think it behoves us to use caution; in our enthusiasm we ignore some of the dangers inherent in this enthusiasm, especially for
peoples whose language and cultures are already under threat from the aggressive
imperialism of the English language. Technology, I argue, cannot be divorced from power.
We must recognise our own position in the exercise of this power.
Heidegger
says, that when we ask the question concerning technology we invite two anwers:
‘Technology is a means to an
end…Technology is a human activity’ (QCT p. 4).
In
this paper I argue that these answers have a complex relation to each other. The idea that
technology can be merely ‘a means to an end’ is to make the claim that
technology can be created in such a way that it is without history, without politics,
without ethical implications, whereas technology as ‘a human activity’ is
assumed to happen in a context which is political, social, ethically laden. In privileging
the first answer, we try to avoid the implications of the second. And, overwhelmingly the
notions of technology circulating through politics and education have been of this first
kind, a move which has the double advantage of providing an apparently politics-free
answer to certain questions of funding, content, pedagogy, access, privilege, and at the
same time answering political demands which have become embarrassing as to the relation
between education and the economy, between the rhetoric of access and the reality of
underemployment, between the expectations of social and economic inclusion and the
experience of exclusion. The Knowledge Economy (Ernst
and Young, 1999) for instance claims that ICT (Information and communication technologies)
‘releases people’s creative potential and knowledge’. The promise of
access, inclusion, opportunity through technological means satisfies demands which are
political in the broad sense of the pressure on politicians to provide for the well being
of citizens, political in the narrower sense of the electoral need to provide for the
well-being of tax payers (by keeping down the public tax-funded costs of education), and
economic in terms of the pressure on politicians to provide for the continued supply of
appropriately educated labour for business.
In addition to all these potent reasons for
continuing to think of education technology as apolitical there is a further reason,
located in the neo-liberal notions of individualism and rationality. Given the assumption
that rational individuals seek their own self interest, the obligation of government is
limited to the provision of an environment in which, technically, it is possible for
individuals to do this. If education can be produced as a cheap instrument by which
inclusion can be offered to all, then further
failure to achieve inclusion can be constructed as failure of the failed to engage this opportunity. The
precise nature of or reason for this failure is politically
beside the point, although it may provide endless material for educational speculation and research. There is
therefore a considerable amount to be gained, politically, by insisting on the
non-political, the instrumental nature of educational technology.
To
look at education and technology thus is, in Heidegger’s words, to look into the
danger, and see the potential growth of the saving power (p.33), but to glimpse the
possibilities of a technology which is relocated in ‘human activity’ is not in
itself to overcome the dangers. Rather it is to start on a question of why technology has
come to be seen as politically neutral, and to ask what unneutral positions are thereby
concealed.
To
do this, one can start with Foucault, (Two Lectures), who examines von Clausewitz’
aphorism that ‘war is diplomacy by other means’. Foucault argues that the
aphorism can usefully be reversed: diplomacy,
the civil relations between states, is war by
other means, since it is always supported by the knowledge of both parties that one has
the dominant position, or the means to defeat the other and therefore, in diplomatic
engagement, that knowledge will always cast one in a position of greater power than the
other. Foucault argues further, that civil relations within states are similarly
constructed: Laws represent the victory of one group of people over another, and are meant
to sustain the relative advantage of those who have ‘power’. Laws are sustained,
legitimated violence (Foucault, Two Lectures, P/K p 90). The ‘pax Romana’, like
the later ‘pax Britannica’ was achieved only by subordinating the values,
traditions and legal systems of defeated peoples to those of the conquerors. That the
conquered came to like them and insist on the ‘universal’ or ‘logical’
nature of the principles of Roman law does not alter the case.
I
wish to argue that, in exactly the same way, technological constructs are sustained,
legitimated violence. As in the case of law, the violence is subsumed in custom and
practices: it is naturalized, accepted, part of day to day life, taken for granted,
regarded as the essential environment in which normal relations exist, essential to the
continued practice of good order, or in the case of technology, essential to the continued
existence of civilized life, or essential to the continued health of ‘the
economy’.
Herbert
Marcuse makes a very similar point when he says that, initially, society has a choice
between
historical alternatives which are determined by the inherited level of the
material and intellectual culture. The choice itself results from the play of the dominant
interests. It anticipates specific modes of
transforming and utilizing man and nature and rejects other mode. …. But once the
project has become operative …. It tends to become exclusive and to determine the
development of the society as a whole. (Marcuse p.xvi)
Moreover,
Marcuse points out that as time goes on, the element of political decision-making inherent
in the choice of alternatives is forgotten:
In the
medium of technology, culture, politics and the economy merge into an omnipresent system
which swallows up or repulses all alternative… Technological rationality has become
political rationality. (Marcuse p.xvi)
Let
me use two examples to illustrate the point. The first comes from the history of this
district, the second from Heidegger’s own work.
Before
the New Zealand civil war of the 1860s Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipi, the statesman-chief of
Ngati Haua of the Hauraki Plains and Waikato region wrote to Governor George Grey and
pointed out to him the inconsistencies of his rhetoric with his actions. Grey’s
rhetoric was about securing peace with the Maori tribes south of Auckland, and his actions
included amassing large numbers of troops, and building a great road which, Tamihana said
‘pointed like a spear at the heart of Waikato’. Tamihana was right: Grey’s
intentions were military and he successfully engineered the conquest of Waikato. The road
remains, and still fulfils its function: insurrection in Waikato is unthinkable, despite
150 years of resentment of defeat and the economic and political submersion which it
entailed. But now it is not seen as a military weapon but as a piece of economic
infrastructure. Maori and Pakeha alike use the road for communication and transport. The
power relations which the road was instrumental in achieving have become if not totally
accepted, matters of civil not military debate, and the existence of the road is no longer
in question – indeed it is not even visible in political terms, except insofar as
questions might be asked about its safety, its maintenance, or its development.
In the Question
concerning technology Heidegger’s anxiety about the Atomic Bomb is pervasive. Yet
he describes in different, mellow, terms the existence of a bridge, ‘the old wooden
bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years’ (QCT. P.16). It is hard to
find any skepticism or anxiety at all about this bridge: here, evidently, we have an
example of technology which does not invoke the question of danger. This is consonant with
Heidegger’s tendency to romanticize the past – the ‘peasant does not
challenge the soil of the field’ (p.15) for instance, despite clear evidence from
Africa, Ireland, the Dustbowl of America and other places that traditional forms of
agriculture can create deserts and wastes which rival the effects of modern technology.
But Heidegger wants to position modern technology as something distinctly new and
different from older forms of technology (‘handwork’). In this I think he is
mistaken. The giganticism which he associates with America (AWP, p.153) may be new (or it
may be a new form of Alexander’s global self-delusions), but technology is not naïve
or innocent just because it is in the past: rather it is the case that we are now
accustomed to the technology of the past: it creates our present, we cannot think our
present or our past in other ways, and so it becomes innocent, the alternatives being
suppressed and unable to speak for themselves.
If
we apply the same kind of historical imagination to this romantic bridge of
Heidegger’s as we have to Grey’s road, perhaps it will become a different kind
of bridge. There were undoubtedly people living on the edge of the water who made at least
an occasional contribution to their living by ferrying people across the water, or warning
when the ford was impassable. There may have been people on one side of the river whose
market was destroyed by their customer’s access to cheaper or better or simply
different produce on the other side of the river. The minor lordling may have lost
considerable power over his side of the bridge. The motive for building the bridge
undoubtedly was a profit of some kind, whether financial or military, and almost
indubitably implied a loss for someone else.
And
yet, not to make such changes is in itself also a political decision and is just as likely
to embed an existing set of political relations. There is no neutral territory here: the
concealment of a possible technology, like the suppression of knowledge is also an act
which has political and ethical implications. If the bridge is not built, perhaps the
people on one side or the other starve, perhaps an oppressive landowner continues to exert
feudal demands while on the other side of the bridge peasants sell their labour. So the
story becomes one of change in general, or at least of deliberate change. Is change
necessarily bad, or necessarily good, or is this not the right question to ask?
These
stories illustrate the nature of the suppressed violence in successful technology- or in
the successful repression of technology. The stocking which does not ladder, the car which
runs on water – these may be urban myths, but they encapsulate an important
understanding, that successful technology is related to the potential profits of the
developer and marketer. The question which
applies to both implementation and suppression is, whose interest is suppressed? Whose
assumptions are rendered concrete in technology? If a new law is under consideration it is
usual for a debate, often heated, to be held on these questions. Even for some forms of
technology – a new motorway, nuclear power, and for some of the issues arising from
technology – the disposal of toxic waste for instance, there has been debate. But
there does not seem to be any such debate over the introduction of educational
technologies. It is as if the answers to any possible questions are already there:
education technology makes education cheaper, more accessible, physically and socially
– these are Good Things and the questions about ‘in whose interests’,
‘at whose expense’, in order to institutionalize what forms of power, or
power/knowledge are not being asked.
Technology
after all does not come from nowhere: it is a tangible answer to a problem, but it is at
the level of the conception of the problem that the political intervenes (Peters and
Marshall, 1993): the problem as Grey saw it, was the intractable nature of the Kingitanga
movement, the answer lay in the technology of war. I hypothesise that the problem to the
German princeling or mayor who instigated the bridge was lack of control over the people
on the other side of the river, or perhaps lack of access to their resources. The
assumptions concerning self-interest, the relative costs of labour in the production of
goods, the need to dominate materially or militarily lie behind most Western technology.
Social consequences are often unforeseen and unplanned: teenage texting, cybersex, the
development of career possibilities for women as typists are not the motivating problems
which caused the development of the mobile phone, the Internet or the typewriter.
I
do not argue that technology has, by definition to be concerned with domination or profit
(although it is difficult to imagine technology now coming to fruition without some sort
of healthy profit in mind for the investors and producers).
It seems to me to be at least theoretically possible that technology could
be the answer to problems which are located in different questions: the Samoan umu which
encourages the production of large amounts of food, to be consumed by large numbers of
people is for instance a technological response to a question differently posed: the
question of preparing and consuming large, often unpredictable, harvests of fish and crops
in a way which supports the power of chiefs and the relations between members of tribes,
and which contribute to the positioning of tribes in relation to each other. The
importance of social relations, not profit is embedded in the question, the problem, to
which the technology provides the answer.
If
there are hidden, obscured questions about power lurking behind the enthusiasm for various
technologies, the urge to ‘unconceal’ those questions may be what Heidegger
means by ‘enframing..that gathers together into the revealing that challenges
forth’ (p.31). For to question, to unconceal these hidden assumptions, is to run
serious risk in a political context in which so much is invested in the notion that
technology is itself the saving power .
I
open here, then, the possibility of thinking technology differently, of thinking it not as
a result of the will to financial or political power but as a result of a will to social
and collaborative power. However, there is
another problem (or perhaps another aspect of the same problem) in trying to think
technology differently. Technology is closely linked in the European tradition with
science, and Donna Haraway presents a convincing argument that the hostility of science to
women, people of colour, and people of lower social class is not accidental but intrinsic.
Haraway argues that initially, ‘the exclusion of women and laboring men was
instrumental to managing a critical boundary between watching and witnessing, between who
is a scientist and who is not, and between popular culture and scientific fact’
(Haraway, p.33), and she points out that the effects on those who are excluded from
science for these reasons are profoundly disabling , that ‘to be the object of vision
rather than the “modest”, self-invisible source of vision is to be evacuated of
agency’ (p.32.) Our conception of science derives from historical experience, and
this historical experience has been deliberately and systematically exclusive of those groups of people. Consequently,
science, and technology are thought in terms which are narrowly located and exclusive of
women, people of different colour, culture or class to those of the western European
middleclass male who is the paradigmatic scientist, so that the problems are distinctively
conceived as the problems of that sort of person – as a side effect of the impact of
liberalism and its preoccupation with the male subject- that which Foucault described as
‘biopower’, without critiquing its masculinist tendency. Moreover, and as a
consequence, the solutions to these problems are likewise conceived as instruments
appropriate to the use of that sort of person. The enthusiasm for scientific or
technological solutions to social problems can be read as an enthusiasm for a particular
kind of solution which will, because of the assumptions of its practitioners (researchers,
inventors, developers, investors) necessarily privilege certain manners of thought and
certain groups of users. To move this idea a little further away from persons (after all,
middle class, European men did not ask to be responsible for all the effects ascribed to
them!), one could talk about a kind of sexually inscribed governmentality.
In
all situations, some form of ‘biopower’ will obtain. The characteristics of the
dominant party may differ. It is the
enlistment of rationality to the interests of a specific type/group/lifestyle and set of
values which makes the position so hard to argue.
Marx
was optimistic about the possibilities of technology to relieve the position of the
working classes. This was a possibility which has been realized in a sense, in that the
use of the spade and pitchfork are no longer the daily lives of millions of people –
at least not in the ‘developed’ world. But, because the problem may differ in
some characteristics does not mean it has gone away. In terms of the use of shovel and
cart, the working classes (at least in the developed world) have been relieved of much
drudgery, no question, but because of the political context of the technology involved
their position is in many ways little better. Moreover, as a result of the impoverishment
of these workers it becomes ever more difficult to find markets for the goods thus more
cheaply produced, so the imperative to find cheaper means of production, either by using
slave labour or machines becomes intensified, in perpetuity.
To
this picture Jacques Ellul adds the question of advertising: choice is illusory because
advertising, as a concomitant of material technology has reshaped human desires and
ambitions, reshaped our ways of being. The sophisticated psychological techniques of
advertising
in close co-operation with material techniques, have at last succeeded in
creating unity, all possible diversity will have disappeared and the human race will have
become a bloc of complete and irrational solidarity. (Ellul, The Technological Society)
To
add Ellul’s picture to mine then is to achieve a very gloomy image: technology has
not freed but enslaved, not physically but psychically.
If
this objection to technological ‘development’ is sustained, then it constitutes
a challenge to all change, including legal and political change. At best it could
constitute the conservatism of Dr Johnson who would change the spelling of a word only
reluctantly,
‘All change is of itself an
evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage’ (Johnson, 1950,
p.126).
This
conservative position then would tend to enshrine old power relations as surely as the
change enshrines new power relations. Consider the response of 'Finau 'Ulukalala', the Tu’i tonga or king of
Tonga, to the explorer, de Surville, who tried to persuade him, as the ruler, to adopt a
currency as a more convenient method of exchange and storage of value than feasting.
'Finau 'Ulukalala' foresaw that a currency would alter the relations between nobles and
commoners: if the people could store their wealth in coins rather than in pigs or plants
or social obligations, then the political and social relationships of Tonga would be
fundamentally undermined. Nobles would lose their raison d’etre as the means of
redistribution of wealth.
Was
the Tu’i Tonga’s decision good? The
answer to this question depends on the standpoint of the reader, who may prefer
traditional social organization or may prefer ‘modern’ social organization. It
was a refusal of new power relations and a preservation of old ones. How does this relate
to Foucault’s notion of law as enshrined violence? Only that the previous laws were
also previous violence enshrined. There is no clear place to stand, no innocent position,
in which technology is merely a means to an end.
Enthusiasm
about technology does not come only from Marx, of course. Milton Friedman, the great
apostle of the New Right is equally enthusiastic about the possibilities of technical
knowledge to emancipate people from what he sees as one of the greatest shackles of all:
government and politics. For if politics can be reduced to a series of technical questions
to which there are knowable answers, then politics as an engagement of people with
different ideas becomes irrelevant. Friedman sees different political philosophies as
simply differences over the analysis of the ‘what is’. If these differences
could be empirically removed, they would disappear. Everyone would agree on what had
become a technical, rather than a political issue. An example might be the question of
collective versus individual behaviour. Once economic science has firmly established which
of these two is the most efficient forms of human organization, further discussion between
‘left’ and right’ on these issues becomes redundant. Friedman does not
discuss the values underlying his criteria: the test of ‘efficiency’ already
presupposes that it is the relation between effort (or labour) and profit which forms the
parameters of his notion of value. So his appeal to ‘science’, apparently so
unbiased, contains a confident assumption that science will support his point of view
(Friedman 1953).
For
the world of science, at least that world of science examined by Haraway, is not just a
world which eschews uncertainty: it is a world which ostracizes all those form of being
which it associates with uncertainty – women, people of colour, working-class people,
non-European people, children, animals. So to move politics into economics is not just a
move about switching from uncertainty- and possibly ignorance, prejudice, impatience -
into a world of certainty, science, logic, research, but about switching from a world of
uncertainty and unpredictability to a world dominated by certain values, predictable
within certain parameters, but ultimately useless, sterile, unscientific because, as
Friedman makes (unintentionally) clear, it cannot afford either a theoretic or an
empirical engagement with that messy world of others. As well as pre-empting theoretic
discussion by assuming that the parameters and values of neo-classical economics are
universal, Friedman also manages to disable any appeal to empirical evidence as proof or
disproof of his theoretical position. Whilst claiming a Popperian basis for economics as
science, Friedman also claims that empirical discrepancies between economic theory and
practical experience are not disconfirming instances, unless trained economists decide
that they are (Friedman 1953), an exception which (although it discredits his claim to a
Popperian form of science), renders economics impervious to empirical disproof.
If
technology is then, political, and politics in endeavouring to become scientific, is also
political, then both are inescapably ‘human activities’ which are subject to the
usual questions about means and ends, that is, about purpose and ethics. And these
questions have to be asked constantly in the light of the perception that
science/technology tends to the exclusion rather than the inclusion of marginalized
groups. The tendency of technical solutions to universality is itself a process of
marginalisation: when the Internet brings education to distant islands or remote bays it
brings with it an incorporation into that world of psychological and material technique
which Ellul describes, and it renders even more marginal the cultures of its students. We
have not considered, even as much as a property developer does, the environmental impact
of what we do, in terms of the effects on the ontology of the subject both in terms of
discipline and in terms of persons. We have not researched the ethics or politics of the
encounter between teacher and student, either in terms of the significance of bodily
presence in the physical classroom, or the impact of the brain-to-brain immediacy of the
internet classroom. We have not researched the ways in which Powerpoint itself – or
even the OHT – tend to reduce communication to the synoptic, the emblematic, the
bullet pointed. It may well be as unethical to deny distant students the possibilities of
ICT as to actively recruit them to Ellul’s world: the tension remains. There is no innocent position but there is an
obligation to consider the effects of what we do. Yet we rip into these projects without
so much as an impact assessment. We make the assumption that if ICT is to bring
(E)nlightenment to distant parts it should be done by us, in English, and through various
techniques both technological and pedagogical. We should consider all of these things,
separately and together.
My thanks to Timote Vaioleti for
details on 'Finau 'Ulukalala'.
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