Critical Theory of Technology

three paragraphs on place

Progress is not from qualitative to quantitative. Quantitative description of a system is not superior to qualitative understanding. When approaching complexity, it is not possible to measure "everything," plug it all into a model, and retrieve intelligible results. For one thing, "everything" is too big. Qualitative understanding is essential in establishing quantitative models. It intrudes into the interpretation of the results. The task of mathematics is to make the arcane obvious and even trivial. That is, it must educate the intuition so that confronted with a daunting complexity we can grasp the crucial features that determine its dynamics, know where to look for the features that make it what it is, suspect mainstream questions as well as answers.

Thus a systems analysis of the regulation of blood sugar may include the interactions among sugar itself, insulin, adrenaline, cortisol, and other molecules but is unlikely to include anxiety, or the conditions that produce the anxiety such as the intensity of labor and the rate of using up of sugar reserves, whether or not the job allows a tired worker to rest or take a snack. Models of heart disease are likely to include cholesterol and the fats that are turned into cholesterol but not the social classes of the people in whom the cholesterol is formed and breaks down. Systems analysis would not know how to deal with the pancreas under capitalism or the adrenals in a racist workplace. Models of epidemics may include rates of reproduction of viruses and their transmission but not the social creation of a sense of agency that may allow people to take charge of their exposure and treatment.

Radical defenders of science cannot defend science as it is. Instead, we have to come forward as critics both of liberal science and of its reactionary enemies. The present right-wing attack on science is part of a more general assault on liberalism, now that the demise of a worldwide socialist challenge makes liberalism unnecessary and intensified competition during a period of long-term stagnation makes liberalism seem too costly. Although its opposition to liberalism is opposition to the liberating aspects of that doctrine, the reactionary attack on liberalism often emphasizes the oppressive or ineffectual sides of liberalism. We have to call for opening up science to those who have been excluded, democratizing what is an authoritarian structure modeled on the corporation, and insist on the goal of a science aimed at the creation of a just society compatible with a rich and diverse nature. We should not hide behind but rather undermine the cult of expertise in favor of approaches that combine professional and nonprofessional participation. __The optimal condition for science is one foot in the university and one in the community in struggle__, so that we have the richness and complexity of theory coming from the particular and the comparative view, and generalizations that only some distance from the particular can provide. It also allows us to see the combination of cooperative and conflicting relations we have with our colleagues and ways in which political commitment challenges the shared common sense of professional communities.

We should not pretend or aspire to a bland neutrality but proclaim as our working hypothesis: all theories are wrong that promote, justify, or tolerate injustice. We should not cover up or lament in private the triviality of so much published research but denounce that triviality as coming from the commodification of careers in scholarship and from the agendas of domination that rule out of order many of the really interesting questions. We should challenge the competitive individualism of science in favor of a cooperative effort to solve the real problems. We should reject the reductionist magic bullet strategy that serves commodified science in favor of respect for the complexity, connectedness, dynamism, historicity, and contradictoriness of the world. We should repudiate the aesthetics of technocratic control in favor of rejoicing in the spontaneity of the world, delighting in the incapacity of indexes to capture life, savoring the unexpected and anomalous, and seeking our success not in dominating what is really indomitable but in far-sighted, humane, and gentle responses to inevitable surprise. The best defense of science under reactionary attack is to insist on a science for the people.

A radical critique of science extends also to the inner workings of the research process. In approaching a new problem, Marxism encourages me to ask two basic questions: Why are things the way they are instead of a little bit different, and why are things the way they are instead of very different? Here "things" has a double meaning, referring both to the objects of study and to the state of the science studying them. The Newtonian answer to the first question is that things are the way they are because nothing much is happening to them. But our answer is that things are the way they are because of the actions of opposing processes. This first question is that of the self-regulation of systems, of homeostasis. In the face of constantly displacing influences, how do things remain recognizably what they are? Once posed, it enters the domain of systems theory in the narrow sense, the mathematical modeling of complex systems. That discipline starts with a set of variables and their connections and applies equations to ask: Is the system stable? How quickly does it restore itself after perturbation? How much does it respond to permanent changes in its surroundings? How much change can it tolerate? It asks, when external events impinge on the system, how do they percolate through the whole network, being amplified along some pathways and diminished along others? We work with notions such as positive and negative feedback loops, pathways, connectivity, sinks, delays, reflecting and absorbing barriers. In its own terms, this analysis is "objective." But the variables themselves are social products.

Marxist critique attempts to see science, in both its liberating and oppressing aspects and its powerful insights and militant blindnesses, as a commoditized expression of liberal European capitalist masculinist interests and ideologies organized to cope with real natural and social phenomena. Its ideology is both a product of European liberalism and a self-generated contribution to that ideology, not a mere passive reflection of it. Radical critiques of agriculture, medicine, genetics, economic development, and other areas of applied science point out both the external and internal aspects that limit science's ability to reach its stated goals. The external refers to science's social position as a knowledge industry, owned and directed for purposes of profit and power as guided by shared beliefs, carried out mostly by men.      The modes of recruitment into and exclusion from science, the various subdivisions into disciplines, the hidden boundary conditions restraining scientific inquiry become intelligible when we examine its social context. We can approach the dominant modalities of chemical therapy in medicine and farming as expressions of the commodification of knowledge by the chemical industry. But the reliance on molecular magic bullets is also congenial to the reductionist philosophy that has dominated European/North American science since its formation in the seventeenth century, and in turn is supported by the atomistic experience of bourgeois social life. (As we trace the connections, we see that "internal" and "external" are in fact not rigidly alternative explanations, another example of the general principle that there are no nontrivial, complete, and disjunct subdivisions of reality.      Yet science is still plagued by the false dichotomies of organism/environment, nature/nurture, deterministic/random, social/individual, psychological/physiological, hard/soft science, dependent/independent variables, and so on.) The internal refers to the reductionist, fragmented, decontextualized, mechanistic (as against holistic or dialectical) ideologies and liberal-conservative politics of science.      Marxist and other radical critics have always called for broadening the scope of investigations, placing them in historical context, recognizing the interconnectedness of phenomena and the priority of processes over things, whereas conservative ideology usually advocates elegant precision about narrowly circumscribed objects and accepting boundary conditions without even acknowledging them.

Organisms do not experience or fit into an environment, they construct it.

Nothing is more central to a dialectical understanding of nature than the realization that the conditions necessary for the coming into being of some state of the world may be destroyed by the very state of nature to which they gave rise. As it is in nature, so it is in the study of nature. Darwin's most powerful contribution to the development of modern biology was not his creation of a satisfactory theory of evolutionary mechanism. Rather, within that theory, it was his rigorous separation of internal and external forces that had, in previous theories, been inseparable.