Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Ideas of modernity and of technology have, since the Enlightenment, been inextricably related. The control of nature and the rationalization of production and social process offered by technology, broadly considered as the instrumentalization of scientific knowledge, are central to the modern worldview and to modern capitalist society, as are versions of the self and body which conceive them as mechanisms which might be improved or better exploited. At the same time, modernity has produced a critique of technology, whether expressed in terms of the totality of the social order it demands, or in terms of its impact on the human subject or nature. This tradition of critique, sometimes nostalgic and often drawing on vitalist notions of the uniqueness of life-energies, is equally a part of modernity. Any account of modernism and technology must account not only for these opposed positions, but also for their instability: for the tendency of the “natural” to become mechanism, and of technology to become a form of life. One of the defining characteristics of modernist thought in social science and the philosophy of history is its focus, in a post-Darwinian context, on technology as it relates to a range of issues: the process of civilization, the human body, communication, mass culture. Works in this tradition include Spengler's Man and Technics (English edition 1932), Lewis Mumford's ... log in or subscribe to read full text