The Voice and the Eye: Social Movements, prequel.

Alain Touraine writes on page 78 of The Voice and The Eye:

“The representation of social movements that we have inherited from industrial society is as follows: a dominator imposes laws, beliefs and a political regime just as much as it imposes an economic system; the people submit to these impositions but revolt against them when their physical and cultural existence becomes threatened. This revolt is not only defensive, it is also a preparation for the future since it explodes the contradictions of the social order and destroys the barriers erected by individual interest and blocking the way for the general and natural progress of society. This vision conflicts with the idea of social movements as I have defined it over two vital issues” (Touraine, Alain (1981) The Voice and The Eye. An analysis of social movements. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Emphasis is mine)

I highlight this piece of text here since it pins down two things about Touraine I am working on and what also may be of interest to someone else. Social movements sit at the heart of society and without them there is no “real” movement in society. All societal change has to do with social movements that convey the energies of individual actors. The way Touraine explains this is elegant and very exact and is best found in the mentioned book The Voice And the Eye. I am currently working on the analysis of my first article so this is something I’ll be using later.

So, Touraine is using a very concrete example to tell us how his vision of social movements is different from all the other contemporary (it was published originally in French in late 70’s) accounts. Remember, at that time it was customary to (over) emphasize the Working Movements meaning to world history. Touraine is not saying that it’s not so but his account cautions us to attribute any collective phenomenon as a true social movement.

The representation of social movements in industrial societies miss the point of Touraines Social Movements in two key dimensions.

1. The actor (or a ‘group’) is not truly social. This is because the ‘revolt’ is only an expression of ad hoc tensions or a product of natural phenomena (people who are forced to act in order to save themselves, for an example). A true actor (or a ‘group’) is truly social: the tension is not in the situation of the revolt. The situation only expresses the tension but the movement is real and in the heart of the entire society. A social actor (or historical actor, as Touraine calls them) is defined by a social relation between it and the ‘other’ he/she is struggling against.

2. The action is not seen as emanating from society but it can only be understood by looking at what it is trying to achieve. This means, the social movement is reduced to it’s utopia: it has separated the original action from the interpretation of the action. A true Social Movement ‘happens’ right now. Utopia, or the alternative cultural relation of the revolting group is an important part of the Tourainean vision but it’s not the source of action as such. To be precise: the struggle creates it’s own aims: it is not going towards  a certain anticipated end but towards an end-in-the-making by the actors themselves.

Touraine himself gives an exhausting and careful explanation of what he sees as a Social Movement. On page 31 he writes:

“A Social Movement is the collective organized action through which a class actor battles for the social control of historicity in a given and identifiable historical context”.

And he elaborates this on page 77.

“A social movement is the organized collective behavior of a class actor struggling against his class adversary for the social control of historicity in a concrete community”.

 

 

What I will do this spring is an article where I will analyze certain aspects of Transhumanism (as a general term). I will try to see it as a historical actor, or, a genuine and real Social Movement. From now on I will not elaborate too much on the details but I will try to keep my thinking “out in the public” during the writing process of the article.

Article notes: “Cognitive Enhancement in Education”

Buchanan, Allen (2011) “Cognitive Enhancement in Education” in Theory and Research in Education 2011 9: 145.

A short but well structured article about how and why Biomedical Cognitive Enhancements (BCE’s) are going to be used to enhance education. The author, Allen Buchanan, is by no means a new name in the transhuman related pantheon of writers. He has authored two books I look forward to reading: Beyond Humanity and Better than Human.

In this article Buchanan focuses on cognitive enhancement. He argues, that this is already done with coffine and nicotine and there is no real obstacle that in the future there would be a selection of ever more powerful cognition enhancing drugs. Buchanan gives four aims for education: 1) promote individual flourishing, 2) equip a person to fulfill the role of citizen, 3) help people to become economically independent and a contributor to society and 4) to promote general social well-being by enabling skills and knowledge that make more complex cooperation possible.

With these four points Buchanan continues on to make the case for the use of BCE’s. He argues, that there is a clear continuity from the four aims of education to the use of cognitive enhancement. According to Buchanan there neither exist any relevant issues, that would speak against the use of BCE:s.

He argues, that the biggest obstacles in using BCE’s have to do with not knowing enough about them. Buchanan argues, that our concept of “natural” has a lot to do with a “pre-Darwin” concept, where all that is natural is good and pure. Also, what he calls biotechnological exceptionalism, we attribute too much contingency on the “new” biotechnology.

Probably the most controversial point in the authors vision has to do with the idea of using cognitive enhancement technologies as part of a mandatory policy. He argues that:

In a society in which the better off will predictably utilize BCE, harnessing BCE to the public educational enterprise would have two significant advantages. First, it would avoid the risks […] where thousands of people are taking prescription drugs in order to enhance their cognitive performance without medical supervision […] Second, it would ensure that access to CBE is not limited to the well-off and create the opportunity for using CBE to reduce rather than to exacerbate unfair inequalities in natural endowments. (Buchanan 2011, 161.)

This was a short introduction to the article and I’m not sure if it makes a fair point about the whole. Still, it raises some difficult questions I need to answer. Here Buchanan talks about ‘enhancement’. I found this article by doing a search with the term ‘enhancement’ in the Sage Journals. Part of my problem in looking at the “concept” (notice the quotations I have started to use) of transhuman technology is that the very central concept of “enhancement” is as broad as it is high.

Very often in STS literature medical technology and technology are separated. With nanotechnology we see a change towards a more hybrid view of technology but generally medical and non-medical technology are different. I suppose this has to do with the history of these particular technologies but I also believe there are different social worlds at play too. The medical technology is part of the medical institution that is run by doctors and the technology sector belongs to the institutions of technology, run by engineers and research scientists. This is just a thought, but it can be that the way these institutions construct ‘technology’ (or the “artifact”) are different.

But, now for the next article…

What is technology? Part 1: José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

I have been sick of the flu for about a week now. Yesterday I started feeling a little better and since we have had terrible snow fall in the last couple of days, I could not imagine anything better to do than read something related to my research (what a rosy picture of motivation that is…). As I like my idea of doing the research ‘live’ I decided to start collecting my “readings” here and publishing them as a series. Note, these are my “notes” and should not be reflected as ‘final’ conclusions about a given subject. Keep that in mind if you use these materials for reference.

Part I: José Ortega y Gasset : Meditación de la técnica (1939) [i’m using the Finnish translation: 2006 “Ajatuksia teknologiasta”. Juvenes Print. Tampere.]

The entire book is a great read. Ortega delivers his thoughts like a very interesting lecture. He is funny, witty and tends to surprise the reader. Sometimes he is very blunt about things but manages to keep his style in control and not to have it corrupt in to some form of elitism. This book is also said to be connected with a larger stream of Ortegas thinking, and therefore it helps to understand his most known work La Rebelión de las Masas (1939) (“The Revolt of The Masses”).

Please note that I’m using the Finnish translation (2006, Antti Immonen, Eurooppalaisen filosofian seura ry). This means that my selection of terms and concepts may very well be different than in the true English translation.

In this book Ortega discusses the philosophy and sociology of technology. This book is in fact the first to systematically present a theory or at least a picture of technology as a phenomenon. At the time of it’s release, there really was only the massive work by Lewis Mumford available on the subject. Of course there were books and articles about technology but it is worth noting that Ortega as well as Mumford were really the first to ponder about technology and technology only.

To be human is to be a technician 

The book consists of twelve chapters. In the beginning Ortega starts building his concepts about humans relation to technology and the world. He starts of with the question of human needs. In Ortegas time as well as still in ours, we tend to think that what separates us from animals is that we use technology to satisfy our basic needs. Ortega however takes a different approach.

He suggests that, for instance, the need for warmth and food are basic needs, but they are not just human needs. Food and shelter are only the necessities for life. Animals also need food and shelter (ie. furr) to survive in their “natural environment”. Here is where Ortega gets interesting. Instead of arguing that humans use technology to satisfy these “natural needs” he claims, that we use technology to make “natural needs” irrelevant. In other words, the needs for a human life are not the same as the “natural needs” to survive.

In the starting chapters Ortega puts this bluntly: technology is an enhancement to control nature and make time and space for ‘real human needs’ that are different than the needs of ‘survival’. Thus humans use technology to create a ‘supernature’ that exists between man and nature. Ortega aggressively claims that human is only a human if he uses technology.

Wellbeing

Human Nature (if Ortega uses this term, I don’t know) does not subjucate to nature but reacts to it. Since it is ‘not human’ to just satisfy the necessary needs for living, Ortega writes, that true human needs include the “natural needs” as well as “other needs” as objective human needs. Ortega gives an example of getting drunk as a very much human need that we however do not need to satisfy in order to stay alive.

The human need to live is to be understood as a need to live well. Technology is used to produce these “extra needs” as well as “natural needs”. Ortega very strongly equates wellbeing with the use of technology.

But, does this mean we are at some level determined by the technology we use? No, says Ortega. He points to the fact that though technology is used to react to our environment, it is not determined by this mechanism. In fact, Ortega takes a very critical stance against such determinism. He claims, that technology is guided by society and especially the particular idea that society has about ‘wellbeing’. Now, he does not mean ‘social constructivism’ as such but he notes that ‘human needs’ direct technology and that these human needs tend to change over time and differ between cultures.

Conceptualizing technology

In the next chapters Ortega dives into some theoretical questions about technology and humanity. He arrives to a conclusion we saw earlier: that the human use of technology means using technology to transgress the “natural” or “human” limitations of “nature”.

Here Ortega begins to slice the concept of human into pieces. He starts at the level of “things”, claiming that there are three possible relations the “human thing” and the “environment thing” can have. 1. If there would be no resistance between humans and nature, humans and nature would in effect be the one and the same. This is the case for plants and rocks. 2. If there would be nothing but conflict, humans would not exist at all. And, perhaps too self evidently, 3. the relation between humans and nature is “complex and filled with resistance and harmony”.

Then Ortega claims that the ‘ontological uniqueness’ of man is to ‘concur the world’ around him. To this he adds that “natural man” is not a human at all. A true Human Nature can exist only through technology that can be seen as as tunnel through which human creativity (the act of being human) can be channeled.

Projects for existence

Ortega claims, that humans must have a project for his existence. This is not an ontological concept, since Ortega also notes that there are people who are satisfied to “doing nothing”. The idea of having an active person developing “his or her project” that is acted out though technology is directly linked to Ortegas concept of having an “idea of wellbeing” in control of technical development.

A human is a “thing” that is “not yet”, Ortega puts it in a nutshell.

The environment (world) is therefore in a role of “raw materials” for humans to cultivate in mans own image – so to speak. Ortega also writes, that if humans are to address the question of ‘being human’ by the use of technology, humans must first get rid of ‘natural needs’ like we saw earlier. After that there is time to focus on the ‘enhancing of humanity’ technology that actually creates the ‘wellbeing’. This is somewhat close to the famous ‘hierarchy of needs’ by Maslow.

Ortega again notes, that technology does not create its own ends and is therefore not deterministic. In other words, technology does not create the ‘project of humanity’ but only makes it real. Here Ortega notes an interesting factor: in the ‘beginning’ technology made things ‘more clear’ but as technology got more and more complex, it started to affect the ‘project’ making it more fuzzy again. Here he remarks on the ‘modern technology’ and the problems and questions it had raised already in 1939.

In the next chapters Ortega discusses gentlemen and boddhisatvas as different orientations to ‘human projects’ and claims that gentlemen are more connected with work and ‘rational ends’ than boddhisatvas and therefore these ‘cultural prototypes’ (England and India) create different technologies.

The ‘history’ of techonoly

Ortega does not write about causal history when he discusses historical phases in technology. He divides different ‘phases’ of technology in three epochs. 1. The random technology, meaning that ‘in the stone age’ people used whatever sticks or rocks they had nearby to accomplish different ends. 2. In the ‘artisan’ phase technology was created by craftsmen and was considered ‘a skill’ but not yet a ‘world of it’s own’. 3. The third phase – or modern technology – technology had a differentiated place in society and culture and manifested itself in the form of an ‘engineer’. This was also the time when technology and science (19th century) bagan to to be seen as parts of the same system.

Modern technology

Ortega claims that modern technology has three distinct features. 1. It creates a ‘supernature’ that humans are related and dependent of. According to Ortega, it is now impossible to ‘live outside of technology’. 2. A machine or mechanics were introduced in the late middle-ages and came to be in 1825 when Roberts patented a ‘knitting machine’. For Ortega a Machine was thing that made humans not the users but the ones being used by technology. In example, a factory is a machine that uses human work as it’s energy. 3. The separation of research and technology, that manifests as ‘engineers’. Not only is technology now a ‘machine’ but ‘technology’ is also a way of thinking. Here Ortega comes close to the views of – as an example – Michael Foucault attributes to ‘mechanisms of power’.

Technology is identified with it’s way of analyzing things. Ortega gives an example. An Aristotelian philosopher of technology looks at the phenomenon and tries to see its ‘substantive ends or final ends’, an engineer dissects a problem and analyses it. This is, according to Ortega, a shift in the way technology is viewed. In other words, technological thinking begins to analyse nature.

Final remarks

This was one way of reading Ortegas essay. I left out some parts and anybody who is interested in the research of technology should spend an evening reading this short but very inspiring text. There are some parts that obviously are of interest to my transhumanism research. Mainly the idea of ‘supernature’ that technology creates between man and nature. It is worth noting that this supernature is something we develop a dependency towards. Also, the view that technology is created by the ‘human project of wellbeing’ is interesting and I may use it as a starting point when I begin to develop my concept of a technological actor. But, this is just a beginning and I’ll probably have a lot of fun reading this in about a years time.