Reflections on Bridging the Gap

Theories of modernity and technology studies have both made great
strides in recent years, but remain quite disconnected despite the obvious
overlap in their concerns. How can one expect to understand
modernity without an adequate account of the technological developments
that make it possible, and how can one study specific technologies
without a theory of the larger society in which they develop? These
questions have not even been posed, much less answered persuasively,
by most leading contributors to the fields. The basic issue I would like to
address is the why and wherefore of this peculiar mutual ignorance.1
In the first half of this chapter I review the positions of some of the
major figures in each field. After posing the problem briefly in this section,
I sketch the background to the current impasse in the original contributions
of Marx and Kuhn, and then consider the obstacles each field
places in the way of encountering the other. In the second half of the chapter
I propose one possible resolution of the dilemma, bridging the gap
between the two fields through a synthesis of their main contributions.
Both modernity theory and technology studies employ hermeneutic approaches
that I elaborate further in a loosely Heideggerian account of
innovation. In the concluding sections I summarize my own instrumentalization
theory and show how it can be applied to the computerization
of society.
Modernity theory relies on the key notion of rationalization to explain
the uniqueness of modern societies. Rationalization refers to the
generalization of technical rationality as a cultural form, specifically theintroduction of calculation and control into social processes, with a consequent
increase in efficiency. Rationalization also reduces the normative
and qualitative richness of the traditional social world, exposing
social reality to technical manipulation. Modernity theories often claim
that this reduction impoverishes our relation to the world. But, the theorists
argue, impoverished though it may be, technical rationality gives
power over nature, supports large-scale organization, and eliminates
many spatial constraints on social interaction. This view of modernity is
characteristic of a normative style of cultural critique that is anathema to
contemporary technology studies. Albert Borgmann’s theory of the “device
paradigm” is a well-known example of this approach (Borgmann
1984; Higgs et al. 2000).
Rationalization depends on a broad pattern of modern development
described as the “differentiation” of society. This notion has obvious
applications to the separation of property and political power, offices
and persons, religion and the state, and so on. However, a rationality
differentiated from society as such appears to lie beyond the reach of social
study. If technology is a product of such a rationality, it too would
escape sociocultural determination.
Technology studies reject this whole approach. They point out the social
complexity of technology, the multiple actors involved with its creation,
and the consequent richness of the values embedded in design.
The principles of symmetry embraced by technology studies undergird
rigorous case studies that persuasively refute the very idea of pure rationality.
Thus modernity theory goes wrong when it claims that all of
society operates under values somehow specific to a science and technology
differentiated from other spheres. However, if technology and
society are not substantial “things” belonging to separate spheres, it
makes no sense to claim that technology dominates society and transforms
its values. Rather, technology is a social phenomenon through
and through, no more and no less significant than any other social
phenomenon.
Technology studies lose part of the truth when they emphasize only
the social complexity and embeddedness of technology and minimize the
distinctive emphasis on top-down control that accompanies technical rationalization.
This trend depends on the differentiation of institutions
such as corporations that wield technical rationality in the interest of
control. Limited though that differentiation may be, it nevertheless
makes it possible to grasp any concrete value or thing as a manipulable
variable, and this includes human beings themselves. Where traditional
craft work expressed the vocational investment of the whole personality,
the modern organization of work separates occupations from personal
character and growth, the better to expose the worker to external
controls (deskilling). Similarly, whereas traditional architecture combined
historical and aesthetic expression with stability and durability,
today strictly “utilitarian” construction is the rule. True, other social
values fill the vacuum left by the differentiation of the technical sphere—
e.g., profit—but this differentiation process is a real characteristic of
modernity, and it has immense social consequences.
Is it possible to find some truth in both these positions or are they mutually
exclusive, as they certainly appear to be at first sight? I believe a
synthesis is possible, but only if the concept of technical rationality is revised
to free it from implicit positivistic assumptions. It is this implicit
positivism that leads modernity theory into the error of assuming that
differentiation imposes a purely rational form on social processes, when
in fact, as technology studies demonstrate, technology is social through
and through. Science and technology studies could thus help us to avoid
hypostatizing rationality as a substantial reality responsive only to its
own logic.
We must also find a way to preserve modernity theory’s insight into
the distinctiveness of modernity and its problems. We need to explain
how rationality operates as such even as it is intertwined with society
through internal relations that determine its concrete realizations. This
technology, that market, will always be socially specific and inexplicable
in the terms of a philosophically purified concept of reason.2 In the next
section I sketch the background to the two very different ways of understanding
rationality in modernity theory and technology studies.
Science of Society and History of Science
The writings of Karl Marx are surely the single most influential source
of theories of modernity. His thought is usually identified with auniversalistic faith in progress. At its core there is an intuition he shared
with his century, the notion that a “great divide” forever separates premodern
from modern societies. All later contrasts of Gesellschaft versus
Gemeinschaft, organic versus mechanical solidarity, traditional versus
post-traditional society, and so on, owe something to Marx’s canonical
formulation of this idea in texts such as the Communist Manifesto and
Capital.3 After World War II, modernization theory emerged as the chief
competitor to Marxism, but it shared Marx’s progressive universalism.
The sense of radical discontinuity in these texts involves more than a
theory of society. Marx’s notion of what Max Weber later called “rationalization”
covers not only the changes in economic and technical systems
Weber identified, but a new form of individuality freed from
ideology and religion. This new form of individuality is plain to see in
the nineteenth-century novels contemporary with Marx’s work, and he
assumes its generalization to the lower classes under the conditions of
modern capitalism. Modern workers have no fixed abode and are not
subject to the paternalistic authority of nobles and clerics. As the tectonic
plates of culture are thrown into movement by the market, workers
are freed from naïve faith in their “betters” and acquire a rational
appreciation of the gaps between ideals and realities. Under these conditions,
they gain mental independence and become, in Engels’ phrase,
“free outlaw[s]” (Engels 1970: p. 23). Marx’s social theory is thus
founded not just on cognitive hypotheses but on the existential irony of
this modern individual. Its method is therefore fundamentally hermeneutic
and demystifying as well as analytical. This duality explains the contrast
between the method in Marx’s critique of ideology and that in his
positive economic theory. It shows up in various guises in modernity
theory and is especially clear in Habermas who, as we will see later in
this chapter, employs both hermeneutic and analytical methods to study
modern society.
If there is any one figure who has played a comparable role for contemporary
technology studies, it is Thomas Kuhn. It is true that the case
for Kuhn as a founding father is less clear. Many students of science and
technology, particularly historians, avoided the positivistic errors Kuhn
criticized in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Kuhn 1970). However, Kuhn’s overwhelming success lent philosophicallegitimacy to these trends and encouraged others to follow their lead.
Nonpositivist historiographic methods triumphed in science studies and
subsequently influenced the new wave of technology studies that grew
out of science studies in the 1980s. Unlike Marx, Kuhn is perhaps less a
source than a symbol of a radically new approach.4
Of course neither Marx nor Kuhn are followed slavishly by contemporary
scholars, but we should not be surprised to find that many of
their background assumptions are still at work in the most up-to-date
contributions to modernity theory and technology studies. I would like
to begin by considering several such assumptions that may help to explain
the gap between these two fields.
Like all modern historians and social theorists, Kuhn writes somewhere
in the long shadow cast by Marx, as can be deduced from the
place of “revolution” in the title of his major book, but his view of historical
discontinuities is quite different from Marx’s. Kuhn did not reject
the idea of radical discontinuities in history, which, on the contrary,
continue to shape his vision of the past. But where Marx took for
granted the existence of a rationality gradient underlying the concept of
modernity, Kuhn deconstructed the idea of a universal standard of rationality
that was more or less identical with scientific reason and capable
of transcending particular cultures and ordering them in a developmental
sequence. The demystifying impulse is still present, but it is directed
at the belief in a “great divide” that characterizes modernity itself. Now
the ironic glance turns back on itself, undermining the cognitive selfassurance
implied in the stance of the naïve ironist.
Kuhn’s method had momentous consequences for the wider reception
of science studies in the academic world. He showed that there is no one
continuous scientific tradition, but a succession of different traditions,
each with its own basic assumptions and standards of truth, its own
“paradigms.” The illusion of continuity arises from glossing over the
complexities and ambiguities of scientific change and reconstructing it
as an upwardly linear progression leading to the present. If we go back
to the decisive moments in the scientific revolution and examine what
actually occurred from the standpoint of the participants, their competing
positions, their arguments and experimental results, we will discover
that the case for continuity is by no means so clear.This practice-oriented approach is neatly captured in Latour’s suggestion
that science resembles a Janus looking back on its past in an entirely
different spirit from that in which it looks forward to the future
(Latour 1987: p. 12). Science, Latour suggests, is a sum of results that
“hold” under certain conditions, such as repeated experimental tests.
While the backward glance shows nature confirming the results of science,
the forward glance presents a very different picture in which the
results that hold are called “nature.” Looking backward, one can say
that the conditions of truth were met because the hypotheses of science
were true. Looking forward, one must say rather that meeting the conditions
defines what scientists will use for truth. The backward glance tells
of an evolutionary progress of knowledge about the way things are, independent
of science; the forward glance tells of the sheer contingency
of the process in which science decides on the way things are.
I doubt if Kuhn would have appreciated this Nietzschean twist to his
original contribution, from which he unfortunately retreated in subsequent
writings. Kuhn himself never challenges the notion of modernity
or the material progress associated with it. But the point is really not so
much to offer an interpretation of Kuhn as of his significance on the
maps of theory. He certainly had no intention of commenting on issues
beyond his field, the history of science, but a critique of Marx is implied
in his notion of scientific revolution insofar as the latter did believe that
his own work was scientific and, more deeply, that rationality characterizes
the institutions and forms of modernity. Thus just because Kuhn
undermines the pretensions of science to access transhistorical truths,
his work also undercuts Marxism and the modernity theory which inherited
many Marxist assumptions. From that standpoint, it is clear that
Kuhn is in some sense the nemesis of Marx and the harbinger of what
has come to be called “postmodernism.” To the extent that many contributions
to technology studies reflect Kuhn’s methodological innovations,
they too bear a certain elective affinity for postmodernism, or at
least for a “nonmodern” critique of Marx’s heritage.
The implicit conflict came to the surface in various formulations of
postmodernism, but it still seemed a mere disagreement between abstract
epistemological positions. Philosophers engaged in heated debates
over the nature of truth, but these debates had only a few echoes insocial theory, such as Habermas’s critique of Foucault. Things have
changed now that the conflict has emerged inside the ill-matched couple
we are considering here, modernity theory and technology studies. Since
no fully coherent account of modernity is possible without an approach
to technology, and vice versa, the philosophical disagreement now appears
as a tension between fields. It is no longer just a matter of one’s
position on the great question of realism versus relativism, but concerns
basic analytical categories and research methods.
Consider the implications of technology studies for the notion of
progress. If Kuhnian relativism has the power to dissolve the selfcertainty
of science and technology, then what becomes of the notion of
a rationalized society? In most modernity theories, rationalization appears
as a spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once
customary and ideological obstructions are removed. Technology studies,
on the contrary, show that efficiency is not a uniquely constraining
objective of design and development, but that many social forces play a
role. The thesis of “underdetermination” holds that there is no one rational
solution to technical problems, and this opens the technical
sphere to these various influences. Technical development is not an
arrow seeking its target, but a tree branching out in many directions.
But if the criteria of progress themselves are in flux, societies cannot be
located along a single continuum from the “less” to the “more” advanced.
Like Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, but on the scale of
society as a whole, constructivist technology studies complicate the notion
of progress at the risk of dissolving it altogether.
In Latour’s account, a contingent scientific-technical rationality can
only gain a grip on society at large through the social practices by which
it is actively “exported” out of the laboratory and into the farms,
streets, and factories (Latour 1987: pp. 249ff.). The constructivist theorists
export their relativistic method as they trace the movements of their
object of study. They dissolve all the stable patterns of progress into
contingent outcomes of “scaling up” or controversies. Institutional or
cultural phenomena no longer have stable identities, but must be grasped
through the process of their construction in the arguments and debates
of the day. This approach ends up eliminating the very categories of
modernity theory, such as universal and particular, reason and tradition,culture and class, which are transformed from explanations into explananda.
One can neither rise above the level of case histories nor talk
meaningfully about the essence and future of modernity under these
conditions.
Modernity theory suffers disaster on its own ground once it encounters
the new technology studies approach. If no fixed path of technical
evolution guides social development toward higher stages, if social
change can take different paths leading to different types of modern society,
then the old certainties of modernity theory collapse. One can no
longer be sure if such essential dimensions of modernity as rationalization
and democratization are actually universal, progressive tendencies
of modern societies or just local consequences of the peculiar path of recent
western development. Unless it squarely faces these difficulties,
modernity theory must become so abstract that this kind of objection no
longer troubles it, with a consequent loss of usefulness, or cease to be a
theory at all and transform itself into a descriptive and analytical study
of specific cases. Here are two examples that show the depth of the
problems.
System or Practice
Modernity as Differentiation
Modernity theory on the whole either continues to ignore technology or
acknowledges it in an outmoded deterministic framework. Most revealing
is the extreme but instructive case of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas is
one of the major social theorists of our time. His influence is widespread
and the rigor of his thought admirable. Yet he has elaborated the most
architectonically sophisticated theory of modernity without any reference
at all to technology. This blissful indifference to what should surely
be a focal concern of any adequate theory of modernity requires explanation,
especially since Habermas is strongly influenced by Marx, for
whom technology is of central importance.
Habermas’s approach is based to a considerable extent on Weberian
rationalization theory. According to Weber, modernity consists essentially
in the differentiation of the various “cultural spheres.” The state,
the market, religion, law, art, science, technology each become distinctsocial domains with their own logic and institutional identity. Under
these conditions, science and technology take on their familiar posttraditional
form as independent disciplines. Scientific-technical rationality
is purified of religious and customary elements. Similarly, markets
and administrations are liberated from the mixture of religious prejudices
and family ties that bound them in the past. They emerge as what
Habermas calls “systems” governed by an internal logic of equivalent
exchange. Such systems organize an ever-increasing share of daily life in
modern societies (Habermas 1984–87). Where formerly individuals discussed
how to act together for their mutual benefit or to maintain customary
rituals and roles, we moderns coordinate our actions with
minimal communication through the quasi-automatic functioning of
markets and administrations.
According to Habermas, the spread of such differentiated systems is
the foundation of a complex modern society. But differentiation also releases
everyday communicative interaction from the overwhelming burden
of coordinating all social action. The communicative sphere, which
Habermas calls the “lifeworld,” now emerges as a domain in its own
right as well. This lifeworld includes the family, the public sphere, education,
and all the various contexts in which individuals are shaped as relatively
autonomous members of society. It too, according to Habermas, is
subject to a specific rationalization consisting in the emergence of democratic
institutions and personal freedoms. However contestable this account
of modernity, something significant is captured in it. Modern
societies really are different from traditional ones, and the difference
seems closely related to the impersonal functioning of institutions such
as markets and administrations and the increase in personal and political
freedom that results from new possibilities of communication.
At first Habermas argued that system rationalization threatened to
create technocratic intrusions into the lifeworld of communicative interaction,
and this reference to techno-cracy seemed to link his theory to
the theme of technology (Habermas 1970; Feenberg 1995: chap. 4).
However, his mature formulation of the theory ignores technology and
focuses exclusively on the spread of markets and administration. The arbitrariness
of this exclusion appears clearly in the following summary of
Habermas’s theory: “Because we are as fundamentally language-usingas tool-using animals, the representation of reason as essentially instrumental
and strategic is fatally one-sided. On the other hand, it is indeed
the case that those types of rationality have achieved a certain dominance
in our culture. The subsystems in which they are centrally institutionalized,
the economy and government administration, have increasingly
come to pervade other areas of life and make them over in their own
image and likeness. The resultant ‘monetarization’ and ‘bureaucratization’
of life is what Habermas refers to as the ‘colonization of the life
world’” (McCarthy 1991: p. 52). What became of the “tool-using” animal
of the first sentence of this passage? Are its only tools money and
power? How is it possible to elide technological tools in a society such
as ours? The failure of Habermasian critical theorists even to pose much
less respond to these questions indicates a fatal weakness in their approach.
There is worse to come.
Habermas’s reformulation of Weber’s differentiation theory neutralizes
rational systems by identifying them with nonsocial rationality as
such. This has conservative political implications. In many of Habermas’s
formulations, for example when he considers workers’ control, it
seems that radical demands would be irrational if they treated systems
as socially constructed and hence transformable barriers to full freedom
(Habermas 1986: pp. 45, 91, 187). He thus offers no concrete suggestions,
at least in The Theory of Communicative Action, for reforming
markets and administrations, and instead suggests limiting the range of
their social influence.
In the case of science and technology, this puzzling retreat from a social
account is carried to the point of caricature. Habermas claims that
science and technology are based quite simply on a nonsocial “objectivating
attitude” toward the natural world (Habermas 1984–87: Vol. I,
p. 238). This would seem to leave no room at all for the social dimension
of science and technology, which has been shown over and over to
shape the formulation of concepts and designs. Clearly, if scientists and
technologists stand in a purely objective relation to nature, there can be
no philosophical interest in studying the social background of their insights.
In Habermas’s view, it is difficult to see how a properly differentiated
rationality could incorporate social values and attitudes except as
sources of error or extrinsic goals governing “use.” This implies, too, aproblematic methodological dualism in which phenomenological accounts
of the lifeworld coexist with objectivistic systems-theoretic explanations
of “systems” such as markets and administrations. No doubt
there are objects best analyzed by these different methods, but which
method is suited to analyzing the interactions between them? Habermas
has little to say on this score beyond his account of the boundary shifts
that preoccupy him.
The effect of this approach is to liberate social theory from all the details
of sociological and historical study of actual instances of rationality.
No matter what story sociologists and historians have to tell about a
particular market, administration, or, a fortiori, technology, this is incidental
to the philosophically abstracted forms of differentiated rationality.
The real issue is not whether this or that contingent happening
might have led to different practical results, for all that matters to social
theory is the range of rational systems, the extent of their intrusions into
the proper terrain of communicative action (Feenberg 1999a: chap. 7).
Could it be that the most important differentiation for Habermas is
the one that separates social theory from certain sociological and historical
disciplines, the material of which he feels he must ignore to pursue
his own path as a philosopher? When the results are compared with earlier
theories of modernity, it becomes clear what a tremendous price he
pays to win a space for philosophy. Marx had a concrete critique of the
revolutionary institutions of his epoch, the market and the factory system,
and later modernization theory foresaw a host of social and political
consequences of economic development. But Habermas’s complaints
about the boundaries of welfare state administration seem quite remote
from the main sources of social development today, the response to
environmental crisis, the revolutions in global markets, planetary inequalities,
the growth of the Internet, and other technologies that are
transforming the world. In his work the theory of modernity is no
longer concerned with these material issues, but operates at a higher
level, a level where, unfortunately, very little is going on.
Of course some social theorists have made contributions to the theory
of modernity that do touch on technology in an interesting way, sometimes
under the influence of other aspects of Habermas’s theory.5 Ulrich
Beck has proposed a theory of “reflexive modernity” in which the roleof technology is explicitly recognized and discussed in terms of transformations
in the nature of rationality. Beck starts out from the same concept
of differentiation as Habermas, but he considers it to be only a
stage he calls “simple modernity.” Simple modernity creates a technology
that is both extremely powerful and totally fragmented. The uncontrolled
interactions between the reified fragments have catastrophic
consequences.6 Beck argues that today a “risk society” is emerging and
is especially noticeable in the environmental domain. “Risk society . . .
arises in the continuity of autonomized modernization processes which
are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats. Cumulatively and latently,
the latter produce threats which call into question and eventually
destroy the foundations of industrial society” (Beck 1994: pp. 5–6).
The risk society is inherently reflexive in the sense that its consequences
contradict its premises. As it becomes conscious of the threat it
poses for its own survival, reflexivity becomes self-reflection, leading to
new kinds of political intervention aimed at transforming industrialism.
Beck places his hope for an alternative modernity in a radical mixing of
the differentiated spheres that overcomes their isolation and hence their
tendency to blunder into unforeseen crises. “The rigid theory of simple
modernity, which conceives of system codes as exclusive and assigns
each code to one and only one subsystem, blocks out the horizon of future
possibilities. . . . This reservoir is discovered and opened up only
when code combinations, code alloys and code syntheses are imagined,
understood, invented and tried out” (Beck 1994: p. 32).7
This revision of modernity theory is daring and suggestive, but it still
rests on a notion of differentiation that would surely be contested by
most contemporary students of science and technology. Their major
goal has been to show that “differentiation” (Latour calls something
similar “purification”) is an illusion, that the various forms of modern
rationality belong to the continuum of daily practice rather than to a
separate sphere (Latour 1991: p. 81).
Yet the main phenomena identified by the theory of modernity do
certainly exist and require explanation. We have reached a puzzling
impasse in the interdisciplinary relationship around this problem. Practice-
oriented accounts of particular cases cannot be generalized to explain
the systemic character of modernity, while differentiation theoryappears to be invalidated by what we have learned about the social
character of rationality from science and technology studies. A large
part of the reason for this impasse, I believe, is the continuing power of
disciplinary boundaries which, even where they do not become a theoretical
foundation as in Habermas, still divide theorists and researchers.
Far from weakening, these boundaries have become still more rigid in
the wake of the sharp empiricist turn in science and technology studies,
and the growing skepticism in these fields with regard to the theory of
modernity in all its forms (see Misa, chapter 1, this volume). I turn now
to two examples from technology studies to illustrate this point.
The Logic of Symmetry
The constructivist “principle of symmetry” is supposed to ensure that
the study of technological controversies is not biased by knowledge
of the outcome (Bloor 1976: p. 7). Typically, the bias appears in popular
understanding as an “asymmetrical” evaluation of the two sides of
the controversy, ascribing “reason” to the winners and “prejudice,”
“emotion,” “stubbornness,” “venality,” or some other irrational motive
to the losers. A similar bias is also presupposed by such basic concepts
of modernity theory as rationalization and ideology. These concepts appear
to be cancelled by the principle of symmetry.
Social constructivists’ main concern is to achieve a balanced view of
controversies in which rationality is not awarded as a prize to one side
only, but recognized wherever it appears, and in which nontechnical
motives and methods are not dismissed as distortions, but are taken into
account right alongside technical ones as normal aspects of technological
debate. The losers often have excellent reasons for their beliefs, and
the winners sometimes prevail at least in part through dramatic demonstrations
or social advantage as well as rational arguments. The principle
of symmetry orients the researcher toward an even-handed evaluation
by contrast with the inevitable prejudice in favor of the winners
that colors the backward glance of methodologically unsophisticated
observers.
However, there is a risk in such even-handedness where technology is
concerned: if the outcome cannot be invoked to judge the parties to the
controversy, and if all their various motives and rhetorical assets areevaluated without prejudice, how are we to criticize mistakes and assign
responsibility? Consider, for example, the analysis of the Challenger accident
by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (Collins and Pinch 1998:
chap. 2). Recall that several engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company
that designed the space shuttles, at first refused to endorse a coldweather
liftoff. They feared that the O-rings sealing the sections of the
launcher would not perform well at low temperatures. In the event they
were proven right, but management overruled them and the launch
went ahead, with disastrous results. The standard account of this controversy
is asymmetrical, opposing reason—the engineers—to politics—
the managers.
Collins and Pinch think otherwise. They show that the O-rings were
simply one among many known problems in the Challenger’s design.
Since no solid evidence was available to justify canceling the fateful
flight, it was reasonable to go forward and not a heedless flaunting of a
prescient warning. Scheduling needs as well as engineering considerations
influenced the decision, not because of managerial irresponsibility,
but as a way of resolving a deadlocked engineering controversy. It appears
that no one is to blame for the tragic accident that followed, at
least in the sense that this is a case where normally cautious people
would in the normal course of events have made the same bad decision.
However, the evidence Collins and Pinch offer could have supported a
rather different conclusion had they evaluated it in a broader context.
Their symmetrical account obscures the asymmetrical treatment of
different types of evidence within the technical community they study.
It is clear from their presentation that the controversy at Morton
Thiokol was irresolvable because of the systematic demand for quantitative
data and the denigration of observation, even that of an experienced
engineer. Can an analysis of the incident abstain from criticizing this
bias?
Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who was most vociferous in arguing for
the dangers of a cold-weather launch, based his warnings on the evidence
of his eyes. This did not meet what Collins and Pinch prissily define
as “prevailing technical standards” (Collins and Pinch 1998: p. 55).
The fact that Boisjoly was probably right cannot be dismissed as a mere
accident. Rather, it says something about the limitations of a certainparadigm of knowledge, and suggests the existence of an ideological
bias masked by the principle of symmetry. Could it be that Boisjoly’s observations
were dismissed—and quantitative data demanded—mainly to
keep the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on
schedule? Or put another way, would the need for quantitative data
have seemed compelling in the absence of that pressure? By identifying
this case with every other known risk in the design, without regarding
Boisjoly’s observations as a legitimate reason for extra caution, Collins
and Pinch appear to surrender critical reason to so-called “prevailing
technical standards.”8
Now, I cannot claim to have made an independent study of the case,
and Collins and Pinch may well have stronger reasons for their views
than those that appear in their exposition. However, we know from experience
that quantitative measures are all too easily manipulated to get
the answer demanded by the powers that be. For example, quantitative
studies were long thought to “prove” the irrelevance of classroom size
to learning outcomes, contrary to the testimony of professional teachers.
This “proof” was very convenient for state legislators anxious to cut
budgets, but it resulted in an educational disaster that, like the Challenger
accident, could not be denied. Similar abuses of cost-benefit analysis
are all too familiar. How can critical reason be brought to bear on
cases such as these without applying sociological notions such as “ideology,”
which presuppose asymmetry?
A similar problem regarding the supposed opposition of local and
global analyses bedevils science studies. Science studies scholars sometimes
claim that a purely local analysis extended to ever-wider reaches
suffices in the study of society without the need for empirically “ungrounded”
global categories. This is to be sure a puzzling dichotomy. If
the local analysis is sufficiently extended, does it not become nonlocal,
indeed global? Why not just generalize from local examples to macro
categories and theories, as modernity theory does?
For Bruno Latour, the analysis of contingent contests for power
within specific networks suffices, and the introduction of terms such as
“culture,” “society,” or “nature” would simply mask the activities that
establish these categories in the first place. “If I do not speak of ‘culture,’
that is because this word is reserved for only one of the unitscarved out by Westerners to define man. But forces can only be distributed
between the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ locally and to reinforce
certain networks” (Latour 1984: pp. 222–223, my translation).9 Latour
continues in this passage to similarly reduce the terms “society” and
“nature” to local actions.
This “symmetry of humans and nonhumans” eliminates any fundamental
difference between them. The “social” and the “natural” are to
be understood now in the same terms. Attributions of social and natural
status are contingent outcomes of processes operating at a more fundamental
level. Then the distinctions we make between the social or
natural status assigned to such things as a student protest in Paris and
a dieoff of fish in the Mississippi, a politician’s representation of
American farmers and a scientist’s representation of nuclear forces,
are all products of the network to which we belong, not presuppositions
of it.
This stance appears to have conservative political implications since
in any conflictual situation the stronger party establishes the definition
of the basic terms, “culture,” “nature,” and “society,” and the defeated
cannot appeal to an objective “essence” to validate their claims quand
même. John Law’s well-known network analysis of Portuguese navigation
is thus widely criticized for ignoring the fate of the conquered peoples
incorporated into the colonial network. And Hans Radder argues
that actor-network theory contains an implicit bias toward the victors
(Law 1987; Radder 1996: pp. 111–112).
Underlying Latour’s difficulty with resistance is the strict operationalism
that works as an Ockham’s razor, stripping away generations of accumulated
sociological and political conceptualization. If nature and
society are exhaustively defined by the procedures through which they
emerge as objects, it is unclear how unsuccessful competitors for the
defining role can gain any grip on reality at all, even the feeble grip of
ethical exigency. For example, the aspiring citizens of an aristocratic society
may appeal to “natural” equality against the caste distinctions imposed
by the “collective” to which they belong. But if nature is defined
by the collective, not simply ideologically or theoretically but really,
how can an appeal to nature be invoked oppositionally to sanction
demands for change? Or consider demands for justice for the weak