Theorizing Modernity and Technology

The Need for Integrated Studies of Modernity and Technology
Technology made modernity possible. It has been the engine of modernity,
shaping it and propelling it forward. The Renaissance was made
possible by major fourteenth- and fifteenth-century inventions like the
mechanical clock, the full-rigged ship, fixed-viewpoint perspective,
global maps, and the printing press. The emergence of industrial society
in the eighteenth century was the result of an industrial revolution that
was made possible by technological innovations in metallurgy, chemical
technology, and mechanical engineering. The recent emergence of an information
society is also the product of a largely technological revolution,
in information technology. Technology has catalyzed the transition
to modernity and catalyzed major transitions within it. More than that,
technologies are and continue to be an integral part of the infrastructure
of modernity, being deeply implicated in its institutions, organizing and
reorganizing the industrial system of production, the capitalist economic
system, surveillance and military power; and shaping cultural symbols,
categories, and practices (see Lyon and Edwards, chapters 6 and 7 in
this volume).
If modernity is shaped by technology, then the converse also holds:
technology is a creation of modernity. The common wisdom of technology
studies, that technology is socially shaped or even socially constructed,
that it is “society made durable,” implies that a full
understanding of modern technology and its evolution requires a conception
of modernity within which modern technology can be explained
as one of its products. If this holds for technology at large, it certainlyalso holds for particular technologies, technical artifacts, and systems.
These are also products of modernity and bear the imprint, not only of
the behaviors of actors immediately involved in their construction, but
also of the larger sociocultural and economic conditions within which
they are developed. To ignore this larger context is to leave out part of
the story that can be told about that technology. It would be like staging
Wagner’s Parsifal with only the actors on stage, without any settings,
costumes, or props.
In the current specialized academic landscape, modernity is the object
of study of modernity theory, and technology is studied in technology
studies. Few works exist that bridge these two fields and that study technology
with extensive reference to modernity, or modernity with extensive
reference to technology, or that concentrate on both by studying the
way in which evolutions within modernity intersect with technological
changes. In modernity theory, technology is often treated as a “black
box” that is discussed, if at all, in abstract and often essentialist and
technological determinist terms. In technology studies, the black box of
technology is opened, and technologies and their development are studied
in great empirical detail, yet technology studies generate their own
black box, which is society. The larger sociocultural and economic context
in which actors operate is either treated as a background phenomenon
to which some hand-waving references are made, or it is not treated
at all—a black box returned to sender, address unknown.
Undoubtedly, part of the reason that modernity theory has not adequately
come to grips with technology has been the lack of empirically
informed accounts of technology. It is only in the past few decades that
major progress has been made in our understanding of technology and
technological change, with the establishment of technology studies as a
mature field of study. The same reason cannot be given for the lack of
reference to modernity theory in technology studies because modernity
theory has been around a lot longer than technology studies. Here, this
lack of reference is more likely explained by the abstract and totalizing
character of many theories of modernity; their often inadequate accounts
of technology; the speculative, untested character of many of
their claims; and the difficulty of connecting the microlevel concepts of
technology studies to the macrolevel categories of modernity theory.These criticisms do not apply equally to all theories of modernity.
There is a world of difference between the abstract, totalizing theories of
modernity of classical critical theory, Marxism, and phenomenology,
and many recent theories of modernity, such as those of David Harvey
and Manuel Castells, that are empirically rich and mindful of heterogeneity
and difference. So if the sociocultural and economic context that
is modernity ought to be considered in technology studies, then technology
studies should work to appropriate more adequate theories of modernity,
or start developing its own.1
It is time, then, to bridge the disciplinary gaps that now separate
modernity theory and technology studies and to work at empirically informed
and theoretically sophisticated accounts of technology, modernity,
and their mutual shaping. In this essay, I contribute to this task
through an analysis of the problems and misunderstanding that now
beset modernity theory and technology studies in their respective treatment
(or nontreatment) of technology and modernity.
A key conclusion is that the major obstacle to a future synthesis of
modernity theory and technology studies is that technology studies
mostly operate at the micro (and meso) level, whereas modernity theory
operates at the macrolevel, and it is difficult to link the two. I analyze
the micro-macro problem and ways in which it may be overcome in
technology studies and modernity theory. The next two sections provide
basic expositions of concepts, themes, and approaches in modernity theory
and technology studies. Their aim is to introduce these fields to
readers insufficiently familiar with them, as well as to set the stage for
the analysis that follows.
Modernity Theory: Understanding the Modern Condition
Structure and Aims
Modernity is the historical condition that characterizes modern societies,
cultures, and human agents. Theories of modernity aim to describe
and analyze this historical condition. A distinction can be made between
cultural and epistemological theories of modernity, most of which are
found in the humanities, and institutional theories, which are common in
social theory—although in both traditions many theories of modernitycan be found that blend cultural, institutional, and epistemological
aspects.
Cultural and epistemological theories of modernity focus on the distinction
between premodern and modern cultural forms and modes
of knowledge. These theories usually place the transition from traditional
society to modernity in the Renaissance period, in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Europe. The transition to modernity, in this conception,
is characterized by the emergence of the notion of an autonomous
subject, the transition from an organic to a mechanistic world picture,
and the embrace of humanistic values and objective scientific inquiry.
Some theories date the transition to modernity later than this, as late as
the eighteenth century, during which Enlightenment thought had culminated
in a genuine project of modernity, with universal pretensions to
progress, and with fully developed conceptions of objective science, universal
morality and law, and autonomous art (e.g., Habermas 1983).
The cultural-epistemological approach to modernity dominates in philosophy,
with Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger as early proponents, and
is also well represented in cultural history and cultural studies.
Many studies in the humanities that analyze modernity as a cultural
phenomenon also focus on modernism, which is a phenomenon distinct
from modernity. Modernism, or aesthetic modernism, as it is also called,
was a cultural movement that began in the mid-nineteenth century as a
reaction against the European realist tradition, in which works of art
were intended to “mirror” external nature or society, without any additions
or subtractions by the artist. Modernist artists, in often quite different
ways, rejected this realism and held that it is the form of works of
art, rather than their content, that guarantees authenticity and liberates
art from tradition. Modernism has been very influential in literature, in
the visual arts, and in architecture, with movements as diverse as naturalism,
expressionism, surrealism, and functionalism being collected
under it.
The emergence of modernism has often been explained by reference to
major social transformations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
modernity. David Harvey, for instance, has argued that modernism was
a cultural response to a crisis in the experience of space and time,
which was the result of processes of time-space compression under latenineteenth-century capitalism (Harvey 1989, chap. 8). The label “modernism”
is also used in a broader sense, in which it does not refer to an
aesthetic movement, but to the culture and ideology of modernity at
large (e.g., Bell 1976). “Modernism,” in this sense, stands for positivism,
rationalism, the belief in linear progress and universal truth, the rational
planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge
and production. When used in this latter sense, the notion of modernism
becomes almost interchangeable with the notion of modernity construed
as a cultural or epistemological condition (see Berman 1982).
Institutional theories of modernity focus on the social and institutional
structure of modern societies, and tend to locate the transition to
modernity in the eighteenth century, with the rise of industrial society in
Europe. Institutional theories of modernity are as old as social theory itself,
with early proponents like Weber, Marx, and Durkheim outlining
key structural features of modern societies and theorizing major transitions
from traditional to modern society. Modernity, in the institutional
conception, is a mode of social life or organization rather than a cultural
or epistemological condition. It is characterized by institutional structures
and processes, such as industrialism, capitalism, rationalization,
and reflexivity. It is with this institutional meaning of modernity that
one can correlate the notion of modernization, which is the transformation
of traditional societies into industrial societies. Modernity used to
describe a condition that emerged in eighteenth-century European societies,
but today it characterizes industrial societies around the globe.2
In my discussion of modernity theory, I give special emphasis to the
social theory tradition, with the understanding that much of this work
analyzes not only institutional aspects of modernity but cultural and
epistemological dimensions as well. Indeed, it is quite common to see
these aspects combined in social theories of modernity, even if institutional
features receive the most emphasis. This blending of traditions has
been particularly strong in critical theory, with authors like Habermas,
Marcuse, and Adorno referring to Hegel and Heidegger as liberally as to
Marx and Weber. However, it is also quite visible in more recent theories
of modernity, such as those of Giddens, Harvey, Wagner, and
Castells, as well as in the early institutional theories of modernity developed
by Weber and Marx.Theories of modernity in the social theory tradition present an account
of the distinct structural features that characterize modern societies
and the way these features came into being. Typically, they contain
most or all of the following elements:
• They draw the boundaries of modernity as a historical period, contrasting
it with a premodern period and sometimes also with a postmodern
period.
• They describe and analyze the special features of modernity, with an
emphasis on institutional, cultural, or epistemological dimensions. They
almost invariably do this through macrolevel or “abstract” analysis.
However, they may contain various elaborations, case studies, or illustrations
of the macro theory.
• They (optionally) describe the dynamics of modernity, delineating
(1) the historic changes that led to modern society, (2) various epochs
within modernity (e.g., early, high, and late modernity; classical and reflexive
modernity), and (3) the transitions between these epochs.
• Some theories of modernity also contain normative evaluations or critiques
of the condition of modernity. Some propose visions of an alternative
society or speculate how present modernity may transform itself
into another type of social formation.
Next to grand theories of modernity, such as those of Marx, Weber,
Habermas, and Giddens, one can find studies of particular eras within
modernity, of major transitions and developments within the modern era,
and of particular features or structures of modernity. Theories of particular
eras within modernity attempt to characterize a particular historical epoch
and to analyze the transitions that led to it (Wagner 1994). Many contemporary
social theorists focus on late modernity as a historical epoch emerging
in the second half of the twentieth century, and attempt to characterize
its special features. Thus, one finds theories of “reflexive modernity” (Beck
et al. 1994), “the risk society” (Beck 1992), “postindustrial society” (Bell
1976; Touraine 1971), “the information age” and “the information society”
(Castells 1996; Schiller 1981), “the global age” (Albrow 1996), and
many others. Akin to these theories, one finds theories of postmodernity,
which hypothesize that we have already left (late) modernity and have
recently entered a new postmodern era (e.g., Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989).Besides theories of particular eras in modernity, there are many studies
of major sociocultural, technological, or economic transitions within
modernity. These range from studies of the scientific revolution and the
industrial revolution to studies of the control revolution (a revolution in
technologies of control that is claimed by Beniger [1989] to have paved
the way for the information society) or the emergence of Fordism, to
theories of the historical development of the modern subject and of new
modern forms of power (e.g., Foucault 1977). Not all these works explicitly
situate the developments they analyze within the wider context
of modern social institutions and culture. Finally, one can find studies
that are concerned with particular aspects or structures of modernity,
such as modern identity (Lash and Friedman 1993; Giddens
1991), capitalism (Sayer 1991), pornography (Hunt 1993), consumer
culture (Slater 1997), and gender (McGaw 1989; Marshall 1994; Felski
1995).
Not every work in social theory is a work in modernity theory. For it
to qualify as such, it would have to be centrally concerned with major
institutional, cultural, or epistemological aspects of or transformations
within modernity, such as capitalism, the autonomous self, modern
technology, and the Enlightenment. Alternatively, for phenomena that
are not inherently tied to modernity or at least do not define it, such as
pornography, adolescence, or the automobile, it would study these in relation
to the larger institutional, cultural, and epistemological context of
modernity. Thus, an analysis of adolescence would be a study in modernity
theory if it explicitly considered the historical, cultural, and institutional
constructions of adolescence in the modern era and changes in
these constructions over time, but not if it treated adolescence in a
largely ahistorical way (e.g., as a set of locally enacted constructions
with little historical continuity), or if it studied its historical treatment in
a particular country or setting without reference to its relation to modern
social institutions and culture.3
Modernity and Social Theory
Theories of modernity have always held a prominent position in social
theory. What follows is a brief review. Any such review will have to
start with Karl Marx and Max Weber, who are often identified as thefathers of modernity theory. They are both known for their theories of
the transition between feudal and industrial society, and their theories of
(capitalist) industrial society. They are hence early proponents of institutional
theories of modernity and of the transition of the premodern to
the modern period.
In Marx’s historical materialist conception of modernity, the difference
between the modern and the premodern era is characterized by
qualitative differences in the economic structure. The economic structure
of a society is made up of production relations and it changes when
the development of the productive forces (means of production and
labor power) results in greater productive power. According to Marx,
the transition from feudal to capitalist society was caused by large increases
in productive power in feudal society. These increases caused
changes in production relations, and hence in the economic structure.
The resulting economic structure was capitalist in the late nineteenth
century, but Marx of course envisioned a transition to a post-class socialist
society, a transition that would occur when further increases in
production power made a socialist state possible. He hence envisioned
an early, capitalist, and a late, socialist state of modernity. Both are
characterized by an industrial system of production, but their social
form and culture are significantly different.
Weber (1958[1905]) did not see the transition from feudal to industrial
society as caused by the development of productive power. Instead,
he held that the capitalist economic system that made industrial society
possible was an outgrowth of the Protestant work ethic, which demanded
hard work and the accumulation of wealth. Because capitalism
is profit based, it demanded rationalization so that results could be calculated
and so that efficiency and effectiveness could be increased. In
this way, rationalization became the distinguishing characteristic of
modern industrial societies. The rationalization of society is the widespread
acceptance of rules, efficiency, and practical results as the right
way to approach human affairs and the construction of a social organization
around this notion. According to Weber, rationalization has a
dual face. On the one hand, it has enabled the liberation of humanity
from traditional constraints and has led to increased reason and freedom.
On the other hand, it has also produced a new oppression, the“iron cage” of modern bureaucratic organizational forms that limit
human potential.4
Weber’s notion of rationalization as the hallmark of modernity has
been very influential in modernity theory. It has been particularly influential
in critical theory, particularly with members of the Frankfurt
school such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas, who
built on Weberian notions as well as Marxist ideas in formulating their
sweeping critiques of modern society (see, e.g., Marcuse 1964 and
Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Jürgen Habermas, without doubt the
most influential scholar in the critical theory tradition, has advanced a
theory of modernity with strong Weberian and Marxist influences, in
which he analyzes modernity as an “unfinished project” (Habermas
1983). He theorizes an early phase of modernity and a later phase. Early
modernity witnessed the rise of the “bourgeois public sphere,” which
mediated between the state and the public sphere. In late modernity, the
state and private corporations took over vital functions of the public
sphere, as a result of which the public sphere became a sphere of domination
(Habermas 1989).
Although he is critical of late modernity, Habermas sees an emancipatory
potential in early modernity, with its still-intact bourgeois public
sphere. He hence sees modernity as an “unfinished project” and has attempted
to redeem some elements of modernity (the Enlightenment ideal
of a rational society, the modern differentiation of cultural spheres with
autonomous criteria of value, the ideal of democracy) while criticizing
others (the dominant role of scientific-technological rationality, the culture
of experts and specialists). Central in this undertaking has been his
distinction between two types of rationality: purposive or instrumental
rationality, which is a means for exchange and control and which is
based on a subject-object relationship, and communicative or social rationality,
which is geared toward understanding and is based on a
subject-subject relationship that is the basis for communicative action.
Habermas claims that there has been a one-sided emphasis since the Enlightenment
on instrumental, scientific-technological rationality, which
has stifled possibilities for expression. The result has been a colonization
of the lifeworld by an amalgamated system of economy and state, technology
and science, that carries out its functional laws in all spheres olife. Habermas regards communicative action as a means to put boundaries
on this system and to develop the lifeworld as a sphere of enlightened
social integration and cultural expression.
Looking beyond critical theory, one cannot escape the powerful
analysis of modernity in the work of Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991,
1994b). Giddens analyzes modernity as resting on four major institutions:
industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, and military power. These
and other institutions in modernity moreover exhibit an extreme dynamism
and globalizing scope. To account for this dynamism, Giddens
identifies three developments. The first is the separation of time and
space, through new time- and space-organizing devices and techniques,
from each other and from the contextual features of local places to
which they were tied. Time and space become separate, empty parameters
that can be used as structuring principles for large-scale social and
technical systems. The second development is the disembedding of social
life, the removal of social relations and institutions from local contexts
by disembedding mechanisms, such as money, timetables, organization
charts, and systems of expert knowledge. Disembedding mechanisms define
social relations and guide social interactions without reference to
the peculiarities of place. The third development is the reflexive appropriation
of knowledge, which is the production of systematic knowledge
about social life that is then reflexively applied to social activity. Jointly,
these developments create a social dynamic of displacement, impersonality,
and risk. These can be overcome through reembedding (the manufacture
of familiarity), trust (in the reliability of disembedding mechanisms),
and intimacy (the establishment of relationships of trust with others
based on mutual processes of self-disclosure).
Risk, trust, and the reflexive appropriation of knowledge are also central
themes in Ulrich Beck’s theory of (late) modernity (Beck 1992).
Beck distinguishes two stages of modernization, the first of which is simple
modernization: the transformation of agrarian society into industrial
society. The second stage, which began in the second half of the twentieth
century, is that of reflexive modernization. This is a process in which
modern society confronts itself with the negative consequences of (simple)
modernization and moves from a conflict structure based on the distribution
of goods to a model based on the distribution of risks. Ourcurrent society is the risk society, in which risks are manufactured by institutions
and can be distributed in different ways. The distribution of
risk occurs with major social transformations at the backdrop, transformations
in which traditional social forms such as family and gender
roles, which continued to play an important role in industrial society,
are in the risk society undergoing radical change, leading to a progressive
“individualization of inequality.”
The idea that modernity has recently entered a new phase is pervasive
in contemporary social theory, even among those authors that stop
short of claiming that we have entered or are entering a phase of postmodernity.
Intensifying globalization, the expansion and intensification
of social reflexivity, the proliferation of nontraditional social forms, the
fragmentation of authority, the fusion of political power and expertise,
the transition to a post-Fordist economy that is no longer focused on
mass production and consumption and in which the production of signs
and spaces becomes paramount—all have been mentioned as recent developments
that point to a new stage of reflexive or radicalized modernity
(e.g., Lash and Urry 1994; Beck et al. 1994; Giddens 1990, 1994b;
Albrow 1996; Lipietz 1987), with most authors identifying the late
1970s as a transition period. Many authors point specifically to the revolution
in information technology in claiming that we have entered an
information age (or, equivalently, a postindustrial age) in which an
economy based on information, not goods, has become the organizing
principle of society (e.g., Bell 1976; see Webster 1995 for an overview).
In the transition from an industrial to an information society, the economic
system is transformed, and along with it the occupational structure,
the structure of organizations, and social structure and culture at
large. According to Manuel Castells, who has presented the most comprehensive
theory of the information society to date, the basic unit of
economic organization in the information age is the network, made up
of subjects and organizations, and continually modified as networks
adapt to their (market) environments. Castells argues that contemporary
society is characterized by a bipolar opposition between the Net (the abstract
universalism of global networks) and the Self (the strategies by
which people try to affirm their identities), which is the source of new
forms of social struggle (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998).Modernity and Postmodernity
Not all scholars agree that modernity is still the condition that we are
in. Theorists of postmodernity claim that we have recently entered an
era of postmodernity, which follows modernity. Postmodernity is often
considered, like modernity, to be a historical condition. Most theorists
who consider postmodernity in this way place the transition from modern
to postmodern society somewhere in the 1960s or 1970s, although
some hold that we are still in the middle of a transition phase. They hold
that changes in society over the past century accumulated during these
decades to produce a society whose institutional, cultural, or epistemological
condition is sufficiently different from that of modern society to
warrant the new label.
Many postmodern theorists point only to cultural changes to support
this claim. Some, however, emphasize technological and economic changes
and see changes in cultural and social forms as resulting from them.
David Harvey emphasizes the 1970s transition from a Fordist economy
of mass production and consumption to a global post-Fordist regime
characterized by greater product differentiation, intensified rates of technological
and organizational innovation, and more flexible use of labor
power (Harvey 1989). Frederick Jameson has theorized a transition to
“late capitalism,” which is global and in which all realms of personal
and social life and spheres of knowledge are turned into commodities.
He claims that late capitalism comes with its own cultural logic, which
is postmodernism (Jameson 1991). Lash and Urry (1994) point to the
shift from an economy of goods to an economy of signs and spaces, as
does Jean Baudrillard (1995), who claims that information technology,
mass media, and cybernetics have effected a transition from an era of industrial
production to an era of simulation, in which models, signs, and
codes determine new social orders. The culture of postmodernity is
often characterized by consumerism, commodification, the simulation of
knowledge and experience; the blurring if not disappearance of the distinction
between representation and reality; and an orientation on the
present that erases both past history and a sense of a significantly different
future. The cultural shifts also include a decline in epistemic and political
authority, the fragmentation of experience and personal identity,
and the emergence of a disorienting postmodern hyperspace.Not all postmodern theorists hold postmodernity to be a historical
condition, however. For some, like Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity
is rather a cultural or epistemological form that is not essentially
tied to a particular historical period. Lyotard holds that within contemporary
society, one can find both modern and postmodern forms existing
together.5 The characteristic of postmoderns like Lyotard is that
they resist the modern form. For Lyotard, modernity is equivalent to
reason, the Enlightenment, totalizing and universalizing thought, and
grand historical narratives. It is equivalent to what I identified earlier as
modernism in a broad sense, that is, the culture and ideology of modernity.
Lyotard criticizes the modern form of knowledge and calls for new
kinds of knowledge that do not impose a grid on reality, but that emphasize
difference. Lyotard’s cultural critique is also a critique of scholarly
method. He argues that postmodern scholars should not do theory.
They are also not to produce new grand narratives of society, but should
deconstruct and criticize modernist claims for universalistic knowledge
by doing local, microlevel studies that emphasize heterogeneity and plurality
(Lyotard 1984a). He rejects the old methodology of social theory,
along with any and all of its theoretical claims. This call for a postmodernization
of the social sciences and humanities has been echoed by
Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Zygmunt Bauman, and can be seen
in the profusion of postmodern case studies and analyses that uncover
difference and heterogeneity and celebrate cultural “others.”
Postmodern theorists thus range from writers like Jameson and Harvey,
who study postmodernity as a historical era, to those like Lyotard
and Rorty, who criticize modernist ideology and develop and employ
postmodern methodologies for the humanities and social sciences. As a
critique of modernist thought, postmodernism is moreover an intellectual
orientation that is different from, even if it overlaps with, aesthetic
postmodernism, which has emerged in literature, architecture, and the
visual arts since the 1960s and 1970s as a response to aesthetic modernism.
Critics of (academic) postmodernism, which include Habermas
and Giddens, criticize both the hypothesized transition from modernity
to postmodernity and the intellectual attitude of postmodern scholars.
Giddens, for example, claims that in spite of the discontinuities cited by
postmodernists, the major institutions of modernity as it existed in thenineteenth century and the early twentieth century—industrialism, capitalism,
surveillance, and military power—are still in place, and he therefore
only wants to go as far as to theorize a late or “radicalized” stage
of modernity (Giddens 1990). He and Habermas have both criticized
postmodernism’s antitheoretical attitude, its epistemological and moral
relativism, its irrationalism, and its laissez-faire attitude to politics
(Giddens 1990; Habermas 1987). Similar debates exist within postmodern
theory, with Harvey (1989) theorizing a transition to postmodernity
while criticizing postmodernist thought, and Lyotard (1984b) criticizing
Jameson’s “totalizing dogmas” and defense of master narratives.