The Charlton Heston Question

Some ideas in my head, wanted to get them somewhere safer (more permanent?) than the flow and flux of my (unreliable) mental equipment, so here we go.

I’ve been thinking on the question of the neutrality of technology, which is a question I think needs to come near the top of my thesis argument. Can we ask questions as to the inherent morality of given technologies, disregarding particular instances of their use? Thus, the title of this posting comes in a fashion after McLuhan, who responds to the suggestion that individual modern technologies are neither good nor bad: “That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say ... “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11)

I’ve been thinking through this example, still used by the National Rifle Association in the US to counter those who seek to limit the availability of guns to civilians in the form of “guns don’t kill people, people do” (hence “the Charlton Heston Question, “ in honour/parody of the late president/spokesman of the NRA). I think it is nonsense to talk only of the particular uses of technologies and disregard the inherent ways in which they work on and shape the ways we relate to the world, our very psycho-social fabric. The very fact that we create guns at all, regardless of their eventual use, is, I think, instructive as to human nature.

For McLuhan, of course, mediating technologies are never neutral, they implicitly shape the messages they carry, in much the way a given metaphor transforms (and thus biases) our understanding of a concept – example: “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, which might tend to make us see ourselves as actors spouting words karaoke style from a predetermined script, but neglects to tell us, then, who the writer, the director, the audience, even the lighting-guy, is (presumably they’re all God, but then this means that this metaphor is implicitly shaping our view of the world as one created by a creator, who wants to watch over us, who approves or not, etc.) – thus we see the world in a novel way, a little differently, see common objects from new aspects, and hence we come to understand it a little better. Ok, so this is a good thing BUT we must heed the baggage and biases, and so iterate the ways in which that media (or metaphor) implicitly shapes the way in which we see the world.

Which is a somewhat similar starting point (though they reach different conclusions) to Heidegger, whose “The Question Concerning Technology,” (In: "Basic Writings", London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, pp.287-317) seeks to address the essence of technology in relation to human existence. There, he posits the view of technology as neutral to be the instrumental/anthropological definition. Thus “According to ancient doctrine”, he advises, “the essence of a thing is considered to be what the things is” (288) and through this definition, we arrive at two statements: “One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity” (288). In these terms, technology is neutered, reduced to nothing more than a human activity pursuant to particular ends.

For Heidegger, this “uncannily correct” (288) definition does not, of course, tell the whole story. For him, in the terms of his earlier work, this would be the ontic explanation, correctly identifying states of affairs but not telling us what it is to be in this relationship. We have privileged ourselves, as the efficient cause of the coming to be of technology, at the neglect of Aristotle’s other three causes: material, formal, final. The material a technology is made of, the particular form it takes, and its telos, that which gives it its cultural bounds as a technology for a purpose, are all responsible for, all at play in the “bringing-forth” of, a given technology.  

Thus the potentialities of the stuff and structure of given materials, along with (and most importantly for Heidegger) the cultural context into which that technology is to be employed, are all necessary causes alongside that of the efficient cause. Given this, in the example of the coming to be of a sacrificial chalice, the silversmith is the efficient cause, “not at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making ... The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. To consider carefully is in Greek legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacred vessel’s bringing-forth and subsistence take and retain their departure.” (291, author’s italics)

So technology is an occasion of “revealing” rather than creation, bring out of concealment into unconcealment, and this, if right has big implications for our understanding of what it is to be the cause of something, as inventor, creator or author. If we aren’t in full control of the coming to be of technology, then the instrumental/anthropological definition is deficient because it neglects the ways in which our technologies act on us, the way we are influenced to bring them to be. Heidegger goes on to argue that our true relation to technology is one of the enframing (Gestell) of nature, challenging it as a “standing-reserve” of resources to be plundered, and that this has a negative impact on our existence. I don’t want to tackle that can of worms just now though, rather just use the first part of his argument (can I just use the first part without being bound to accept the latter? – I think so, but maybe not) as an illustration of why the view of technologies as neutral is deficient, to demonstrate that human intention is not the sole author of technology, and to iterate the reasons why we must attend to the ways in which they are working on us as well as us on them.  

For Langdon Winner, in “The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,” technologies have political consequences:

“The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.” (28-9)

Thus, he proposes that the neutral view of technology blinds us to an essential matter of enquiry: “we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.... If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.” (25)

All of which (I think) I agree with, and leads back into my research, where the definition of materiality I gave in my last post (“materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content”) can be, perhaps, be sharpened into the research question:

“What are the material differences between analogue and digital forms, and in what logically and temporally prior ways do these differences hold the potential to effect and affect creation, consumption, and curation of content?”

As an example of the sorts of questions this is trying to pose: what does it mean that I can put a hyperlink here to something which may or may not be related to this piece, how does that effect my writing this, your (if you’re there) reading of it (did you immediately link through to it, or if you didn’t, will you ignore it now that I’ve made it questionable whether its even connected, will you even come back to read the rest of this if you do click on it?), and the effects on the archive (e.g. if this blog were being archived, would that page now be considered part of this work?). How does this sort of interlinking of information affect us? Is there anything in the truisms that concentration suffers, depth of thought sacrificed for a life of surfing/scratching the surface? Are we all living essentially post-modern lives on the net, lives of a random flow of unrelated shreds of information, a loss of traditional narrative form for one where any casual interconnection is taken to be symbolic of the larger web of meaning(lessness)? Etc, etc, etc. Wild speculation at the end, I know, but that’s where all this stuff is eventually heading ...