School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, University of London MACHINES AND THE MACHINIC IN POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE Undergraduate Option Course 2003-2004 Mondays, 18.00-19.00, 19.15-20.15, Room N4003, Main Building Contents Course tutor Aims Objectives Background reading Reading and libraries Journals The Internet Computing facilities Teaching arrangements Assessment General Essay requirements Essay guidelines Keeping in touch Problems affecting study Student feedback Syllabus and dates Lecture Outlines and Reading Lists Exam paper, 2001-2002 Appendix 1: essay guidelines Appendix 2: marking schema Appendix 3: plagiarism in coursework and dissertations Appendix 4: Calendar for 2003-2004 Course tutor 1 2 2 3 4 5 5 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 10 11 46 48 50 51 55 James Brown, c/o School Office, 10 Gower Street e-mail: j.brown@mdx.ac.uk ’phone messages: 020 7631 6789/0 1 Aims Technology looms large in modern, industrial societies, both as concrete, economic fact, and as idea and symbol. It has become an intriguingly and awkwardly overdetermined term: so much so that it can seem that the more insistently we speak of technology as such the less sure we are what we mean. On the one hand, we reach for technology as explanatory model and as fact the better to understand and control our world; on the other we invest it with such mystique as almost either to worship or demonize it, and often fear it is getting out of control -- possibly to control us. The modern version of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? sometimes seems to be What technology will regulate technology for us? IT has a certain vogue as a likely candidate; but that only begs the further question: What will regulate IT? Technology is complexly and variously concerned with power and powers: we reach for it to enhance our powers (though often fear we forfeit them by so doing, as, for example, when craft workers are deskilled by new technologies); we also engage in it as the only decisive way of demonstrating our powers; and both as image and as fact it is readily seen not merely as a political tool but as the entire political system. This is an idea Hobbes starts running with his image of the state as a clockwork, artificial man, and it persists in talk of machinery of government and the political or party machine. The idea gets a further twist as states increasingly assert power and control by means of various technologies, so it’s unclear when we think of states in machinic terms whether we’re indulging in metaphor or metonymy. The aim of the course is to explore the interplay between cultural, political, social and material processes, and the terms available in which to conceive and govern them, as manifested in the impact of machines as idea, metaphor and fact. The course is organised into an approximately chronological selection of topics. But it is not an historical survey: so no careful history of the Industrial revolution, for example. In looking backwards, the course seeks issues that are of immediate concern to us now, and which historical perspective might help us to reappraise. The earliest sections of the course introduce a world in which machines as ideas and facts are starting to develop their characteristic and slippery ambiguity in relation to the material and the ideal. But it’s a world in which mentality and experience have arguably yet to be radically recast by the idea of technology as such. The ‘machine’ as a model of explanatory orderliness, self-regulating autonomy and tireless productivity affects this world only in part. A simple way into the course is to see it as charting some of the complex, often contested, uneven and not necessarily inevitable processes by which certain cultures come to be permeated by uses and concepts of machinery, and the ways in which these impinge upon (for example) forms of society, organization, power, legitimation, decision-making, selfunderstanding, work, and culture. Besides the idea of the machine, the course is drawn together by several recurrent issues, such as the autonomy of technology, the relation between technology and political or social control, and the problem of rationality vis-à-vis culture. Objectives Students taking this course will continue to develop their skills in evaluating evidence and argument, and in oral and written presentation. They will cultivate particular expertise in 2 exploring a complex theme in relation to a wide variety of materials, drawn from various discourses and from material culture. They will acquire a broad understanding of what has become a pervasive issue in industrial civilization, and will assess and criticize different ways of reflecting upon this in a theoretically sophisticated and historically informed way. Background reading Aronowitz, Stanley, Barbara Martinson & Michael Menser, Eds, 1996, Technoscience and Cyberculture, New York: Routledge. Cutcliffe, Stephen H. Terry S. Reynolds, Eds., 1997, Technology and American History: an historical anthology from Technology and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durbin, Paul T., Ed., 1980, Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology and Medicine, New York: Free Press. Andrew Feenberg & Alastair Hannay, Eds., 1995, Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jennings, Humphrey, 1987, Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings & Charles Madge [1985], London: Picador. Landes, David S., 1969, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melzer, Arthur M., Weinberger, Jerry, & Zinman, M. Richard, Eds., 1993, Technology in the Western Political Tradition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitcham, Carl, 1994, Thinking Through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mumford, Lewis, 1934, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt Brace. Mumford, Lewis, 1967, The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. Mumford, Lewis, 1970, The Myth of the Machine Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. Olson, Richard, 1990, Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, vol. 2., Berkeley: University of California Press Pacey, Arnold, 1983, The Culture of Technology, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Pacey, Arnold, 1999, Meaning in Technology, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. 3 Pursell, Carroll, 1994, White Heat: People and Technology, London: BBC Books. Rhodes, Richard, Ed., 1999, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems and the Human World, New York: Simon & Schuster. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1932, Science and the Modern World [1926], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winner, Langdon, 1977, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Reference Bunch, Bryan & Alexander Hellemans, Eds., 1994, The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology, New York: Simon and Schuster. Day, Lance & Ian McNeil, 1996, Eds., Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology, London: Routledge. Walker, Peter M.B., Ed., 1995, Larousse Dictionary of Science and Technology, Edinburgh: Larousse. Bibliographies published annually in Technology and Culture [available in ULL] Reading and libraries Although lectures and seminars constitute an essential element of the course, your learning depends largely on the reading and research that you undertake personally. With this in mind, please make sure that you register with the libraries listed below as soon as possible. You should also acquaint yourself with the periodicals that are available on-line as e-journals. These are accessible, free and direct to your PC, via the Birkbeck College Library website — http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/ejournal.html. Most importantly, try to get into the habit of regular reading and preparation for your weekly classes. Your success in this course, as well as your enjoyment of it, will be directly related to regular participation and the amount of reading that you accomplish throughout the year. Most of the items listed in the reading list below can be found in the Birkbeck College Library, in the Malet Street building, which is open seven days a week for most of the year. In addition, the Library provides an increasing number of on-line services, including JSTOR and Ingenta (formerly, BIDS) are available in the Library. The Library produces a comprehensive set of guidelines about how to use it and other libraries. Together with other useful information, they are available on the Library website at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/. Those books or journals which are not in the College Library can usually be found in collections close by, for example, at the University of London Library at Senate House, and the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It is important that you familiarise yourself with these libraries—what they hold in their collections, when they are open, how access can be obtained, what your borrowing rights are, whether remote access is possible, and what specialist features (e.g. electronic and on-line 4 sources, short loan facilities, etc.) are available—as soon as possible. Sometimes your rights as a reader may not be clear, so it is always worth inquiring. For example, as a Birkbeck student you may not enter the BLPES course collection, which holds a wealth of valuable material but is open only to LSE students. However, you can order items from the course collection and have them delivered to you in the open part of the library. This can take some time but it is important to know that you do have this option. The Short Loan Collection in the College Library is a particularly important resource. It holds many of the essential journal articles and books for this course. It is important to make the most of the electronic resources available for this course, both through the library and on the internet, as well as to use such other libraries as are open to you. While the School makes every effort to ensure that the library is stocked with the materials needed for all course units, the number of students will always far exceed the number of copies of any given text. Planning your reading ahead and diversifying the range of resources you use will help to avoid the problems that arise from ‘herding’, when 20 or 30 students on a course go in search of the same handful of copies of a core text at the same time. Students using the Birkbeck College Library are asked to report any lost or stolen item to the School as soon as possible, so that steps may be taken to locate or replace it as quickly as possible. They may notify the School Administrator for undergraduates, Sylvia Cabrera (s.cabrera@bbk.ac.uk, 7631 6780), the lecturer for this course unit (James Brown, j.brown@mdx.ac.uk) or the School’s Library Officer Dr. Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, D.Dimitrakopoulos@bbk.ac.uk, 7631 6786. When reporting a missing item to the School, please provide the author’s name, the title and the Birkbeck Library shelfmark. NB Items that are the main reading for a session are usually marked as being in the Short Loan Collection (SLC), along with their shelfmarks. This does not mean that there are not any copies in the rest of the library. Journals The following journals are likely to prove useful: • Impact of Science on Society • Research in Philosophy and Technology [an annual] • Science as Culture • Science, Technology and Human Values • Social Studies of Science • Technology and Culture • Technology in Society The Internet The internet is a very important learning resource. Many valuable materials are now available on-line, but you should be no less critical of the material that you find on-line than you would be of books and articles. You should endeavour to become a regular user—taught courses are run by CCS at Birkbeck and a teach yourself course, Tonic, is available in the College Library—and to familiarise yourself with relevant websites, including the School website at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/polsoc/. You should visit this site regularly for information about the 5 course, announcements and messages from course tutors or other students. Please note that where you use it material available on the Internet needs to be cited as punctiliously as any article or book. Besides the School website at http:www.bbk.ac.uk/polsoc/ the following contain handy links for issues in this field: http://shot-dev.jhu.edu/ Society for the History of Technology -- publishers of Technology and Culture http://echo.gmu.edu/center/index.html Specializes in links to sites specializing in history of science and technology http://www.alteich.com Specializes in study of technology http://radburn.rutgers.edu/andrews/projects/ssit/default.htm IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University There are also some web-based journals which are worth keeping an eye on, among them: Wired First Monday Culture Machine http://www.wired.com http://www.firstmonday.dk.issues http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk And many, many more sites... If you find anything especially useful, do mention it to the rest of the group. For this course experience of this and other data-systems might also be deemed fieldwork as well as research. As you use it you might try to notice how the experience of following up references and hunting for information affects you. What kind of intereaction (or passivity) does it foster? Some people see new forms of society and politics in this. Do you? And remember that the pearls are cast in the midst of a lot of dross. For every worthwhile item there are scores of inane, misleading, and insane ones. Computing Facilities Workstation rooms, provided by Central Computing Services (CCS), are available at a number of locations in the College. CCS produces useful information sheets on a range of IT-related subjects and runs training sessions on various aspects of IT use. Information is available on-line at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ccs/. All students are automatically given a password at the beginning of term for use of computers and e-mail. If you do not receive a password, you should contact CCS directly (020 7631 6298). 6 Teaching Arrangements The course is taught through a combination of lectures and student-led discussion. A lecture in the first hour will identify the main themes and debates for each given topic. The second hour will take the form of organised student-led discussion. Class discussion will relate to the lecture and may be structured around a particular piece of assigned reading, or a presentation by one of the group. Regular attendance at classes is essential. You should contact either one of us or the School Office (020 7631 6789/0) if you are unable to come to a particular session. The work for each seminar is set out below, and it is expected that all students will have read the relevant required reading and be prepared to participate in discussion. Classes will take place between 6.00 and. 8.15. on Monday evenings in room N4003 in the Main Building. Assessment General When writing your essay, please make use of the essay guidelines (Appendix I), which are intended to offer advice on academic conventions, including referencing, and style. You will also find the Marking Schema, which outlines the criteria that will be used in evaluating your written work, towards the end of this coursebook (Appendix II). You should note, crucially, that all work submitted for assessment must be your own. Before beginning your first piece of coursework, please ensure that you are clear about the concept of plagiarism and how to avoid it (see Appendix III). Regrettably, instances of plagiarism are on the increase, and the School and the College have been compelled to impose severe penalties where plagiarism is detected. The assessment for this course is by unseen written examination taken at the end of the academic year. This method of assessment encourages and tests the development of subjectspecific understanding and knowledge, skills of analysis, evaluation and problem solving, and encourages study across the breadth of the syllabus. It discourages plagiarism. However, you are strongly encouraged to submit two essays of c.1500 words, the first on or before 12 December 2003 and the second on or before 26 March 2004. Though these will not count towards your final mark, writing these essays is an extremely valuable exercise. They enable us to monitor your progress, allow you an opportunity to receive feedback on your work, and give students returning to education an opportunity to adjust to the discipline of writing without jeopardising their final results. To wait until the exam before working out how to formulate your ideas is to wait too long. There’s nothing like writing for making one find out what one thinks. You can use the essay questions that accompany each week’s reading, or one of the questions from the past exam paper (included in this coursebook). There will also be an opportunity to sit a mock exam paper towards the end of the course. 7 Essay Requirements Two copies of each essay are to be submitted to the School office. Each copy is to be accompanied by a cover sheet (available from outside the School office and on the School website). All essays should be typed or word-processed, double-spaced and printed in a font of a readable size. All essays should give explicit acknowledgement to sources. Although a bibliography should be included in all essays, this does not exhaust this requirement. Quotations should be attributed and ideas used in the text should be referenced. Students are advised to use the Harvard system of referencing. There are serious penalties for plagiarism— the copying or close paraphrasing of published or unpublished work—which is regarded as a serious office by the College. Late essays carry a penalty unless an extension has been agreed with the lecturer in charge of the course – not the School administrative staff. The mark for an essay submitted late without an agreed extension (or after the extension deadline) will be reduced by 2% per working day. Students are responsible for ensuring that their essays and dissertations reach the School on time, no allowance can be made for the loss of work that is posted, or for the loss of work dispatched via a third party. Essays arriving late through the post will be considered to have arrived on time where the postmark is not later than the day before the actual deadline. Essay Guidelines Essays should always present an argument in answer to the chosen question and not just rehearse what you know about the subject. An essay should provide an analysis of the subject rather than consisting merely of description. The argument should be put forward coherently, and be substantiated by factual or textual evidence. It should respond precisely to the question posed. Your argument should be sustained from the first paragraph to the last, with each paragraph contributing in some way to the support or elucidation of your larger multi-stage argument. The first paragraph is particularly important in organising your essay. It should address the question directly and crisply, and introduce the argument that you intend to make. Simplicity of expression throughout is strongly preferred to purple prose. Marks will be awarded according to the quality, clarity and coherence of the argument presented in the essay, the essay’s structure, how well supported by evidence the main claims of the essay are, and whether reference is made to the relevant literature. It’s usually, therefore, a good idea to set aside some time to thinking about the precise terms of the question, and reflecting upon what ways there might be of interpreting and answering it. There are often several possibilities. It’s also often wise to leave oneself time to revise the essay. Especially if you only find out what you’re arguing as you write, revision can be crucial to bringing the argument to the fore, and making it consistent. Ideally, by the time you sit down to write the final version of an essay, you’ll already know what the conclusion is going to be. Every paragraph should in some way help to lead one to that conclusion. If you’d like to discuss an essay you’re working on, do get in touch with me to arrange a tutorial. Detailed guidance on the substance, presentation and referencing of essays is given in appendices 1-3 in this coursebook. 8 Keeping in Touch If you’d like to meet to discuss any aspect of our work, do contact me to arrange a meeting. E-mail me (j.brown@mdx.ac.uk), or leave me a message and your ‘phone number by calling the School Office (020 7631 6789/0), or have a word after class. Problems affecting study If a problem arises which is affecting your studies, you are encouraged to discuss the matter with any of your personal tutor in the first instance, your programme director or the Head of School, Professor Peter John (020 7631 6783, p.john@bbk.ac.uk). Alternatively, you might contact the Students’ Union or any of the College services listed in the Programme Handbook. Student Feedback The School believes that student feedback is important to the quality of its provision. It invites you to make your views known or to raise issues through the following formal channels: Class Representatives are elected in the third week of the winter term. They represent the class in the Student's Union and at the Student-Staff Exchange Meetings (see below), and can also approach the programme director or the Head of School to raise issues on behalf of the class or individuals in the class. Student-Staff exchange meetings are scheduled for 17 November 2003 and 23 February 2004. All students are invited, and class representatives are expected to attend. A Course Evaluation Questionnaire is completed and submitted in the spring term. Students are asked to comment on the course and the quality of teaching. Responses are collated and summarised in a course review, presented by the course director to the School Teaching Committee, where they are discussed. The course director examines the issues raised and identifies the follow-up action which is to be taken. A summary is posted on the School noticeboard following the meeting, and a report is presented by the Student Liaison Officer at the next Student-Staff Exchange Meeting. Personal Tutors will communicate any concerns you have to the relevant tutor, teacher or administrator. This is a good way of giving feedback to us privately. 9 Syllabus and Dates Date No. Topic 29 September 6 October 13 October 20 October 27 October 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Introduction The Social and Cultural Life of Early Modern Science Clockwork and Authority Machines for Making States and Souls: Guns and Print Mechanism in Eighteenth-century Social Thinking 3 November 10November 17 November 24 November 1 December 8 December READING WEEK 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Romanticism: Organicism / Mechanism Critiques of the Enlightenment: Instrumental Rationality Political Economy of Machines Technology, Religion and the Sublime Technology / History: The Technological Determinism Debate CHRISTMAS VACATION 12 January 19 January 26 January 2 February 9 February 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16 February 23 February 1 March 8 March 15 March 22 March Biology / Technology Philosophy / Technology Political Machinery The Private Life of Machines Technology and work: Taylorism and its aftermath READING WEEK 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Technology and Modern War Machine Art Luddites or Prophets? Some Critics of Technology Can we choose? Technology and Social Policy Toys for Boys? Feminism and Technology EASTER VACATION 26 April 3 May 10 May 17 May 10 21. 22. 23. 24. Information and Communication BANK HOLIDAY Posthumanism Revision LECTURE OUTLINES AND READING LISTS 1. Introduction We’ll consider the scope of the course and its limits (especially its focus on the west), and consider the construction of the category of ‘technology’. We’ll review various definitions of technology (as artefact, system, process, as more or less social or (alternatively) purely technological); and some of the different ways of discussing technology, such as history of technology, or the various things gathered in the category philosophy of technology, and the ways different kinds of approach generate different kinds of discourse -- something illustrated by an initial look at the argument between technological determinism and social constructivism (see also week10). We’ll reflect on some of the problems of discussing technology, especially the idea of ‘the problem of technology’, and the tendency to frame discussion in terms of dualisms, such as nature vs. artifice, mechanism vs. organism, and the problem of the ideas of control and freedom. With an eye on next week’s topic, we’ll think about the relation of technology to rationality and to science. Reading Archer, Margaret S., 1990, ‘Theory, Culture and Post-Industrial Society,’ Theory, Culture, Society, 7 iii: 97-119. Carroll, John, 1993, Humanism: the Wreck of Western Culture, London: Fontana. Gellner, Ernest, 1992, Reason and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, John, 1985, Powers and Liberties: the causes and consequences of the rise of the west, Oxford: Blackwell. Bernard Joerges, 1990, ‘Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat,’ Technology and Culture, 31: 203-27. Kass, Leon R., ‘Introduction: The Problem of Technology’ in Melzer, Arthur M., Weinberger, Jerry, & Zinman, M. Richard, Eds., 1993, Technology in the Western Political Tradition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitcham, Carl, 1994, Thinking Through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, chs. 7-10, esp. ch. 7. Sheehan, James J. & Morton Sosna, Eds., 1991, The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, Berkeley: University of California Press. 2.The Social and Cultural Life of Early Modern Science The early modern period is often deemed to have witnessed a scientific revolution, at the heart of which was a mechanical conception of nature, and from which modern science 11 develops. We’ll be questioning this, by looking at the social and cultural origins of what becomes modern science, and considering ways in which it was embedded in early modern society. We’ll consider science’s uncertain differentiation of itself from other discourses, its debts to earlier periods, and its positioning in these highly stratified societies. Science is usually deemed crucial to processes of modernization and rationalization, which are commonly contrasted to traditional cultures, which they’re seen as uprooting or transforming. We’ll look at the Weberian problem of how such a discourse could arise within a culture, and look at Merton’s Weberian case regarding Puritanism and modern science. We’ll take a preliminary look at the kind of world this science posits, and ask whether at this point it makes more sense to think of science as applied technology, or technology as applied science. We’ll take a preliminary look at science in relation to issues of social, political and epistemological authority (i.e. the sociology of scientific knowledge) -- something we’ll take up again next week. Main reading Porter, Roy & Mikulás Teich, Eds., 1992, The Scientific Revolution in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SLC (509.4031SCI) [John Henry’s chapter on ‘The Scientific Revolution in England’, and, should time allow, L.W.B.Brockliss’s on France, and Mario Biagioli’s on Italy] Other reading Cohen, H. Floris, 1994, The Scientific Revolution: a historiographical inquiry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cohen, I. Bernard, Ed., 1990, Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press Dear, Peter, 2001, Revolutionizing The Sciences: European knowledge and its ambitions, 1500-1700, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Debus, Allen G., 1980, Man and nature in the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dijksterhuis, E.J., 1961, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grant, Edward, 1996, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacob, J.R., 1975, ‘Restoration, Reformation and the Origins of the Royal Society,’ History of Science, 13: 155-76. Jacob, Margaret, 1988, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Jacob, Margaret, 1997, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, New York: Oxford University Press. 12 Pumfrey, Stephen, et al., Eds., 1991, Science, Culture and Popular belief in Renaissance Europe, Manchester, Manchester University Press Rossi, Paolo, 1968, Francis Bacon: from magic to science, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. NIL. Rossi, Paolo, 1970, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S.Attanasio, New York: Haper Torchbooks. Rossi, Paolo, 2001, The Birth of Modern Science, trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen, Oxford: Blackwell Shapin, Steven, & Schaffer, Simon, 1985, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Princeton: Princeton University Press Shapin, Steven, 1996, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapin, Steven, 1994, A Social History of Truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Larry, 1992, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, technology and natural philosophy in Newtonian Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Keith, 1973, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England [1971], Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Yates, Frances, 1964, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Essay Question Discuss some of the ways in early modern science drew upon, and was affected by, the social and cultural resources of the Europe in which it was practised. 3. Clockwork and Authority We’re thinking this week about the relation of early modern science and of mechanical ideas and images to politics and power. The background to this is bloody political turbulence in the wake of the Reformation. Concepts of power and control adopt specifically mechanistic forms. In a world where fear of damnation was common, and history a process of increasing decay, Bacon’s early seventeenth-century project to use science to improve the human condition (or "Man’s Estate") stands out -- and begs questions about different kinds of power and order, mechanical and political. Descartes and Hobbes use mechanical images to propose a model of order and control. This has some implications for fundamental social theoretical issues, such as human agency and freedom. It also starts to affect forms of social organisation and division of labour. 13 Main reading Merchant,Carolyn, 1990, The Death of Nature, rev. edn., San Francisco: Harper & Row, chs. 8-9. SLC (304.2MER) Other reading Bacon, Francis, The New Atlantis [any edn.] De Solla Price, Derek, 1975, ‘Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy’, rptd. in Science Since Babylon, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan, esp. introduction. Jacob, James R. & Margaret C. Jacob, 1980, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution,’ Isis, 71: 251-67. Latour, Bruno, 1993, We Have Never Been Modern [1991], trans. Catherine Porter, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mayr, Otto, 1986, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, chs. 2-5, esp. chs. 4-5. Rabb, Theodore K., 1975, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe, New York: Oxford University Press. Schmitt, Carl, 1996, ‘The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and Descartes’ [1937], in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab & Erna Hilfstein, Westport CT, Greenwood Press. Sarasohn, Lisa, 1985, ‘Motion and Morality: Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes and the Mechanical World View,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 363-79. Spragens, Thomas A., 1973, The Politics of Motion, London: Croom Helm. Richard Westfall, 1977, The construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Winner, Langdon, 1977, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press Essay Question What were the political implications of mechanical ideas in the early modern period? 4. Machines for Making States and Souls: Guns and Print We’re turning this week from mechanical ideas to actual devices: early modern military and information technologies, or, plainly, guns and print. They’re significant partly because they impinge upon a whole society -- indeed, it can be argued that they play a role in 14 starting to constitute a single society vis-à-vis the state, where formerly there’s been intermittent and uncertain control, and life was mostly organized locally and self-sustainingly. We’ll consider how these technologies are used, and how they are shaped. In particular we’ll look at arguments over their effects on forms of socio-political organisation and forms of selfunderstanding and self-cultivation (especially in the case of print). This begs questions about possible relations between technologies, forms of organisation, and the character of the human. Main reading Pacey, Arnold, 1992, The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, 2nd edn., Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. chs. 4 & 6. SLC o/o Other reading Anderson, Benedict, 1991, Imagined Communities, rev. edn, London: Verso, esp. ch. 3. Black, Jeremy, 1991, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 15501800, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Braudel, Fernand, 1981-4, Civilization and Capitalism, 3 vols., London: Fontana, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, ch. 6. Downing, Brian M., 1992, The Military Revolution and Political Change: origins of democracy and autocracy in early modern Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1979, The Printing Press as Agent of Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack, 1986, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuhan, Marshall, 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Ong, Walter, 1982, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen Parker, Geoffrey, 1988, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SLC Essay question Explain the role played by one or more early modern technologies in chnaging the nature of political institutions and action. 5. Mechanism in Eighteenth-Century Social Thought We’re turning this week to a moment some way after the seventeenth-century crisis, when the imposition of social order seemed to many a less urgent task -- indeed, concepts of 15 order as immanent in the nature of social and economic processes start to appear, and mechanical images and concepts are arguably intrinsic to them. We’ll look at the eighteenth-century project of a human science, and the role of mechanistic, often (allegedly) Newtonian, thinking in it. Followed through remorselessly it could be controversial, as in La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine which posits a mechanical, materialist theory of human nature. Usually, though, mechanistic ideas were annexed to visions of providential order, while claiming to reserve some unique difference to distinguish at least the human individual, if not the group. We’ll review Otto Mayr’s case that in political, social and economic life models of organisation based on (human) control give way to an emphasis on self-regulating mechanisms, such as that proposed in economic life by Adam Smith, which figure in early liberal social and political thinking. We’ll reflect on the ambiguities over mechanism and nature here, and develop our thinking about human subjectivity and agency and forms of power in relation to this material -- especially in debates in the period concerning necessity, freedom, and ethics. By the end of the period, we’ll see providentialist, self-regulating mechanisms start to give way to the possibility of social engineering, especially in the work of Bentham. We’ll return to this in considering the political economy of machines in week 8, and touch on it in connexion with Foucault in week 7. Main reading Otto Mayr, 1986, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, chs. 9-11. SLC o/o Other reading Becker, Carl L., 1959, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers [1932], New Haven: Yale University Press, esp. ch. 2. Bentham, Jeremy, 1995, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic, London: Verso. Cassirer, Ernst, 1951, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Boston: Beacon Press. SLC Cohen Rosenfield, Leonora, 1968, From Beast Machine to Man Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to LaMettrie, 2nd edn., New York: Octagon Books. Knight, Isabel, 1968, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbe Condillac and the French Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale University Press. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 1912, Man a Machine, French with English translation, La Salle IL: Open Court. [or any other edition] MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1967, A Short History of Ethics, London: Routledge, chs. 11-13. Olson, Richard, 1990, Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, vol. 2., Berkeley, University of California Press, ch. 6 Rousseau, G.S., Ed., 1990, The Languages of Psyche, Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, Berkeley: University of California P. 16 Thomas, Keith, 1984, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 15001800 [1983], Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Vartanian, A., 1960, La Mettrie’s ‘L’Homme Machine’, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yolton, John, 1983, Thinking Matter: Materialism in 18th-Century Britain, Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. Wellman, Kathleen, 1992, La Mettrie: medicine, philosophy, and enlightenment, Durham N.C.: Duke University Press Willey, Basil, 1940, The Eighteenth Century Background, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Essay question ‘In the mid-eighteenth century, before the social problems brought by industrialization, the idea of society as mechanistic was not dehumanizing, but reassuring and providential.’ Discuss. 6. Romanticism: Organicism / Mechanism At the risk of crude simplification, the Enlightenment espouses reason (often in the context of an elite, cosmopolitan high culture), and Romanticism reacts against this. It poses fundamental questions about creativity and the true sources of vitality, and in the process develops an often quasi-religious response to Nature. By comparison the mechanistic is often seen as inauthentic or dehumanizing. This construction and evaluation of organicism and mechanism is in some ways still current, and continues to inform the way we organise and conduct our affairs (e.g in the value we attach to wildernesses and places of such natural beauty that we restrict development of them). But while often elevating imagination and creativity, Romantic writers also register deep unease about our own capacity for creation, especially for self-creation, and there’s often a kind of secularized spiritual anguish over the ideas of our being both creators, and creatures -- created entities, perhaps crudely recreated by incompetent human intervention, instead of being produced by nature. These are ideas that had been formulated by Rousseau, which would inform critiques of what industrialiation was doing to the human spirit in the nineteenth century, and which still impinge on, for example, some of our representations of cyborgs, and our responses the things for which they stand. Frankenstein raises many of these religious and philosophical questions in compelling form, and offers besides a proto-feminist critique of a masculine and arrogant creativity that destroys more than it makes. This is a story of biotechnology run mad, nemesis and male arrogation of the power to give birth. Not surprisingly Frankenstein has become a powerful myth of our relations with technology and nature. Main reading Shelley, Mary, 1996, Frankenstein, ed. J.Paul Hunter, New York: W.W.Norton. [1993 edn., ed. M. Butler in SLC (YHK, S4/Of8 [She])] [any decent edition will do, but this one usefully includes a lot of contextual and critical material] 17 Other reading Abrams, M.H., 1953, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition, New York: Oxford University Press Cantor, Paul, 1984, Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. ch. 4. Cantor, Paul, 1993, ‘Romanticism and Technology: Satanic Verses and Satanic Mills,’ in Melzer, Arthur M., Weinberger, Jerry, & Zinman, M. Richard, Eds., 1993, Technology in the Western Political Tradition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coleridge, S.T., Biographia Literaria [any edition] Cunningham, Andrew & Nicholas Jardine, Eds., 1990, Romanticism and the Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hindle, Maurice, 1994, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, Penguin Critical Studies, Mitcham, Carl, 1994, Thinking Through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, epilogue. Olson, Richard, 1990, Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, vol. 2., Berkeley: University of California Press Rousseau, G.S., Ed., 1972, Organic Form: The Life of an Idea, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ [any edition] Tarnas, Richard, 1996, The Passion of the Western Mind [1991], London: Pimlico, ch. 6. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1932, Science and the Modern World [1926], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Essay question Discuss some of the ambiguities in the understanding of society and culture opened by Romanticism’s exploration of the dualism of organicism and mechanism. 7. Critiques of the Enlightenment: Instrumental Rationality Last week we considered the criticism of the Enlightenment implicit in the Romantic reaction against it.. This week we’re turning to the terms in which influential, recent, explicit critiques of the Enlightenment have been developed. Especially since Max Weber, the idea of instrumental rationality has loomed large in criticism of the Enlightenment project: the 18 machine-like adaptation of means to ends, and the systematization of activities, often deemed to lead to a situation in which only those ends and activities which can be so systematized persist. In other words, means usurp ends. Weber advances his critique by arguing that rationalization, though self-sustaining once under way, and seemingly self-given, has a concealed or repressed genesis, especially in the spiritual anguish and world-view of Calvinists in the wake of the Reformation. We’ll consider the conceptions of reason and culture implicit in this case, consider how it is developed by Critical Theory, and look at the different way in which Foucault handles related ideas -- especially in his discussion of the Panopticon in the context of his broader account of normalization and the ‘great confinement’. This begs some fundamental questions. Some of them we’ve already started thinking about -- to do, for example, with what we mean by ‘power’ in these different contexts. But here we’ll also want to probe the idea of instrumental rationality, and ask about its specifically technological qualities, and consider whether reason per se can in principle be the grounds of values. Main reading Wolin, Sheldon, ‘Reason in Exile: Critical Theory in Technological Society,’ in Melzer, Arthur M., Weinberger, Jerry, & Zinman, M. Richard, Eds., 1993, Technology in the Western Political Tradition, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. SLC 321.8 TEC Other reading Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M., 1972, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: Herder & Herder. Foucault, Michel, 1977, Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel, 1986, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, esp. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault, Michel, 1989, Madness and Civilization, London: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest, 1992, Reason and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. . Habermas, Jurgen, 1987, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Cambridge: Polity, esp. the overview in the Appendix. Habermas, Jurgen, 1987, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, esp. ch. 1 on Weber. Held, David, 1980, Introduction to Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity, esp. chs. 5, 9 & 11. Jay, Martin, 1973, The Dialectical Imagination, London: Heinemann, esp. ch. 8. Murray, Patrick, 1982, ‘The Frankfurt School Critique of Technology,’ Research in Philosophy and Technology, 5: 223-48. 19 Schmidt, James, Ed., 1996, What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, Berkeley: University of California Press. SLC Turner, Bryan S., 1992, Max Weber: From History to Modernity, London: Routledge, esp. ch. 7, ‘The Rationalization of the Body’ Weber, Max, 1992, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904], trans. Talcott Parsons, intr. Anthony Giddens, London: Routledge. Essay question Is the Enlightenment project vulnerable to the criticism that it enshrines and seeks to impose on human life a limitedly instrumental rationality? 8. Political Economy of Machines Industrialization changes the social and political implications of the idea of machines - not least because machines, in increasingly interconnected systematic and even networked forms are clearly material facts, with certain obdurately unignorable and less than appealing features -- at least in the ways in which they’d been instantiated. Machinery was clearly fundamental to the industrial economy, and this in turn was begetting social problems that cried out for some response, which, given the available machinery for social governance (to use the inevitable metaphor) were profoundly difficult to respond to. Political economy proposes techniques for socio-economic governance. Political economists have things to say specifically about machinery and its economic implications. But there’s also some sense in which political economy has some of the traits of a machine. This becomes clear in the way political economic problems sometimes seem to be issues of data-processing, feedback and control. The participation of the computing pioneer Charles Babbage in the debate points to this. We’ll ponder the possibility of this being an early instance of the technological fix: the idea that the answer to the problems thrown up by technology is more technology. It also relates to the idea of the political process being remodelled in machine terms -- something Carlyle latches onto, and to which we’ll return in week 13. For Marx the situation was rather different: the collapse of bourgeois control of the economy and of politics was desired. Yet the proletariat’s power is in some ways intriguingly and ambiguously related to the machinery that they’ve become expert in using. Marx’s attitude to machinery is complex. We’ll look at the different ways in which it could seem both dehumanizing and empowering, at its revolutionary potential, and at the possibility of Marx’s thinking being informed by a streak of technological determinism (of which more in week 10). Main reading Berg, Maxine, 1980, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, part 1. SLC (MVS/E [Ber]) 20 Other reading Babbage, Charles, 1835, The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th edn. [excerpts available on the web or as photocopy from me] Babbage, Charles,1989, Science and reform: selected works of Charles Babbage, ed. Anthony Hyman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beniger, James R., 1986, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Benthall, Jonathan, 1976, The Body Electric: Patterns of Western Industrial Culture, London: Thames & Hudson. Carlyle, Thomas, 1829, ‘Signs of the Times’, rtpd. in Carlyle, Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Clayre, Alasdair, Ed., 1977, Nature and Industrialization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvie, Christopher, Graham Martin & Aaron Scharf, Eds., 1970, Industrialisation and Culture, 1830-1914, London: Macmillan for the Open University Press. Kennedy, Noah, 1989, The Industrialisation of Intelligence: Mind and Machine in the Modern Age, London: Unwin Hyman, esp. chs. 2-4. SLC MacKenzie, Donald, 1984, ‘Marx and the Machine,’ Technology and Culture, 25 (July 1984): 473-502. Marx, Karl, 1976, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, intr. Ernest Mandel, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ch. 15. Pollard, S., 1963, "Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution," Economic History Review, 2nd series, Vol. 16, pp. 254-271. Ricardo, David, 1821, Principles of Political Economy,3rd edn., in Works and Correspondence, 11 vols., ed. P. Sraffa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951, esp. ch. on machinery. Ruskin, John, 1857, The Political Economy of Art [any edition] Thompson, E. P., 1967, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, No. 38, pp. 56-97. Ure, Andrew, 1835, The Philosophy of Manufactures, rptd. New York: Augustus Kelley, 1967; partially rptd. in Michael Brewster Folsom & Steven D. Lubar, Eds., The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates over Industrialization in the United States, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press; excerpt rptd. in Clayre, op. cit. 21 Essay question Write a critical appraisal of Marx’s interpretation of the social and historical significance of technology as fact and concept. 9. Technology, Religion and the Sublime In many ways technology may look like a secular and even a secularizing phenomenon. But several accounts suggest that a quasi-religious feeling can quicken in response to it. In a crude way one sees this in some of the wilder cyber-prophecies current today: a techno-destinarianism that envisages our taking our place among the stars, and escaping the tyranny of the flesh (more of this in the final week). But on a more modest level, even particular technologies (rather than merely imagined ones) can seem to be touched by grace -not least because they work. The more improbable a technology is, the more its working can be a source of wonderment -- though of course that wonder can wear thin with overfamiliarity. One sees such wonder in the engineer-philosopher, Friedrich Dessauer’s view of technology as something like the materialization in our world of ideas from another realm. Of particular interest to us is the possibility of quasi-religious feeling about technology having a social function. In this connexion we’ll review David Nye’s case about the ‘American technological sublime’, which he relates to Durkheim’s view of religion as having a fundamental role in securing social solidarity and representing a society to itself. We’ll consider whether this case (which Durkheim applies to tribal societies) can be plausibly adapted to modern, pluralist and individualist industrial societies, and follow through some if the implications of the way Nye discusses technology and nature, and the influence of Romanticism here. Main reading Nye, David E., 1994, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, esp. introduction & chs. 1 & 2. SLC (303.4830973NYE) Other reading Davis, Erik, 1999, TechGnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information, London: Serpent’s Tail. Dessauer Friedrich, 1972, ‘Technology in its Proper Sphere’, rptd. in Mitcham, Carl & Robert Mackey, Eds., Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, New York: The Free Press. Floorman, Samuel C., 1995, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering [1976], London: Souvenir Press, esp. chs. 10-11. Kubrick, Stanley, 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey [film] Marx, Leo, 1964, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press. 22 Midgley, Mary, 1992, Science as Salvation: a modern myth and its meaning, London: Routledge. Mitcham, Carl & Grote, Jim, Eds., 1984, Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, Lanham: University Press of America. Mumford, Lewis, 1970, The Myth of the Machine Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. Noble, David F., 1998, The Religion of Technology: the divinity of man and the spirit of invention, New York: Knopf. Pacey, Arnold, 1983, The Culture of Technology, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, esp. ch. 5. Pirsig, Robert, 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, New York: Morrow. Technology in Society, 1999, Special issue on Science, Technology and the Spiritual Quest, 21 iv . Wertheim, Margaret, 1999, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, London: Virago Essay question ‘Western technology promises a redemption it cannot deliver.’ Discuss. 10. Technology and History: The Technological Determinism debate At its simplest technological determinism boils down to the idea that technological development is the driving force of history. In this uncompromising sense of the term, there’ve been very few technological determinists. Yet the idea persists. Some adopt a qualified determinism, some versions of which we’ll consider. Some histories of technology, by confining themselves to technology, adopt an implicit technological determinism by default. But there’s also the widespread felt experience of technology as a force visited upon us from without -- and this the idea of technological determinism does at least express, even if we find it to be intellectually wanting. The relation (or lack of it) between professional intellectual opinion and general felt experience is something we’ll need to bear in mind here. Determinism can also be embraced as destiny (cf. last week’s topic), and is deeply implicated in authority, control and freedom which, as we’ve seen, are issues that loom large in modern scientific technology. The perception of determinism also raises the question of what would count here as free choice, and we’ll consider the issue of individual as against collective decision-making (something we’ll return to in week 19). We’ll also consider one of the main alternatives to technological determinism: social constructivism. We’ll think about different kinds of understandings of technology in relation to history, and how far, if at all, different kinds of understanding might affect our ability to make our own history. 23 Main reading Smith, Merritt Roe & Leo Marx, Eds., 1994, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, esp. Heilbroner’s two chapters. SLC 303.483 DOE Other reading Bijker, Wieber E., Thomas P. Hughes, & Trevor J. Punch, Eds., 1987, The Social Construction of Technological Systems, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Carlisle Y.M. & D.J.Manning, 1999, ‘Ideological Persuasion and Technological Determinism,’ Technology in Society, 21 (1999): 81-102. Cook, Scott D.N., 1996, ‘Technological Revolutions and the Gutenberg Myth’ in Stefik, Mark, Ed., Internet Dreams, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Lemonnier, Pierre, Ed., 1993, Technological Choices: transformation in material choices since the neolithic, London: Routledge. Marx, Karl, 1947, The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Progress [or any edition] SLC Pacey, Arnold, 1983, The Culture of Technology, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, esp. ch. 2. Segal, Howard P., 1985, Technological Utopianism in American Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staudenmaier, John M., 1985, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. White, Lynn, jr., 1962, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Essay question ‘Technology may not determine history by itself, but we’re prone to making our history (and our technologies) as if it did.’ Discuss. 11. Biology / Technology Ethical and other controversies about biotechnology and artificial life are much in the news at present. But we’re going to go back some way to get to some of the underlying questions here. Darwinian evolution poses fundamental challenges. It implies that human life is explicable in materialist terms, and posits a natural history of such immense scale and seeming indifference to our conscious sentiments and intentions, as to dwarf human history. The basic challenge, then, is to the way in which we conceive the human -- a challenge which swiftly begot the strange and strangely influential doctrines of social Darwinism. Some of these ideas are swiftly applied to technology -- for example in Samuel 24 Butler’s Erewhon (= Nowhere backwards) novels, which imagine machines competitively out-evolving their human creators. On the one hand this is another manifestation of the recurrent theme of technology out of control -- and one still with us. But on the other hand, if evolutionary natural history is really what we have to get some purchase on in order to regain control, then technology may look like the best bet for defying fate. One manifestation of this is the widespread (and pseudo-scientific) invocation of race, and of racial groups as collective political entities. It’s almost an obsession from the late nineteenth century onwards, and begets various eugenic schemes, by which we’ll gain technological command of our biological destiny. This culminates in the obscenity of the Final Solution, which should give us pause for thought, before proceeding to probe the political implications of more recent bio-technology, especially based on genetics. Among the other questions to ponder here is the problem of being at home in the world, since Darwin posits life processes as in some ways quite alien to the worlds of consciousness in which we seek to live; the problems of defining life or humanity, especially in opposition to mechanism or artifice; and some awkward questions thrown up by the attempt to use a kind of techno-politics to get a directing grip on history and biology. Main reading Mazlish, Bruce, 1993, The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Human and Machines, New Haven: Yale University Press, chs. 10-11. SLC (303.483MAZ) Other reading Agamben, Giorgio, 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ansell Pearson, Keith, 1997, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge. Arendt, Hannah, 1966, The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: Allen & Unwin Bauman, Zygmunt, 1989, Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity. Brodwin, Paul E., Ed., 2000, Biotechnology and Culture: bodies, anxieties, ethics, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Bud, Robert, 1994, The Uses of Life: a history of biotechnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Samuel, 1872, Erewhon [any edition — and also available on the internet] Caudill, Maureen, 1992, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person, New York: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, Richard, 1988 , The Blind Watchmaker, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dyson, George B., 1997, Darwin among the Machines, London: Addison-Wesley. 25 Emmeche, Claus, 1994, The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life, trans. Steven Sampson, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kelly, Kevin, 1994, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, London: Fourth Estate. Sharp, Margaret, 1985, The New Biotechnology: European Governments in Search of a Strategy, Brighton: Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex.. Shiva, Vandana & Inguna Moser, Eds., 1995, Biopolitics: a feminist and ecological reader on biotechnology, Atlantic Heights NJ: Zed Books. Walgate, Robert, 1990, Miracle or Menace: Biotechnology and the Third World, London: Panos. Ward, Mark, 1999, Virtual Organisms, London: Macmillan. Essay question Do our current concept of biology, and techniques and technologies for intervening in it, pose inherently political problems? 12. Philosophy / technology Heidegger can be seen as a critic of technology alongside Mumford and Ellul, whom we’ll be looking at later. The reason for tackling him here by himself is partly convenience, in that his key work on technology, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ happens to so compactly suggestive as to warrant and make possible our close reading of it. His thinking on technology presents some sophisticated terms, especially in the context of his philosophy in general, for thinking about fundamental issues: the relation in which we stand to the world and the world conceived as a kind of reserve store for our projects, technologies as a kind of revealing (cf. Dessauer, whom we encountered in week 9), among others. However, besides attending to what he has to say, we’ll also want to consider the position from which Heidegger speaks. His own cultural and political life poses some awkward questions. His values are partly informed by a very German ideal of the smalltown, organic community, and a correspondingly ambivalent response to modernity. Yet certain kinds of organicism and reactions against modernity also informed Nazism, even though it was in other respects very high-tech. and self-consciously modern, and Heidegger was at the very least a Nazi fellow-traveller for a time. The unsatisfactory silence he maintained on this score, we can perhaps pass over. More relevant for our purposes is the larger issue posed by contextual reading of Heidegger on technology of finding a place on which to stand and from which to speak in relation to technology. Main reading Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology in Heidegger, Martin, 1993, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge. SLC (193HEI) [If this seems overfacing, look instead at Pattison’s introductory account -- reference below] 26 Other reading Arendt, Hannah, 1958, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borgmann, Albert, 1987, ‘The Question of Heidegger and Technology: A Critical Review of the Literature,’ Philosophy Today, 31 no.2 (Summer 1987): 98-194. Dusek, Val & Robert Scharff, Eds., 2002, Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: an Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell. Feenberg, Andrew, 1995, Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gehlen, Arnold, 1980, Man in the Age of Technology, trans. Patricia Lipsomb, New York: Columbia University Press [store] Herf, Jeffrey, 1984, Reactionary Modernism: technology, culture and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitcham, Carl & Robert Mackey, Eds., 1983, Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, New York: The Free Press. Pattison, George, 2000, The Routledge Philosophy Guide to the Later Heidegger, London: Routledge. Rapp, Friedrich, 1981, Analytical Philosophy of Technology, trans. Stanley Carpenter & Theodor Lagenbruch, Boston: D. Reidel. Simpson, Lorenzo C., 1995, Technology, Time and the Cinversations of Modernity, New York: Routledge. Thiele, Leslie Paul, 1995, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolin, Richard, 1990, The Politics of Being: the political thought of Martin Heidegger, New York: Columbia University Press. Zimmerman, Michael, 1990, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Essay question How, for Heidegger, does our technology shape our perception of and engagement with the world? 27 13. Political Machinery This session develops issues we broached in thinking about control systems and political economy in week 8, where we considered some of the ways in which local, relatively discrete systems of governance ran into difficulties to which the answer often seemed to be more elaborate, systematic, interconnected systems of governance. For if the phrase ‘government machine’ is a metaphor, it’s a metaphor in which it’s hard to tell where the metaphor ends and reality takes over. For governance has come to deploy more technologies for administration, while its bureaucrats in the view of Weber and others came to function as a kind of human machine -- even before computerization. We’ll reflect upon particular political technologies, such as electronic voting, systems of surveillance, and information systems, and enquire how far these have changed or might change the character of political processes. We’ll also consider cybernetics (which shares its etymology with ‘governor’) as an attempt to see biological, mechanical and political control and feedback processes in similar terms. Main reading Winner, Langdon, 1977, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ch. 6. SLC (303.483WIN) Other reading Achterhuis, Hans, Ed., 2001, American Philosophy of Technology: the empirical turn, trans. Robert P, Crease, Bloomington: Indiana UP. [chapter on Winner] Ackroyd, Carol, Karen Margolis, Jonathan Rosenhead & Tim Shallice, 1977, The Technology of Political Control, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barker, Benjamin R., 1998-9, ‘Three Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Strong Democracy,’ Political Science Quarterly, 113 iv: 573-89. Brown, David, 1998, Cybertrends: Chaos, Power, and Accountability in the Information Age [1997], Harmondsworth: Penguin. Burnham, D., 1983, The Rise of the Computer State, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Deutsch, Karl W., 1966, Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control, New York: The Free Press. Diffie, Whitfield & Landau, Susan, 1999, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1999. Gosling, William, 1994, Helmsmen and Heroes: Control Theory as a Key to Past and Future, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gray, Chris Hables, Ed., 1995, The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge. 28 Gray, Chris Hables, 2001, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Post-human Age, London: Routledge. Hill, K. & Hughes, J, 1998, Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield Loader, Brian D., 1997, The Governance of Cyberspace, London: Routledge. ——, 1999, Digital Democracy, London: Routledge. Lyon, David, 1993, The Electronic Eye: The rise of the surveillance society, Oxford: Blackwell. Schone, Richard, 1995, Democracy and Technology, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Weber, Max, 1948, ‘Bureaucracy’ in From Max Weber, ed. H.H.Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge. Wiener, Norbert, 1968, The Human Use of Human Beings: cybernetics and society [1950], London: Sphere Books. Essay question Discuss the problems and opportunities presented by technologized forms of politics. 14. The Private Life of Machines After the abstract and political concerns of the last few weeks, we come this week to the intimate life of technologies -- or, rather, our intimate life with them. How do we interact with technologies in daily life? How do we establish a sense of possession of them? How are we encouraged to adopt technologies? What ideological baggage or constraints do they come with? Giedion’s book, from which the main reading comes, is fascinating and compendious. I’ve asked you to have a look at the material on the household -- but if you have time do also have a look at the material on the bath -- one of the most intimate ways in which we use technology. One of our concerns here is with the incorporation of technological systems and their networks into felt cultural normality -- as, for example, in the way in which our often almost visceral sense of acceptable standards of personal hygiene is structurally dependent upon complex networks of fuel, machine production, plumbing and sewerage. There are also questions of power involved -- as feminists point out in relation to domestic technologies, which may promise liberation, but which (some argue) deliver a different kind of bondage. But these technologies are also implicated in one of the most striking social changes of the last hundred years: the decimation of the servant-class, which has a host of political and other implications. We’ll glance also at Gifford’s history of the way habitual perceptions (of, e.g., distance and space) have changed over the past two centuries, and then seek to locate these intimate technologies in relation to terms proposed by Don Ihde and Albert Borgmann, 29 respectively, for thinking about different kinds of technology and different ways of engaging with them. Main reading Giedion, Siegfried, 1969, Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution to anonymous history [1948], New York: W.W.Norton & Co, part VI, esp. ‘Mechanization Enters the Household’. SLC 609 GIE Other reading Achterhuis, Hans, Ed., 2001, American Philosophy of Technology: the empirical turn, trans. Robert P, Crease, Bloomington: Indiana UP. [includes chapters on Borgmann & Ihde] Borgmann, Albert, 1984, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cowan, Ruth S., 1989, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technologies from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, rev. edn., London: Free Association Books Gifford, Don, 1990, The Farther Shore: A Natural History of Perception 1798-1984, London: Faber and Faber. Higgs, Eric, Andrew Light & David Strong, Eds., 2000, Technology and the Good Life? Chicago: U of Chicago P. [essays on Albert Borgmann] Ihde, Don, 1990, Technology and The Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, Stevii & Shaun Moores, Eds., 1995, The Politics of Domestic Consumption: Critical Readings, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lie, Merete & Knut H. Sorensen, Eds., 1996, Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Martin, Michèle, 1991, ‘Hello Central? Gender, Technology and Culture in the formation of telephone systems, Montreal: McGill / Queen’s University Press. [also relevant to weeks 15 & 20]. Wosk, Julie, 1992, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Essay question ‘The technologies that most affect us are the ones we use so intimately and routinely that we no longer attend to their technological constructedness.’ Discuss. 30 15. Technology and work: Taylorism and its aftermath In looking at the political economy of machines (week 8) we saw the advent of the factory, with its special control and management systems, and with some industrialists already speaking of the workers as human components of the machinery. We’re concerned here in the first instance with the development of these in ‘scientific management’. Tasks are carefully broken down into simple elements, and the worker is carefully drilled in one of these. Time and motion studies optimize performance. It’s something Chaplin satirizes in Modern Times -- especially in showing the worker actually being dragged into the machinery: a telling metaphor for what’s going on here. Apart from the obvious questions of whose interests are being served, and of whether these seemingly technical questions are not properly political, there’s a larger context here of the ‘social engineering’ movement and of ‘technocracy’ to which its related. It’s strong in the US which goes at disorientating speed from pastoral to industrial society, and whose various social ills are responded to by some with a strong impulse to impose rational, grid-like order on life. We’ll consider some of the ideological issues at stake, before looking to recent transformations of work, especially in relation to the renewed attempts to get people to identify with the machines they use, and the possible value of this in terms of social discipline or productivity. Main reading Doray, Bernard, 1988, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness [1981], trans. David Macey, foreword Maurice Godelier, London: Free Association Books, esp. chs. 5 & 6. SLC 331 DOR Other reading Benson, Ian & Lloyd, John, 1983, New Technology and Industrial Change, London: Kogan Page. Braverman, Harry, 1974, Labour and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press. Chaplin, Charlie, 1936, Modern Times, United Artists [film] Downey, Gary Lee, 1998, The Machine in Me: an anthropologist sits among computer engineers, New York: Routledge. Forester, Tom, Ed., 1985, The Information Technology Revolution, Oxford: Blackwell. Jones, Bryn, 1997, Forcing the Factory of the Future: Cybernation and Societal Institutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy, Noah, 1989, The Industrialisation of Intelligence: Mind and Machine in the Modern Age, London: Unwin Hyman. SLC Knapp, James F., 1988, Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, introduction. 31 Maier, Charles S., 1970, ‘Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5. Marx, Karl, 1844, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Noble, David F., 1984, Forces of Production: a social history of industrial automation, New York: Knopf. Pollard, S., 1965, The Genesis of Modern Management, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Taylor, F.W., 1914, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper. Yates, Joanne, 1989, Control through Communication: The Rise of the American System of Management, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Essay question Should technical efficiency be the main criterion in the organization of work? 16. Technology and modern war War is one way of the defining activities of modern, sovereign states, and is now the most elaborately technological of their functions. We touched on military technology and the state back in week 4 -- and that concern for military technology has now become intense. So much so that in some accounts of the modern industrial state -- at least of the US, the most modern one -- the ‘military/industrial complex’ seemed to become a machine-like entity that virtually defined the state: as if Hobbes’s clockwork image of a sovereign invested with overwhelming power vis-à-vis society, both to protect and to discipline it, had finally come to pass. Preparation for warfare has played a large part in the development of many of our most significant technologies: nuclear power, computers, the internet. Disquietingly, it calls into doubt the hope that rationality and enlightenment might go hand in hand. Instead it may be that we simply get more and more rationalized (i.e., in this case, destructive) systems for doing more and more irrational things. Yet if the Hobbesian compact (protection in return for obedience) looked like it was unravelling in the World Wars, what struck many as the ultimate insanity of nuclear weapons too terrible ever to be used in a curious way could be seen as renewing our protection. For the Cold War standoff can be argued to have prevented war, or at least a certain kind of war. Latterly, however, the so-called ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ has seen the development of allegedly precision-weapons, and has arguably renewed the possibility of warfare on the part of the western powers -- especially the post-Vietnam US. But we’ll want to consider how far this is a question of what the weapons make militarily possible, and how far a question of what they make politically acceptable. In other words, we’ll consider the issue of public support for war. But there the question of the possibility of adequate public perception of conflicts looms large. For besides weapons systems, the systems for representing wars, and 32 controlling their representation, have enormous political significance -- as well as begging questions we’ll come back to next week, about our ability to grasp or know reality. Main reading Pick, Daniel, 1993, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, esp. ch. 12. SLC (303.66PIC) Other reading Boyer, Paul, 1995, By the Bomb’s Early Light, New York: Pantheon. Brown, Louis, 1998, A Radar History of World War II: Technology and Military Imperatives, Bristol: IOP. NIL Edwards, Paul N., 1996, The Closed World, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Ellis, John, 1975, A Social History of the Machine Gun, London: Croom Helm. Franklin, H. Bruce, 1988, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. Gray, Chris Hables, 1997, Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, London: Routledge. Hacker, Barton, 1993, ‘Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education and the Rise of the Industrial State,’ Technology and Culture, 34: 1-27. Hagerman, Edward, 1988, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harrison, Mark, 1996, ‘Medicine and the Management of Modern Warfare,’ History of Science, 34: 379-410. Hirst, Paul, 2001, War and power in the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity. Ignatieff, Michael, 2001, Virtual War, New York: Vintage/Ebury. Kubrick, Stanley, 1963, Dr. Strangelove [film] Landa, Manuel De, 1991, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, New York: Swerve Edition MIT. Lawrence, Philip K., 1997, Modernity and War: The Creed of Absolute Violence, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Levidow, Les & Robins, Kevin, Eds., 1989, Programming the Military Information Society, New York: Columbia University Press. 33 Moskos, Charles C., John Allen Williams & David R. Segal, Eds., 2000, The Postmodern Military, New York: OUP. Nye, David E., 1994, American Technological Sublime, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ch. 9. Terraine, John, 1982, White Heat: The New Warfare, 1914-1918, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Virilio, Paul, 1989, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso. Weart, Spencer R., 1988, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Essay question ‘The main danger of modern war lies less in the terrifying reality suffered by its victims, than in the remote unreality in which its technological weapons cocoon the high-tech warrior.’ Discuss. 17. Machine Art Modern concepts of art crystallize in the Romantic period, though are often traced back to the Renaissance. Although literature had been mediated through the technology of print for several centuries, the processes of reading had developed in such a way as to foster a sense of inwardness and individuality. And the other arts still seemed relatively immune from technological reproduction. Painting and music, for example, might involve technologies in their production, but these were often craft-based, and the results were either a unique artefact, or a live performance for which the real presence of the performers was essential. These are among the reasons why art could be invoked to defend a certain vision of humanity and even of its uniqueness. In the nineteenth century machine-, mass-production starts to impinge on these other arts: with the advent of photography, audio-recording and cinema. The uniqueness of the work of art begins to be called into question. We’ll explore some of the implications of this for our self-understanding by starting from Walter Benjamin’s essay, though we’ll also look backwards to consider the earlier impact of industrialization on art, and at Victorian attempts to defend certain kinds of creativity (based on craft as well as art) in the face of technological production. Yet this attempt to limit the impact of the machine on symbolic, cultural life arguably fails. One strand of modernism accordingly becomes fascinated by machines, while also jettisoning established forms of representation. Thus, as the Renaissance technique of representing objects in perspective starts to feel less like the inescapable way to grasp reality, and more like a worn out convention, the solidity, reality and autonomy of especially the human subject seems called into question -- though nothing in this process is unambiguous. At the same time in a popular art Hollywood cinema establishes a set of conventions which (somewhat improbably, perhaps) prove potent in representing reality and in narrative -conventions now so deeply internalized by most of us that we’ve almost forgotten they are conventions. We’ll be considering the ways different technologies of production relate to different kinds of convention and representation, especially of the human subject, and the implications of this for sustaining the comprehensibility of the world, and some of the 34 implications of technology itself impinging as both content as a well as medium -- something seen at its most playful in Disney’s Pinocchio: an animated film about, not just the wooden boy, but scores of objects coming to animated life. Main reading Benjamin, Walter, 1973, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana. SLC (836BEN ILL) Other reading Apollonio, Umbro, Ed., 1971, Futurist Manifestos, London: Thames and Hudson. Berman, Marshall, 1983, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: the experience of modernity, London: Verso. Bukatman, Scott, 1993, Terminal Identity: the virtual subject in postmodern science fiction, Durham NC: Duke UP. Calvino, Italo, 1989, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ in The Literature Machine, trans. Patrick Creagh, London: Picador. Cavell, Stanley, 1979, The World Viewed, rev. edn., Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Disney, Walt, 1942, Pinocchio [film] Kenner, Hugh, 1987, The Mechanic Muse, New York: Oxford University Press. Klingender, Francis D., 1972, Art and the Industrial Revolution, rev. Arthur Elton [1968], St Albans: Paladin. Ong, Walter, 1971, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Orvell, Miles, 1995, After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries, Jackson: University Press of Missouri. Poirier, Richard, 1988, The Renewal of Literature, London: Faber, ch. 3 Scott, Ridley, 1982, Blade Runner [film] Smith, Anthony, 1996, Software for the Self: Culture and Technology, London: Faber and Faber. Sussman, Herbert L., 1968, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Williams, Raymond, 1974, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana. 35 Williams, Rosalind, 1990, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Essay question ‘Art of the machine age reveals the human subject as the plaything of essentially inhuman forces.’ Discuss. 18. Luddites or Prophets? Some Critics of Technology This week we’re assessing the work of several critics of technology -- especially Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. Both produce wideranging critiques running to many essays and several books apiece. Mumford, for example, develops his position over nearly half a century. Though we’ll have time only to grasp the general outlines of the way they frame their enquiries, we’ll seek to understand what kind of discussion each is offering: how it’s put together, upon what assumptions it rests, and so on. We’ll also wish to reflect upon the implications of this for the development of our own terms in which to discuss technology in relation to society and politics. Both Mumford and Ellul, for example, use terms which seem to totalize technology, possibly in such a way as to imply that it has (or has ended up being treated as if it has) a determining force in our lives. Thus Mumford speaks of the ‘MegaMachine’, and Ellul characterizes technology as having become for the twentieth century the kind of determining force that capitalism was in Marx’s day. But neither writes with a sense of doomed impotence in face of technology -- which should make us want to consider where they identify the possibility of our exercising some degree of freedom, and whether we find this plausible. Each writer arguably offers a humanist critique of technology -- and critiques which often contrast modern technology with different kinds of creation, especially art (on which both also wrote much). For contrast it’s worth considering the extraordinary creative satisfaction that engineers can find in technology -- hence the inclusion of Floorman’s book in the reading list. Main reading Excerpts by Mumford and Ellul in Mitcham, Carl & Mackey, Robert, Eds., Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology, New York: The Free Press. SLC (601MIT) [This is very much a barebones minimum. If you’ve more time, you might go on to Ellul’s ‘Characterology’ of technology in The Technological Society or almost any chapter from Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power] Other reading Christians, C.G., & Van Hook, J.M., Eds., 1981, Jacques Ellul: Interpretative Essays, Chicago: University of Illinois P. Floorman, Samuel C., 1995, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering [1976], London: Souvenir Press, esp. ch. 4. [an engineer answers back] 36 Ellul, Jacques, 1967, The Technological Society [1957], trans. John Wilkinson, intr. Robet K. Merton, New York: Vintage Books. Fromm, Erich, 1968, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, New York: Bantam Books. Hughes, Thomas P. & Hughes, Agatha C., Eds., 1990, Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, New York: Oxford University Press. Illich, Ivan, 1975, Tools for Conviviality [1973], London: Fontana Collins. Lovekin, David, 1991, Technique, Discourse and Consciousness: an introduction to the philosophy of Jacques Ellul, Bethlehem: Lehigh UP. Marcuse, Herbert, 1964, One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press Miller, Donald L., 1989, Lewis Mumford: a life, Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh P. Morley, Jane, 1985, On Lewis Mumford: An Annotated Bibliography, Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania. NIL Mumford, Lewis, 1934, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt Brace. Mumford, Lewis, 1952, Art and Technics, New York: Columbia University Press. Mumford, Lewis, 1967, The Myth of the Machine Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. Mumford, Lewis, 1970, The Myth of the Machine Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. Roszak, Theodore, 1970, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, London: Faber and Faber. Staudenmaier, John M., 1985, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Winner, Langdon, 1986, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Essay question Can the critiques of technology offered by Mumford, Ellul and others be exonerated from the charge of essentialist humanism? Answer in relation to one or two thinkers. 37 19. Can we choose? Technology and policy-making The question of the extent of our freedom in relation to technology has run through the course. The particular concern of this week’s session is whether we have the capacity to make effective, collective, political choices about technology. The possibility we explored earlier (in the session on political machinery) that our decision-making is itself becoming machine-like complicates this. What’s at stake here is not just the question of whether technologies are socially shaped, rather than being the manifestation of technology conceived as an autonomous force, but whether a social will can be created or identified, formulated, expressed and acted upon politically. And, of course, even if it can, whether the resulting decisions will prove wise. This begs questions about forms of political representation, and about policy-making processes. Technologies also pose special problems of unforeseen consequences and risk. These are problems to which Beck has devoted much attention, and to which Collingridge attempts to outline a practical response at the level of policy-making and implementation. We’ll also consider the Appropriate Technology movement, which offers a significant test case here, for its claim was that there were ways of developing and applying technologies that would be in accord with sustainability and certain values of community in a way that was not the case in the industrialized world. There’s no doubting the intense desire of some for a feasible alternative to capitalist industrial technology, though whether this is possible is unclear. Main reading Webster, Andrew, 1991, Science, Technology and Society, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, chs. 3 & 6. Other reading Barry, Andrew, 2001, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, London: The Athlone Press Beck, Ulrich, 1995, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society, trans. Mark A. Ritter, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press. Boyle, C., D. Elliott & R. Roy, Eds., The Politics of Technology, London: Longman. Brigstock, Martin, et al., Eds., Science, Technology and Society: an introduction, Cambridge: CUP. Collingridge, David, 1981, The Social Control of Technology, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Dickson, David, 1974, Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change, [n.p.] Fontana/Collins. Feenberg, Andrew, 1999, Questioning Technology, New York: Routledge. 38 Goldblatt, David, 1996, Social theory and the environment, Cambridge: Polity Press. [useful discussion of Beck] Hornig, S., 1993, "Reading Risk: Public Response to Print Media Accounts of Technological Risk," Public Understanding of Science, 2: 95-109. Ihde, Don, 1990, Technology and The Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ch. 7. Intermediate Technology Development Group -- ITDG website: http://www.itdg.org Latour, Bruno, 1996, Aramis: or the Love of Technology, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Mitcham, Carl, 1995, ‘The Concept of Sustainable Development: its origins and ambivalence’ in Technology in Society, 17 iii: 311-26. Nelkin, Dorothy, 1977, Technological Decisions and Democracy: European Experiments in Public Participation, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Nelkin, Dorothy, Ed., 1979, Controversy: The Politics of Technological Decisions, Newbury Park CA: Sage. Schumacher, E.F., 1973, Small is Beautiful, London: Blond & Briggs Ltd. GS Schwarz Michiel & Michael Thompson, 1990, Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology and Social Choice, Philadelphia:Universityof Penssylvania P. Tatum, Jesse S., 1995, ‘Science, Technology and Government: Re-examining the Relationship,’ Technology in Society, 17 i: 85-102. Tenner, Edward, 1996, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge Effect, London: Fourth Estate. Willoughby, Kelvin W., 1990, Technology Choice: A Critique of the Appropriate Technology Movement, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Essay question Is it possible to exercise liberal democratic control over technological development? 20. Toys for Boys? Feminism and Technology This session returns to an issue we touched upon in reading Frankenstein: that allegedly gender-neutral technology and science and the trajectory of their development may be determined in specifically masculine and sexist ways. At one level what we’re looking at here is a kind of uncommonly wideranging social constructivist case — one in which the specific ways in which many technologies are constituted and implemented serves the one overall purpose of confirming a sexist 39 construction of gender roles. Thus several feminists argue that different kinds of work and technologies get assigned to men and women, and that the form of that work (to say nothing of the pay) differs accordingly. Thus it’s argued that some high-tech kinds of work are effectively maintained as all-male. This difference in the ways in which men and women engage with technology has been traced back some way: virtually to the cradle, where some argue that different kinds of toys and differences in education cause the gendered character of technology to become deeply internalized. Apart from these areas of work and schooling, there’s marked feminist interest in medical, especially reproductive, technologies. For if women have been hindered from entering the world of technology in the workplace, no such restraint has prevented technology in the form of medicine from impinging on women’s sexual and reproductive lives. There’s the possibility that medical expertise and technology serve in effect to assert a specifically male control over women. We’ll review several feminist critiques of technology. The underlying question is whether modern technology is sexist, and, if so, whether it is inherently or only accidentally so. If the latter, then feminists may find a use for it. What one might call ‘technofeminism’ (a.k.a cyber-feminism) takes up the challenge to create less gendered forms of technology, and explores the possibilities of a radical recasting and re-imagining of what has hitherto been deemed human nature. For if human ‘nature’ has long been the product of concealed sexist artifice, then (so some assert) we can now finally envisage its re-creation. For some, the more that technology seems to be getting out of control the better: control was always a male obsession, and the fact that men’s favoured technological means for imposing control are now backfiring may open new possibilities. So, for example, in place of a nervous concern to defend a pure humanity from technological contamination, Haraway embraces the hybrid figure of the cyborg. And Sadie Plant offers an exhilaratingly written account of women as pre-adapted to a world of digital technologies that look set to undermine the foundations of masculine identity. These two writers in particular also seek to move beyond the formalities of discursive academic prose to achieve an expressive freedom, which can generate a powerful sense of involvement. But that also leads to questions about the significance to attach to these kinds of writing. Should they be taken more as kinds of literary expression than as social or cultural critique? As fictions in both good and bad senses? Or should we abandon such categorization? What have such forms of expression to contribute to the way in which we reflect upon technologies? Main reading Wajcman, J., 1991, Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 6 and conclusion. SLC (KDDT [Waj]) Other reading Balsano, Anne, 1996, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Durham NC: Duke UP. Butler, Judith & Scott, Joan W., Eds., 1992, Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. 40 Cockburn, Cynthia, 1983, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change, London: Pluto. Corea G., et al, 1985, Man-Made Women: How new reproductive technologies affect women, London: Hutchinson. Devonshire, Amanda & Barbara Wood, Eds., 1996, Women in Industry and Technology, London: Museum of London. Dobres, Marcia-Anne, 2000, Technology and Social Agency, Oxford: Blackwell. Gray, Chris Hables, Ed., 1995, The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge, esp. ch. 6.2. Haraway, Donna J., 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, esp. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. SLC (305.42HAR) Harding, Sandra, 1986, The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. SLC Lang, Fritz, 1926, Metropolis, UFA [film] MacDonald, Anne L., 1992, Feminine Ingenuity: Women and Invention in America, New York: Ballantine Books. Myerson, George, 2000, Donna Haraway and GM Food, Duxford: Icon Books. Penley, Constance & Andrew Ross, Eds., 1991, Technoculture, Cultural Politics, vol. 3, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Plant, Sadie, 1997, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London: Fourth Estate. Rothschild, Joan, Ed., 1983, Machina Ex Dea, Oxford: Pergamon Scutt, Jocelynne A., Ed., 1990, Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of Motherhood [1988], London: Green Print. Stabile, Carol A., 1994, Feminism and the Technological Fix, Manchester: MUP. Stanley, Autumn, 1993, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Technology in Society, 1987, Special issue on Technology and the Regulation of Human Fertility, 9 iii. Wosk, Julie, 2001, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 41 Essay question Have feminists more to welcome than to fear in modern technology? 21. Information and Communication This week’s session is in part a way of coming at the question of AI and whether machines could be said to possess intelligence. Alan Turing, the mathematician, computerpioneer and code-breaker, had an answer to this: the Turing test. You send messages out. If the messages coming back persuade you that there’s a living person replying, even if you’re actually hooked up to a machine, then the machine’s intelligent. And machines have passed this test (to say nothing of beating Grand Masters at chess). However, it’s arguable that language remains problematic for AI. But what’s striking from a cultural, social and political point of view, is the tendency to assimilate all kinds of symbolic practices to the category of information. It’s a move that’s often queried. For example, many have argued that there’s a fundamental distinction to be drawn between data and knowledge. However, we’ll be exploring the possibility of distinguishing between information and communication. In other words, we’ll be asking ourselves questions about forms of society and forms of interaction. If communication is the characteristic form of symbolic interaction of communities, can it be expressed in terms of information networks on the model of networked computers? Can we say ‘No’ in answer to this without succumbing to some form of questionable humanist essentialism? Are languages a kind of code? What’s the difference between, say, the DNA code in one’s genes and cultural ‘code’ of one’s utterances (or choice in clothes, or whatever)? We’ll also consider Habermas’s account of communicative rationality here in relation to the distinction he draws between Lifeworld and System, besides considering the possibility that some of the questions we’re asking ourselves may only be answerable on the basis of what one might kindly call a wager, or, more bluntly, prejudice. As often in this course, we’ll be coming back to the possibility that the ‘human’ may be a kind of construction, and possibly one that’s had its day -- of which more next week. Main reading John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, 2000, The Social Life of Information, Cambridge MA: Harvard Business School Press, ch.1. [available online through the book’s website: www.slofi.com/]. SLC (303.4833BRO) Other reading Bolter, J. David, 1984, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, Chapel Hill, U. of N. Carolina P. Davis, Martin, 2000, The Universal Computer: the road from Leibniz to Turing, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Dreyfus, Hubert L., 1992, What the Computer Still Can’t Do: a critique of artificial reason, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. 42 Habermas, Jurgen, 1987, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity. Vol 1 SLC. Harris, Roy, 1987, The Language Machine, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Joas, Hans, 1997, G.H.Mead: a contemporary re-examination of his thought, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, ch. 7. Jones, Steven G., Ed., 1995, Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications. Bruce Mazlish, 2000, ‘Invisible Ties: from patronage to networks,’ Theory, Culture, Society,17 ii: 1-19. Myerson, George, 2001, Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone, Duxford: Icon Books. Poster, Mark, 1990, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rheingold, Howard, 1994, Virtual Community, London: Secker. Roszak, Theodore, 1988, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking [1986], London: Paladin Grafton Books. Turing, Alan, 1950, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, rptd. in Boden, Margaret, Ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, ch. 2. Volosinov, V.N, 1986, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929], trans. Ladislav Matejka & I.R.Titunik, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press Weizenbaum, Joseph, 1976, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, San Francisco: W.H.Freeman & Co. Woodward, Kathleen, 1980, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, Madison: Coda Press Inc. Essay question ‘Information per se is socially inert. Only in the form of communication can it mean anything to us.’ Discuss the socio-political implications of this view. 22. Posthumanism Very crudely the idea we’re exploring in the last session is the end of humanity: the idea that the ‘human’ has had its day and is passing. Perhaps because we are now, or soon will be, technologically equipped to go beyond biological constraints which have hitherto defined the human condition, or because Samuel Butler’s half-mocking nightmare is about to come true, and machines are set to waken to consciousness, out-evolve us, and then either keep us as pets or wipe us out as a pest. 43 The first of these possibilities points to the appearance of what is variously called the posthuman, the transhuman or the metaman. This entity may avoid even the fundamental biological limit of death, so some say. Among the political questions to pose here is: Need there be conflict between living machine or posthumans on the one hand, and humans (if it would be possible to be human in a universe that contained these other entities)? Would it be possible to recognise rights, or even subjectivity in different kinds of being? Or is this, for all the energy some are devoting to making it a concrete fact, better seen as a metaphorical expression of something that’s already happening? Perhaps some rupture in the character of subjectivity? Lyotard, as you’ll see from the booklet on his views that’s this week’s reading, urged a defence of a kind of humanism. We’ll want to consider what kind, given Lyotard’s declaration of the end of metanarratives in his influential account of postmodernism. How open and undetermined can humanism be before it ceases to be humanism? A useful comparison here is with Neil Postman, who is like Lyotard in urging a defense against an encroaching technology, or what he calls technopoly, but who leaves one wondering ‘A defence of what?’ Postman’s answer seems to be ‘culture’ -- but it’s a word which, as we’ve seen, is fraught with difficulty in this context. By comparison, and for a wholly disorientating taste of an alternative, we’ll sample the figure of the machine in Deleuze and Guattari -- where it figures in the midst of a radical abandonment of hierarchy and control, which challenges the terms in which to think and with which to represent many of the issues we’ve been discussed. Main reading Stuart Sim, 2001, Lyotard and the Inhuman, Duxford: Icon Books. SLC 303.483 SIM. OR ‘Can thought go on without a body?’ in Lyotard, The Inhuman, below. Other reading Ansell Pearson, Keith, Ed., 1997, Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, London: Routledge. Badmington, Neil, Ed., 2000, Posthumanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bogue, Ronald, 1989, Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, 1984, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1973], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, pref. Michel Foucault, London: Athlone. Gray, Chris Hables, Ed., 1995, The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine, 1999, How We Became Posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press Kroker, Arthur, 1992, The Possessed Inidividual, technology and postmodernity, Basinstoke, Macmillan. 44 Lyotard, J.-F., 1991, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby, Oxford: Blackwell. SLC (190LYO) Marks, John, 1998, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, London: Pluto Press. Massumi, Brian, 1992, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: MIT Press. Postman, Neil, 1993, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York: Random House. Regis, Ed., 1992, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Warwick, Kevin, 1997, March of the Machines: Why the New Race of Robots Will Rule the World, London: Century Books. Essay question Are our actual or putative technologies tending to the end of the human, and, if so, should we welcome this? 45 46 47 Appendix 1: Essay Guidelines You may either use one of the pre-set essay questions or develop one of your own. If you do decide to develop your own, please clear it with your tutor first (even if only in a telephone conversation or via e-mail, if you haven’t time to arrange a meeting). A fuller set of essay guidelines can be found in your BA programme handbook. Substance Essays should always present an argument in answer to the chosen question and not just rehearse what you know about the subject. An essay should provide an analysis of the subject rather than consisting merely of description. The argument should be put forward coherently, substantiated by factual or textual evidence, and soberly presented in formal language. It should respond precisely to the question posed. Your argument should be sustained from the first paragraph to the last, with each paragraph contributing in some way to the support or elucidation of your argument. The first paragraph is particularly important in organising your essay. It should address the question directly and crisply, and introduce the argument that you intend to make. Simplicity of expression throughout is strongly preferred to purple prose. Marks will be awarded according to the quality, clarity and coherence of the argument presented in the essay, the essay’s structure, how well supported by evidence the main claims of the essay are, and whether reference is made to the relevant literature. Format and presentation Please consult this checklist before beginning your essay, and again before submitting it: • Two copies of each essay are to be submitted to the departmental office. It is important that you hand in each essay to the department and not directly to me, as the office records receipt of all essays and it should go there first in order to ensure that there is no confusion about whether or not work has been submitted. • Each copy is to be accompanied by a cover sheet (available from outside the departmental office). • Essay length is usually around 1,500 to 2,000 words but does vary from course to course, so you should check with your lecturer if in doubt. You do not need to get panicked about exact word counts, but essays which are far shorter or far longer than stipulated may be penalised. • All essays should be typed or word-processed, double-spaced and printed in a font of a readable size. • Make sure to number the pages of your essays. Referencing All essays must be properly sourced. A list of books and articles at the end of the essay is necessary, whatever your referencing method , but not sufficient. References are necessary when you source ideas that you have borrowed and not simply when you cite quotations. References are scholarly acknowledgements of work referred to or quoted. Please note that proper citation of sources is an elementary but critical mark of the presentation of academic work. There are several different conventions and it does not matter which one you adopt provided that you cite sources properly, giving all the necessary information and keep consistently to the same convention. The ‘Harvard’ system is recommended and is outlined below. You should use one of three methods of sourcing the ideas (any ideas you have borrowed, not just the direct quotations) in your essays: 1. footnotes, appearing at the bottom of each page and indicating the author, title, publisher/journal, year of publication and page numbers; or 2. endnotes, providing the same information but at coming the end of the text; or 3. in-text bracketed references to the author’s name, year of publication, and relevant page numbers. 48 Sample references are listed at the end of these guidelines; please employ these formats. If you opt for footnotes or endnotes, be sure that the notes themselves correspond correctly to the footnote/endnote numbers in the text. (This may sound obvious, but I have often found that the notes and text references did not match up!) If you prefer bracketed references in the text, they should correspond to entries found in a detailed bibliography at the end of the essay. For instance, your essay may start by saying, “In this essay, I will take issue with some of the more simplistic analyses found in this literature (Tompson, 1997:3) . . .” This allows the reader to check your bibliography, find the reference for the book/article on the topic published by Tompson in 1997, look it up in the library and verify the stupidity of what Tompson had in fact written on p. 3. The ‘Harvard’ system uses brackets in the text and is therefore one of the easiest to use, especially if you do not have a reasonably sophisticated word processing programme at your disposal. It is also widely employed in academic publications, both journals and books. The list of references at the end of the essay should be arranged alphabetically with full bibliographic information. The alphabetical list should include all the references which have been used (books, articles, reports, government publications, theses etc.). The references in the alphabetical list should contain the name of the author, the date of publication, the title of publication, the place of publication and the publisher, set out as follows: for books: Parsons, W (1995) Public Policy (Aldershot: Edward Elgar). for articles: H. Margetts (1991) ‘The Computerization of Social Security: The Way Forward or a Step Backwards?’ Public Administration 69 (3) pp.325-43. for chapters in edited volumes: L. Keliher (1995) ‘Core Executive Decision Making on High Technology Issues: The Case of the Alvey Report’, R. Rhodes and P.Dunleavy (eds.) Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive (London: Macmillan) pp. 219247. for government reports or other publications where there is no author’s name: Office of Management and Budget (1997) The US Federal Budget (Washington DC: GPO). When writing your essays, it may be useful to have a good English dictionary to hand, as well as a copy of W. Strunk and E White (1979) The Elements of Style (New York: Macmillan) or some similar book (e.g. Fowler). Footnotes may be used in conjunction with the Harvard system when you have a piece of information to give but it is inconvenient to break up the text to give it. Traditionally footnotes appear at the bottom of the relevant page in a smaller font: most word-processing packages will create them for you. Alternatively, you may put all ‘notes’ at the end and signal them in the text by a superscript or number in brackets. 49 Appendix 2: Marking Schema Course essays, examination scripts and dissertations are assessed using the following criteria (not in order of importance): • • • • • • Answering the question: the extent to which the work has dealt directly and clearly with the assigned task and provided a focused answer to the particular intellectual problem posed. Structure: the extent to which the work demonstrates coherent organization of the material and an overall argument that proceeds logically from introduction to conclusion. Conceptual clarity: the extent to which the work has understood key terms and concepts, defined ambiguous terms, and employed them correctly. Analytic Content: the extent to which the work provides a critical analysis of the problem that evaluates competing arguments and interpretations rather than a purely descriptive or narrative discussion. Literature: the extent to which the work demonstrates familiarity with, and command of, the relevant scholarly writings on the subject to which the work is addressed. Evidence and Examples: the extent to which the work deploys apposite examples and pieces of evidence to support its claims, thereby turning unsupported assertions into critical arguments. While there is no set order of priority among these criteria, the main emphasis is on evidence of understanding and the ability to think, to argue a case or to solve problems. These criteria are used to categorise submissions into the following classes (note that the narratives below are guidelines). Criteria for marking 0–34% Fail—A very poor answer in all areas. Does not address the question, shows little or no knowledge of the subject, and fails to deal with the issues raised by the question. 35–39% Pass—definitely a weak answer but not totally below the standard. Says something which is relevant to the question but does not show much evidence of reading or an ability to develop a clear argument. 40–49% Third—a somewhat weak answer in all or most areas. Shows a grasp of some basic relevant information and understanding, but is poorly argued, lacking organisation and clarity. 50–59% Lower Second—a good answer. Answer is competent in all areas or strong in some but weak in others. Shows an awareness of the major issues, shows knowledge of the sources and of alternative approaches to the subject but does not show a clear understanding of alternative arguments and makes uncritical use of sources. 60–69% Upper Second—a very good answer. Very competent in all or most areas, or showing moderate competence in some and excellence in others. Generally well planned and well argued, showing a solid ability to develop logical and persuasive arguments. Treats the issues in a critical and balanced way and shows an awareness of context, sources and different explanations. 70%+ First class—an excellent answer in all or nearly all areas. Displays exceptional knowledge of the subject, clear well-organised argument and substantial evidence of independent thought. Shows a high degree of competence in all areas. 50 Appendix 3: PLAGIARISM: A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS All work submitted by a student as part of the requirements for any degree must be expressed in the student’s own words and must incorporate his own ideas and judgements. This applies equally to coursework and dissertations no less than to examinations. Plagiarism—the presentation of another person’s thoughts or words as one’s own—in essays, dissertations or other assessed work is a serious disciplinary offence. Action will be taken wherever plagiarism is suspected. Disciplinary proceedings will be initiated wherever there is evidence that plagiarism has been committed. Where plagiarism is confirmed, candidates stand to fail on the work concerned and may be liable for further disciplinary action, including permanent exclusion from study not only at Birkbeck, but also anywhere else in the University of London. The handling of cases of alleged plagiarism is governed by the University of London’s Regulations for Proceedings in Respect of Examination Irregularities. These regulations shall apply until determined otherwise by the College. The purpose of this short guide is three-fold: • to clarify what constitutes plagiarism; • to provide clear guidance as to how best to avoid it; and • to set out the penalties that may be applied where plagiarism is discovered. What is plagiarism? The College statement on the subject, provided to all students, is as follows (emphasis added): You are reminded that all work submitted as part of the requirements for any examination of the University of London or Birkbeck College must be expressed in your own words and incorporate your own ideas and judgements. Plagiarism—that is, the presentation of another person’s thoughts or words as though they were your own—must be avoided, with particular care in course-work and essays and reports written in your own time. Direct quotations from the published or unpublished work of others must always be clearly identified as such by being placed inside quotation marks, and a full reference to their source must be provided in the proper form. Remember that a series of short quotations from several different sources, if not clearly identified as such, constitutes plagiarism just as much as does a single unacknowledged long quotation from a single source. Equally, if you summarise another person’s ideas or judgements, you must refer to that person in your text, and include the work referred to in your bibliography. Failure to observe these rules may result in an allegation of cheating. You should therefore consult your tutor or course director if you are in any doubt about what is permissible. Recourse to the services of ‘ghost-writing’ agencies (for example in the preparation of essays or reports) or of outside word-processing agencies which offer ‘correction / improvement of English’ is strictly forbidden, and students who make use of the services of such agencies render themselves liable for an academic penalty. 51 Simply put, plagiarism is a form of fraud. That is why the University, the College and the School take it extremely seriously. It is dishonest and undermines the entire basis for the academic awards given to students: the award of a degree, and its class, should be conferred on the basis of the recipient’s own work, not the work of others. Plagiarism subverts the assessment process and, if undetected and unpunished, has a corrosive effect on the value of all degrees awarded. It is important to understand that plagiarism encompasses more than the wholesale use of others’ exact words as your own: summaries, précis and paraphrases, as well as shorter quoted passages, should all be acknowledged as such with appropriate references. How can you avoid plagiarism? This section is intended to help you avoid unintentional plagiarism. The mistaken belief that plagiarism is limited to the wholesale reproduction of entire papers or long passages of text is widespread, but these are only its most spectacular forms. While penalties are generally much more severe where the plagiarism is flagrant, no case of plagiarism that is uncovered will be ignored. You could, therefore, find yourself in difficulties as a result of too close a reliance on sources that are not properly acknowledged. Even if it was clearly unintentional, plagiarism will, if detected, lead at the very least to a mark of zero on the assessed work in question and at most to suspension from all further study in the University of London. It is therefore very important to know just what is and is not likely to get you into trouble. So what do you need to do? 1. Always attribute quoted words. It does not matter if the quote is long or short, every quoted passage taken directly from the work of another should be clearly marked as such by the use of quotation marks. The full reference, including page number, should be given for each quotation, either in a footnote or endnote, or in the text using the ‘Harvard system’ of text references. 2. Always give full references for paraphrases of others’ ideas or judgements. Simply rewriting a passage in your own words rather than the author’s does not avoid plagiarism. Paraphrases or summaries of the ideas or judgements of others should be referenced fully. 3. Give references to support purely factual claims where necessary. Plagiarism is mainly about the appropriation of others’ ideas and judgements. Factual references are less sensitive. You certainly do not need to include (as some students do) references for facts that are well established and can be found in any number of places (don’t bother with a reference telling the reader where you found the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example). However, where the facts are less well known and some other investigator has persuasively established some claim of fact, you should acknowledge this in your references, as a well as the sources for any quantitative data you might use. 4. Include a reference to any source used in a paragraph in that paragraph. One way to find yourself sailing rather too close to the wind is to include a single reference at the end of a long passage of more than one paragraph that gives the source for the entire passage. This can give the reader the impression that the reference refers only to the last paragraph or so, rather than the whole passage. If for some reason you wish to avoid repeating references to the same source, then include a statement or footnote early on indicating that the discussion that follows is drawn from such-and-such a source. For example: ‘Except where indicated otherwise, the description of EU policy-making set out in this section is drawn from Kassim (1997:285–79).’ You then need only provide additional references for 52 those points in the description of EU policy-making taken from sources other than Kassim (1997). 5. Remember that a full bibliography is necessary but not sufficient. You should be at pains to include every source on which you have relied in your bibliography. However, mere inclusion in the bibliography is not enough. If you have drawn on a source in ways that are not acknowledged in the text, its inclusion in the bibliography is insufficient (though omitting it from the bibliography altogether would generally be an even more serious offence). Ultimately, the golden rule should be: when in doubt, give the reference. This not only protects you from unintended plagiarism, it is also good manners: credit should be given to sources where and when they are used. That is why it is not unusual to find academic articles of 10,000 words or so that have anywhere from 50 to 150 references. Students sometimes worry that giving full references throughout will make it appear as though their papers are just compilations of other people’s views. However, even if there are 100-odd references to a medium-length article or chapter, the author’s own contribution to the discussion should be clear to the reader. If it is not, then the paper is probably not a very strong one. This means that thorough referencing will provide a good check on the substance of your essays and dissertations: if the finished product looks like nothing more than a cut-and-paste job full of others’ ideas and data, it probably needs to be rewritten. The above guidelines apply to essays, other coursework, dissertations and theses. You do not need to worry about punctilious acknowledgement of sources when writing unseen written examinations. Generally, it helps on an exam to show familiarity with the major writers in a given field, but examiners do not expect to find references to all the items relied on. After all, exams are meant to test your understanding of the material, not your memory. The penalties for plagiarism Plagiarism is regarded as a serious disciplinary matter. While the penalties imposed depend on the seriousness of the offence, even the minimum penalties are serious: • Any case of plagiarism detected will be recorded in the offending student’s file and will be reported to the Examinations Office of the College. This can have far-reaching consequences in itself: a former student needing a reference from the School will be in an unenviable position should his file contain a case of plagiarism. • Any work found to contain plagiarism will automatically be assigned a mark of zero. The offending student may be allowed to replace the plagiarised assignment with another piece of work if the offence was not too flagrant and if there are grounds for believing that it was not intentional. Otherwise, the zero will stand as the mark for the assignment. If a replacement assignment is permitted, it will be eligible for a bare pass at best (35 for an undergraduate, 50 for an MSc/MRes student). More serious cases will result in more serious penalties. The offending student may, in a serious case, be failed for his/her degree and forbidden from re-entry. This is the norm where students have been found to commit plagiarism a second time. You should therefore be aware that, if a relatively mild penalty is applied to a first offence of plagiarism, the penalties are likely to be much more severe in the event of a second infraction. 53 Handling cases of plagiarism If course directors/tutors conclude that a piece of assessed work has been plagiarised in whole or part, he or she normally, after consulting with the School’s Examinations Officer, send a formal invitation to the student to meet with the course director/tutor and the Examinations Officer at a mutually convenient time. The purpose of this meeting is to ascertain whether the student fully understood the definition of plagiarism in the statement and whether the plagiarised work was essentially inadvertent or intentional. In cases where the course director/tutor and Examinations Officer conclude that the student did not fully understand the definition of plagiarism or where the plagiarism may reasonably be deemed to have been inadvertent, the student is required to submit a letter to the Course Director stating that s/he now understands how the plagiarism regulations had been infringed and is required to resubmit the assignment by a date set by the course director/lecturer. Such work is eligible for no more than a bare pass mark (35 for undergraduate work, 50 at MSc level). Whether the student will be permitted to revise the plagiarised assignment or must submit an alternative piece of work in its place depends upon the extent of the plagiarism. If the course director/tutor and Examinations Officer conclude that the plagiarism in the assignment can reasonably be deemed to have been intentional, the course director/tutor and Examinations Officer agree remedial action and sanctions appropriate to the particular circumstances. In the case of serious infractions, the Examinations Officer may refer the case to the Examinations Office of the College for further action. In cases of both inadvertent and intentional plagiarism, full records of the plagiarised assignment, relevant evidence of plagiarism, and meeting minutes are kept by the course director/tutor. The Head of School is also notified and, through him/her, other tutors who may be teaching the student who submitted the plagiarised assignment. University hearings and appeals Under the University of London’s Regulations for Proceedings in Respect of Examination Offences, the College may refer cases of plagiarism to the University and a panel may be convened to hear the case. The hearing committee may find that no offence has been committed. If it finds that an offence has been committed, it is empowered to impose a range of penalties, including the exclusion of the candidate from all future examinations for awards of the University of London—effectively barring the candidate not only from re-entering Birkbeck College but also from entering any other institution of the University to read for a degree or other award. Candidates may appeal against a hearing committee’s decision on grounds of procedural irregularity or against the penalty imposed by the hearing committee. An appellate committee has the power to reverse or modify the penalties imposed by the hearing committee, although it may not impose any more severe penalties than those imposed by the hearing committee. However, candidates should be aware that, in the event of an unsuccessful appeal, the appellate committee can order them to pay a contribution to the costs of the appeal. This contribution shall be recoverable from the appellant candidate as a civil debt due to the University. 54 Appendix 4: Calendar for Students in the School of Politics & Sociology, 2003–2004 Autumn Term 2003 September 26 Friday: BA Politics and Society Student Induction Evening October 11 Saturday School on libraries, note-taking, essay-writing, organised by David Styan 13–17 Student representatives elected in each class 27-31 BAPS students to meet personal tutors November 03–07 Reading week 17 Monday: Student-Staff Exchange Meetings for BAPS students: all student class representatives to attend; all other undergraduate students welcome December 12 Friday: BA first core course essay deadline for Political Transformations, Formation of Modern Societies and Democracy & Authoritarianism 12 Friday: term ends Spring Term 2004 January 12 Monday: Term begins. 16 Friday: BA in Politics and Society Social & Political Theory essay 1 deadline February 05 Thursday: Dissertation workshop for part-time Masters students 16–20 Reading week 23 Monday: Student-Staff Exchange meeting for BAPS students. Student class representatives must attend; all other undergraduate students welcome March 01 Monday: BA in Politics & Society options meeting (evening) 06 Saturday: Practice examinations 12 Friday: BA in Politics and Society Social & Political Theory essay 2 deadline 13 Saturday: Exams Saturday School organised by Rosie Campbell 26 Friday: BA second core course essay deadline for Political Transformations, Formation of Modern Societies and Democracy & Authoritarianism 26 Friday: term ends Summer Term 2004 April 26 Monday: Term begins May 03 Monday: BANK HOLIDAY 05 Wednesday: undergraduate dissertation workshop 14 Friday: BA in Politics and Society: Social & Political Theory essay 3 deadline 17 Monday: BA Dissertations due July 05-09 End of year party 09 Friday: Term ends 55