Graduiertenkolleg
Technisierung und Gesellschaft
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Graduiertenkolleg
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This description has been written for the 2nd generation of the college (~ 1999-2002). The German descripton refers to the last generation (~ 2003-2006).
The Post-Graduate College ‘Technology and Society’ pursues technology research in the humanities and social sciences. In other words, the focus is not on technology itself but rather on human behavior, action, and forms of thought and organization connected to the development of technology. In order to grasp the infiltration of technology into human affairs, we researchers at the Post-Graduate College conceive of technology as meaning more than a way of knowing, more than expedient action directed toward fulfilling one’s self-interest, with no consideration of ethical values. What interest us are the ever wider diffusion and influence of technological processes, that is, cases in which technology has a formative function as a material dispositif in human perception, thinking, acting, or organization.
The individual research tasks are defined in interdisciplinary terms as a matter of principle. The training program is designed to integrate the members of the research groups closely and achieve cross-fertilization among their different disciplines and research traditions. The training program must therefore offer all graduates continued training in scientific methodology. Because the research focuses on processes of development, the historical dimension plays a role in all the studies.
The aim of the research at the Post-Graduate College is to help clarify the question of what it means to live in a technological civilization. This work is intended to sharpen awareness of current radical changes so that science can do what it can to pave the way for political and moral regulation of these processes.
[back to top]In the research at the Post-Graduate College ‘Technology and Society’, technology is to be viewed neither as an object that can be isolated (whether it be a particular technology, a technical system, or an engineering community) nor as a parameter or factor interacting with other, nontechnical parameters or factors. The research focuses on technology in societal contexts of action, in policy-making, in perception, and in the production and processing of knowledge and literature. In short, it is about technology as a formative element of objects, contexts, and developments that have traditionally been the domains of the social sciences and the humanities.
Of the many different ways to characterize the current state of western societies—capitalist society, late modern society, risk society, information society, and knowledge society—the most neutral and perhaps most basic is probably society as a technological civilization. It is neutral because it is relatively independent of political systems and social conditions. It is basic because it refers to fundamental structures of the social and human dimension per se, that is, to the structures underlying the relation of human beings to themselves. Technology has a part in determining what politics, transport, social relations, perception, thinking, knowledge, and literature are. In this regard, technology loses its properties as a resource or means and becomes a structural element of politics, transport, perception, thinking, knowledge, and literature. The change leads to a partial deculturation
of these areas. In other words, human and social behavior, which has traditionally been marked and regulated by norms, rites, symbols, and images, is now being shaped more and more by technological patterns.
This partial deculturation of social and human contexts, a process characteristic of technological civilization, has global significance. The spread of technological civilization throughout the world despite the persistence of cultural differences is due not only to factors of political and economic power but also to the neutralization brought about by technology’s permeation of social and human behavior.
[back to top]Technology is a term whose meanings vary constantly. This variety should not be forsaken in interdisciplinary work, especially not in a project like the present one, in which the perspective of the participating researchers is relevant in areas of social action and human behavior. The multiplicity of the word’s meanings in everyday use makes it possible to convert such experiences into specific scientific questions. An attempt to distill the substance of the concept of technology from its daily use can go in three directions.
Technologyis derived from the Greek word tekhne, skill, which is a type of knowledge. It draws attention to production knowledge as distinct from knowledge acquired through and about practice and to knowledge about resources as opposed to knowledge about objectives (wisdom).
techniquedoes in the phrase
piano technique.
For the research of the Post-Graduate College ‘Technology and Society’, the word technology
is taken primarily in the third sense. The use of the term dispositif
requires explanation. The expression material resource system
was used in the initial proposal to create the Post-Graduate College ‘Technology and Society’. It was chosen in order to tie into traditional ideas about technological objects such as devices, instruments, and apparatuses that are used as resources. It was stressed, however, that modern technological development is characterized instead by a decoupling of technical equipment from stated, narrowly defined objectives. It is all about technology’s multifunctionality. Moreover, the intention is to make it clear that interest no longer centers on the discrete technological object, but rather on technological networks or systems. Lastly, the chosen expression should make it possible to speak of existing technology, or the stock of technology. The project has meanwhile advanced, however, and the research fellows have long since grown accustomed to speaking of technology in the sense of habitus, medium, infrastructure, and technostructures of society or human action. A procedure tying into the traditional concept of technology as a means to achieve objectives would therefore be obsolete.
The term dispositif
comes today from modern French philosophy, especially that of Foucault. In the history of philosophy, though, it harks back to the concept of diathesis used by Aristotle (Metaphysics, 10 22 B1). The Greek diathesis became dispositio in Latin. Drawing on Leibniz, Christian Wolff has defined dispositio as possibilitas acquirendi potentiam agendi vel patiendi
(Psychologia empirica, §406). In modern philosophy, dispositif
is used in order to avoid lending the term the psychological dimension suggested by the word disposition. An installation, constellation, facility, or structure is considered a dispositif if it makes something (X) possible or restricts the possibilities of that something. Foucault, for example, speaks of power dispositif–constellations or structures that facilitate the exercise of power but at the same time also preform and channel the exercise of power.
If technology is conceived of as a dispositif, then this something (X) has to be identified for each study. One can speak of technology as a perceptual dispositif to the degree that existing technology shapes what is possible as perception today. Or one can speak of technology as a social dispositif to the degree that technology exists as social infrastructure.
For two reasons, it is important at this juncture to speak of material dispositifs. First, technology as a dispositif can be distinguished from other kinds of dispositifs, such as discursive ones. (In Foucault’s philosophy, dispositifs are usually discursive, but by no means always. Bentham’s Panopticon, for example, is a material dispositif, that is, technology in our sense. We avoid Foucault’s concept of the productive function of dispositifs because it would be misleading in a technological context.) Second, the point of our work is to elaborate the social and anthropological meaning of technology, precisely insofar as technology is also independent of what goes on in human minds,
that is, independent of ideas and mutual expectations. Technology has a sort of inertia vis-à-vis its users. As a material dispositif it is a structure or framework to be assumed from the outset. For our question, we therefore need to be able to speak of existing technology or technology as fact. This de facto existence of technology means that technological equipment created by one generation for particular purposes may be present as boundary conditions of developments by the next generation and can be used quite differently. An example is the Internet, which was originally created for the transmission of military information. The de facto existence of technology also means that technology can shape structures even where it is not used, as in socialization processes and as a model for ideas. A classic example of this interplay is the emergence of visual habits and theories of vision to which optical devices gave rise. The intention of the Post-Graduate College is to study technology as a dispositif for social organizations and human behavior, as a perceptual dispositif, a knowledge dispositif, and a text dispositif.
The basic thesis of the Post-Graduate College is there has now been a century of civilizational change in which what used to be material resources are becoming dispositifs of this kind. Although technological objects and equipment have always had a role as resources, technology went almost without mention in Norbert Elias’s depiction of the process of civilization. That approach is no longer possible. Because of technology’s salience in civilization, it is justifiable to call modern civilization a technological civilization. The work of the Post-Graduate College is thus set apart from previous descriptions of technological civilization, notably those by Max Weber and Jacques Ellul, in which technology was understood to mean rationalization or a systematic procedure that raises efficiency.
[back to top]In the traditional philosophy of technology, the meaning that technology used to have for perception lay in strengthening, enlarging, or replacing organs (Gehlen). As revealed by Feyerabend and Duden, however, technology’s mounting influence on perception since the early modern age indicates that perception has been structurally changed by the use of technologies–devices–of perception. To capture these kinds of changes, one must assume that human perception is subject to cultural (i.e., historical and biographical) influence. Then it is conceivable that the historiocultural efficacy of perceptual techniques leads to changing forms of perception also when no technologies are applied.
The Post-Graduate College will focus mainly on developments of the recent past. In the optical sphere, many studies on the effects of the camera, film, television, and the video machine already exist. The changes that modern audio technologies have wrought in the aural behavior of humans have received little note to date. To some degree, however, these technologies can also be called traditional. By contrast, there are several modern technologies with which the very object of perception is produced as it were: visualization technologies, virtuality, simulation, and endoscopy. They mark a kind of turning point in the main trend of development in modern natural science, which was to exclude human perception as much as possible. They facilitate a sort of return to human perception. The potential of perception, that is, immediacy, integration, and orientation, are being used in order to explore, become informed about, gather experience in, acquire knowledge of, and make decisions on matters that are abstract, overly complex, and "inhuman" (i.e., dangerous and untreadable). We are talking about the use of virtuality in training programs, about animation and simulation as a way of knowing, about visualization technologies for diagnosis and for surgical intervention.
The cultural history of perception is to be pursued not only as technological and pictorial history but also as literary production, where technology works as a dispositif affecting imagination. Potential hypotheses for dissertations:
In the past century technology has gotten under man’s skin so to speak. With the advent of genetic engineering, the depth of technological invasive manipulation reaches the human being’s very genes. The possibilities of genetic engineering, reproduction therapy, transplantation, and artificial limb technology pose the question of what can still be regarded and accepted as natural endowment. Theories stemming primarily from the field of scientific research aim largely at suspending the classical dichotomy placing nature on one side and technology, culture, civilization, and so forth on the other. The human being is thought of as a hybrid (Latour) or a cyborg (Haraway).
The ever greater mix of technological and organic components in the human body is paralleled by the development of progressively organic technical devices. Scientists are attempting to reproduce the achievements, skills, sensory faculties, and other characteristics of the human being (artificial intelligence) and to simulate living creatures, be it in function or appearance. The processes leading to the human being-as-artifact and to the anthropomorphic types of technology are a challenge to the way humans see themselves and their world. On the one hand, technology as a medium for opening up the world serves the transparency and understanding of the human being as an artifact. On the other hand, the image it thereby creates of the human being could assume the function of a standard and yardstick. Commonplace, scientific, political, and social, and other types of discourses about how human beings see themselves will be studied for reactions to technology’s increasing influence on human beings and their areas of life and for the points at which essentials of human dignity and human rights are touched upon. Possible hypotheses for dissertations in this field:
Subjective and Sociostructural Dimensions
Work, in all its personal and social facets, is one of the central areas in which technology’s influence is spreading nowadays. Both individual work and collective work are increasingly becoming a matter of processing information. Explanation of the relation between these informational components and the expansion of the service sector is neither theoretically nor empirically adequate. Are we dealing with a new, informational quality of services, that is, with a new wave of the information-centered service society? Or is a network-like type of informational work replacing traditional service-centered work? The hypothesis proposed in this research area is that the classical normal employment relationship
is eroding and that it is being biographically, temporally, spatially, and institutionally supplanted by new forms of flexible working conditions. This change will not be possible until information and communication technologies are widely used and promoted. In terms of social structure, this development coincides with clear tendencies toward a polarization of society as the gap widens in working and employment conditions, in the distribution of income and wealth, and hence in basic parameters of people’s social opportunities.
Another inadequately discussed topic is the qualitative change wrought by the increased use of information technology in all areas of work. The growing reliance on this technology has clearly gone hand in hand with an accumulation of abstract job requirements and an escalation of the skills needed for work. It is unclear, however, how these aspects relate to the demands on the subjective facets of skill requirements and work performance, which have likewise become much more important than they used to be. The theses developed in the literature include the reduction of agency to the peripheral individual
(Holling & Kempin) because of the agent’s technological dimensions
(Wenzel); the corrosion of character
(Sennett); and a diagnosed resurgence of individuality because of the erosion of traditional social relations (Beck) or, more emphatically, because of expectation that the spread of information technology will liberate humans and lead to autonomous individuality (Toffler). The work within this research area of the Post-Graduate College explores the hypothesis that the actor’s access to knowledge and the ability to use it is crucial to that person’s future role in work and organization. Both the transformation of information into knowledge and the attendant growth in the abundance and scope of information remains tied to subjective intellectual input and thereby helps offset the tendencies to quash initiative in modern organizations.
A profound change in forms of organization has followed upon the new role assumed by information and communication technologies since the early 1980s and upon economic and political globalization. Analysts alert to the importance of modern society’s ever greater reliance on technology have been led by the paradigm of the network organization to grant this development a socially formative function, as in the expression network society
(Castells). However, it has thus far been difficult to distinguish between mental anticipation and reality. The actual development of organizations has gone largely unresearched. The same is therefore true for the question of the degree to which organizations are also shaped by trends of social development other than the spread of technology or whether the virtualization of organization is in fact the dominating trend. The work of the Post-Graduate College builds on the assumption that forms of virtual organizations are spreading, not only in the new service areas aided by information technology but also in traditional sectors of production and administration. In addition to depending heavily on the agency of the members, these forms of organization aim at bringing economic realities directly into contact with day-to-day individual action. The integrity and boundaries of organizations therefore rest upon the foundation of new technology but are socially defined largely in economic terms.
Mechanization of the Household and Rising Standards of Hygiene in Society
The increasing reliance on technology in daily life is documented in a number of examples, some of which have been treated in various classical texts. Norbert Elias showed keen interest in this topic in the 1930s with his historical and sociological analysis of the fork’s dissemination. In the decade thereafter Sigfried Giedion published a synthesizing work on the subject. But in the subsequent research inspired by Elias, the spread of technology received little or no attention with respect to either the early modern period or, even more amazingly, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By contrast, Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command greatly influenced many studies on the history and sociology of everyday technology. Those concepts of mechanization and of the growing reliance on technology made it possible to convincingly analyze the spread of different artifacts, especially during the era of Germany’s economic miracle.
These artifacts included the electric stove and the significance it had for household production and reproduction, the car and its effect on the human being’s relation to space and time, the telephone within the network of modern communications structures, and the television as the appliance at the center of domestic interior design, indeed, as the primary reference point for an entire way of life.
To the extent that researchers in modern social and cultural science have addressed such issues at all, they have repeatedly criticized studies for their undertones of technological determinism. If technology’s permeation of everyday life is understood instead as the accrual of material dispositifs, the concept’s use may well be justified in historical studies as well. Evidence to this effect was provided by the study on the introduction of electrical household appliances in the period between World Wars I and II—research conducted during the first phase of work by the Post-Graduate College. This success is one of the motivating factors behind the decision to pursue this line of investigation in the next phase of the Post-Graduate College’s work. The household is still a place where the use of technology is not only rapidly increasing but, as a result, is also causing clearly discernible behavioral change affecting society at large. To remain open, the investigation will not be restricted to a particular technology from the outset, though examples have been cited above.
This cluster of topics will be complemented and expanded by a set that closely links society and the individual from the start by virtue of its focus on social-control technology. At about the time the Second German Empire was created, there began a process of upheaval that people could cope with only by adopting new practices in daily life. Gigantic technological networks for supplying water and disposing of sewage helped give cities and towns a new look (and a new smell) and improved household hygienic standards. These developments required vast restoration programs and new architectural visions with which contemporaries aimed to imbue society with air and light.
In order to understand the process of technology’s pervasion of urban life, it must be placed in a fairly broad social context. The main thesis of this research area is that an explanation based on structural functionalism is inadequate for that task because it does not sufficiently respect the basic hermeneutic requirement of the cultural sciences. Instead, we take the concept of hygiene as the point of departure for our investigations because it indisputably served as a vision. Hygiene
and the associated terms cleanliness
and health
had a coordinating, increasingly controlling, and hence authoritarian role in much of the Western world. Our hygienic period,
as it was called by a Norwegian women’s journal, became a part not only of urban design and housing but also of medical and psychiatric practice, anthropology (in the sense of racial hygiene), the handling of food, and occupational safety equipment. Work in this research area is expected to link specific studies on the increased use of technology in an area of daily life (e.g., living spaces, the battle against disease, and means of transport or communication) with content analysis of cognitive and institutional practice. The intention is to show that the development and spread of technology cannot be understood as an autogenic process but rather as a result of complex social interactions. In our opinion this research area thus offers especially promising opportunities for interdisciplinary work.
This research area comprises studies on the ever more prominent role of computer technology in knowledge production, that is, on the application of information technology to knowledge. The interest is in research on the relation between knowledge and information at different levels. The application of information technology to knowledge production (e.g., algorithmic calculations and simulation) has provided insight into differences (and similarities) between information and knowledge and between the various types of knowledge, between code and speech, and between systems of artificial intelligence and of natural intelligence. However, one cannot overlook what could be called the imperialism of information technology: the implicit or explicit technological leveling of the difference between information and knowledge. If this trend goes unchecked, the only thing that will count as real
and rational
will be what information-processing machines can comprehend through the binary code. The research in this context deals with theoretical and practical questions. They focus on the hinges
(the translations) between information and knowledge: How does knowledge change when processed by information technology? How does knowledge change when it appears as information? What gets highlighted and what gets de-emphasized? What effects do such changes in contrast have on how both information and knowledge are understood by the individual and by society? What is the role played by the strikingly high number of technological imagery and metaphors? Another question to investigate is which skills must be required of and developed by the actors so that information-processing of knowledge can be reintegrated meaningfully into the individual’s contexts of daily life and work. Because these skills can be called literacy in a broadly figurative sense, they are linked to a shift in cultural history, a shift whose examination is the purview of a field traditionally known as philology – the study of languages and literatures. Although computers were originally calculators, they are now also word and image processesors and, most recently, even audio media. Probing this spectrum of topics, researchers will inquire into the significance of the computer and its networking as a text medium.
The investigation raises a number of questions for discussion concerning the special aspect of interdisciplinarity at the Post-Graduate College. How does the observed application of technology to knowledge relate to literary fiction and nonliterary facticity ? Within the historical arch spanning the paradigm shift from oral/written culture to postmodernity, how is the process of technology’s application to knowledge affected by the historical shift to the perspectives of cultural science in the study of literature? Does technology’s application to knowledge also change the cultural technologies for appropriating literature? How does the material dispositif relate to the increasing mediazation of literature in modernism and postmodernism? As the simulation of reality is superseded by the simulation of perception, what role does this shift have in literature? What new ways of producing texts and, hence, literature are emerging? What new forms of reception? In what way does technology as a text dispositif relate to cultural technologies for appropriating literature? To what extent is the production of literature in modernism a matter of writing channeled by dispositifs? Is the turn to cultural science in the philologies, which have been the subject of discussion in the disciplines since the 1990s, an expression of a change in perception-based knowledge? These questions, which are to be taken as working hypotheses, make it possible to study processes of change appearing today.
[back to top]The increasing role of technology in communication is one of the most important and best known dimensions of technological change. The story spans the gamut from communication by letter to communication via the Internet today. This research area could include work in which these media-based forms of communication are contrasted with face-to-face communication in order to determine whether media-specific modes and manners of communication can be identified. Another question to study is what relationships exist between media-based communication and the formation of social groups. A final topic of interest is how media-based communication is expressed in the formation of subjectivity and identity.
Ground has already been broken in this field. Project proposals for the Post-Graduate College are expected to differ clearly from studies devoted purely to the history of a technology (e.g., the telephone network) and should go beyond, say, Pflüger and Schurz’s work on the mechanical character of humans and Turkle’s on network subjectivity.
[back to top]Although the research at the Post-Graduate College is focused chiefly on technology in terms of its meaning for phenomena traditionally associated with the humanities and social sciences, technology itself will always also be a topic. One purpose is to examine whether types of technology are likely to be affected by the new civilizing role of technology. In this context a main thesis at the Post-Graduate College would be that indeterminateness is spreading in technology. Although long considered a synonym for definiteness, exactitude, constructive transparency, and functionality (all facets of which could supposedly be planned and controlled because the actual mechanisms were known), technology, too, is confronted at different levels with issues of its vagueness. Indeterminateness, unpredictability, ambivalence, evolutionary risks, collateral impacts, and problems of acceptance are merely a few key words accompanying the reflexive and indefinite manner in which technology is developing.
Two main tasks are to be tackled in the programs of the Post-Graduate College. The first one is to formulate concepts and models of technology development that appropriately convey these changes and thereby communicate a realistic overall image of technology. The second task is to study how humans themselves deal in various areas with the uncertainties and tensions resulting from technological development.
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