Comments on: Tyranny as enlightenment: a response to “Among the Disrupted” http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/tyranny-as-enlightenment-a-response-to-among-the-disrupted/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tyranny-as-enlightenment-a-response-to-among-the-disrupted English 738T, Spring 2015 Sat, 12 Nov 2016 04:10:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Collin Lam http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/tyranny-as-enlightenment-a-response-to-among-the-disrupted/#comment-1276 Collin Lam Tue, 10 Mar 2015 20:45:57 +0000 http://mith.umd.edu/eng738T/?p=1177#comment-1276 At the beginning of the semester, I think I would have (and did) believe wholeheartedly on the side of Wieseltier when it came to the problematic relation of technology and our society. But, now I would be about equally 50% on the side of yours and his. Re-reading this article, and particularly the passage of his you cite, "the character of our society cannot be determined by engineers", reminded me of a paper by Bruce Robbins entitled "The Sweatshop Sublime". In the paper, Robbins argues that our progressive tendency toward action, especially morally charged political action, in which we must always act immediately to "right the wrong" is often valued above contemplation of that "wrong". Essentially, Robbins disagrees with this call to immediate action because it fails to understand the unseen mechanisms (political, economic, and social) that are constantly churning below the surface before it rushes in. I think a similar argument could be laid against our inherent belief that the progressive determinism of technology often leads to benign or even good consequences for its own sake. This is not meant to repeat the cautionary tales taken so superficially from works like Frankenstein or Terminator, of course, but rather that there are necessary processes of reflection on the labor, output, and effect that accompany our continual desire toward innovation and the creation of new technologies which are all too often neglected because of that desire. Technology for technology's sake, like art for art's sake, is all well and good, but, unlike art, technology's focus is to effect the way the we live among things, while art's focus is to affect the way we think and feel about them. I believe Wieseltier's comment about our society not being "determined by engineers" is not to say that technology is inherently inhumane, but that we have tried to strip it of all artful reflection for the sake of progressing out of a unsatisfying present. At the beginning of the semester, I think I would have (and did) believe wholeheartedly on the side of Wieseltier when it came to the problematic relation of technology and our society. But, now I would be about equally 50% on the side of yours and his. Re-reading this article, and particularly the passage of his you cite, “the character of our society cannot be determined by engineers”, reminded me of a paper by Bruce Robbins entitled “The Sweatshop Sublime”. In the paper, Robbins argues that our progressive tendency toward action, especially morally charged political action, in which we must always act immediately to “right the wrong” is often valued above contemplation of that “wrong”. Essentially, Robbins disagrees with this call to immediate action because it fails to understand the unseen mechanisms (political, economic, and social) that are constantly churning below the surface before it rushes in.

I think a similar argument could be laid against our inherent belief that the progressive determinism of technology often leads to benign or even good consequences for its own sake. This is not meant to repeat the cautionary tales taken so superficially from works like Frankenstein or Terminator, of course, but rather that there are necessary processes of reflection on the labor, output, and effect that accompany our continual desire toward innovation and the creation of new technologies which are all too often neglected because of that desire. Technology for technology’s sake, like art for art’s sake, is all well and good, but, unlike art, technology’s focus is to effect the way the we live among things, while art’s focus is to affect the way we think and feel about them. I believe Wieseltier’s comment about our society not being “determined by engineers” is not to say that technology is inherently inhumane, but that we have tried to strip it of all artful reflection for the sake of progressing out of a unsatisfying present.

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