Critical perspectives on technology: on subversive rationalization & symmetry

When I wrote my dissertation on the ways experienced teachers adapt and, inevitably, resist technological spaces as they teach in them for the first time in 1998-'99, I was deeply influenced by the thinking of Andrew Feenberg's work on processes he has come to call "subversive rationalization," a concept that emerges from but is not exactly fleshed out in his seminal work Critical Theory of Technology. I still believe CTT to be a valuable perspective and subversive rationalization to be an interesting articulation of resistance, especially in the context of formal educational institutions (with curricula, programs, built environments, and online learning spaces designed in line with institutional goals).

Let me try to explain the transformative idea that Feenberg advances in CTT very simply here. Too simply, no doubt, but you can always follow up and read the full work. I recommend it. Here goes:

Technologies that we use have a set of values, intentions, and embedded assumptions that accompany the physical or logical (in the case of software, for instance, or complex systems like public transit) components. The values, assumptions, etc. are called the "technical code" by Feenberg. They can't be split apart. Both can be designed, and designed well or poorly. And they are mutually constitutive of one another (more on that in a second). The technical code is special, though, for several reasons. One is that it is invisible. Talking about the affordances of technology is a process of making some of the technical code explicit: the ways that features of a design enable or constrain activity as it relates to users' goals and motivations.

Another reason the technical code is special is even more transformative. Changes to the technical code can re-write and override the physical artifact, or cause ripples in a complex technical system that dramatically influence how a technology is used, who can or does use it, and who benefits from it. Think of the ways that twitter was used in the Arab Spring uprisings, for instance, as a way to re-write the technical code of a service characterized as "microblogging" or disregarded (practically) as solipsistic nonsense. Feenberg gives the name "subversive rationalization" to the deliberate re-writing of the technical code to resist and/or refigure oppressive social conditions bolstered by a dominant technological order (where that consists of artifacts and code used, generally, in concert to maintain power).

Ok, so how did I do? Still with me?

Subversive Rationalization & (A)symmetry
Curiously, I was equally influenced in my formative years as a researcher by the work of Latour & Woolgar, whose book Laboratory Life I thought (and still think) is one of the best studies of writing I've ever read. "Writing?" you ask? Well, yes. In that book a research laboratory - the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA -  is rendered as a writing machine, or perhaps more accurately a writing system, wherein people in various roles and machines are coordinated to produce writing in the form of peer-reviewed scientific articles. The scientific community and even the science studies community is, even to this day, not so sure about it all. As the blogger I linked to confesses, it's a deeply mundane look at what folks who work in a science lab do routinely. So mundane, that the detail of the description may seem uninteresting (or, I should probably argue in a seperate post) threatening for what it reveals. But my point here is that if you are interesting in writing and studies of writing, my goodness it is anything but boring. It is fascinating.

What makes it fascinating is the research stance that Latour & Woolgar had to adopt (and invent) to create the portrait they present of the laboratory.  This stance has since come to be known as actor-network theory. And it famously adopts a position vis-a-vis its object of inquiry (a system) that treats human and non-human components of the system with analytic symmetry. The reason for doing this is a choice made for research purposes and is a conscious trade-off of looking at components of the system in different, more conventional ways. One of these trade-offs is that factors we associate with human agency like "motive" and "learning" or other forms of development are not in focus. At times, and this is especially true of later works by Latour and other ANTs, the research account is deliberately uninterested in development-over-time as something to tune into about humans in a given social system.

Adopting this perspective of symmetry between humans and non-humans when examining technologies - especially complex technical systems - turns out to have some real benefits. (Clay's series on this is really helpful, btw, for those who want examples). For one, it enables researchers to render the "logics" of those systems in ways that demonstrate how multiple and even competing logics can co-exist. Doing this has become a signature of ANT, in fact. See Annmarie Mol's The Body Multiple for one of the most well-written and fascinating examples in which her object of analysis - the condition known as atherosclerosis - is explored in the physical and social space of a hospital wherein multiple "ontologies" of atherosclerosis are not only present, but interdependent on one another.

This ability to make clear the tensions that constitute "the technical code" is something Feenberg's analysis in CTT predicts but cannot really deliver on in the same way. The reason goes back to symmetry. Feenberg's approach begins with humans designing into technologies - non-human actors - a set of values and assumptions that become modified as artifacts are taken up and used in the world. But these objects don't make people do things in Feenberg's world - they either serve the will of their designers (or the regimes of technopower that the designers knowingly or unknowingly work to maintain) or they are reappropriated by users who use their features in ways that subvert the designers' vision.

Feenberg's analytic stance, in other words, also involves a tradeoff. By viewing humans and non-humans assymetrically, he's able to craft a call for intervention and frame a strategy for technological change: subversive rationalization. This strategy follows from the Frankfurt School tradition of theory that does a particular kind of work in the world. According to Horkheimer, theory should be an act to reduce oppression by disrupting abusive systems of power.

And so now I come to a suggestion. This one goes out not just to folks in the Teaching with Technology course, but to all of those folks in my field who do research on technology, writing, pedagogy, etc. Here goes:

Don't confuse an analytic stance with a committed ideological one (this may mean making far less of Latour's book We Have Never Been Modern than many who approach Latour by way of English Studies seem to do).  Let's not make more of a researcher's choice - one made with painful realizations of limitations as well as potential benefits in terms of what one pays attention to and does not - than it deserves. Radical symmetry is not a terribly useful composite view of the social world. It's a way to carefully examine a carefully selected and painstakingly prepared sample of the social world. It is like a gas chromatograph: good for telling you what elements something is made of, but you wouldn't want to look through one 24/7 as you go about your day.  A gas chromatograph disintegrates the bits of reality it produces an analysis of - literally. That's one working definition of analysis, btw. So do most analytic schemes. They disintegrate what they are used to "see." The resulting view can be useful. But so can other views of the very same object of inquiry, even simultaneously.

I understand subversive rationalization as a heuristic for inventing technological change. It may overstate the agency of humans in a given technological order to call them to action. I understand radical symmetry as a way to map possibilities to feed a heuristic like Feenberg's. It may imply agency at the level of a technological system where there is no such thing. These are known distortions that accompany each perspective. Use them with care. But use them both.