In
The Fetish of Technology: Causes and Consequences, David Harvey illustrates the
means by which we imbue technology with sorcerous capabilities, and the ways
through which such misplaced endowment manifests. Harvey argues the importance
of reevaluating this paradigm in our culture because we attribute technological
solutions to the problems we cultivate with technology itself.
On
page four of the text Harvey writes “ the fetish of technology worms its subtle way into
even the most perceptive of critical commentaries as well as into everyday
conversations when we say things like, the automobile has radically changed the
shape of our cities… The automobile is not in
itself able to shape anything.” The inherent
interconnectedness of these elements articulates the logical fallacy in such a
statement. The city, let alone its shape and topography is product of human
intervention, thought, policy, writing, action, movement. These motions are
intrinsic to modern humans, and are forms of technological achievement, but
they are not in unto themselves technological in the colloquial sense of the
term as used by Harvey. Cities are shaped by capitalistic endeavors, or “organizational forms” as Harvey calls them. These forms create demand.
Capitalism, is shaped by a need for cheap labor, which in term creates a
culture of “the other” since the labor will
always be separate from the consumer. In our culture, bodies of color have
taken on the role of labor as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. As a
result, cities, mimic the shape of capital strata. This segregation demarcates
urban environments as the source of production, and segregates the laborers
nearby. The city then takes a shape of our choice, and the highway is built to
accommodate the transportation of white bodies to “residential” areas. The automobile, is a metaphor of these forces,
but is not the vehicle of the shape itself. The automobile is a symptom of the
cause, not a solution. To exclude these organizational forms from the narrative
between capital, consumption, labor, and technology would be, as Harvey writes,
to tell a history of the computer without mention of Microsoft and the social
consequences of the internet.
Harvey
summarizes Marx’s explanation of the
individual capitalist’s fetishization of technology.
Superior technologies accelerate production, and produce excess profit
temporarily until other capitalists develop a similar or better technology. “Profit always arises out
of the social relation between capital and labor. The idea that machines are a
source of value is, therefore, the fetishistic extension of the very real
effect of superior machinery in generating temporary excess profits…Capitalists innovate not because they want to
but because they have to in order to either acquire or retain their status as
capitalists.” Through this a market is
created, a gaggle of competing stakeholder. Contemporaneously, technological
advancement manifests itself as the out sourcing of labor abroad. Transnational
corporations export goods from less regulated nations. The efficiency in doing
this, particularly due to streamlined freight cost is a technological
achievement fetishized by consumers. The ephemeral excess profits cultivated
through this method of production dissipate into the detritus of the consumer
waste.
The extensions of technology’s
material benefit are short reaching. We invest in them the power to avert
crisis, but alternatively they feed underlying social problems. 
1 comment:
The Marxian language of the critique of commodity fetishism is notoriously suffused with the magical: monsters, ghosts, witches, animated furniture, objects endowed with speech and so on. I can't help but wonder if you are genuflecting toward this tradition when you describe the way "we imbue technology with sorcerous capabilities." Our fetishistic investment of technological artifacts (qua commodities) with agency comes at the cost of a loss of our sense of our own collective solidarity and hence our own agency. Summarizing this general critical project is announced in your opening paragraph and you return to it in your third, when you offer up a sketch of the account which conjoins the orthodox critique of commodity-fetishism with the more specific sorts of critiques of technology familiar from this class. Although Harvey has much more to say on this score, you have chosen a fine quotation in which he is trying for a more concise formulation himself. This very ably concludes the precis, if the qualification with which you concretely end does feel a bit anticlimactic. All of this is good, quite clear.
What I would want to pause on, however, is your second paragraph. Something else is happening here. It seems to me the most engaged writing in your precis is here. Harvey describes the way it is now commonplace to declare "the automobile changed the city" when in fact the way citizens take up the automobile in the context of stubborn and stratifying institutions and hierarchies is what changes the city, and this incidental illustrative example is something you dwell in for a good deal of your piece. What follows is your unpacking of quite a few of the unstated assumptions and guiding aspirations that bring Harvey to say this. While the account that follows isn't exactly Harvey's, or my own, it actually models the kind of criticism he is advocating in the piece and it does bring us to a place in which we understand tolerably well why Marxist Harvey wants to level his critique here and now. Did I just "actually" you? A penny goes into the swear jar!
I do think that a general precis -- of the kind you seem to be writing in the framing paragraphs of your precis -- would want to cover some of the other conspicuous multi-page-spanning arguments to which the Harvey essay devotes itself. It is perfectly fine, however, and I find it quite useful in my own practice, to write precises of sections within arguments to clarify their stakes sometimes, especially dense or confounding passages. Explicitly limiting the portion of text to which you are devoted, down to a section, a paragraph, a page, is perfectly: as long as you include an explanation justifying the excerpting, relating it to the whole, and addressing objections about skewed results. I think that is really the sort of precis yours wants to be. As I said, while this section doesn't explain and elaborate and unpack Harvey's claim *exactly* as I would or think he would -- who cares? I do still think this is good, clarifying work, perhaps more the beginnings of a reading than a complete recapitulation. There are places here, I want to add, where I think your writing here is not merely clear but quite graceful, a pleasure to read. Good work!
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