Ben Murray
Precis
In David Harvey’s essay, The Fetish of Technology: Causes and Consequences, he seeks to critically examine the existence and relevance of a fetishization of technology that has inhabited the modern world. Harvey starts his essay by defining this term, saying that quite simply humans have the habit of endowing various technologies with significant powers that they do not, in fact, possess. Harvey then frames his thesis in the form of a question; If technologies do not possess these powers, then why do we attach such monumental importance to them? The answer, according to harvey, is because we are blinded by various fetishistic beliefs.
Harvey first turns to Karl Marx to lay out some previous theories on how technology and its eventual fetishization was formed originally. By allowing Marx to shadow Harvey’s arguments from this point onward, this essay and its arguments become inseparably tied to Marx’s understanding of a bourgeois capitalist society and the rules that such a society follow. Harvey then lays out a set of “internal relations,” consisting of a series of sub-categories to which we must hold up examples of developing technology to individually. These categories are, put simply, developement, social relations, mental conception of the world, and one’s relationship to nature. Here it is stressed how nuanced this topic really is, and the dangers and shortcomings that have resulted from a generalization of technology fetishism. Two examples are given here; The first describes the various scientific technologies we use to see and connect with the natural world around us, but then calls into question the fact that someone must have had the idea to invent such devices in the first place, in which case they would have to have held a unique perception of the world from everyone else in the first place. In the second instance Harvey employs a similar example of a nuclear power plant in order to illustrate the social, natural and capitalist factors intertwined within the development of such a technology.
The main body of this essay is laid into neat sections concerning the fetishization of technology. The first of these sections turns back to Marx in order to lay out historical context for the development of this fetishistic behavior in capitalist societies. Within the labor capital relationship, Harvey cites Marx when he states that the motivation for corporations to invent and produce technology is based in its ability to decrease the value of labor power without diminishing the material standard of living for the working class. The important portion of this part is when Harvey warns us of the dangers of mixing up the real, tangible benefits of these technologies within this system by assuming that technology-based productivity = profit, instead of the fact that profits are the result of a specific social relation between labor and capital.
Next, Harvey makes it clear that fetishizing different types of technology, both hardware and software, cannot directly drive forces within the system of inner relations, but they do have specific kinds of agency within their sphere of influence. The forces they do have get split into two axis of power which shape the world; Those who “control and manipulate capital,” and “that of the political/military institutions of governance within territorial entities.” He then goes on to discuss how the lines between these two axis are blurred by technology and are constantly shifting.
The next chunk of this essay is a further categorization which lays out the different specific categories of technological fetishization we implement into our lives. First, the robot. In other words, he deskilling of the labor force, the homogenization of labor processes and the replacement of human workers with machines. Second, the domination of nature, or the debate on the overall large-scale positive versus negative effects upon the natural world that we perceive to be determined by technology. Third, the annihilation of space and time. By this Harvey means the motivation for corporations to “reduce the friction of distance,” in the pursuit of efficiency. Fourth, fictitious values/fictitious capitals, or the increasingly abstract nature of currency and value in a technologically advancing world. And finally, the technologies of consumption, spectacle, and fantasy production; The ways in which the bourgeoisie's infatuation with the spectacle is beneficial to the capital cycle, and the tools it uses to keep that infatuation in place.
After very systematically laying out all of this categorical evidence, Harvey lays out the actual consequences of these circumstances. In doing this he makes a key differentiation between science and technology, stating that science seeks to demystify and make the world more easily rendered, while technology “is fundamentally concerned with getting something to work, no matter...the things and processes are understood or not.” It is revealed in this portion of the essay that what Harvey is truly concerned about is the re-mystification and illusion of the world as caused by the current fetishization of technology. In finalizing his argument, he reminds us that technological fetishization is not inherently bad, and is objectively good in many senses, but that is important for us to understand and be fully aware of its effects so that we may make fully conscious political and social decisions in our lives.
1 comment:
I love how painstakingly chronological you allow this to be -- a true precis. You begin at the beginning, and recount the argument in order, section by section, "chunk" by "chunk," even, in possibly my favorite paragraph of your precis, the second to the last, an internal numbered inventory of positions, rat tat tat. Excellent!
Of course, were you to write a close interpretive reading this plodding bit of construe would be the last thing you would want, you would pick from these points the ones most salient and the order of the paper would no longer track the chronology of the text and would instead reflect the order of revelation of details and reasons to best develop your take on the piece. But, imagine what a better position you are in to take on Harvey's text in this way for having done this initial recapitulation. This is the reason I make the assignment, not because close readings look anything like this but because the best close readings rely so often on the ability to generate such a precis.
I make this point in part because I have so little to quarrel with in reading your work. It's pretty much exactly what I want to see in a precis, and so I hope it gave you the purchase on the text that inspires the assignment!
You mention that Harvey's claim is made from within a Marxist framework. As you remind us, Harvey declares that fetishism names a process in which we endow objects with agentic power to the cost of our own. Of course, this is a bit of loose talk, and the Marxist scholar Harvey is mobilizing quite a lot of sophisticated understandings in the background of all this fairly plainspeaking. For Marx, our habituation to buying and selling mediated entirely by the price-form distracts/deranges us from our awareness that things in the objects *mediate* historical and social relations of exploitation, of solidarity, of collaboration, of resistance, of play among subjects. This alienation is the condition under which we misrecognize agency as emerging out of techs rather than out of people mediated by tech: as when we say "let the market decide," investing contingent market regulations and treaties and such we actually "decide" on with a power to decide for us instead, usually with the impact that those who the beneficiaries of the status quo do the deciding.
The exposure of fetishism is one of, if not THE, key strategies of critical theory, properly so-called, and all three of the key threshold figures who developed critical theory as a post-philosophical discourse -- Marx, Nietzsche, Freud -- formulated a theory of the fetish (commodity fetishism, ressentiment, and the sexual fetish) as a crux of their critique. With this text, Harvey is making an argument that connects the explicit project of critical theory with the topic of our course most forcefully of all. Tho' I mentioned it is one of my favorite paragraphs of yours, I actually think it isn't exactly right to describe "the robot" or "the technological destruction of time and space" or the rest as "fetishes," strictly speaking, as discourses (here Harvey actually takes up a Foucauldian account of the term "episteme") all of which are doing fetishistic work.
When it comes down to it, all of this stuff I am saying is just lecturing you about wider implications of the arguments you summarize so well. As I already said, I figured you would appreciate that more than me simply pointing out that you have pretty much done exactly what I was looking for. What else can I say? Excellent work throughout.
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