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Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society
Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political prcoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself. In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from direct action to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published June 8, 2001
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August 2, 2023
Surprisingly interesting read for comps. It was one of the last books I read, and breezed through it very quickly because I was short on time. It engages with a lot of core STS scholars and historians of science and technology. It was often enjoyable to read, though sometimes there wasn’t always a substantive argument that I could discern behind the palatable prose. It spent a lot of effort thinking about the intersection of technology and politics (governance, empire, space, networks, movements etc.).
My favourite chapter was definitely “On Interactivity” (Chapter 6) about interactive exhibits in museums and science centres (the San Francisco Exploratorium, London’s National Museum of Science and Industry, and another similar place in Paris). Barry writes:
“For the museum of science, putting the interactive model into practice promises to turn the unfocused visitor-consumer into the interested, engaged and informed technological citizen. Interactivity is more than a particular technological form. It provides what Deleuze calls a diagram for organising the relations between objects and persons. Today, interactivity has come to be a dominant model of how objects can be used to produce subjects. In an interactive model, subjects are not disciplined, they are allowed.”
Barry goes on to work through various examples and cases from his museums of interest, citing theorizations from Bourdieu, Zizek, Foucault, Lyotard, and interestingly J.B.S. Haldane. There was one particularly interesting section on IMAX theatres (a company I am quite fascinated by because IMAX Corporation is headquartered in Mississauga, where I live). It engages with Virilio and also mentions the bizarre role the defense contractor Lockheed Corporation played in making a popular IMAX film happen:
“Just outside of the Cité, the position of the museum visitor in the museum ’s exhibitionary strategy is dramatically symbolised by a huge 3-D Omnimax cinema — La Géode — in which ‘visual effects combine with sound effects to transport the spectators into the midst of the action surrounding them’.”! Reflecting on the significance of La Géode, Paul Virilio reminds us that ‘the fusion/confusion of camera, projection system and auditorium in the Imax/Omnimax process, is part of a long tradition of “mobile framing” in cinema, dating from the invention of the tracking shot in 1898’.”” Placing the Omnimax in relation to the early history of cinema is certainly appropriate. Like the cinema of the 1890s and 1900s, contemporary Imax/Omnimax cinema is less concerned with narrative than with exhibition, spectacle and affect.” However, the economic conditions of Imax and early cinema are quite different. Whereas small-scale production companies played an important role in the develpment of early cinema, the relative scarcity of Imax/Omnimax audioria and the expense of film production has meant that the development of Imax/Omnimax depends on corporate sponsorship. In La Geode one popular programme is a film of the Space Shuttle produced by NASA and the Lockheed Corporation.”
The chapter on air-quality monitoring called “Political Chemistry” was also enjoyable, with further engagement with Virilio, Althusser, and Haraway. And the following chapter on Demonstration was also interesting. Some excerpts from that chapter:
“It is commonplace to think of a demonstrator as a political actor: a protestor against an injustice, the breaking of a promise, a threat (or the absence) of violence, or an intolerable situation. Demonstrators, in this sense, are markers of the unacceptability of another’s actions, expressions of whether the exercise of power should be limited, or intensified. They claim to display that subjects have a stake in government. This political sense of the term emerged the nineteenth century in connection with the Chartists and the revolutions of 1848, a manifestation of the emergence of the masses as a political subject. But the notion of demonstration also has an earlier historical sense. In the Middle Ages the demonstrator had a particular function in the anatomy lecture theatre. He pointed out the feature of the body which vas being shown and about which the lecturer was speaking. The demonstrator made visible to the audience the object of which the lecturer spoke, and thereby made a significant contribution to the production and dissemination of anatomical knowledge in public.” To be in the presence of a demonstration was a matter of witnessing a technical practice. The truth of the lecturer’s knowledge was established through observing a demonstration. This sense of the term still exists, in some rm, today. In the university science laboratory, a demonstrator is one usually a graduate student) who assists undergraduates in their practical classes, pointing out the objects they are expected to discover and understand. The truths of laboratory science are proved to the novice, in part, through demonstration.”
The same chapter has an interesting comment on proletarian public space and some engagement with Miriam Hansen:
“In considering the importance of electronic media to political movements, many critical accounts have tended to posit a distinction between official or corporate mass media and radical media. In an analysis of broadcast media, for example, one model is suggested by Oskar Net and Alexander Kluge. In their book Public Sphere and Experience, they draw a distinction between a bourgeois and a proletarian public sphere; a distinction which broadly corresponds to one in which political and cultural life is governed from 'above' through the activities of public institutions - or from below, through the experience of subjects themselves, through their everyday life. As Miriam Hansen observes, the ‘proletarian' public is not so much an empirical category in Net and Kluge's work but a category of negation. It is that complex set of spaces which are both suppressed in the interests of government, and yet emerge, in Hansen's terms, 'in the fissures, overlaps and interstices of a nonlinear historical process. In this context, experimental and independent media occupy, according to Negt and Kluge, a critical role in the continual regeneration of a proletarian public sphere and the exploitation of the complex political opportunities and problems that develop from it. Perhaps. The example of the road protests suggests, however, that while Negt and Kluge's sense of the 'overlaps and interstices of nonlinear' processes is very suggestive, their bimodal model of experimental and independent media and state media is too crude, or simply historically specific to the German 1970s.”
There was also a fun little section on this European technology bureaucrat who was into Marxist theory, which was really random but interesting, haha:
“| want to tell one specific story about networks — __about a particular part of the European Commission’s bureaucracy in Brussels, a section (Directorate A) of DG-XII (the Directorate General for the Science, Research and Development) which, when I visited it in 1994-95, was devoted to research strategy and supporting measures: ‘which basically means studies, evaluations, reports and foresight studies and so on’.
…One researcher, who worked for a unit called FAST (Forecasting and assessment of science and technology) in DG-XIIA had been interested in labour-process theory, in Gramsci and in ethnomethodology. He expressed his institutional position in the following terms: '[Individually] we have an awful lot of autonomy, which makes it important for us to go through the whole hierarchy and especially to jump between institutions and promote the viewpoints of each of us [in FAST]. We have our own networks, and we write our syntheses and we promote our own recommendations for Community policies. Another senior figure's intellectual and political position derived, in part, from Marxism and systems theory, but was also, in his view, comparable to the position adopted by some scientists. FAST was a 'scientific militant about the human and social utility of science ... a scientific militant like Prigogine is [a] militant for the new alliances ... . Its function was to open up controversy about the social dimensions of science and technology in the Commission and to conduct a 'resistance' against dominant positions including, above all, the 'competitiveness ideology' which conceived of the function of scientific and technological activity in narrowly economic terms.”
My favourite chapter was definitely “On Interactivity” (Chapter 6) about interactive exhibits in museums and science centres (the San Francisco Exploratorium, London’s National Museum of Science and Industry, and another similar place in Paris). Barry writes:
“For the museum of science, putting the interactive model into practice promises to turn the unfocused visitor-consumer into the interested, engaged and informed technological citizen. Interactivity is more than a particular technological form. It provides what Deleuze calls a diagram for organising the relations between objects and persons. Today, interactivity has come to be a dominant model of how objects can be used to produce subjects. In an interactive model, subjects are not disciplined, they are allowed.”
Barry goes on to work through various examples and cases from his museums of interest, citing theorizations from Bourdieu, Zizek, Foucault, Lyotard, and interestingly J.B.S. Haldane. There was one particularly interesting section on IMAX theatres (a company I am quite fascinated by because IMAX Corporation is headquartered in Mississauga, where I live). It engages with Virilio and also mentions the bizarre role the defense contractor Lockheed Corporation played in making a popular IMAX film happen:
“Just outside of the Cité, the position of the museum visitor in the museum ’s exhibitionary strategy is dramatically symbolised by a huge 3-D Omnimax cinema — La Géode — in which ‘visual effects combine with sound effects to transport the spectators into the midst of the action surrounding them’.”! Reflecting on the significance of La Géode, Paul Virilio reminds us that ‘the fusion/confusion of camera, projection system and auditorium in the Imax/Omnimax process, is part of a long tradition of “mobile framing” in cinema, dating from the invention of the tracking shot in 1898’.”” Placing the Omnimax in relation to the early history of cinema is certainly appropriate. Like the cinema of the 1890s and 1900s, contemporary Imax/Omnimax cinema is less concerned with narrative than with exhibition, spectacle and affect.” However, the economic conditions of Imax and early cinema are quite different. Whereas small-scale production companies played an important role in the develpment of early cinema, the relative scarcity of Imax/Omnimax audioria and the expense of film production has meant that the development of Imax/Omnimax depends on corporate sponsorship. In La Geode one popular programme is a film of the Space Shuttle produced by NASA and the Lockheed Corporation.”
The chapter on air-quality monitoring called “Political Chemistry” was also enjoyable, with further engagement with Virilio, Althusser, and Haraway. And the following chapter on Demonstration was also interesting. Some excerpts from that chapter:
“It is commonplace to think of a demonstrator as a political actor: a protestor against an injustice, the breaking of a promise, a threat (or the absence) of violence, or an intolerable situation. Demonstrators, in this sense, are markers of the unacceptability of another’s actions, expressions of whether the exercise of power should be limited, or intensified. They claim to display that subjects have a stake in government. This political sense of the term emerged the nineteenth century in connection with the Chartists and the revolutions of 1848, a manifestation of the emergence of the masses as a political subject. But the notion of demonstration also has an earlier historical sense. In the Middle Ages the demonstrator had a particular function in the anatomy lecture theatre. He pointed out the feature of the body which vas being shown and about which the lecturer was speaking. The demonstrator made visible to the audience the object of which the lecturer spoke, and thereby made a significant contribution to the production and dissemination of anatomical knowledge in public.” To be in the presence of a demonstration was a matter of witnessing a technical practice. The truth of the lecturer’s knowledge was established through observing a demonstration. This sense of the term still exists, in some rm, today. In the university science laboratory, a demonstrator is one usually a graduate student) who assists undergraduates in their practical classes, pointing out the objects they are expected to discover and understand. The truths of laboratory science are proved to the novice, in part, through demonstration.”
The same chapter has an interesting comment on proletarian public space and some engagement with Miriam Hansen:
“In considering the importance of electronic media to political movements, many critical accounts have tended to posit a distinction between official or corporate mass media and radical media. In an analysis of broadcast media, for example, one model is suggested by Oskar Net and Alexander Kluge. In their book Public Sphere and Experience, they draw a distinction between a bourgeois and a proletarian public sphere; a distinction which broadly corresponds to one in which political and cultural life is governed from 'above' through the activities of public institutions - or from below, through the experience of subjects themselves, through their everyday life. As Miriam Hansen observes, the ‘proletarian' public is not so much an empirical category in Net and Kluge's work but a category of negation. It is that complex set of spaces which are both suppressed in the interests of government, and yet emerge, in Hansen's terms, 'in the fissures, overlaps and interstices of a nonlinear historical process. In this context, experimental and independent media occupy, according to Negt and Kluge, a critical role in the continual regeneration of a proletarian public sphere and the exploitation of the complex political opportunities and problems that develop from it. Perhaps. The example of the road protests suggests, however, that while Negt and Kluge's sense of the 'overlaps and interstices of nonlinear' processes is very suggestive, their bimodal model of experimental and independent media and state media is too crude, or simply historically specific to the German 1970s.”
There was also a fun little section on this European technology bureaucrat who was into Marxist theory, which was really random but interesting, haha:
“| want to tell one specific story about networks — __about a particular part of the European Commission’s bureaucracy in Brussels, a section (Directorate A) of DG-XII (the Directorate General for the Science, Research and Development) which, when I visited it in 1994-95, was devoted to research strategy and supporting measures: ‘which basically means studies, evaluations, reports and foresight studies and so on’.
…One researcher, who worked for a unit called FAST (Forecasting and assessment of science and technology) in DG-XIIA had been interested in labour-process theory, in Gramsci and in ethnomethodology. He expressed his institutional position in the following terms: '[Individually] we have an awful lot of autonomy, which makes it important for us to go through the whole hierarchy and especially to jump between institutions and promote the viewpoints of each of us [in FAST]. We have our own networks, and we write our syntheses and we promote our own recommendations for Community policies. Another senior figure's intellectual and political position derived, in part, from Marxism and systems theory, but was also, in his view, comparable to the position adopted by some scientists. FAST was a 'scientific militant about the human and social utility of science ... a scientific militant like Prigogine is [a] militant for the new alliances ... . Its function was to open up controversy about the social dimensions of science and technology in the Commission and to conduct a 'resistance' against dominant positions including, above all, the 'competitiveness ideology' which conceived of the function of scientific and technological activity in narrowly economic terms.”
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