use of different technologies, or to overcome the malfunction or dysfunction
of technology, Heidegger argues that technological society presupposes a
more ‘theoretical attitude’ oriented towards objects of knowledge, rather
than ‘practical reason’, which is concerned only with instruments. Thus,
what was once the specialization of science and experts becomes an ‘attitude’
throughout the population.
Such a change prompts Knorr-Cetina to examine the relation that
scientists and experts have to objects in developing an extended account
of what she calls ‘objectualization’. Objectualization describes the way
that ‘objects displace human beings as relationship partners and embed-
ding environments, or that they increasingly mediate human relationships,
making the latter dependent on the other former’ (1).
For Knorr-Cetina, there are two principal driving forces of objectuali-
zation: ‘The first is the spread of expert contexts and knowledge cultures
throughout society that discharge these cultures into society as a possible
driving force behind the rise of an object-centred sociality’ (23). The second
are the ‘relationship risks’ that many find inherent in contemporary human
relationships.
Where human relationships fail, individuals turn to objectual rela-
tionships as compensation. Knorr-Cetina describes this as a post-social
development, where ‘social’ is reserved for forms of societies based upon
solidarityin the Durkheimian sense (18), the unity of something shared, the
unity of a moral field or a unity of meaning.
Like Touraine and Rose, Knorr-Cetina argues that information soci-
eties are undergoing a post-social transition. But post-social transitions
imply that social forms as we knew them have become flattened, nar-
rowed and thinned out; they imply that the social is retracting. Knorr-
Cetina points out that this is usually explained in Durkheimian terms as
a further boost to individualization and the loss of a common culture (6).... as common values are no longer at the award growth of shared
traditions and cannot just be imposed by some authority, integration via
norms and values appears to be less and less effective. In fact, this sort
of integration is imaginable today only as a socio-culturally engineered
consensus. (24)
But the shift away from such value consensus and the rise of indi-
vidualization need not be read as the ‘death of the social’: ‘postsocial rela-
tions are not a-social or non-social’ (7). Rather, Knorr-Cetina argues that it is
an error to characterize individualization in terms of ‘human relation-
ships’ in the present period. If we take into account the ways in which
human beings tie themselves to object-worlds, then the ordinary concept
of individualization is problematized. In that case, ‘objects may simply be
the race winners of human relationship risks and failures, and of the
larger postsocial developments’ (23) In other words, for Knorr-Cetina,
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