Cultural Geography

KNOWLEDGE AND GEOGRAPHY’S TECHNOLOGY 533

discourse. Finally, this section points to cultural

studies of the materiality of technological prac-

tices in human geography and the linkages to

capitalist and modernist ideological knowledge

production.

Radar is one example I will use to provide

examples of how technology changes the ways

geographers produce knowledge as well as the

implications of that knowledge. In contrast to

‘geographical engineering,’ which included the

grandiose plan to build a vastly larger Panama

Canal using 300 atomic bombs to remove the

mountain chains at the isthmus of Panama and

conveniently vaporize most of the material, radar

seems to be a far humbler technology. However,

its political consequences are wider since it

enables modern, instrumentalist command and

control of space and time. The tragic social con-

sequences of instrumentalist command and con-

trol were made ignobly clear during the Vietnam

War debacle, when under the influence of Robert

McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to

1968, radar technology was used to coordinate

US attacks on the Ho Chi Minh trail and across

southern Laos along what was called the

McNamara line (Edwards, 1997). Managed by a

command and control center called Igloo White,

a tripped ground sensor would be registered by

the observation center in Thailand and within

five minutes an air strike would blast whatever

happened to be at the sensor coordinates. To say,

with hindsight, that this ‘tool’ or system failed to

work, but could be improved, ignores the human

tragedy caused by this indiscriminate use of vio-

lence and masks the political intent of these acts.

Living in a techno-culture whose enamoring of

cyberspace seems to climb rung after rung on the

same rationalist’s ladder, tool-makers rarely step

back to see that technologies such as radar are

never neutral: they embody and reinforce com-

plex power relationships that alter society and

culture. Reciprocally, the resulting cultural

changes codetermine the next technological

development. The tool metaphor fails to capture

these complex relationships evident in geo-

graphy’s relationship to technology.

Just as the army staff of project Igloo White

had no need to leave their Bangkok military

bases to direct bombers over Vietnam to their

targets, geography tends to stay more in the back

offices of government and industry, and persist

in its peculiar, Faustian, relationship with

technology. Parts of the discipline have always

depended on it and driven its development, other

parts have used it, some have studied its use, and

a few people have criticized it. Only a few have

examined the political dimensions of geography’s

technology (Chrisman, 1987; Openshaw, 1991;

Smith, 1992). The imbricated relationships

necessitate a broad review. The examination of

literatures on culture, technology, and geography

engages the political stakes involved in techno-

logy. Exploring the different theoretical dimen-

sions helps to understand how we can theorize

the relationship between technology and society,

and by implication culture. This allows us to

assess what technology is from an ontological or

material standpoint and probe its political and

social dimensions (Curry, 1998).

PERSPECTIVES ON TECHNOLOGY

Every human culture has the technological

means to enhance and ensure its continued exis-

tence. From a normative perspective in western

civilization, technology defines civilization

(Mumford, 1967). Beginning with the most basic

manual implements of varied practices, includ-

ing planting, gathering, hunting, and sheltering,

to organizing scribes to duplicate books or

guaranteeing society’s survival when faced with

harsh environments, technology is inseparable

from every culture’s foundation. Along with the

many mundane uses, technology also provides

ways of producing, communicating, and archiv-

ing knowledge. Clearly, technology is integral to

culture, but then what are its politics? What are

its social and cultural impacts?

A great number of liberal and conservative

scholars in the modern tradition have repeatedly

asserted that technology is the great empower-

ment of current western civilization and is the

means to uplift other civilizations. These posi-

tions are so ingrained that many people have dif-

ficulty recognizing the problematic assumptions

inherent in the representation of human society’s

evolution from Stone Age tools to farming trac-

tors to digital communication. The hype that

accompanies releases of hardware and software

often makes use of this millenarist and progres-

sive imagery to invoke powerful suggestions of a

better world that awaits the user of the newest

invention. By returning to Marx’s work and trac-

ing the development of related political-

economic perspectives on technology, this

section presents theoretical dimensions to engage

the politics, economics, and cultures of techno-

logical knowledge production and representation.

Marx and technology

The Marxian corpus provides much of the foun-

dation for understanding the role of technology

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