Cultural Geography

in geography. Although dated in many ways,

Marx’s classical analysis of production itself pro-

vides a useful opening for grasping technology’s

impact on cultural production. Specifically, the

industrial revolution involved a change in the

mode of production. Technology contributed to

society’s wealth by increasing the means of con-

trol, enhancing the exploitation of workers, and

contributing to the growth of fixed capital held

by a small class of capitalists. It is often over-

looked that Marx also saw technology as a means

to decrease working hours and to create time for

proletarian educational and cultural activities.

Neither dismissive nor condoning of technolo-

gies, Marx wrote about technological potentials

and risks from a political-economic emphasis on

production and class struggle.

Marx and Engel’s work on labor theory of

value and the mode of production is the founda-

tion for some of cultural geography’s engage-

ment with technology. The theorized mode of

production distinguishes itself from liberal

analyses that emphasize technology as a tool in

enhancing extractive capabilities. In Marx’s

detailed analysis of the role of technology in the

production process, published in the Grundrisse

(1857–8), the introduction of machinery requires

an initial capital input, but overall requires less

capital outlay because the production of surplus

value is equal or greater to the surplus value pro-

duced by the workers whose labor has been

replaced by technology. The capital input is

made up for by a reduction in the costs of wage

labor. In the process of substitution, the total sum

of capital laid out diminishes and the surplus value

of the retained workers increases. Politically, this

is an appropriation of labor by capital, an act that

Marx thoroughly understood as a Faustian bar-

gain: ‘Capital absorbs [machine] labor into itself –

as though its body were by love possessed.’ The

exchange of living labor for objectified labor

changes the situation of workers, as ‘the creation

of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time

... but rather on the general state of science and

on the progress of technology’. In consequence,

‘He [the worker] steps to the side of the

production process instead of being its chief

actor.’ In contrast to the miserable nineteenth-

century ‘theft of labor’, Marx downplayed the

problems of substitution and saw technology

positively in the development of a social individ-

ual who acquires free time for artistic and

scientific development. In the mode of

production, Marx conceived of technology as the

means of liberating workers from capitalist

exploitation and an integral part of social repro-

duction: ‘They [machines] are organs of the

human brain, created by the human hand; the

power of knowledge objectified’ (italics in the

original).

Foreshadowing subsequent analysts (Habermas,

1984; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944), Marx

recognized that if the whole of society did not

reduce labor time, then labor time would become

the measure of value and the promise of techno-

logical liberation would encounter its dialectical

antithesis when, in Marx’s memorable words, the

machine forces ‘the worker to work longer than

the savage does’. Having acknowledged western

literature in the form of Goethe’s Faustian

bargain, Marx and the neo-Marxists rely on the

‘selling of the soul versus modest existence’

binary to critique the development and adoption

of technology in capitalism, which emphasizes

the short-term impacts on work time, papering

over broader issues such as the impact of

technological advances in production on society

at large.

Frankfurt School influences

Addressing the limitations of Marx’s analysis,

along with Hannah Arendt (1958), a number of

writers coming from or influenced by the

Frankfurt School indicate that technology in the

twentieth century has become a cultural inter-

mediary for our engagement with the world.

Breaking with Marx’s Enlightenment assump-

tions about scientific liberation, Horkheimer and

Adorno analyzed science and technology as

ideology and a set of discourses that extends the

power of dominant social forces (Horkheimer

and Adorno, 1944). These analyses are characteri-

zed by a stark either/or binary: the unreflective

adoption of new technologies, or critical reflec-

tion on their role in hegemonic cultural politics

(Postman, 1993). Unintentionally keeping the

binary between technology and society, the

Frankfurt School writers aptly addressed the neg-

ative attributes and consequences of technology.

Technological determinism characterizes

many of the other writings on technology in the

twentieth century (Sejerstad, 1997). Jacques

Ellul’s The Technological Society, first published

in English in 1964, is a ground-breaking analysis

of the relationship between technology and

society in the technological determinist frame-

work. In these analyses, technology is culturally

and politically problematic.

Structuralist analysis provides a robust frame-

work for probing implications and effects.

Kroker and Weinstein’s Data Trash: The Theory

of the Virtual Class(1994) stands out as a recent

publication in this area. They skillfully analyze the

cultural processes through which the development

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