and fetishization of technology lead to a closure
of cultural opportunities. An earlier publication,
one emblematic for humanists, is Hannah
Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). She
assesses cultural changes in work in western
civilization alongside the increasing fetishization
of technology. Arendt’s work provides a
thoughtful examination of western civilization’s
presumption that technology is a mere tool. Her
compatriot Martin Heidegger (1977) also
engaged these issues, albeit from a more conser-
vative posture in line with cultural and political
attitudes in 1930s Germany.Heidegger on technologyRenowned for his work in phenomenology and
reviled for his support of the Nazi regime, Martin
Heidegger’s work on technology bears special
attention. Similar in some ways to the Frankfurt
School’s focus on ideology, but more conserva-
tive, Heidegger’s (1977) reflections on technology
point to the significant cultural consequences of
the modernist ideology and the rise of instru-
mental thought. While Heidegger is highly critical
of technology, he does not suggest discarding,
disregarding, or destroying technology (Dreyfus,
1995). Technologies for Heidegger intervene
between human activities and the world, distanc-
ing and possibly separating people from nature.
Ideas are not simply imposed on reality. Being
calls forth thought. As William Lovitt writes in
the preface to his translation of Heidegger’s
work on technology, ‘in the modern “Cartesian”
scientific age man does not merely impose his
own construction upon reality. He does indeed
represent reality to himself, refusing to let things
emerge as they are. He does forever catch reality
up in a conceptual system and find that he must
fix it thus before he can see it at all. But man
does this bothas his own work andbecause the
revealing now holding sway at once in all that is
in himself bring it about that he should do so’
(1977: xxviii, emphasis in the original).
From the ontological issue of being,
Heidegger articulates the perspective that
humans have always used technological devices,
but must resist their domination. Technologies
gather and focus human practices in line with
technological uses, subverting pre-technology
practices. Culturally technology supports new
ways of being through shared practices. Modern
technology, for example, emphasizes efficiency
and effectiveness, ways of being that spill over
into social relations between humans, and
between humans and machines. By assuring that
technology does not lead to the domination ofhumans, we can assure that instrumentalism does
not destroy our nature. The gathering and focus-
ing of human practices through things present us
with opportunities to develop new practices and
ways of knowing.
The ubiquity of information technology, its
mythological importance, and consumerism in
late capitalism effectively veil these opportuni-
ties. At the same time, ontological and epistemo-
logical limits to modernist attempts to seek to
develop logical science, rational reasoning, and
flawless engineering point to the underlying cul-
tural instability of technology. Heidegger’s work
theorizes a relationship between work and tech-
nology, but does not engage the implications that
are intricately caught up in the day-to-day use of
technology. This oversight is commonplace in
progressive notions regarding the role of
technology in society and has a broad influence
on liberal agendas. Addressing this issue, Hubert
Dreyfus (1992) presents a detailed critique of the
inherent failings of artificial reasoning. Arising
out of work on cybernetics, artificial reasoning
has been a field characterized by the broadest
assertions about the ability of scientists to
develop information technology whose reasoning
could not be differentiated from humans.
Dreyfus’ main argument is that their attempts fail
because human thinking is not a ‘closed system’,
but is open and characterized by a rich faculty for
making associations that lie outside a rational
‘problem area’. His well-thought-out analogy of a
restaurant waiter using non-verbal clues to nego-
tiate a customer’s order point clearly to the
marked limitations of so-called expert systems,
which can only account for narrowly specified
categories that have been defined a priori. While
eggs can be readily stored by a system as a menu
item for breakfast, a customer ordering ‘eggs
Benedict’ may crash the system.Poststructuralist turnsAs technology became more ubiquitous in
western civilization, analyses shifted from
Marx’s political-economic orientation to con-
sider political and cultural dimensions. These
works attempted to specify highly intercon-
nected mind/machine relationships. Recently
new and very diverse scholarship has turned to
the imbricated relationships between technology
and society which are no longer just matters of
impacts, of structure and agency, but involve
mutual constitution in webs of relationships.
Most directly related to the Franfurt School,
the work of Dreyfus (1995), Winner (1986),
Suchman (1987), and Agre (1992) point to newKNOWLEDGE AND GEOGRAPHY’S TECHNOLOGY 5353029-ch29qxd.qxd 03-10-02 11:08 AM Page 535