Page 260 - Contribution To Phenomenology

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL REVENGE 253

This is not to dismiss the insightfuhiess of the second generation
critiques. These pioneers who forefronted technology (a) saw that
technologies are histoncalfy<ulturalfy embedded. And, while there are
elements of Eurocentric chauvinism impKed, in the main the development
of technoscience as a peculiarly Euro-American phenomenon remains
correct, (b) They also saw, again correctly in my view, that technologies
are non-neutral and with changes in technologies there are changes in
cultures, whichever way the causal patterns drive. And (c) they saw,
although sometimes only implicitly, that late modern technologies are
again acidic to traditional cultures, I agree with and affirm each of these
findings which occur among the forefathers of philosophy of technology.
But, in retrospect, it now seems to me that their aim was off, both with
respect to altitude and target.
If "technological" culture was acidic to traditional European culture,
according to these critics, one might also expect any cultural ''revenge'' to
take place at the level of a different metaphysics. That has not
occured—does this then, leave us, like Heidegger, "awaiting a god"? But
this is to treat "revenge" in its older, explicit form. To get revenge is to
get back at someone or group which has injured you or your group, to
enact an equal or greater injury upon the perpetrator(s).
If the "internalists" are correct, the injury here has been self-inflicted.
Technological culture is our own invention, so the metaphysical tradition
holds. And, from this perspective, the injury can only be a variant upon
a deterioration theme—high values are replaced by low ones. Nietzsche
sounded these, followed by our second generation dystopians. In this
version high culture is replaced by "popular culture" and the enemies are
symbolized by "jeans," "MacDonalds," "rock," "Madonna," and "MTV,"
(often not too subtly associated with the "American.") Thus the irony is
one of having both high technology and "low" or popular culture.
In what follows, I shall argue that this tradition misreads both the
nature of the challenge to Eurocentrism and the histories which lead to
the present situation. I shall propose a different reading which finds in
crossculturality a much deeper history of "cultural revenge" and the
emergence of a "pluriculturality" which is a distinctive contemporary form
of the cross cultural which has too often been occluded even in our
critical perspectives.
The macrothesis is one which sees in technoscience a dominant
movement outward from European, then Euro-American roots, like a tide
reaching all the shores of the world. But, like all tides which reach