Technological+Action+(Boisvert)


 * Overview:**

In “The Strange Meshing of Personal and Impersonal Forces in Technological Action,” Adrian MacKenzie never overtly defines “technical action,” but continually redefines how it has been applied and what qualities it possesses. For example,

“Technological action has specificity that is difficult to grasp. Almost unavoidably today, general framings or constructions such as ‘information’ or ‘biotechnology’ overshadow specific technological actions. Concretely, technological action appears in mundane objects and practices, ranging from TV remote controls, through various pieces of software to hardware modifications of consumer electronics to large-scale technological ensembles such as the internet” (Mackenzie, 197).

A little further down, he claims that “technological action is not individual or collective. Rather it explores relations with other technological ensembles. Technological action both abstracts and concretizes existing social relations. It generates singular intersections and historically and materially specific impersonal and personal forces.”

While this argument may seem at first glance to be extremely relativist, his intention lies in uprooting the common utilitarian reductionist theories of technology by uplifting “technological action” to the level of signification. However, unlike cultural or linguistic theories of signification, technological actions are unsedimented; they possess a double-gesture that “overflows norms, identities and structures,” landing technological action in the domain of ambivalent artifact.

MacKenzie suggests that the “openness of technological acts to explore a heterogeneous universe” by “cutting across socially constructed ties between person and thing” carries the potential to not only teach cultural theorists, but all of us, a “new way of being with others” (MacKenzie, 206 ).


 * Examples of Technological Action at Work in the Mundane:**

To further clarify and explain the concept of technological action, MacKenzie suggests that the term is best understood through application, because the concept has not yet been fully understood, represented or symbolized. By showcasing a series of “culture jamming” examples of mundane objects and practices as critical sites of technological action, he intends to reveal technology as an interesting terrain for critical thought, and collective life suffused with power relations.

Through the following five examples, MacKenzie intends to dispel common doomsday presumptions that technology is alienating, disruptive and causes lose of meaning in the world by displacing social relations, and instead engender them with the capacity for generating meaning.

//I. TV-B-Gone (meaning & action)//

TV-B-Gone is/was a gadget the size of car key chain that turns off all televisions operating in public and commercial spaces within a certain range. This technological action, an activist gesture, MacKenzie suggests “reroutes semi-stable relations between viewers and TV screens in public places the through hands of pedestrian.



//II. Google Desktop (problematizing actions)//

Google Desktop is/was software from 2004 that makes anything on your PC hard drive (not Mac) searchable like the web. MacKenzie claims “in Google Desktop, ‘personal’ info becomes ‘impersonal; it becomes something an individual searches like the Web, a space populated in principle by others,” thereby instigating an unstable dynamic, an ambivalence, which MacKenzie refers to as the informatic problematization. In Foucauldian terms this means:

“[B]oth a kind of general historical and social situation--saturated with power relations, as are all situations, and imbued with the relational ‘play of truth and falsehood,’ a diacritic marking of subclass situations--as well as a nexus of responses to that situation” (MacKenzie, 199).

Resting in this in between space, Google Desktop moves between function, form and materiality, and instead catalyzes an what Gilbert Simondon (whom MacKenzie references abundantly) “evolving composite of relations” and “overflows existing modalities of perception” by bringing together disparate things.

MacKenzie infers that Google Desktop, therefore, illustrates how alterity and personhood is possible through technological action, and can become a kind of signification, but one that defies sedimentation by virtue of its ensemble of different practices, objects and actors in flux.

Both Simondon and Bruno Latour also write about this shift to a more pervasive understanding of technology; one which offers a new “model of radical self-other relatedness.” While Simondon reveals how technological objects/actions are a way of questioning notions of individuality, self and subject. Latour writes “[t]echnology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or to put it another way, to a mode of exploration of being in the midst of many others.” (MacKenzie, 200).

Technological action here redefines what we call real, valuable and meaningful.



//III. Botnets & RSS Feeds (abstract & impersonal)//

Botnets are coordinated malware assaults, which are established under the control of hackers who turn millions of computers into a distributive spam-network. This type of technological action, MacKenzie believes inhabits a middle zone, outside of norms, because it’s both impersonal and intimate at the same, in the same way that an RSS feed depersonalizes a blog by “vectoralizing” it into various categories and topics.

For an alternate take, read the [|Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser], the founder of Moveon.org.



//IV. Case-Modding & PSP Hacker (from abstraction to concrete)//

Case-Modding is when consumers/users customize commercial hardware; they carry out minor adjustments that alter or refine the relations between elements of the technical ensemble, of the computer. This technological action--intervention--MacKenzie proffers “concretizes abstract relations between commodified hardware components” (MacKenzie, 206). With RIN, the PSP Hacker enabled proprietary hardware to run software for an older platform, which breaks up the platform-specificity stranglehold. MacKenzie concludes that the incompatibilities that emerge “attach to cultural arrangements of property and consumption” (MacKenzie, 206).



//V. BitTorrent (action and normativity)//

BitTorrent is a program that allows the anonymous distribution of file sharing on the Internet without the need of a centralized web server. This technological action responds to a contest over access and distribution. MacKenzie claims that “[t]hrough both abstraction and concretization, it links different orders or disparate realities through restructuring, and also serves “to amplify resonances already found in collective life, because it enmeshes the availability of information with its popularity” (MacKenzie, 208).




 * Critical Thought not Separate from but Embedded in Technological Action:**

MacKenzie (echoing Walter Benjamin) claims that “critical thought was falsely predicated on the assumption that the conditions of perception, representation, conceptualization and judgement are themselves separate or detached from the technological practices and contexts in which they are located” (MacKenzie, F208).

MacKenzie concludes, however, that technological action carries the capacity for, and in fact, is deeply rooted in, critical thought, based on the following observations:

1. Technological action is provisional, historically and materially specific, and perhaps ambivalent. 2. Technological action activates in highly temporally complex ways the potentials of the pre-individuated realities that comprise of collective life. 3. Technological action generates a material psycho-social point of connection to self that only secondarily relies on social norms. 4. Technological action becomes a mediator, a site of co-invention of the situation and language, irreducible to social norms.

As technologies become more adaptive and sentient, and technicity (that aspect of identity expressed through one’s relationship with technology) more pervasive and invisible, critical theory will demand a second look at technological actions as meaningful signification.


 * Related Terms:**

Technological acts Technological objects Informatic problematization Transindividuality Technicity Reticulatory


 * References:**

MacKenzie, Adrian. "The Strange Meshing of Personal and Impersonal Forces in Technological Action,” from Culture, Theory & Critique, 2006, 47(2), 197–212.