1
Bringing Determinism Back In: Technological Determinism
and ‘The International’
Daniel R. McCarthy
University of Sussex
D.McCarthy@sussex.ac.uk
Paper for Millennium Annual Conference, Oct 20-22 2012
ROUGH DRAFT – PLEASE DO NOT CITE
2
Bringing Determinism Back In: Technological Determinism and ‘The International’
Abstract
Technological determinism as a theory of social change has been thoroughly tarnished in both social
theory, science and technology studies, and the discipline of International Relations. If once claims
to an ahistorical development of technology (e.g. Cohen 1978) were treated with significant respect,
this is no longer the case. Indeed, it is by now a ritual to disclaim any notion of technological
determinism in theories of international relations and the non-human world (Peoples 2010; Herrera
2006; McCarthy 2011). Yet we must be careful of not throwing out the power of technological
determinations with the teleological bathwater. This paper attempts to develop a sociological
account of technological determinism as dependent upon ‘the international’. I will argue that
technological determinism operates both temporally and spatially due to the presence of multiple
political communities. Determinism and the specificity of the non-human world is thereby
recaptured as a distinct form of power in international politics.
Technological determinism has loomed as the bogeyman for Science and Technology Studies
and studies of science and technology in International Relations for some 30 years. Associated with
teleological accounts of the social world, an obliviousness to human agency in the historical process,
and a thoroughly ahistorical account of social development, determinist accounts of technological
progress are certainly passé. Indeed, one of the key insights of the development of the Sociology of
Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and its sibling field Science and Technology Studies (STS) was the central
role of human agency in constructing scientific objects of study, and of the political, cultural and
economic determinations of technological design. 1 Whether or not ‘social constructionism’
represents as significant a theoretical breakthrough or merely a common sense insight 2 the
reincorporation of science and technology within the social represented an advance over previous
accounts of social development. International Relations theorists have taken account of these
development to develop a more sophisticated understanding of technological artefacts and
processes.3
1
Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems,
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987); Wiebe E. Bijker, Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: toward a theory of
sociotechnical change, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995).
2
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Please note that
the term constructionism is applied as used in the field of STS, and to distinguish it from IR theories of
constructivism.
3
Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Stefan Fritsch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs,’ International
Studies Perspectives 12 no. 1 (2011): 27-45; Hansen, Lene and Helen Nissenbaum. ‘Digital Disaster, Cyber
Security and the Copenhagen School.’ International Studies Quarterly 53 no. 4 (2009): pp. 1155-1175. Geoffrey
Herrera, Technology and International Transformation: The Railroad, the Atom Bomb, and the Politics of
Technological Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Daniel R. McCarthy, ‘The Meaning of
3
Yet with this development there is danger of losing some of the insights of deterministic
accounts. A significant number of historical and political studies have noted the deterministic
qualities of technological diffusion between states. Whether in the context of British-European
relations during the Industrial Revolution4 , the impact of Fordist technologies on forms of social
relations in Russia/the Soviet Union5, the role of advanced technology in a condition of agricultural
backwardness6, or the diffusion of railways (Herrera 2006; Others?), it is clear that the spread of
non-human objects disrupts settled social relations and generates new political settlements. How
precisely this occurs, however – that is, the processes that generate this outcome and the precise
nature of the determinations themselves – must be developed theoretically if we are to avoid simple
descriptive accounts of what is a patterned process of social development. It is, moreover, crucial to
understand in greater depth and clarity precisely how this unique form of social power – the power
to make a global material culture – operates internationally. I will argue that technological
determinism operates within the international realm in a quite specific and, to date, under-theorized
manner. Its determinations function within an unevenly textured totality of human development,
and it is tracing out the nature of these processes that produces ‘systemic’ outcomes and which
requires greater attention. This paper thereby addresses calls for Marxist engagements with
technology in International Relations (IR), while contributing to the ongoing conceptual
development of International Historical Sociology.7
The paper will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss the myriad different forms of
technologically determinist argument. Second, I will discuss the general arguments against
determinisms in International Relations. This discussion will point to an understanding of technology
as ‘biased but ambivalent’, incorporating an understanding of the structural qualities of
technological institutions8 while retaining scope for (stratified) human agency. Third, I will assert the
case for a specific understanding of determinism as an ontological condition of ‘the international’
and generated through its specific properties. Finally, I will note how this understanding produces a
novel interpretation of how technology functions as a form of power in international relations.
Materiality: Reconsidering the Materialism of Gramscian IR,’ Review of International Studies 37 no. 3 (2011):
1215-1234.
4
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Pelican, 1968); Sidney Pollard,
Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981);
Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, (New York: Viking Press, 1964 [1915]): 1943, 188-192.
5
Kendall E. Bailes, ‘The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet
Union, 1917-1941’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 no. 3 (1981): 421-448.; Gerschenkron 1962;
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (London: Haymarket Books, 2009 [1930]).
6
Terence J. Byres, ‘The new technology, class formation, and class action in the Indian countryside,’ Journal of
Peasant Studies 8 no. 4 (1981): 405-454..
7
Fristch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs’, 41; Mark Zachary Taylor, ‘Toward an International Relations Theory
of National Innovation Rates’, Security Studies 21 no. 1 (2012): 151. Critical Theory and Marxist approaches to
technology have emerged in IR but are yet to be referenced in the mainstream literature on technology and
world politics. See Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999);
McCarthy, ‘The Meaning of Materiality’; Columba Peoples, Justifying Ballistic Missile Defence: Technology,
Security and Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8
The term ‘institutions’ is used consciously. Technological institutions are integrated systems of non-human
objects with norms, rules, and decision-making procedures. The Internet or container shipping crystallize this
sense most clearly – however, the concept extends beyond transportation and communication technologies.
4
Defining Determinism
Technological determinisms are not all of a kind.9 While the concept of technological determinism
seems relatively straightforward – technology causes social change – the actual nature of
deterministic arguments covers a wide range of claims regarding the status of technology in society.
Two broad types of technologically determinist arguments are technological instrumentalism and
technological essentialism.10 We will now deal with each in turn.
The first variant, instrumentalism, is closely related to a common sense understanding of
technology.11 In this conception technology does not carry with it, as non-human physical objects,
any determination that structures social outcomes. James Rosenau provides the clearest example of
this tendency in IR
It is more permissive than dismissive to argue that information technologies are essentially neutral.
They do not in themselves tilt in the direction of any particular values – neither good or bad, nor left
or right, nor open or closed systems. They are, rather, neutral, in the sense that their tilt is provided
by people. It is people and their collectivities that infuse values into information. For better or worse,
it is individuals and organizations that introduce information into political arenas and thereby render
it good or bad. Accordingly, the neutrality of information technologies is permissive because it
enables the democrat as well as the authoritarian to use information in whatever way he or she sees
fit.
There is, in other words, some utility in starting with the premise that information and the
technologies that generate and circulate it are neutral. It enables us to avoid deterministic modes of
thought in which people are seen as being deprived of choice by the dictates of information
technologies. Put more positively, the neutrality premise compels us to focus on human agency and
how it does or does not make use of information technologies. 12
This is a ‘tool-like’ understanding of technology in which it is a mere instrument of human action.
Using a given technology does create certain outcomes – the specific use of Radar by the Royal Air
Force in 1940, for example, helped the RAF weather the Battle of Britain(better example). But the
use of Radar, or any other technological object, does not necessarily create any kinds of social or
political outcomes as it does for essentialists. Nuclear weapons do not restructure forms of
international politics; the Internet does not lead to democracy, authoritarianism, or any specific
social outcome. Any given object can be used to meet any given set of ends – the means do not
determine them.
9
Sally Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism,’ in Edward J. Hackett
Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wacjman (eds) The handbook of science and technology studies,
third edition, (London: The MIT Press, 2008): passim.
10
This division is central to the philosophy of technology, but less present in the field of STS. See Don Ihde,
Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990): 4-10;
Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 3-13. Philosophy of
Technology has in general taken more account of work in STS than vice versa.
11
Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead’, 168, views determinism in general as common sense.
12
James N. Rosenau, ‘Information Technologies and the Skills, Networks, and Structures that Sustain World
Affairs’ in James N. Rosenau and J.P. Singh (eds) Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing
Scope of Power and Governance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002): 275. See also James N.
Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990): 15-17, 315-322.
5
Conceiving technologies as neutral and ‘tool-like’ in this manner brings with it a number of
either explicit or implicit claims. First, as noted, the claim that a given technological object does not
create any specific social determinations – technology does not cause social change. Second, the
invention of technology occurs regardless of social context. This view accords with a simple
philosophical Realism in which our social context does not influence the determination of scientific
or technological findings – a mind-independent world and its rationality necessitates a specific
outcome. A particular set of circumstances, such as substantial research and development funding,
strong higher education institutions, and a critical mass of researches may be necessary to
technological development, but this context does not influence actual scientific and technological
findings. To draw on a classic example from STS, the instrumentalist perspective suggests that the
development of the bicycle was a result of progressive technological improvement, rather than a
contested struggle over the social and moral norms the technology would realize.13 It is at this point
that the connection to essentialism, and its teleology, is clearest. Thus, while human agency
operates in such accounts, it cannot alter technological rationality as such. A universal and
ahistorical technical rationale determines the success or failure of non-human objects. Andrew
Feenberg effectively summarizes the problem with the instrumentalist perspective:
Technical development does not point definitively toward any particular path. Instead, it
open branches, and the final determination of the “right” branch is not within the
competence of engineering, because it is simply not inscribed in the nature of the
technology.14 9
Rather than treating technological rationality as exogenous to social relations, as waiting to be
discovered, Feenberg stresses the need to account for the politics that create a specific
understanding of this rationality as such. Accounts of an external criteria for technological rationality
cannot grasp the socially determined nature of these claims.
The second variant of determinism, essentialism, is the clearest form of the determinist
argument. Essentialists do not form a coherent body of thought. Differences arise between different
variants of determinism according to their view of how technology develops. There is a strain of
Romanticism within essentialist arguments that pushes for a rejection of the technological and a
return to simpler forms of life. Associated most prominently with Heidegger, this view also
resonated in the work of William Blake and the Romantics, in some variants of ecological theory, and
remains a subterranean influence within certain strains of Marxist thought. 15 Essentialist
understandings of technology are often wildly divergent split into optimist and pessimist camps.16
13
Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, ‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of
Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other,’ in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and
Trevor Pinch (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and
History of Technology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987): 28-40 ; Bijker, Of Bicycles and Bakelite.
14
Andrew Feenberg, ‘Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power and Democracy’, in Andrew Feenberg
and Alastair Hannay (eds) Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995): 9.
15
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989): 137-148; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997 [1944]).
16
Compare the technological pessimism of the first generation of Frankfurt School authors with their Second
International Marxist predecessors.
6
However, several characteristics of essentialist arguments are common across these varied
understandings.
Technological essentialists assert that technology possesses an intrinsic character.
Technological artefacts and institutions have a necessary form and develop in a linear direction as a
result. Rather than being neutral in their social effects, non-human objects have an essence which
impacts upon social and political relations. In IR this viewpoint is most readily apparent in the work
of scholars influenced by the work of Paul Virilio.17 In Simon Glezos work, for example, technological
developments are conceived as accelerating the processes of political life, with negative impacts for
democratic decision-making and control over warfare. 18 This understanding of technological
development as autonomous, as outside human control, is pervasive in essentialist accounts. The
only alternative is to restrain the technological, to reign in the logic of the non-human as closely as
possible. Human beings may seek to modify the impact of technological objects, to restrain their
negative outcomes, but if technology is to be used then it can only be used in one manner and for
one purpose – the purpose inherent in the objects themselves.
Thus, if there is a central element uniting both instrumentalist and essentialist conceptions
of technological determinism it is the excising of human agency. In both accounts, agency is
ultimately handed over to non-human objects as the central driving force behind social change in
the world – this is precisely what makes these arguments determinist, as a necessary linearity to
development is implied. This denial of human agency in making and creating the social world –
including science and technology as social practices – has been the main target of critical reaction to
these currents of thought. Sally Wyatt notes that ‘One of the problems with technological
determinism is that it leaves no space for human choice or intervention and, moreover, absolves us
from responsibility for the technologies we make and use.’19 Perhaps even more importantly, the
concept of power – so central to any account of international politics – cannot be undertaken with
this conceptualization, as it excises social relations from the production of stratified social relations
and the creation of dominant social actors. This account of agency is plainly inadequate, as has been
demonstrated repeatedly and comprehensively by both STS and increasingly within IR.
Yet there is a sense in which this understanding of technological objects as exogeneous to
human social development still obtains, and which the proponents of social constructionism often
neglect. It is not that technology develops outside of human agency, but that it develops outside of
some humans agencies. While not phrased in precisely these terms, the debate around the
relationship between democracy and science revolves around precisely the issue of asymmetric
structures of power and the determinations that some social actors can thereby impose upon others.
In this way technological determinism does exist, and the forces of social change for less powerful
agents may indeed be technologies over which they exhibit no control. For most people, our daily
encounters with the Internet occur without any input into how they should take place, whatever our
feelings about the free flow of information. If we drive, we do so in a carbon-intensive manner, even
if we would like to use green but impracticable forms of individual automotive transportation. Work
17
James Der Derian, Anti-Diplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); James Der
Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Oxford: Basic Books,
2001); Simon Glezos. The Politics of Speed: Capitalism, the State, and War in an Accelerating World (London:
Routledge, 2011). A list beyond the Virilio-inspired is extensive. For a sample, see William E. Scheuerman,
‘Realism and the Critique of Technology,’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22 no. 4 (2009): 563-584.
18
Glezos, ibid.
19
Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead’, 169.
7
is structured by the forces of production developed and designed to meet the interests of their
owners.20 This asymmetry, present within a given society, is amplified and intensified when it occurs
internationally, among different political communities.
Developing Determinist Insights
Theorists of technological determinism have often sought to apply their arguments at a
broad, overarching level of social development. In these accounts – typified by the work of G.A.
Cohen’s Marxist technological determinism21 – technology is the driving force behind the totality of
human history. Claims of this kind are justifiably subject to criticism. They neglect the role of human
agency in creating technological objects, they obscure the intensely political struggle over design
decisions, and impose a Whiggish linearity upon a deeply fractured historical development of
technology. For these reasons a return to a traditional technological essentialism is foreclosed.
However, despite the opprobrium heaped upon essentialist accounts of technological
change, essentialist perspectives are more rigorous and defensible than their instrumentalist
counterparts. There remains at the core of the essentialist position a central insight – that nonhuman objects do structure the social world and do mediate the potential forms that human social
interactions make take. Technological artefacts do have biases that determine – in the sense of
structuring processes – how human beings relate to each other and to nature.22 Grapsing this
process is central to understanding historical development. Moreover, acknowledging the central
insight of determinists does not require abandoning the insights of social constructionism, although
it does require a minimal acceptance of empirical Realism. A secondary benefit of this form of
technological determinism is its emphasis on the material context of ideational phenomenon.
Determinist accounts often stress the central role of material objects and institutions in shaping
what we think about the world, and how we do so. They therefore stress the central role of social
being in determining social consciousness, the manner in which human beings remake their natures
through a labour process mediated by technology.23 This material aspect of human sociality is key to
any account of social development.
While these benefits are important, It is necessary to receonceptualize determinism in order
to save it from its primary faults. Three important steps are involved, outlined in increasing order of
importance. First, It is vital to recapture the sense of social development as process in order to avoid
the pitfalls of the essentialist position. While essentialism is important in highlighting the very real
bias that technological institutions carry, they tend to view the imposition of these determinations
as a once and for all, singular event. Once a technological object has been introduced into a social
environment it necessarily structures human life according to its dictates for eternity. This is, of
course, not the case. The elements of the process of technological development are the initial
20
Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991); David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism,
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). Cf. McCarthy, ‘The Meaning of Materiality’, passim.
21
G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). It took
the clear and rigorous development of the logic of this Marxist position by Cohen to fully demonstrate its
fundamental inadequacies.
22
On this idea of determination see Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2000 [1980]);
E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: An Orrery of Errors (New York: Merlin, 1978).
23
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867]): 283-299.
8
identification of a social problem requiring a technological solution, the politically contested
development and design of a given object to solve a given problem, and the process of technological
closure by which an object is discursively narrated as a fitting solution to an – equally narrated –
problem. It is vital to note this precisely as a politically contested process, and one that cannot be full
closed due to the necessary ambivalence of simple technological objects. 24 Furthermore, the
politically contested nature of this technological development and design is embedded within
structured relations of social power, and is a ‘battlefield of struggle’ in its own right.25 The scope for
human agency to alter the negative outcomes of a given technology are ever-present – in seatbelts,
software patches, the ‘safety’ bicycle. Technological institutions are continually maintained and recreated by actors.
Second, it is central to emphasize the social, political, and historical context when detailing
the design, development, and diffusion of technological artefacts. When historians of technology
stress the centrality of singular inventors to the process of technological creation, they necessarily
place these inventors within the wider social, political, and economic context that allowed their
work to proceed. Thomas Hughes, for example, in his history of American technology from the late
1870s, details the centrality not only of Edison or Tesla’s own flashes of inspiration, but the
mundane tasks of securing adequate funding, laboratory space, and forging strong working
relationships.26 These forms parts of the process of technological development and its socially
embedded character.
The third, and most important, area of criticism is the relative neglect of the spatial
dimensions of technological determinism. Most accounts of the determining impact of technology
are concerned with its impact upon ‘society’ in the singular. The resulting conceptualization of
technological determinism is thereby purely temporal in nature. That is, technologies are invented
that structure human societies through time, but the differential impact of technologies across space
is neglected. The concept of determinism is literally ‘global’ in character, effecting significantly
different societies in precisely the same manner. It is, in this sense, only a matter of time before the
determinations of technology are realized in any given society. The technological essentialist
perspective slides into an understanding of social development in which all societies must pass
through a given set of stages in the course of their historical development.27
Conceptually, then, theorizations of this sort elide the specificity of ‘the international’ for a
clearer conceptualization of technological determinism. As a result, the processes by which
technological diffusion between societies that co-exist in time but are politically differentiated
cannot be taken into account theoretically. This crucial area of sociological development, empirically
detailed time and time again, must be theoretically re-embedded in order to account for the specific
processes that generate this pattern. It is to this task that we now turn.
This reconceptualization is not epistemologically neutral. While it does not commit one to a
fully-fledged and comprehensive school of thought within the Philosophy of Science, it does entail a
minimal empirical realism.28 For these reasons, this understanding of technological determinism is
24
Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology; McCarthy, ‘The Meaning of Materiality’, 1231.
Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, passim.
26
Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis.
27
The similarities between essentialist and stagist theories of economic development and industrialization is
striking. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth; A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960).
28
Ian Hacking, ‘The Participant Irrealist at Large in the Laboratory,’ The British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science 39 no. 3 (1988): 277-278, 292-293..
25
9
not compatible with what may now be the most prominent theoretical approach in STS, ActorNetwork Theory (ANT). ANT is committed to a form of irrealism, and a methodology of ‘following the
actors’, that is inappropriate for an understanding of technological as a deterministic force. For ANT
any such conceptualization is merely part of a broader attempt to enrol these ontological claims into
a larger narrative for political purposes.29 While I am sympathetic to these warnings, and have
attempted in the past to outline how such narrative constructions operate in relation to the Internet,
ANT’s ‘irrealism’ ultimately undermines the primary insights of STS.30 It is precisely the objectivity of
technological institutions that creates their determinations as they diffuse internationally, as they
are introduced into social contexts separate from their initial place of creation.
The Differentiaton of International Society: Technology and Systemic Change
Fritsch and Herrera are primarily concerned with systemic change. However, understanding systemic
change without understanding U&CD’s role in producing that very change leaves their arguments
lacking a generative mechanism. Social differentiation, a concept borrowed from Durkheim and now
subject to wider engagement in IR, is somewhat question begging. While Fritsch notes the uneven
impact of technologies, he does not theorize its generative processes, or outline how these
determinations occur in depth.
Both Fritsch and Herrera offer strong insights into the functioning of technology in IR. Their
work represents an important step in developing a deeper materialist understanding of the
constitution of world politics. By moving beyond traditional conceptions of materialism and
beginning an engagement with the sociology of technology they contribute to the ongoing
sociological development of the discipline of IR. While these strengths are to be applauded, both
authors also reproduced some of the conceptual apparatus of essentialist determinism. This occurs
both in the referent object of their study of (socially constructed) technological determinations international society conceived systemically – and their subsequent conceptualization of
technological bias as functioning temporally but not spatially.
Fritsch, in his survey of the benefits of Science and Technology Studies for rethinking
technology and ‘the international’ tends toward a conception of technology as autonomous. In this
way, he repeatedly reintroduces a notion of technological determinism. In his – overall accurate –
criticism of Liberal positions, Fritsch notes Liberals have a tendency for ‘underestimating the
reciprocity between technology and the global system.’ 31 He argues that ‘the diffusion and
application of technology not only results in more efficient, but rather in completely new social
structures as well as forms of social action (Bohme 1986:55)’.32 Here efficiency as a product of
technological development is unproblematically referenced, despite emphasis within STS when one
encounters a claim of efficiency one must always ask ‘efficient for what?’ and ‘efficient for whom?’
Discussing the work of Thomas Hughes on technological systems, Fritsch asserts
29
Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour,
Reassembling the Social, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
30
The stipulation of a minimal realism is entirely consistent with constructionist accounts. The material reality
of technological objects – or any real world object – is not altered by being socially constructed. The point to
be developed below is that the uneven nature of economic development actually produces different
epistemologies in relation to technological objects.
31
Fristch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs’, 38.
32
Fritisch, ‘Technology and Global Affairs’, 32.
10
Their distinct qualities, such as their network character, their tendency to diffuse globally over time,
their vital backbone function in global economics, security, and culture, and particularly their impact
on time-space compression in global social relations make them so relevant for any in-depth
exploration of the mutual relationship between technology and global affairs. 33
Here we see Fritsch reintroducing a separation between the technological and the social. This
follows from his conception, following Thomas Hughes, of technologies as systems, and of the
impact of systemic effects over time. The agential language used to refer to technology is telling,
granting technology status as an actor rather than an object. Alleged effects of technological systems
are introduced, most notably ‘time-space compression’, which are currently undergoing processes of
intense political contestation34 (if indeed these effects exist at all).35 Technologies are even given ‘life
cycles’, rather than embedded in processes that see their continued reproduction. Maintaining
technological institutions requires massive ongoing effort. Benjamin Sims and Christopher R. Henke
illustrate this process in a fascinating account of US attempts to maintain nuclear capabilities and
credibility after the Cold War.36
The tension which pervades this argument results in a concept of technological systems
‘evolving,’ a biological metaphor that is highly problematic. Evolution does not, of course, have an
agent. An historical account of technological change would note not only that the social forces
driving technological development change over time, but also that the notion that technology
‘evolves’ relies, in some sense, on reading back into history a natural teleology of technological
change which does not exist.
Ultimately, Fritsch is unable to break from a technologically determinist perspective. Noting
that social constructionists have been criticized for being ‘unable to deliver convincing answers to
the question of how technology then could be meaningfully distinguished from other social
phenomena,’ 37 Fritisch has overlooked the central insight of STS – that neither science nor
technology can nor should be distinguished from other social phenomena. By trying not to collapse
technology into the social this argument maintains precisely the conceptual distinction that
generates ill-considered technologically determinist arguments.38 Arguing for technology as distinct
due to its path dependency reinstates the divide between the technological and the social. For while
it seems that technological objects are particularly path dependent, one is entirely entitled to note
in response the role of ideas as ‘material forces’ and their tremendous endurance over time.39 To
give one small example, socialism as an ideal has endured when the material circumstances that
gave rise to it have long passed.40 Technological systems can also fall into disarray and disuse
without being superseded by new inventions. Recent American fears over the potential loss of
knowledge over how to construct nuclear weapons is a striking example, although there are many
33
Fritsch 2011, 33.
Deibert et al. 2008, 2010, 2012.
35
Joseph Nye, 1990; Rosenberg 2005? Tristram Hunt’s brief characterization of the revolutions of 1848 notes
the speed at which revolution spread on the Continent absent Twitter, Facebook, or Blackberry SMS.
36
Benjamin Sims and Christopher Henke, 2012.
37
Fritsch, 2011, 32.
38
Fritsch 2011, 34.
39
Gramsci, 1971, pp?; Bieler and Morton, 2008.
40
Hobsbawm 1978, 1986; Davenport nd.
34
11
others. The quality of endurance alone does not distinguish technology’s character as social
phenonmena.
The problem with Fritsch’s argument is that it is based upon an understanding of
technological determinism as occurring within a single bounded social entity – the international
system. Smuggled into this understanding is a purely temporal dimension of technological
determination, and not a spatial one. With no outside to the determinations of technology in the
international system the spatial dimension of determinism is left out of the picture. Technology
determines human social development through time, but not through the interaction of differently
located and developed political communities. It is this missing spatial element of technological
determinism that is the core of its possible recapture as a valid form of argument within the social
sciences.
The determinist roots of differentiation theory
The conceptual root of Herrera and Fritsch’s work is located in their development of Barry
Buzan’s development of Durkheim’s understanding of interaction capacity and differentiation, and
the related aspects of functional explanation that structural Realism utilizes, again from Durkheim
via an engagement with Kenneth Waltz.41 In this understanding, technologies of communication
operate to increase the interaction capacity of the international system. Buzan and his co-authors
offer a relatively clear conception of essentialist technological determinism – they outline new
information technologies as causing social change. For example, Buzan and Little assert that
‘Although command of these technologies is unquestionably an element of unit power, their
availability quickly transforms conditions of interaction for all units, and therefore transforms the
system itself.’42
Buzan and Little do acknowledge the uneven distribution of technological objects and
capabilities. They assert that
there can be no doubt that the international system is marked by quite extreme uneven
development in interaction capacity as in many other spheres of life. Both physically and
socially, the global system was made by a small number of leading states. ..interaction
capacity remains very uneven, as do the flows of action that rest on it.43
Yet this understanding sits in tension with their essentialist arguments centred upon interaction
capacity. The possession of high technology seems to benefit advanced states in their interaction
with other states due to its simple possession. That is, that one state has steamships and another
does not works to the advantage of the leading state. Once these artefacts – tool-like in their
conceptualization as state possessions – diffuse throughout the system, the system changes.
41
Barry Buzan and Mathias Albert, ‘Differentiation: A sociological approach to international relations theory,’
European Journal of International Relations 16 no. 3 (2010): 316-337. Barry Buzan and Richard Little,
International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000): 80-84. See also Jack Donnelly, ‘The differentiation of international societies: An
approach to structural international theory,’ European Journal of International Relations 18 no. 1: 151-176.
42
Buzan and Little, ibid, 82.
43
Buzan and Little, ibid, 297.
12
The argument is functional in its essence. It relies upon understanding the cause of
technological development in its functional role in increasing interaction capacity and functional
differentiation in the international system. The effect of technological development is thereby read
back into the cause and seems to precede it. Buzan and Albert assert that population pressures and
technological capacities lead to the increased functional differentiation of the international system,
that the dynamic density these create is the driver of international change.44 They state their claim
to these drivers as foundational for IR theory strongly – ‘The ideas from sociology and anthropology
discussed earlier about the interplay of population growth and technological innovation within
environmental constraints as the ‘primary engine’ for the evolution of social forms, look like a good
place to start such thinking.’45 Aside from the deep problems with the Malthusian account of
historical development suggested by Buzan and Albert, it is entirely evident that this is a determinist
understanding of technological change. 46 They write of the ‘pressures’ of technology on
international relations.47 Their view of technology is quite explicitly evolutionary in nature. This
argument is its focused on the nature of systemic change. At this level, the actual decision-making
processes that lead to technology either enhancing or retarding forms of functional differentiation is
lost. Certain technological institutions do indeed have the effects that Buzan and Albert attribute to
them. But we need to recognize that they effects are the outcome of politically contested processes
occurring over time. The ‘driving forces’ are not, ultimately, population growth and technology, but
human social relations in their myriad forms. Alienating the role of agency, these accounts ultimately,
and ironically, produce ahistorical accounts of social development.
The systems theorizing of this approach are not, ultimately, able to grasp the precise nature
of technological determinism in global politics. Either technological objects are socially constructed
and maintained objects, or they have their own evolutionary processes to which human beings must
adapt. Fritsch’s attempt to marry the two, to retain a sense of technology as systemically
determining, cannot escape the singular systemic focus of its conceptual roots. Metaphors of
evolution and life cycles, and the functional undertone of arguments over ‘system capacity’ undercut
the attempt to chart a way out of the traditional technological determinism that characterizes IR
theory in general. There is a form of determinism generated by sociological processes of
development that we must take into account, but the blend of STS and functional explanation
cannot, in the end, reach that aim.
Uneven and Combined Determinism
In order to rescue the insights of a determinist perspective – the sense that technology can
and does cause social change – it is necessary to reconfigure its conceptual boundaries. As noted,
this requires: first, a sensitivity to technological development as an historical process; second,
remaining conscious of the context in which technological objects are developed and their resultant
44
Buzan and Albert, 333-334.
Ibid, 335.
46
The role of population change as a driving force of historical change is central to the transition debates in
economic history. Robert Brenner’s account of the transition effectively dismantled the Malthusian account of
historical development. For the debates, see Robert Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Origins of European Development’,
Guy Bois, Le roy Ladurie, etc.
47
Buzan and Albert, 335.
45
13
biases; and, third, an introduction of spatial coordinates to overcome the purely temporal
understanding of deterministic arguments. The first two considerations are present in much work in
STS – the consideration that the impact of technological institutions must be maintained in order to
operate, and that non-human objects are material condensations of social relations. Technological
determinations are thus extensions of human agents and not exogenous to human sociality.
Introducing the third element it is necessary to internationalize the concept via a consideration of
how the presence of multiple, co-existing, differentially developed political communities created,
and are created by, their encounters with the non-human. This is best achieved through a
consideration of technological determinism within the processes of uneven and combined
development (U&CD).
When Trotsky analyzed the course of the Russian revolution in his work of 1930, he
produced a clear statement of the phenomenon of inter-societal technological determinism within
the context of his broader understanding of U&CD. Trotsky argued
Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things
in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or
rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole
series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without
travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past. The European colonists in
America did not begin history all over again from the beginning. The fact that Germany and the
United States have now economically outstripped England was made possible by the very
backwardness of their capitalist development...The development of historically backward nations
leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process. Their
development as a whole acquires a planless, complex, combined character.
The possibility of skipping over intermediate steps is of course by no means absolute. Its
degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities of the country. The
backward nation, moreover, not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in
the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture.48
In this passage, while asserting the presence of an ‘advantage of backwardness’, Trotsky notes the
process by which technological artefacts structure the form of social development for late
developing societies. While an ‘advantage’ to this process is at least questionable (and remarkably
understudied49), nevertheless there is a clear indication in this passage that the introduction of
technological objects produced to meet the aims and goals of a given society will create definite
social and economic impacts once introduced into a different social context.
The mechanisms that give rise to this process emerge themselves from the differentiation of
humanity into multiple political communities. The process of interaction between these
communities has recently been elaborated and substantially developed within IR theory. The
fundamental starting points of the concept of U&CD are effectively laid out by Justin Rosenberg:
48
Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 32.
The assumption of an ‘advantage to backwardness’ pervades both economic history and international
relations theory without any clear specification of what precisely the concept means – to whom it obtains,
how an ‘advantage’ is measured, or, indeed, whether an advantage of any type can be said to exist at all. For
its uses in IR see Robert Gilpin, War and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); George
Modelski; William R. Thompson; Justin Rosenberg 2008. For a critique, see Jon Elster, in John Roemer (ed)
Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 202-220.
49
14
(1) The Uneven temporal development of different societies;
which generates
(2) A ‘whip of external necessity’ for societies for societies developing more slowly
(3) Leading to forms of Combination via substitutionism and the introduction of the
attributes of leading societies into backward societies.50
One need not accept all of these suppositions – and I remain somewhat agnostic towards some of
them – to recognize that the presence of uneven tempos of social development across different
societies may generate either the geopolitical pressure or the process of social emulation that leads
to the adoption of advanced technologies from leading states.51 U&CD generates technological
diffusion and prevents any conception of a stagist, linear form of social development. It is this
condition that prevents any ‘global’ understanding of technological determinism and requires a
reorientation of the concept from its disposition to totalizing claims towards a more ontologically
grounded understanding of how societies develop and change over time.
This process, a necessary condition of sociological development, cannot be understood as
purely structural. An incorporation of subjectivity – how ‘advanced’ societies and ‘backward’
societies understand their conditions and relationships – is vital to completing the picture of both
U&CD and the centrality of technological determinism to it. Often absent in recent work on U&CD52
the role of subjectivity has often been noted as central to processes of unevenness through studies
on nationalism, political theory, and technological objects themselves.53 Subjective understandings
of what a technology is, why it should be adopted or rejected, its relationship to norms of civilization,
progress, power and wealth all form a key element structuring the impact of technological in a new
social context. Michael Adas notes the importance of such norms to Western practices of
colonialism in the early 20th Century
Roosevelt did not categorize the Mexicans, much less the Spanish and the French, with the
Indians as savages. But he defended U.S. annexations of their territories or military repulses
of their imperial initiatives on the grounds that America’s superior technical acumen,
entrepreneurial skills, and energetic laborers would develop the western regions for the
benefit of all humankind.54
This was not and is not, it must be stressed, one-way traffic. The design and development choices of
‘advanced’ societies are equally informed by their relationship to ‘backward’ states.55 In this sense
the relativism of constructionist perspectives within STS are retained – again, not in contrast to a
minimal Realism – as the varied social and political contexts of a technologies development and
50
Rosenberg 2010 web; Personal communication.
On the central role of emulation see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, passim; Michael Adas,
Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press, 2006); Robbie Shilliam, German Thought and International Relations: The Rise and Fall of a Liberal
Project (London: Palgrave 2009).
52
Rosenberg 2008; Anievas 2012.
53
Hobsbawm 1993? Davidson 2009; Shilliam, German Thought and International Relations; Adas, Machines as
the Measure of Men.
54
Michael Adas, Dominance by Design, 88.
55
James Delbourg and Nicholas Dew (eds) Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (London: Routeldge, 2008):
5-6, passim.
51
15
reception are stressed. It is precisely this condition of variability, this condition of unevenness, and
the resultant necessity of combination, that allows for the relativist claims of STS to be realized. That
the physicality of technology structures these encounters does not diminish these claims.56
Nor must this claim be structured as an opposition between the ‘West’ and ‘Non-West’.
Hobson has amply demonstrated via the development of Western Europe through its encounter
with the advanced civilizations of China and the Near East.57 Colonial encounters often transmitted
‘indigenous’ forms of knowledge back to the metropole to be duly categorized, appropriated and
retrainsmitted. In the current historical moment the relationship between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’
societies and the transmission of scientific knowledge through Intellectual Property Rights and the
World Trade Organization continues this process. Here a distinction is necessary to avoid confusion:
the forms of knowledge embodied in technology are not necessarily produced by the designers and
developers of that technology. While the agency to design and develop technological objects is
highly structured within the modern capitalist international system a monopoly on knowledge is
much less so.
This understanding of determinism is not functional, but nor does it fall into a contingent or
purely agential form of explanation. Actors still confront technology as a determining force – and
thus as a form of power outside of their control which structures their choices according to its norms
and rules - but this process is not generated by the needs of the system for stability or interaction
capacity.58 Instead, different power capabilities, structured by social property relations, establish
how the determining qualities of a technology will be produced. Again, technology is not a structure
– it is an institution. It does not set limits to social action itself, but mediates the limits to social
action set by actors who previously established and maintain the institutional rules and norms of
technology, both materially and discursively. In this understanding of technological determination
the power of technology to cause social change is clearest, and it highlights the practical, moral, and
evaluative dimensions of the relationship between technology and social change in global politics.59
Conclusion
This argument gives us a closer insight into how technological determinism operates as a form of
institutional power in international politics. What is required is to ‘internationalize’ the concept of
technological determinism. A determinist process is at work in the course of social development, and
it is constituted by the presence of multiple political communities. Technological institutions – with
norms, rules, and decision-making procedures – exercise a specific type of determinism in the
context of ‘the international’.
If the potential benefits of an ‘uneven and combined’ conceptualization of technological
determinism are evident in IR, the extension of this approach to the conceptual underpinnings of
Science and Technology Studies is potentially quite interesting. The principle of symmetry, as
outlined by the David Bloor and Barry Barnes in STS – dubbed the ‘Strong Programme’ – may take on
56
David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour,’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 no. 1 (1999): 93-94.
Hobson, 2004, 2011. I remain skeptical about claims of an ‘advantage to backwardness’.
58
On the institutional conception of power see Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall. ‘Power in International
Politics’, International Organization 59 no. 1 (2005): 51-52.
59
Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, Second Edition (London: Palgrave, 2005): 67, on these three aspects of
power analysis.
57
16
a different character in the context of the international. The principle of symmetry requires that
explanations for the success or failure of a given scientific experiment must follow the same format.
That is, success cannot be attributed to the character of the world while failure is described as a fault
in experimentation, the product of irrationality, or some other failing. Instead, success and failure, or
truth and falsity, must refer to the same criteria when adjudicating between claims. If failure is
explained via social causes, success must also be explained in the same manner. When this
methodological principle is internationalized, however, it appears to take on entirely different
dimensions. The criteria of both failure and success encounter a social context entirely absent from
their formulation at the initial site of scientific production and technological development and
design. A ‘symmetrical’ argument may have no meaning given these altered coordinates. These
considerations suggest that outlining the theory of technological determinism within a theory of
uneven and combined development is, at best, in its early, ground clearing stages. For
considerations of technology and IR theory the royal road is only now opening up before us.
ROUGH DRAFT – PLEASE DO NOT CITE