Marx, Leo The machine in the garden

This is the seventh in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.
Transition notes
From (cultural) constructions with consequences    
  in other words, "deep play"   e.g.:  
      disabilities Varenne & McDermott
      plows and families Goody
      irrigation and the state Wittfogel
      literacy and civilization Ong
To exteriorized imagination    

Much is being written about the impact of the new technologies on the human imagination. While much of this has been done in relation to the impact of print, there are good reasons to look at this in the context of more recent technological innovations, such as the beginning of the steam engine and railways in the United States (one could also look at the beginning of electricity).

There are different issues here:

  1. What is to be meant by "imagination"
  2. What is the specific imaginative, narrative, rhetorical form that shapes talk about technology.
  3. What are the consequences of imagination on technology

Imagination may be, classically, a property of the psyche but, for our purposes, it is most useful to think of it as

  1. a property of language-in-use,
  2. symbols arranged in patterns
  3. discourse and narrative (Ricoeur)
  4. conversation (Goodwin)

That is, we are concerned with the externalization of imagination as it enters the public sphere.

Note that I am not primarily concerned here with the postmodern strictures about the psyche being fully constituted by the language used to talk about it, nor even with the social psychological strictures about the impact of socialiazation on the self. I am interested rather on the consequentiality of imagination on future action, and this is a fully social problem that arises only after externalization of imagination, whatever the source of the original experience.

Specifically, for America in a more immediate fashion than for Europe:

"the machine in the garden,"
  nature vs. industry,
  "ecology" (in the narrow sense as used in the media) vs. further industrial development.

Note how familiar some of the dichotomies, fears, and apologies are: the machine (steam engines, electricity, computers) threatens the "natural" character of interaction but it is inevitable and we must all live with it (Jefferson). For the machine is fun and its manifestation, while acknowledged as possibly detestable, are in fact "beautiful" in a new esthetics.

The question remains, "to what extent," or "in what ways" are imaginative processes constitutive of (a word that I am trying to distinguish from "determine") future action. They are action themselves but are they "purely talk"?

The role of language in science

  1. the thinkability of scientific possibilities
  2. the joint construction of scientific objects (Goodwin on "Seeing in depth")