José Galisi Filho, journalist
At the time of his death in the spring of 1978, Michel Benamou was developing what he called a “subjective square” of discourse about technology, a typology of attitudes that he also described as “the four humors of discourse about technology.” Unfortunately, he had only begun this research. I have selected the following excerpts from Benamou’s working papers. They present his map of the “four humors,” sketch out two of its basic positions, and suggest the comparison he intended to make between discourse about technology and literature that reflects a technological “mind-set.”
Text: Michel Benamou, Notes on the Technological Imagination: II. American Technocriticism: A Subjective Square
During the past ten to fifteen years over a hundred volumes on technology have appeared in the United States. They range from Lewis Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power and Jacques Ellul’s La Technique (translated only in 1966) to the Club of Rome’s pronouncements and Victor Ferkiss’s The Future of Technological Civilization. Besides their pragmatic and programmatic intentions, an urgency, almost a passion, distinguishes these books from the discourse about science.
This impassioned tone belongs to the subject: although scientific knowledge is often pressed into service to justify models of political or economic behavior, discourse about science tends to mask ideology with its claim to objectivity. Discourse about technology, on the contrary, can make no such claim. Under the threat of extinction or the hope of millenary post-industrialism, it is almost always visceral, humoral, polemical.
It fills the four corners of a subjective square which I have borrowed from William Irwin Thompson’s At the Edge of History and have modified to contain what I call the four humors of discourse about technology:
Happy technophiles are politically conservative believers in Agape, such as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Paolo Soleri. Admirers of Teilhard de Chardin, they believe technology will bring about convergence and unification.
The liberal worshippers of a rational Logos are anxious technophiles, who see contradictions in planetary culture but keep their faith in democratic controls over technology. Their prototype is the Lewis Mumford of Technics and Civilization.
Disillusioned rationalists become desperate technophobes, who maintain that the worst technological disaster has already occurred in our Western minds. They include Jacques Ellul, who sees technique as autonomous, the Mumford of The Pentagon of Power, and the hopeless Marcuse of One-Dimensional Man. To them, planetary culture means the unavoidable destruction of basic human values, denned in terms of a stable relation to nature. Thus, they appear to be reactionary.
The fourth corner is occupied by hopeful technophohes. They are the radical parry of Eros against Thanatos: ecological anarchists like Paul Good-man, the surrealist Marcuse of Essay on Liberation, Ivan Illich, and Theodore Roszak. They are convinced that urban industrialism is but a failed experiment which will be replaced by human-scale technologies once the counter-cultural forces of the “Great Refusal” and the “New Sensibility” have prevailed.
In general, we can say that what Ihab Hassan has called a debate between technophiles and arcadians—a formulation that he too has seen as problematic—is complicated by internal contradictions: there are happy technophiles and anxious ones, desperate technophobes and hopeful ones. At times the same thinker shifts from one pole to another: for example, the Lewis Mumford of 1934 was an anxious technophile, but by 1970 he had become a desperate technophobe; Marcuse, on the other hand, desperate in his One-Dimensional Man of 1964, had become a more optimistic technophobe in his Essay on Liberation of 1969.
Two philosophical positions suffuse this discourse about technology: determinism and the closely related but distinct notion of the autonomy of technology. Their antidotes are indeterminacy and the political control of technology. Contributors to technocriticism, moreover, represent a variety of disciplines. They include sociologists (Bell), economists (Tof-fler, Heilbroner, Kahn, Schumacher), historians of culture (W. I. Thomp¬son, Roszak, Mumford), communications specialists (McLuhan, Bag-dikian), theologians (Illich, Cox), inventors (Fuller, Cage, Soleri), literary scholars (Hassan, Marx, Sypher, Goodman), and philosophers (Ellul, Hans Jonas).
Whatever their differences, they all recognize the indisput¬able fact raised by McLuhan as early as 1948: the present generation is already living in a technological or postindustrial era.
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