Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
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文物有政治性吗？
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
L. Winner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Winner
在关于技术和社会的争论中，没有比技术事物具有政治性质的概念更有煽动性的了。争论的焦点是，现代物质文化的机器、结构和系统不仅可以根据它们对效率和生产力的贡献，不仅可以根据它们对环境的积极和消极影响，而且可以根据它们体现特定形式的权力和权威的方式来准确判断。由于这类想法在关于技术意义的讨论中持续存在并令人不安，它们值得明确关注。大约20年前，刘易斯芒福德在《技术与文化》中写道，他对这一主题的一个版本进行了经典陈述，认为“从近东的新石器时代晚期，一直到我们今天，两种技术反复并存：一种是专制的，另一种是民主的，第一种是以制度为中心的，非常强大，但本质上不稳定，另一种是以人为中心的，相对较弱，但足智多谋且持久。[2]这篇论文是芒福德对城市、建筑和技术史研究的核心，反映了彼得·克鲁泡特金、威廉·莫里斯和其他世纪工业主义批评家早期作品中表达的关切。最近，欧洲和美国的反核和太阳能运动也采用了类似的概念作为其论点的核心。因此，环境保护主义者丹尼斯·海耶斯总结道：“增加核电设施的部署必然会导致社会走向威权主义。事实上，只有在极权主义国家，才有可能安全地依赖核能作为主要能源。与许多支持适当技术和软能源道路的人的观点相呼应，Hayes认为“分散的太阳能比集中的技术更符合社会公平，自由和文化多元化。[3]热衷于用政治语言来解释技术产物，这绝不是大规模高科技系统批评家的专利。一长串的支持者坚持认为，科学和工业所提供的“最大和最好的”是民主，自由和社会正义的最佳保障。工厂系统、汽车、电话、收音机、电视、太空计划，当然还有核能本身，都曾被描述为民主化和解放的力量。大卫利连塔尔，在T.V.A.：例如，民主在游行中，在phos 121中找到了这一承诺
In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention.1 Writing in Technology and Culture almost two decades ago, Lewis Mumford gave classic statement to one version of the theme, arguing that "from late neo lithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."2 This thesis stands at the heart of Mumford's studies of the city, architecture, and the his tory of technics, and mirrors concerns voiced earlier in the works of Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and other nineteenth century critics of industrial ism. More recently, antinuclear and prosolar energy movements in Europe and America have adopted a similar notion as a centerpiece in their arguments. Thus environmentalist Denis Hayes concludes, "The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state." Echoing the views of many proponents of appropri ate technology and the soft energy path, Hayes contends that "dispersed solar sources are more compatible than centralized technologies with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism."3 An eagerness to interpret technical artifacts in political language is by no means the exclusive property of critics of large-scale high-technology systems. A long lineage of boosters have insisted that the "biggest and best" that science and industry made available were the best guarantees of democracy, freedom, and social justice. The factory system, automobile, telephone, radio, television, the space program, and of course nuclear power itself have all at one time or another been described as democratizing, liberating forces. David Lilienthal, in T.V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phos 121