Richard Wright...Strange Weather...MM 8#1...Review
- R I C H A R D W R I G H T
A N D R E W R O S S
Strange Weather
Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits
- Verso (New Left Books), London 1991, ISBN-0-86091-567-0 (paperback),
English text, 275 pp.
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- Strange Weather
is/was the latest attempt to open up the debate on technology and popular
culture for cultural scholarship. This project from a group of North American
writers tries to look again at all those quirky rad-chic sub-cultures
predicated on new technology that you tried to avoid being associated with when
they first came around. From New Agers, hackers and cyberpunks, Ross tries to
salvage what was socially progressive about them and to use this to reconstruct
cultural sociological strategies that might have an appeal outside of the
university seminar room.
-
Ross considers what happens when slogans like Think Global, Act Local
and Everything has to go somewhere replace Workers of the world
unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and concludes that the
field in which the aims of left libertarians and the popular sub-cultures have
most in common is in the politics of ecology, especially social ecology. In
fact Ross refers to his theoretical approach as social meteorology, a
way of tactically predicting future trends that will unite leftist social,
cultural, economic and political interests on a variety of fronts.
-
Like most people, Ross is bored with technologically-informed critiques that
are polarised between the optimism of a democratic Utopia and the despair of
the re-imposition of centralised controls. The book spends much time trying to
redress an imbalance in the received judgements about various
technologically-inspired movements of the past and present. Opinions that are
now generally considered to be naive and out moded are re-presented and shown
to contain much in the way of genuine usefulness in the context of their time
and place. Likewise, techno-fashions that are now accorded plenty of
street-cred are revealed as being based at least partly on reactionary social
reflexes.
-
Ross points out firstly that the traditional conflict between the `two
cultures' of sciences and humanities is actually more a question of political
rivalry, given that both camps base their world views on a logic of continual
development and progress, of one kind or another. The crisis point is reached
at the level of ecological issues, where their common assumption of unlimited
exploitation of natural and rational resources breaks down. Ross finds that an
ecologically motivated opposition is a way of avoiding the exploitations of
both technological determinism and self-centred Humanism, and of grounding its
dynamics in people's everyday lives. Enter a range of alternative discourses to
challenge the authority of the `two cultures', which Ross proceeds to question
in order to discover what is really radical about them and what is merely a
wish to emulate their peers.
-
First into the ring are the New Agers, eager to oppose the `materialist'
attitudes of big science with their `natural' approach. But in order to more
successfully oppose the established scientific community, they find themselves
increasingly obliged to adopt the language of inductive reasoning of their
enemies in order to have their `pseudo-scientific' claims taken seriously. A
less disciplined thinker would be content to allow these different cultures and
beliefs to occupy an equal place in the postmodern constellation of
pluralities, but scientific practice forces the issue to the pragmatic level of
who has access to knowledge and the means by which contemporary life is
technologically structured. This gives Ross a chance to attack naive cultural
relativism, for science is an area where cultural differences are always
unequal due to the responsibility for each group to provide better accounts
of the world (as Donna Haraway describes) and to be answerable to the
people whose lives they will effect. Most troubling, the New Agers' `holistic'
critique of science is based on the individual pursuit of `natural'
go-it-alone alternatives and therefore eschews the wider social critique
of areas such as the American health care system that might result in the more
fundamental restructuring that Ross would prefer.
-
Similar in vein is the chapter on the development of the science fiction genre
and its relation to the `technocracy' movements of the 1930s. Ross is motivated
by a desire to correct a comment made by cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling in
referring to the naive technophilia and wrong-headed outlook of early
science fiction editors like Hugo Gernsback, who went to the length of setting
up a panel of experts to decide whether the stories of his writers reached the
required level of scientific accuracy. At the same time as this there was a
growing feeling amongst American intellectuals that science could provide a
viable programme of social change as an alternative to either Fascism or
Communism. Most typical was the Committee on Technocracy formed in 1932. The
committee produced various economic surveys that concluded that the current
Capitalist economy was hopelessly inefficient and wasteful and that the only
way to avoid massive unemployment and social hardship was a logical scientific
approach to building a `post-scarcity future'. But what eventually happened to
all these high-minded individuals? Unfortunately, the mass of `ordinary' people
could never understand what they were going on about, and the only people that
did listen were the managers of large corporations who began to hire them in
the Fifties to help them to make their businesses more efficient industrial
competitors. Finally, the regulations of this new scientific management stifled
the inventor-genius individual that was the mythological underpinning of
Gernsback. Simply stated, Ross's argument is that, like the New Agers, because
the Technocracy movement possessed no theory of explicitly social
transformation and the assumption of power (any politics is irrational), their
high ideals were easily reduced to technical methods for improving the
profitability of the Fordist industrial system that they were originally
opposed to. Ross suggests that it is the role of intellectuals like himself to
help to turn popular movements like these into more potent political forces by
providing them with a full programme of social transformation.
-
After sections on cyberpunk, hacking and futurology science that make similar
points, the last chapter takes us back to the starting theme of meteorology,
particularly the effect of the new 24-hour TV Weather Channel in forming a US
national identity based on a shared discourse about their weather conditions.
In the first place, weather becomes another player in the struggle for economic
success, business are `competing' with nature to turn resources into profit,
and are keen to take advantage of `global resource management'. This has the
effect of climatology acting to `naturalise' conditions that are actually
man-made -- your livelihood has failed because the weather was against you, not
because you turned your whole farm over to producing cash crops. The book ends
with the image of the lone member of the Association of American Weather
Observers -- the volunteer service that provides data for the National Weather
Service -- and their embryonic status as a new `global citizen'.
-
The most successful aspect of the book is the detective work of the cultural
scholar in building up a historical picture of some of the main developments in
technoculture throughout the century. But Ross's approach that first demands a
more specific critique of the objects of technological discourse and then
`socialises' those findings into a political argument does not adequately
address the nature of the relations between the two. In emphasising the
necessity of political activity in technoculture, too much faith is put in the
ability of groups to realistically predict and control outcomes towards any end
they desire. This implies a too deterministic logic that was one of the
problems that got us here in the first place. There are `limits to growth' here
as well, as in the advancement of corporate capitalism itself where the
difficulty is in taking account of every possible eventuality in the chaos
(theory) of the global marketplace. The principle way in which science and
technology can now be seen to enter any discourse is as a form of media and it
is how this partly autonomous creature works which needs closer attention. It
is only because things like this have changed the fundamental practice of
scientific knowledge that allows different groups to contest some theories and
adopt others. It is a study of these changes which will give us a clearer idea
of just what we mean when we argue for popular `technoliteracy'.
-
The cause of a common division among critics is either to ask whether a
particular piece of technological restructuring is desirable or not, or whether
all such things are technologically inevitable and out of our hands and that
the real battle is to find an appropriate response when they eventually fall
into our lives. The Anglo-American response is most commonly the first,
preferring to believe that every technological implementation is the result of
conscious (authoritarian) deliberation. Where Ross's future work could fill the
gap is in showing the limited range in the social meteorology of tracing the
first cause and responsibility for every effect, and in increasing the number
of `fronts' that must include a respect for the unforeseen objective nature of
scientific and technological advance and a readiness to make, as Ross admits,
a historical opportunity out of a historical necessity.
..
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