SKETCHES OF ANOTHER FUTURE - The Cybernetic Brain - page 392

noW people just get uglier and i have no sense oF time.
bob Dylan, “memphis blues again” (1966)
What's wrong with modernity? Perhaps nothing, but perhaps there is. Martin
Heidegger (1976 [1954]) equated modern engineering, and modern science
behind it, with enframing and a reduction of the world and ourselves to
“standing reserve.” Jürgen Habermas (1970) worried about a rationalization of
the lifeworld, an inherently political reconstruction of selves and society via
scientific planning that derives its insidious force from the fact that it can find
no representation in orthodox political discourse. More materially, Bruno
Latour (2004) suggests that modernity (as I have defined it, following him)
is coming back to haunt us. Its dark side shows up in the “unintended con-
sequences” of modern projects of enframing, often in the form of ecological
crises. A couple of centuries of industrialization and global warming would be
a stock example. More generally, James Scott's (1998) catalog of projects that
he calls “high modernist”—schemes that aim at the rational reconstruction
of large swathes of the material and social worlds—reminds us of their often
catastrophic consequences: famine as another side of the scientific reform of
agriculture, for instance. 6 I think of murder, mayhem, and torture as another
side of the imposition of “democracy” and “American values” on Iraq.
If one shares this diagnosis, what might be done? The obvious tactic is
resistance—the enormous and so far successful opposition to genetically
modified organisms in Europe, for instance. But we can note that this tactic
is necessarily a negative one; it aims to contain the excesses of modernity, but
only by shifting the balance, recalibrating our ambitions without changing
their character. Arguments about global warming remain within the orbit of
the modern ontology; they themselves depend on scientific computer simula-
tions which aim to know the future and hence bend it to our will. This sort of
opposition is immensely important, I think, but in its negativity it also con-
tributes to the grimness of what Ulrich Beck (1992) famously called the “risk
society,” a society characterized by fear —of what science and engineering will
bring us next.
And this, of course, gets us back to the question of alternatives. Is there
something else that we can do beyond gritting our teeth? Heidegger just
wanted to get rid of modernity, looking back to ancient Greece as a time when
enframing was not hegemonic, while admitting that we can never get back
there and concluding that “only a god can save us” (1981). More constructively,
there is a line of thought running from Habermas to Latour that grapples