User:BlueHoosier1/notes for technological rationality

Intro and Chapter 1


 * Technology has the potential to free man from work and toil. More freedom beyond necessity (early ch 1). This is the end of technological rationality.
 * Instead, however, technology collapses freedoms and subsumes it. Technology controls how the society is structured economically, its intellectual drivers, and how free time is used. It becomes totalitarian.
 * governments exploit technology to control its people. control comes through needs
 * True and false needs. True needs are the basic needs (food, water, shelter). False needs are those implanted by society. The more advanced the society, the less the individual can differentiate between true and false needs. The class distinction in needs also breaks down. This leads to loss of liberty.
 * Technology, science and industry overtake Reason
 * Reason requires negative thinking, which is removed in industrial society. Industrial society subsumes reason into "the facts of life". Consumers become attached to their producers. The good life leads people to not push for change, and this creates one-dimensional thought.
 * Since the world is defined by technology, technological processes define thought. Operationalism takes over as the method of thought.
 * Decline of freedom and opposition is not a product of lessening intellectualism or moral degradation; it is rational under technology's hold to be more productive.(Chapter 2 Welfare State first paragraph)

Chapter 2

-Technological rationality causes the workers to lose sense of their enslavement. Their is now a "technological veil" between their work, and the gap between blue collar and white collar worker closes and their lifestyles become more similar.

-Technicians and scientists become more powerful than politicians; they determine what the politicians want

-Automation will cause upheaval.

-Rise in quality of life is inevitable. Socially necessary waste requires rationalization through science

-Freedom is no loner rational when the better life can be found in administration

-defense needs keep the state productive. A made up Enemy is needed (capitalism or communism, neither of which exists). The real enemy is "the specter of liberation"

-Opposition is taken up into the society and neutralized

-Everything is understood in terms of operation; the function or operation becomes definitional

Chapter 3


 * High art has been flattened from two dimensions into one
 * Culture and social reality are no longer distinct.
 * Removal of artistic alienation of the past
 * Everything becomes mass produced and consumable by the masses
 * "Artistic alienation is sublimation." Technology desublimates it. The freedom and negation that are required for art are no longer present in a one-dimensional society. Art becomes integrated with commerce and daily life.
 * Libido is retracted by the technological world to just the immediate sex acts. We no longer gain as much pleasure from work, which is one direction the libido can flow into.
 * There is sexual liberation, which reduces the desire for protest. But the libido falls into lines with the demands of technological and urban world, which greatly reduces its expression
 * Reality Principle over Pleasure Principle

Chapter 4

-The Happy Consciousness espouses that the real is rational and that the current system supplies all that is good, needed, and wanted.

-Language has authoritarian character

-Conflation of nouns and the reduction of meaning to one thing. This one thing can be slanted and draw comparisons that are not actually there

-Personalization of things due to "yours"

-This suppression of meaning has not always been historically true. Operational rationality has shrunk meaning

-Reduction in tension between thought and reality through one-dimensionalization of operationalism

Chapter 5

-Classically, labor led to unfreedom. Only through the absolvance of lab requirements could someone be free. Which is why technology on the surface should make everyone freer.

Chapter 6

-Domination of other men is still the goal of reason, but the traiditional master-slave relationship has been uprooted by a new focus on the "objective order of things" such as markets. Man is enslaved by this force and desire to maintain this general order.

-Production and progress are destructive, but this is our rationality

-Progress produced higher standards of living, but in return, the new rationality imposed a system (way of thinking and behaviors) that would not permit opposition to itself.

-The world becomes more objective and only accepts ideas that can be qunatified. Thus ideas such as freedom and beauty, which still hold value for social cohesion, no longer can challenge the system because they are weakened.