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<meta content="Davison, Aidan" name="eprints.creators_name" />
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<meta content="habitus, environment, epistemology, philosophy of technology, sense of place" name="eprints.keywords" />
<meta content="A lack of awareness of the ways we inhabit, and not just merely use, technology has greatly
limited our capacity to understand the ways in which reason and practice structure each other. In
exploring the interplay of rationality and experience in this paper, then, I resist the
representation of artefacts as mere tools or autonomous tyrants, arguing instead that
technological, conceptual, and moral changes are webbed together in everyday practices.
Influential explanations of practical reason such as Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of habitus are
vital in developing such a relational understanding of technology. We shall see, however, that
even such excellent accounts of mind's embodiment in social space seem unaware of the irony
that the dominance of the ideal of transcendent reason is no longer maintained by the work of
theorists. Rather, it is maintained by a specific condition of practice; namely, the new
technological capacity to dissociate ends and means. The 'foreground of ends' is organised by
the freedoms of individual self-creation through consumption. Yet in the 'background of means'
that sustains this world of private choice social structures become objective 'facts' beyond
rational negotiation. The reciprocity of self and world required for genuine inhabitation of
ecological and social places is lost. Any recovery of this reciprocity thus demands that decisions
about technology be recognised as nothing less than political and moral, i.e., rational,
deliberations about what kinds of humanity we want to build and inhabit." name="eprints.abstract" />
<meta content="2004" name="eprints.date" />
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<meta content="Technology in Society" name="eprints.publication" />
<meta content="26" name="eprints.volume" />
<meta content="1" name="eprints.number" />
<meta content="85-97" name="eprints.pagerange" />
<meta content="10.1016/j.techsoc.2003.10.007" name="eprints.id_number" />
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<meta content="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2003.10.007" name="eprints.official_url" />
<meta content="1. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 10.
2. Langdon Winner, "Citizen Virtues in a Technological Order," Inquiry 35, nos. 3/4 (1992): 341-
361, p. 341.
3. Indeed, we might even be prompted to remember the convergent histories of technological
progress and warfare, histories recounted in Peter McMahon, Global Control: Information and
Globalisation Since 1845 (Cheltenham, UK & Northampton, MA; Edward Elgar, 2002).
4. As Langdon Winner showed in Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a
theme in political thought (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1977), technological determinism has been a
powerful narrative in modern social debate. Notable positive determinists include R. Buckminster
Fuller, Nobert Weiner and Arthur C. Clark. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Jacques Ellul,
Herbert Marcuse, and Ivan Illich, while influentially ambivalent accounts have been provided by
Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford.
5. See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 104-
140.
6. For research that uncovers something of the lived complexity of reactions to these technologies
see Ian Barns, Renato Schibeci, Aidan Davison and Robyn Shaw, “’What do you think about
genetic medicine?’ Facilitating sociable public discourse on developments in the new genetics,”
Science, Technology and Human Values 25, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 283-308.
7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), p. 91. For his final elaborations of habitus see Pascalian Meditations,
trans. Richard Nice (London: Polity Press, 2000), especially Chapter 4 ‘Bodily Knowledge’, pp.,
128-163; and his essay “Habitus” in Hillier, J. and Rooksby, E. (eds), Habitus: A Sense of Place,
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 27-34.
8. “I wanted,” claimed Bourdieu, “to reintroduce agents that Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists …
tended to abolish, making them into simple epiphenomena of structure. And I mean agents, not
subjects,” cited in Mick Smith, An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social
Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 192. For a description of
mechanism and finalism see Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p.138.
9. Bourdieu, 1998, op cit., p. 81.
10. Habitus is “a system of dispositions, that is, of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and
thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of
perception, conception and action,” Bourdieu, 2002, op cit., p. 27.
A. Davison Technology in Society 26 (Author’s copy)
10
11. Smith, op cit., p. 199.
12. It is unfortunate that many commentators have failed to grasp habitus’ central dialectic of
constraint and innovation, thereby overemphasising the power of habitus to replicate itself as
determining structure. Bourdieu, 2002, op cit., pp. 29-30.
13. Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (eds), Habitus: A Sense of Place (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
14. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Pub.
Co., 1981 [1901]), p. 382.
15. Katherine N. Hayles, 'Searching for Common Ground', in Michael Soulé and Gary Lease (eds),
Reinventing Nature, (Washington D.C. & Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1995), pp. 47-63.
16. See, respectively, Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard UP, 1982); Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1984).
17. See Charles Taylor’s explanation of the nature of moral ontology and moral space in Sources
of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989).
18. An argument well presented in the context of environmental debates by Jim Cheney and
Anthony Weston, 'Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette: Toward an Ethics-Based
Epistemology', Environmental Ethics 21 (Summer, 1999): pp. 115-134.
19. Mary Oliver, “Home,” Aperture 150 (Winter 1998): 22, 25, p. 25.
20. See, e.g., Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern
Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
21. I have elaborated upon the themes of the following two sections at length in Aidan Davison,
Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2001), pp. 95-113.
22. See Bourdieu’s ‘Critique of Scholastic Reason’ in Pascalian Meditations, op cit, pp. 9-32.
23 . A criticism I have similarly levelled at Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre’s explanation
of moral space. Davison, op cit., pp. 169-172.
24. The lack of any substantive analysis of technology, or even the use of this term in any of the
chapter titles or index in Hillier and Rooksby (eds) op cit., is especially noteworthy as they
expressly claim that “this volume attempts to engage in such a dialectical relationship, building
theory on practice and stories of everyday lifeworlds.” Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby,
“Introduction,” in Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (eds), Habitus: A Sense of Place (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2002), 2-25, p. 5.
25. For Heidegger’s ambivalent role in establishing this awareness in recent philosophical
discussion see Davison, op cit., pp., 116-23. For an excellent discussion that gives historical and
cross-cultural depth to this claim in the context of revisioning technology in archaeological study,
see Marcia Anne Dobres, Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for
Archaeology (Mass. CA & Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
26. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical
Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
27. Ibid., p. 44.
28. Ibid., p. 47.
29. Ibid., p. 10.
30. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), p. 110.
31. Borgmann, 1984, op cit., p. 39.
32. David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1997).
A. Davison Technology in Society 26 (Author’s copy)
11
33. This advertisement ( Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC. A DaimlerChrysler Company) can be
found in Business 2.0, Vol 4, No. 1 (Feb, 2003).
34. Borgmann 1984, op cit, p. 158.
35. Ivan D. Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Calder and Boyers, 1973), pp. 100-101.
36. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1999).
37. Bourdieu 2002, op cit., p. 33.
38. Bourdieu 1998, op cit, pp. 79-80.
39. See also MacIntyre’s discussion of praxis, op cit,pp.146-164.
40. John Dewey, ‘Moral theory and Practice’ in The Early Works 1882-1898, Vol. 3 (Carbondale
and Edwardsville: Southern Illinios University Press, 1969).
41. Bourdieu 1998, op cit, p. 90.
42. Taylor 1989, op cit, pp. 3-52.
43. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University
Press, 1991).
44. In Australia, these discussions have their explicit origins in the work of George Seddon—see,
e.g., Landprints; Reflections on Place and landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997). More widely, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Topophilia: A study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes
and Values (Englewood Cliffs, CA: Prentice-Hall, 1974), Tony Hiss’s The Experience of Place
(New York Vintage, 1990); Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
are important landmarks in this literature. The neo-Heideggarian discussion of dwelling by
design professionals—see, e.g., David Seamon (ed.), Dwelling, Seeing and Designing Toward a
Phenomenological Ecology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993)—and the ethical analysis of built
environments—see, e.g., Warwick Fox (ed.), Ethics and the Built Environment (London & New
York: Routledge, 2000)—also mark important developments as does the recent volume edited by
Hillier and Rooksby, op cit, drawing together the themes of habitus and sense of place..
45. Hillier and Rooksby op cit, p. 5.
46. Analyses of the relevance of practical reason to sustainability discourses can be found in
Davison, op cit., pp. 159-213 and Bent Flyvbjerg, “Aristotle, Foucault and Progressive Phronesis:
Outline of an Applied Ethics of Sustainable Development,” in Applied Ethics; A Reader (New
York: Blackwell, 1993), 11-27.
47. Lester R. Brown, “Feeding Nine Billion,” eds Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin and Hilary
French in State of the World 1999 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1999), 117-118.
48. I draw here tangentially, and tentatively, from what Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John
Law, amongst other sociologists are exploring under the heading of actor-network theory. For a
useful overview see. John Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, strategy,
and heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 5, no. 4 (1992): 379-393." name="eprints.referencetext" />
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<meta content="A lack of awareness of the ways we inhabit, and not just merely use, technology has greatly
limited our capacity to understand the ways in which reason and practice structure each other. In
exploring the interplay of rationality and experience in this paper, then, I resist the
representation of artefacts as mere tools or autonomous tyrants, arguing instead that
technological, conceptual, and moral changes are webbed together in everyday practices.
Influential explanations of practical reason such as Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of habitus are
vital in developing such a relational understanding of technology. We shall see, however, that
even such excellent accounts of mind's embodiment in social space seem unaware of the irony
that the dominance of the ideal of transcendent reason is no longer maintained by the work of
theorists. Rather, it is maintained by a specific condition of practice; namely, the new
technological capacity to dissociate ends and means. The 'foreground of ends' is organised by
the freedoms of individual self-creation through consumption. Yet in the 'background of means'
that sustains this world of private choice social structures become objective 'facts' beyond
rational negotiation. The reciprocity of self and world required for genuine inhabitation of
ecological and social places is lost. Any recovery of this reciprocity thus demands that decisions
about technology be recognised as nothing less than political and moral, i.e., rational,
deliberations about what kinds of humanity we want to build and inhabit." name="DC.description" />
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<h1 class="ep_tm_pagetitle">Reinhabiting technology: ends in means and the practice of place</h1>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><span class="person_name">Davison, Aidan</span> (2004) <xhtml:em>Reinhabiting technology: ends in means and the practice of place.</xhtml:em> Technology in Society, 26 (1). pp. 85-97. ISSN 0160-791X</p><p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"></p><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><tr><td valign="top" style="text-align:center"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1516/1/Davison_2004.pdf"><img alt="[img]" src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png" class="ep_doc_icon" border="0" /></a></td><td valign="top"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1516/1/Davison_2004.pdf"><span class="ep_document_citation">PDF (Author Version)</span></a> - Registered users only - Requires a PDF viewer<br />109Kb</td><td><form method="get" accept-charset="utf-8" action="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/cgi/request_doc"><input accept-charset="utf-8" value="1941" name="docid" type="hidden" /><div class=""><input value="Request a copy" name="_action_null" class="ep_form_action_button" onclick="return EPJS_button_pushed( '_action_null' )" type="submit" /> </div></form></td></tr></table><p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block">Official URL: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2003.10.007">http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2003.10.007</a></p><div class="not_ep_block"><h2>Abstract</h2><p style="padding-bottom: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 1em auto 0em auto">A lack of awareness of the ways we inhabit, and not just merely use, technology has greatly
limited our capacity to understand the ways in which reason and practice structure each other. In
exploring the interplay of rationality and experience in this paper, then, I resist the
representation of artefacts as mere tools or autonomous tyrants, arguing instead that
technological, conceptual, and moral changes are webbed together in everyday practices.
Influential explanations of practical reason such as Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of habitus are
vital in developing such a relational understanding of technology. We shall see, however, that
even such excellent accounts of mind's embodiment in social space seem unaware of the irony
that the dominance of the ideal of transcendent reason is no longer maintained by the work of
theorists. Rather, it is maintained by a specific condition of practice; namely, the new
technological capacity to dissociate ends and means. The 'foreground of ends' is organised by
the freedoms of individual self-creation through consumption. Yet in the 'background of means'
that sustains this world of private choice social structures become objective 'facts' beyond
rational negotiation. The reciprocity of self and world required for genuine inhabitation of
ecological and social places is lost. Any recovery of this reciprocity thus demands that decisions
about technology be recognised as nothing less than political and moral, i.e., rational,
deliberations about what kinds of humanity we want to build and inhabit.</p></div><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" cellpadding="3" class="not_ep_block" border="0"><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Item Type:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">Article</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Keywords:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">habitus, environment, epistemology, philosophy of technology, sense of place</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Subjects:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/370101.html">370000 Studies in Human Society > 370100 Sociology > 370101 Social Theory</a><br /><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/360104.html">360000 Policy and Political Science > 360100 Political Science > 360104 Political Theory and Political Philosophy</a><br /><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/370402.html">370000 Studies in Human Society > 370400 Human Geography > 370402 Social and Cultural Geography</a></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ID Code:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">1516</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited By:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><span class="ep_name_citation"><span class="person_name">Dr Aidan Davison</span></span></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited On:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">28 Sep 2007</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Last Modified:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">09 Jan 2008 02:30</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ePrint Statistics:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a target="ePrintStats" href="/es/index.php?action=show_detail_eprint;id=1516;">View statistics for this ePrint</a></td></tr></table><p align="right">Repository Staff Only: <a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/cgi/users/home?screen=EPrint::View&eprintid=1516">item control page</a></p>
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