Knowing Machines

962 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Me, depicting his relentless but futile efforts to impose accountability on those responsible for auto plant closings that devastated his home town of Flint, Michigan. The last essays in this thought-provoking collection pause to ex­ amine controversial aspects of our current moment of postmodern disillusionment. Orvell is impressed by the use of traditionally “low­ brow” media to confront serious issues, as inJay Cantor’s meditation on the atomic bomb through the minimalist cartoon Krazy Kat and Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed “graphic novel” about his family’s expe­ rience of the Holocaust, Mans. He is less enamored of Disneyland, perhaps the ultimate expression of “escapist” American mass cul­ ture at century’s end. Its plastic, corporate-underwritten “Main Street,” like other restricted-access “virtual” environments now pro­ liferating, serves to obscure the appalling disintegration of “main streets” in the public sphere. “The problem with virtual reality is that it creates a technological mode that approaches a cognitive habit, in which the distinction between what is real and what isn’t becomes (literally) immaterial,” Orvell concludes. When we finally “trade fantasy for reality” in this way, we become open to, among other things, a “politics of illusion” that can have the most danger­ ous repercussions. GregoryD. Sumner Dr. Sumner teaches in the Department of History at the University of Detroit Mercy. He is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor­ nell University Press, 1996). Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change. By Donald MacKenzie. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. Pp. ix+338; illustrations, fig­ ures, tables, notes. $35.00 (cloth). In Knowing Machines, as in his extraordinary Inventing Accuracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), Donald MacKenzie blends the best elements of sociology and history. From Sociology, MacKenzie brings theoretical sophistication and a keen sense of the many­ dimensional, often contradictory character of knowledge and prac­ tice in vivo. From history, he brings a gift for beautifully crafted narratives, backed by definitive documentary research. His supple, fluent weaving of the two traditions and their techniques avoids the pitfalls of each, while strengthening the possibilities of both. MacKenzie has reflected deeply upon recent lessons from the soci­ ology of scientific knowledge, especially actor-network theory (ANT). ANT holds that materials and physical principles rarely de­ termine unique paths to the conception, design, or long-term suc­ cess of a technology. Instead, new artifacts succeed to exactly the degree that their proponents can enroll people, institutions, and things in heterogeneous “actor-networks” that support them. The TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 963 social elements of actor-networks affect competition between de­ signs by determining the efforts, resources, and loyalties committed to each. ANT’s prescription for historical insight is to make the actor-network, rather than the artifact, the unit of analysis. These themes won’t surprise T&C readers. But MacKenzie’s ren­ dition of them is a cut above the rest. More than almost anyone else writing today, MacKenzie grasps the practical relevance of sociologi­ cal theory to real, momentous issues. Yet theory does not dominate this book. MacKenzie’s exceptionally lucid, sober writing masks a passionate engagement with some of the most pressing issues of our times, including nuclear weapons proliferation and safety-critical computing. In his hands, social constructivism leaves relativist dogma behind in favor of hardheaded, historically grounded anal­ ysis. Knowing Machines collects nine previously published articles. In a new introductory chapter and two theoretical essays, MacKenzie cuts to the heart of current debates over the relative roles of economic, social, and material factors in technological change. First, he revisits Marx. Neither economic nor technological determinism, Marx’s ac­ count of the machine as a durable, material anchor for the once strongly resisted social system of wage labor still offers a central les­ son: that technological change must be seen within the larger con­ text of capitalist political economy. Second, MacKenzie attacks the idea, popular among economists, of “natural trajectories” of tech­ nological change. Physical reality constrains technical possibilities. But within those constraints, impartial attention to the real condi­ tions of both failures and successes reveals that any given technology’s “momentum” may stem more from self-fulfilling prophecy than

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