Technology and Postmodernism

Man is on the threshold of breaking past the discontinuity between himself and machines. In one part this is because man can now perceive his own evolution as inextricably interwoven with his use and development of tools, of which the modern machine is only the furthest extrapolation. In this quote, Bruce Mazlish, an historian of science at M.I.T., identifies what he calls the Fourth Discontinuity, a gap between what is perceived as human and what is perceived as mechanical in the self, a gap which he predicts is about to be effaced or bridged. The three other discontinuities in Mazlish's scheme are those between man and the natural universe (bridged by the' Copernican revolution); between man and the beasts (bridged by the Darwinian revolution); and between man and his unconscious self (bridged by the Freudian revolution). The anxiety that technology poses a specific threat to or competes with something human has been articulated by artists and critics again and again since the Industrial Revolution: the English Lake poets, the French Symbolists, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Matthew Arnold, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Lewis Mumford are just a few who have historically taken a firm stand against technological encroachment. More recently, Jacques Ellul, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan, as well as innumerable authors of humanistic science fiction, have offered us a vision of a more or less apocalyptic world in which homo faber is converted into homo machina and subjugated by his own fabrications. That science fiction and McLuhan and Kenner (in The Counterfeiters) betray a perverse fascination for and celebration of machines at the same time that they warn against its assaults on expression and freedom points to one of the paradoxes of technology: gazing into the hitherto ineffaceable and unfathomable distance between man and his creations, those writers discover an ambivalence toward man's technological success, a powerful vertigo produced by this disposition, at once fascinated and revolted

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