Network Work

Abstract

In critical social theory, technology occupies a central role in the organization and distribution of power. Foucault, for example, sees the capilarization and disciplinarization of power in modernity as tied to science and technology. The shift from overt authoritative control to implicit disciplinary control entails the emergence of disciplining techniques. Subjectification and self-disciplining through the construction of a panoptic space is a prime example of such technique (Foucault 1995). Technologies, even in the narrowest sense of tools or machines, are a particular case of Foucault’s indivisible knowledge/power nexus; they are a phenotype of both knowledge and power and cannot be analyzed solely in terms of one or the other (Foucault 1994). More recently, Bruno Latour upheld the indivisibility of knowledge—in the form of technology—from social relations, stating that “technology is society made durable” (Latour 1991), and Castells concurs, saying “technology is society, and society cannot be understood and represented without its technological tools” (Castells 1996, 5).