IngentaConnect MAKING LIBERAL OBJECTS

Author: Otter, Chris

Source: Cultural Studies , Volume 21, Numbers 4-5, July 2007 , pp. 570-590(21)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Nineteenth-century Britain is often seen as being the great age of liberalism. It was also a great age of engineering and building. This paper explores the interconnections between liberalism and technology, using Samuel Smiles as its point of departure. Smiles eulogised liberal individualism in Self-Help (1859), and engineers in his multi-volume Lives of the Engineers (1862). In the first part of the paper, I produce a typology of 'liberal objects' - the machine, the network, and the device - paying particular attention to the kinds of human agency such artifacts made possible. In the second part, I connect this typology to the theory of liberalism and its historical practice. Liberalism, I argue, often functioned by using technology to materialise a mode of indirect rule. Machines, networks and devices encouraged a set of practices - productive labour, mobility, health, cleanliness, attention, independence - essential to liberal subjectivity, and were promoted and imagined as such. Considering liberalism as a government of, by and through technology explains why such a supposedly reticent and inactive mode of government became so involved in the regulation of material life. It also explains the origins of the 'technological fix' - the belief that technology is the solution to any social problem - which has become predominant in the West in the twentieth century.

Keywords: liberalism; technology; subjectivity; government; agency; engineering

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/09502380701278962