Dreams and Calamities: Is This the Future for Which We Have Struggled?

Jau-lan Guo

Waste of Modernization

In December of 2012, at the time the Third Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition Melancholy in Progress was on display at the Hong-Gah Museum, public opinion was piqued by high unemployment among young people and average starting salaries as low as 22k per month (~ US$ 9, 000/year). Since the rise of globalization in 1990 investment has shifted to Mainland China, thus eviscerating Taiwan’s core manufacturing industries and weakening labor. Under these conditions, young people face low salaries, a low employment rate and fewer opportunities to reach their potential. Observing this phenomenon, we come to realize that Taiwan has always been positioned internationally, but not in opposition to the local as we have imagined. Taiwan cannot escape the global geopolitical structure based on capital flows.

Following current trends, regions that were once dumping grounds exploited by developed countries now produce discarded people as “an inseparable accompaniment of modernity.”(Bauman, 5)  Discarded junk that has lost its original function can still be recycled and put to some beneficial use, but discarded people are worthless once thrown off the rails of progress by a changed and utterly unrecognizable post-industrial landscape. Modernization is a process of planned obsolescence, when the expiration date of each individual is determined by one’s value in the world and is the consumption gap of factory output to scrap. As capital moves around the world, the expiration date extends and recedes.

Zygmunt Bauman describes production in modern societies as a “‘production line’ of human waste or wasted humans.” (6) In order to maintain the glossy surface of cities, (human) waste is dumped into the sewers to remove it from our sight. The more glorious the cityscape, the more we need a (human) waste disposal mechanism. If a waste production line is a type of infrastructure we rely on to exist, then why do we always overlook it? How should we coexist with it?

Observing this psychological perception, social relation and movement of regional economic domains, one can not help but ask, which kind of spiritual construction decides our future? If this huge mechanism even controls our ability to dream, then can we wake from this dream and draw up new plans by considering the basic default of the system's framework and its intermediary systems, which includes technology, consciousness, borders, and order?

Technological Somnambulism

In 1793 England sent ambassador George Macartney to China in hopes of establishing a trade agreement with the Qing Court. Emperor Qianlong refused, confidently declaring, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.”(Russell, 45) Macartney's delegation had wanted to launch a hot-air balloon over Beijing in order to impress the Qing Court and prove the West's superiority to all of China. Although the Minister Heshen forbade them from doing so and Emperor Qianlong was self satisfied, the West could not be stopped and this rejection only managed to stall feelings of inferiority that China would eventually have about its technological backwardness. In the end, the West's modernity and technological domination have drawn the attention of all parts of East Asia.

In the first half of the twentieth century, technology and science were seen as capable of solving all of life's problems and foundations of the good life. Technology has even been raised to the level of religion, and a universal belief in its power to drive progress and create a happy future have circled the globe. The word “progress” is often used as a slogan in the pursuit of technology in third world countries. The worship of reason is manifest in the pursuit of technocracy and technological supremacy. According to research, technocratic systems have never really been realized in Europe, but rather appeared in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. (Shi, 4) In idealized democratic societies, logic, objective experience, instrumental reason and myths of technology often grant experts support from the public sphere, resulting in organized irresponsibility for a government favoring meritocracy and technocracy.

Every time we turn to pick up that gradually disappearing technology, we catch a glimpse of how our society has been fooled by wave after wave of technology in the name of innovation. As consumers of imported technology, we have committed ourselves to the research and development of innovative technology in order to strive for international status, and even the uncertainty of nuclear energy cannot escape such logic. The definition of “new” is just the technological output of so called advanced countries.

Research and development in science and technology are believed to be the only means of economic development and social change, and justify an iron triangle composed of science, technology and capital. This futurism is just like what Paul David pointed out when he said that commitment to the future is an understandable trend. He claims it has caught most humans who want to dramatically improve their physical environment, and that commitment to the future may be a long-term functional response of modern industrial democratic countries, as well as an attempt to guide social resources away from achieving cooperation and to the conquest of science.

Technology and the concept of technical rationality serve as an intermediary system, and in this way hide the politics of technology and technological objects, leaving a situation of imbalance, loss of control of technology, and a division between science and society.

In his book We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour takes the separation of judicial and administrative practice in the constitution as a metaphor for modernity. He states that in the separation of various divisions of government, although the system can regulate different departmental interactions, there exists an inevitable interaction that is underground. In a similar way, modernity makes invisible mutual entangled relationships between science, technology and society. This underground power of modernity, which Latour termed “modern constitution” is even bigger than the power of the real constitution itself. (Lei, 221-36)

The appropriate technology movement of the 1970s advocated the invention of objects suitable for people rather than people in the service of objects. Today this concept of separation of people and objects is insufficient to cope with the current phenomenon of naturalized technology. For example, a smart phone has become the beginning of socialization for a child. Technological objects that were chosen by the last generation of adults have become the starting point of socialization for the next generation of children. Social forces struggle over the selection process and in the next generation the process will vanish without a trace. This is how technological objects have been naturalized. Furthermore, in a world where technological objects are ubiquitous, the borders between objects and the self become blurred. We use technology as well as the technological objects themselves, which has ultimately tampered with the significance of reality and wiped out its core. Overlapping this is the fact that the gap in cultural identity brought by technological objects no longer exists only between the dominant West and backward East; the same spirit of ranking has also been internalized in every area.

Technology meets certain predetermined human goals, but the result of technological development is not something that can be predicted. Langdon Winner has coined the term “technological somnambulism” to describe such technological uncertainty and our nonchalance toward the effect new technology has on us.Technology is an autonomous force increasingly out of control. It is no longer merely a tool that we call at our convenience, but rather is embedded in a larger system that has an overall influence in our lives, like a giant smokescreen that makes its own operations invisible.

The Allure, Trap and Transmutation of Modern Progress

In 1900 the Japanese screened the Auguste and Louis Lumière film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory at Taipei's Freshwater Pavilion (located near today's Changsha Street, and formerly Deng Ying Academy during the Qing period), which was perhaps the earliest documented case of moving image technology being imported into Taiwan. Although there really is no way to find out how Shozo Matsuura, the Japanese performer who provided live narration for the silent film, explained “factory” to the people of Taiwan, we can still get some clues about how the Taiwanese people, based on their experience, might have misread the first film of human movement and collective labor.

The film, which was just a few minutes long, might have presented a glorious image of the modern world. In addition to the image projected into the eyes of the audience, there was the mysterious black box that created the illusion, which is fundamental in making technology dazzling. In fact, in 1900, Taiwan was not without factory experience. There were sugar factories in Yunlin and Chiayi that were established to supply Japan, the colonial master of Taiwan. Finally in 1940, the film Southward to Taiwan was released in Japan, presenting areas around Taiwan from Keelung to Taitung and suggested Taiwan was an island rich in useful resources required to arm the Greater East Asia Empire of Japan as it planned to extend southward. Reminiscent of the Lumière brothers’ film, Southward to Taiwan's opening shot features a train, which represents Taiwan's modern history, speeding toward the direction of the audience. This film resembles one of the earliest motion pictures, which was also made by the Lumière brothers, of a train pulling into a station, and is symbolic of progress like running engines.

Artist Chen Chieh-jen once said when talking about the beginnings of Taiwanese film, one should not start from when films were first introduced into Taiwan, nor from when Taiwan began to film production, but rather from how local language and culture were used to interpret or even distort the film's content, through live performance, when silent films were narrated to the audience. More than just telling the story, the narrators in this age were translators, and in the process used slang and local language familiar to the audience, which intervened and interfered with the colonist's unidirectional distribution of strong visual culture. Thus, we believe that when talking about our modernity, we should start from the moment of awakening, and be aware of the strong cultural avalanche rushing towards us and use micro even incoherent ways to resist.

The aggressive promotion of progress is a kind of high-end superstition that mires us in the progress of globalization and a network of mysticism, necessitating us to re-select a way to renegotiate our relations with the world. We should neither close ourselves in a corner, nor catch up in the existing global economic dynamic. If current technological progress threatens our survival should we expand alternative ideas of progress hidden in the discourse of modernity, and then restart the system and framework of knowledge to create a new world map? Moreover, if our existing social and cultural relations have to be based on experts and technology, then can we find a model that also deals with political and local parameters? With this new model, we can undermine the “economy first” and “currency maximization” ideas that have kidnapped our thinking, and re-invite the opposites that have been excluded by modernization, and once again unite individuals trapped by social atomism. This is not a once and for all rethinking about our kidnapped state of survival, but an ongoing vigilance against it.

Works Cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.

David, Paul A. “Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror.” Technology and Productivity: The Challenge for Economic Policy. Paris: OECD, 1991.

Lei, Sean Hsiang-lin. “Three Significances of We Have Never Been Modern.” Taiwanese Journal for Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine. No. 10. April, 2010.

Russell, Bertrand. The Problem of China. Publisher: Arc Manor, 2008.

Shi, Chen. “The Chinese Technocratic Leadership: A Case Study of Municipal Leadership of Shanghai in the Reform Era.” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1997.

Wang, Wen-ji, ed. yiwaiduochongzou. (STS and truth) Taipei: Flâneur Culture Lab, 2012.