Technology and Culture

1148 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE As with many such studies, and more damagingly in one that emphasizes “technology,” the book does not engage directly with the material conditions of science. To treat language as a technology helps, but in suggesting how material culture is an aspect of ideas, it remains a long distance from the commonsense notion of technology that is the true subject of popular discontent. The current preoccu­ pation with language has produced some brilliant work in the epistemology and history of science, but there are—as Ian Hacking among others has observed—material and nontextual aspects of science. It is, to be sure, important to emphasize the processes of science, its human and imaginative dimension, its literary qualities, and its nature as a fallible discourse, a human construction. But a study of the material manifestations of science and an attempt to resolve the difficulty of the “material” in the human imagination cannot be successful if they are to be limited to a recognition that thought, too, is a technology. This book does not arrive at the problem of the material, or recognize its challenge to the dominance of discourse analysis in current critiques of science. But it is an admirable, if scattered, effort to imagine a way out. George Lf.vine Dr. Levine is director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. By Rosalind Williams. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 265; illustrations, notes, index. $19.95. Notes on the Underground argues that while 19th-century Americans expressed the hopes and anxieties engendered by technology in the metaphor of the machine in the garden, Europeans of the same period preferred the far more ambivalent image of the subterranean habitat. In America, machines still encroached on a natural if already somewhat mythical landscape; in Europe, industrialization by the mid-1800s had transformed cities into proletarian underworlds myth­ ical in the more classic senses of grave and womb. Although fictional descents into forbidden depths were constants of Western culture, science and technology lent a new resonance to such motifs for writers like Hugo and Dickens. Geologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists made the excavation of layers of earth and time the dominant “plot” of scientific narrative. For them metaphor was method, and their conviction that truth lurked below surfaces would shape the next century’s Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, and Chomskyean linguistics. Just as important in England and on the Continent was the literal digging that multiplied mines, tunnels, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1149 subways, and sewer systems. In response, science fiction set imaginary domains beneath the earth, where technology sustained and some­ times oppressed the humans who lived there. For Rosalind Williams, such works mark the onset of a consciousness of technology as an artificial environment from which nature has been banished. According to Williams, underground lighting helped mutate ro­ mantic notions of the sublime, a term usually applied to the chasms and grottos of untamed nature, into the late-19th-century aesthetic category of the fantastic, a term descriptive of the beauties of invention. The appeal of the fantastic in turn contributed to the death of realism, when the complexities of industrialization defeated the artists’ attempts at verisimilitude at the same time that the inequities of social and economic class reduced the options for the individual to flights of fancy. European retreats into fictional underworlds—like American tropisms toward forests or frontiers—thus served two wholly symbolic purposes, one psychological, in which a character plumbed the recesses of the self, the second social, in which the individual explored the hidden strata of culture. The vast cities set beneath the earth’s crust in futuristic works like Edward BulwerLytton ’s The Coming Race (1862) made the “real” Parisian sewers of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (also 1862) seem paltry, and the more elaborate engineering signified radical social and political agendas. By inventing underground havens, writers on the one hand ex­ ploited visions of ecological catastrophe common to the period’s geological and Malthusian debates, or capitalized on the fears of satanic mills gone out of control. On...