In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Assault on Progress: Technology and Time in American Literature
  • Lisa Crystal (bio)
The Assault on Progress: Technology and Time in American Literature. By J. Adam Johns. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Pp. ix+259. $45.

J. Adam Johns’s The Assault on Progress examines thinkers from a variety of traditions, praising the extent to which they resist the idea of progress and lamenting the moments at which they succumb to it. He argues that the idea of progress stems from a problematic understanding of the relationship between technology and time. Borrowing terminology from thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, Johns characterizes progress as a form of violence against the concept of time itself—a “flattening of time” or a “death of time.” He believes that progress must be eradicated from the concepts of technology and time altogether, and replaced with a notion of undirected change. To this end, Johns focuses on several figures from the nineteenth-and twentieth-century American literary tradition, exploring how their work has approached this anti-teleological ideal. He claims that American literature can be a valuable resource for historians of technology, insofar as it “[imagines] the possibility of resisting that teleological, eschatological way of understanding technology” (p. 9).

Johns takes issue with the idea of progress, and the accompanying [End Page 669] “death of time,” for two reasons: first, he argues that teleological thinking is historically inaccurate; second, he asserts that such thinking is “moral and intellectual poison” (p. 6). To Johns, any thinker who explicitly or implicitly suggests any directionality in the history of technology—whether in the form of a messianic end-of-history, a sudden and irreversible rupture in history, or a historical movement toward increasing mechanization—is misrepresenting the facts. Further, Johns argues that such historical mis-characterizations are inherently dangerous. This attack on teleology in the historical conceptualization of technology will not be new or controversial for historians of technology, though not all scholars see undirected change as the only alternative to teleology. The value of Johns’s contribution comes less from the originality of his own arguments about time, technology, and teleology and more from the attention he draws to the way the American literary tradition has treated these issues.

Johns devotes his first chapter to The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx (1964), taking issue with Marx’s “uncritical acceptance of the machine’s suddenness,” as well as Marx’s implicit acceptance of the organic/ mechanical divide as “the telos of Western civilization” (p. 15). The second and third chapters treat Herman Melville’s work and Lewis Mumford’s reading of Melville, both of which Johns believes come close to rejecting a teleological understanding of technology while not going far enough. The fourth chapter discusses William Faulkner, whom Johns argues is also unable to entirely eradicate teleology from his thinking. The final chapter is devoted to Ralph Ellison, who in Johns’s view is “the pinnacle of the anti-teleological tradition in American literature” (p. 7). (There is thus an odd sort of progress to be found in the literary assault on progress.)

In addition to the literary figures discussed, Johns borrows from a host of philosophers and critical theorists to make his point. He brings in ideas from Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, Henri Bergson, and Giorgio Agamben, to name a few. Many of these thinkers receive a rushed and superficial treatment, and Johns often doesn’t provide enough context for their ideas. For example, he paraphrases Heidegger: “the problem with technology is that it flattens time, eliminating true historical being” (p. 42). Johns then refers back to the “flattening of time” throughout the book, which in the absence of context for Heidegger’s ideas remains an opaque concept. At points Johns’s use of the concept of time is difficult to understand. He uses “time” to refer to a multiplicity of different concepts, and often another word such as “change,” “history,” or “experience” would better convey his meaning. This imprecision with respect to the concept of time, in combination with Johns’s often superficial borrowing from philosophy and critical theory, make the...

pdf

Share