Cultures of Control (review)

Cultures of Control. Edited by Miriam R. Levin. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1999. Pp. xix+274. £37/£17.

The essays collected in Cultures of Control explore the history of the notion of control and its connections with culture and technology. In assembling the volume, Miriam R. Levin has brought work from cultural history and the history of ideas together with work in the history of technology. Unsurprisingly, with a topic so large and diffuse, the volume is uneven and imperfectly unified. Still, it suggests a nexus of control, technology, and culture that should stimulate further effort in this area.

In the editor's preface, Levin sets out three threads that she sees as inspiring her volume: ideology as culture of control, the seamlessness of technology and society, and the relationship between control and industrialization. In his introduction, Thomas P. Hughes focuses on technology and control, tracing developments that took place from the early nineteenth century, when technology was used primarily to control nature, to the end of that century, when the focus had shifted to controlling technology, to the twentieth century, when "engineers and managers--even the public--try to control large technological or socio-technical systems" (p. 1). From this point, the book is divided into two parts: the essays in part 1 focus on the historical origins of the culture of control, primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while those in part 2 focus on twentieth-century notions of control as linked with information technology, cybernetics, and complex technological systems.

Part 1 begins with Levin's "Contexts of Control," which traces the notion of control to the Enlightenment. Levin argues that at the heart of the Enlightenment project "lay the self-conscious notion that culture itself . . . was a means of control. Culture could be designed, systematized and rationalized to produce predetermined effects if it were modeled on natural systems. That is how culture became coterminous with technology" (p. 16). The next essay, by Rosalind Williams, also deals with Enlightenment thought, exploring the ideology of circulation that emerged in that period and how it was later reified in infrastructural technologies such as communication and transportation networks. She returns to the present to show that this ideology of circulation enabled control over the circulation of people, ideas, money, and goods but constrained control over locality and place, with negative consequences for the environment. The next four essays explore specific intersections of control and technology, including mathematical controls and the measurement of cloth in eighteenth-century France (Daryl M. Hafter), control over household harmony and hygiene in turn-of-the-century Sweden (Boel Berner), cultural control of early automobile use in France (Catherine Bertho Lavenir), and the vision of technology embodied in Celebration, Disney's new town in Florida (Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella).

Part 2 examines twentieth-century technologies of control. Denis Bayart discusses the emergence of graphical representations that gave material form to new technologies of statistical control, both providing support for theory and helping organizational members to act in the manufacturing world. Other essays deal with "Controlling the Bodies of Concentration Camp Prisoners" in the service of eugenics and genocide rather than of production (Michael Thad Allen); four cultures--involving airplanes, guns, the telephone network, and servomechanisms--that came together during World War II to form modern visions of control (David A. Mindell); the use of "liquid" metaphors for information and the shift from a perception of it as a dangerous "flood" to a portrayal of information as an "ocean" upon which people surf (Mark D. Bowles); and the process by which Soviet scientists reconstructed cybernetics from a reactionary theory to a tool of military and economic control (Slava Gerovitch).

Historians of technology will find many of these essays valuable. But the book's theme--the convergence of control and technology in a culture of control rooted in the Enlightenment and industrialization--is simultaneously too amorphous and too large to be fully realized in an edited volume of essays. Some of the essays (for example, Levin...