Technologies of Power in the Victorian Period Print Culture, Huma ...

led to the delinguistification of social interaction: that is, the displacement of subjectively informed communicative actions within objectively framed, technically oriented systems of reasoning that inculcated apathy by demonizing social critique. The written word was prioritized over oral traditions that were not able to be so easily replicated or mass produced. However, public speaking was regarded as not only an art form but also a performative function of membership within the public sphere. In light of Habermas's conceptions of technology as an “instrumental form of nonsocial rationality” (“Technology and Science” 105), it will be pertinent to tease out whether or not technologies of industrialization compromised and forever altered conceptions of the public sphere by limiting the potential for spoken discourse as a human techné,⁸ a countermeasure to technical rationality.

Victorian culture emphasized the value of oratory and speech as an accepted technique for advancing the process of social critique. The diminution of social critique within the Victorian technological sphere caused the disruption of the repetition of rhetorical values of critical language which had been stabilized by the performative act of speech. On a deeper level, it also suggested how technical rationality has been used by dominant social groupings as a strategy for divesting spoken language of its voluminous possibilities for invigorating critical conversation.

What has been theorized is whether or not technology might be responsive to a new critical language. However, a more radical critique has not been proposed in order to delay the processes of technological domination, processes that might have been halted during the Victorian age but might now only be interrupted by postmodern, anticritical intellectual banality. It is, therefore, important to devise appropriate techniques for