| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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man-made creation, continuously readapted to promote social exchanges. However, in the technological sphere, critical language collapses under its own theoretical weight and is left devoid of conceptual mass. Critique is not able to transcend the immanent plane of technological knowledge that comprises the technical sphere.
However, speech becomes the performative function of radicalism, a techné for reactivating the limitless possibilities of difference, for challenging the status quo by invigorating critique and releasing us from the limits of technical principles. A central pathology of industrialized societies has been the willingness to colonize the lifeworld by reconstructing and reinscribing it within interlocking systems of rationality, or, as Habermas terms it, “self-regulated systems of purposive-rational action and adaptive behavior.”7 Systems of rationality are employed by industrial societies to achieve dominion over natural resources that are used in service of social interests. The same systems of rationality are mobilized in support of individual or group interests and redirected against populations to regulate action and behavior by administering the production and distribution of technical and communicative resources.
Technology has been transforming societies, and some of the most exploitative, dehumanizing, and oppressive uses of new technologies have also been the most productive. During the Victorian era, British mercantilism employed technologies of industrialization to expand systems of trade by delving into international economic markets in order to promote agendas of imperialism and colonialism. The growth of mercantilism, in early nineteenth-century Britain, along with the emergence of the new industrial and technological sphere it expanded, limited the potential for engaging speech as the performative act of communicative rationality within Victorian life. Technology of