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

conceptions of contestation and contradiction. Theoretically, radical critique might be traced through the multiplication of supplements that seek deferral of meaning and might, therefore, be reconstituted through the process of differentiation.

However, technologies of production require consensus of principles of labor and capital. Human socialization within the public sphere has been contingent on obedience to and performance of technical principles that disable radical critique of labor and capital by interrupting the process of differentiation. Technology, therefore, has been becoming a total power that humans might neither eschew nor escape. Technologies of production, therefore, have also exerted control over the sign systems used to reveal meaning and reality. Technology, once a means for delineating class distinctions, has been becoming value-neutral because it has placed under erasure the ways in which differences have been privileged and signified. Technical rationality, therefore, has exerted control over values used to signify meaning and identity. If technology has achieved value bias, it is only by way of self-preservation and the perpetual signification of technical principles that are themselves situated within other forms of knowledge. To consider technology as nothing more than a different social subsystem would diminish how technologies of production have been successfully interwoven into other systems of knowledge, so much so that technology cannot be differentiated from them.

The regularity of technical processes has become so commonplace that the logic of differentiation has been eschewed in favor of automated labor that subsumes individual ambition and character within units of homogeneous production. Technical processes foster a sense of purposiveness, a sense of belonging, which obscures how technical rationality severs the links between mind and body, between thought and action, and between realization