| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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within the dominant culture as a strategy for causing the absence of critical language from Victorian social discourse to maintain the socioeconomic status quo. The transformation from communicative rationality to technical rationality necessitated the renegotiation of British conceptions of how one occupies public and private domains by representing women and working-class characters as the embodiment of the nameless and faceless masses that populate the landscapes of industrial novels. This study employs Habermas's theoretical language to accommodate Victorian concepts of class and gender determinism within technical conceptions of noncoercive consensus.
In the study, I also explore the dynamic tension, found in selected industrial novels, between the ideas of technology as an autonomous and self-referential instrument of nonsocial rationality and technology as a neutral component that is responsive to socially determined interests of the Victoria era. The study locates historical attitudes and sentiments within the context of industrial novels to suggest the effects of technology on individualism and provincialism within the Victorian age as well as its transition from oral culture to literate culture. I consider how industrial novels anticipate the incompatibilities of technology and critique in the postmodern age by offering the social antagonist as a metaphor for retrieving the lost techné of public speech from the displaced knowledge of preindustrial culture.
Borrowing from Max Weber, Habermas's theory of rationality suggests the organizing feature of society is to shape knowledge into templates of rational apprehensions that become facts: “the world of systems … colonizing the world of life” (Communicative Action 81). However, Habermas's comments allude to the possibility of a suprasphere of technical rationality that subordinates all prior forms of knowledge and expression to the procedures of the technological sphere. While preindustrial