"The kind of rationality that drives the modern scientific, economic, and technological revolutions - instrumental or administrative reason (herrschaftwissen) - is only one kind of knowledge, knowledge for the sake of power, profit, and control. Unlike the type of rationality that is critical, ethical, communicative, and dialogical in nature, the goal of instrumental reason is to order, categorize, control, exploit, appropriate, and commandeer the physical and living worlds as means toward designated ends. Accordingly, this general type of reason—a vivid example of what Nietzsche diagnoses as the Western “will to power”—dominates the outlook and schemes of scien-tists, technicians, capitalists, bureaucrats, war strategists, and social scientists. Instrumental knowledge is based on prediction and control, and it attains this goal by linking science to technology, by employing sophisticated mathematical methods of measurement, by frequently serving capitalist interests, and byabstracting itself from all other concerns, often disparaged as “nonscientific,” “subjective,” or inefficient.
The dark, ugly, bellicose, repressive, violent, and predatory underbelly of the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge, of “reason,” and of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “rights” as well, has been described through a litany of ungainly sociological terms, including, but not limited to: secularization, rationalization, commodification, reification (“thingification”), industri-alization, standardization, homogenization, bureaucratization, and global-ization. Each term describes a different aspect of modernity - reduction of the universe to mathematical symbols and equations, the mass production of identical objects, the standardization of individuals into the molds of conformity, the evolution of capitalist power from its competitive to monopolist to transnational stages, or the political and legal state apparatus of “representative” or “parliamentary” democracies. Each dynamic is part of a comprehensive, aggressive, protean, and multidimensional system of power and domination, co-constituted by the three main engines incessantly propelling modern change: science, capitalism, and technology. In industrial capitalist societies, elites deploy mathematics, science, technology, bureaucracies, states, militaries, and instrumental reason to render the world as something abstract, functional, calculable, and controllable, while transforming any and all things and beings into commodities manufactured and sold for profit. [...]
Clearly, instrumental reason targets not only objects and things for control, but also subjects and society; and just as mechanistic science moved seamlessly from objectifying heavenly bodies to policing social bodies, so administrative rationality moved from controlling nature to manipulating society. The disciplining of bodies in eighteenth century schools, the ubiquitous gaze of guards over prisoners in nineteenth century penitentiaries, the Taylorization process in twentieth century factories that studied workers’ movements to minimize wasted energy and maximize surplus value; the eugenics discourse and mass sterilization policies in the United States during the 1920s; the networks of mass culture, electronic media, and advertising that constitute a vast “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) that transforms citizens from active agents to passive consumers; the colonization of minds of children, youth, and adults through a cornucopia of chemical toxins that dull, deaden, and neutralize minds through pharmaceutical warfare—these are only some of the seemingly infinite methods and techniques used to regiment populations, pacify resistance, neutralize activity, and eliminate opposition."
Excerpted from The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination.
The dark, ugly, bellicose, repressive, violent, and predatory underbelly of the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge, of “reason,” and of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “rights” as well, has been described through a litany of ungainly sociological terms, including, but not limited to: secularization, rationalization, commodification, reification (“thingification”), industri-alization, standardization, homogenization, bureaucratization, and global-ization. Each term describes a different aspect of modernity - reduction of the universe to mathematical symbols and equations, the mass production of identical objects, the standardization of individuals into the molds of conformity, the evolution of capitalist power from its competitive to monopolist to transnational stages, or the political and legal state apparatus of “representative” or “parliamentary” democracies. Each dynamic is part of a comprehensive, aggressive, protean, and multidimensional system of power and domination, co-constituted by the three main engines incessantly propelling modern change: science, capitalism, and technology. In industrial capitalist societies, elites deploy mathematics, science, technology, bureaucracies, states, militaries, and instrumental reason to render the world as something abstract, functional, calculable, and controllable, while transforming any and all things and beings into commodities manufactured and sold for profit. [...]
Clearly, instrumental reason targets not only objects and things for control, but also subjects and society; and just as mechanistic science moved seamlessly from objectifying heavenly bodies to policing social bodies, so administrative rationality moved from controlling nature to manipulating society. The disciplining of bodies in eighteenth century schools, the ubiquitous gaze of guards over prisoners in nineteenth century penitentiaries, the Taylorization process in twentieth century factories that studied workers’ movements to minimize wasted energy and maximize surplus value; the eugenics discourse and mass sterilization policies in the United States during the 1920s; the networks of mass culture, electronic media, and advertising that constitute a vast “society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) that transforms citizens from active agents to passive consumers; the colonization of minds of children, youth, and adults through a cornucopia of chemical toxins that dull, deaden, and neutralize minds through pharmaceutical warfare—these are only some of the seemingly infinite methods and techniques used to regiment populations, pacify resistance, neutralize activity, and eliminate opposition."
Excerpted from The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination.
