Technoculture: Another, More Material, Name for Postmodern Culture?

"If we want technology to liberate rather than destroy us, then we, the techno/peasants, have to assume responsibility for it."-- The Techno/Peasant Survival Manual [1] Perhaps the question is, what isn't technoculture? The two parts of this word, techno(logy) and culture are actively contested in contemporary social criticism. Donna Haraway, for instance, has read the logos of techne as "translatable/transferable technique", and then more closely as "frozen labor " [2]. Haraway draws attention to the accountable, though usually unaccounted for, aspects of "our " artifacts, our shirts, our computers, our words. She asks: "How is the world in the object, and the object in the world? " [3]. With regard to culture, it is precisely these webs of interconnection and constructed barriers of individuation which are under attack within and without anthropology: "culture " as a signification of privilege, by the privileged. Under these lights, technoculture points toward a world where the high and low speed technique-transfers are the common culture, and where "culture " is a technology. Technoculture, the book, looks in this and other directions. Penley and Ross use technoculture in their introduction almost always in the phrase "Western technoculture " and situate technocultural situations as stemming from technology transfer problems and creative appropriations. "The essays collected in Technoculture are almost exclusively focused on what could be called 'actually existing technoculture ' i