Do Artifacts Have Politics?

The question of the significance of participation, though vital to much contemporary work, is one that should be treated with some suspicion. The mere involvement of the actions of audience members is not enough to assume a vital or direct relationship to the work of art …. How the exchange of participation takes place must be carefully framed, so

Winifred says she does not care for “politics.” She complains about the intellectualization and politicization of art that, to her mind, started after World War II. The director here interjects an apt quotation from Walter Benjamin—“Thus fascism aestheticizes politics and communism answers with the politicizing of art”—clearly indicting Wagner and

Perhaps leaning so hard as I have on democracy will only cause it to snap. Perhaps we need another word; perhaps the word can be refurbished and put to better use. Either way, technology is sure to be drafted in the cause. A further fruit of Langdon Winner’s reflections on artifacts and politics is an observation about the amnesia that surrounds in

Consequently, what is at stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in technological process.

will identify six ways in which all people of the world are threatened by industrial development after passage through the second watershed: (1) Overgrowth threatens the right to the fundamental physical structure of the environment with which man has evolved. (2) Industrialization threatens the right to convivial work. (3) The overprogramming of m