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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Simon Fraser University, 1996. / Theses (School of Communication) / Simon Fraser University. Includes bibliographical references. Bibliography: p. 300-325. Available in PDF via the World Wide Web.

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George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art satisfies necessary and sufficient conditions for definition, but by leaving evaluation open cannot address artistic capacities to outstrip the usefulness of the theory for appreciating the concept of art comprehensively or meaningfully. Artworks that are known to members of the central and peripheral artworld seep into the general purview of the population at large as known “great works” of art. Upon examination of works that garner significant cultural influence, works broadly appreciated as great works, we find that their resistance to Dickie’s concept of “the artworld” and its associated behaviors is that which makes them conspicuously significant.

This dissertation examines a technologically specialized officialdom of Manchu called bondservants (or booi) that thrived in the eighteenth century. Through a case study of Tang Ying (1682--1756), a supervisor of the Imperial Porcelain Manufacture and a prolific playwright, I demonstrate the formation of what I call a "technocratic epistemology" across disparate fields of technical, artistic, and literary production. One of my key arguments is that bondservants differed from traditional Han scholar-officials in their practical approach to technological knowledge and their expanded literary representation of intercultural experiences in the multiethnic empire. Both contributed to the practice of statecraft that is modern in nature. In research questions and method, this project lies at the intersection of the history of technology, literature, and material culture. Tang Ying's case not only provides a vintage point for observing a technocrat's lineage, training, and career path, it also allows us to view the Qing empire from such previously little-studied vantage points as manufacture, technical knowledge, and fiscal management. This case study adopts a mobile perspective, following Tang's multiple journeys across the empire, often traversing social and ethnic boundaries. By closely analyzing Tang Ying's technical treatises, literary compositions and extant porcelains, I show a two-fold principle governing three aspects of technocratic cultural production. First, Tang Ying's illustrated treatise shows how bondservants appropriated non-textual knowledge of craftsmen and merchants into statecraft by means of writing and images. Second, Tang Ying's development of porcelain technology showcases how technocrats experimented with knowledge encoded in texts, images and tools. Third, documentary and experimental imperatives governed the literary and artistic compositions of bondservants. For Tang Ying, to document meant not only to record information but also to compartmentalize, to count, and to order information systematically. This dissertation sheds light on the central institutionalization of practical expertise in the expanding multiethnic empire of China. Trained for the projects of empire building, bondservants integrated the skills and practices of scholar-officials, artisans and merchants to give birth to a technocratic culture.

This dissertation explores the modernization of architecture in Spain in relation to the ideological, cultural, and institutional evolutions of Francisco Franco’s regime (1939-1975). It traces the ways in which buildings, images, and ideas about the built environment participated in the distinct form of technocracy—a Catholic technocracy—that conformed the Franquista State at mid-passage. In so doing, it provides an interpretation of the historical development of Franquismo as seen through the lens of architecture as much as of the politics of the architecture of the period. Throughout its thirty-six year span, the authoritarian state led by General Franco transitioned from the fascist military autarky that came out of the Civil War (1936-1939) to a technocracy that retained the ultra-conservative values that were essential to its inception. Members of the organization Opus Dei, the lay Catholic movement founded in Spain in the late 1920s, came in the 1950s to control the cultural and governing apparatus of the regime. As non-party technocrats, they were called upon to rationalize the government, advance sciences and technology, liberalize the economy, and bring forth the country’s geopolitical realignment with the democratic West. The ambiguous combination of conservative Catholicism and modernization they promoted best suited the regime, as it sustained the reactionary apparatuses of the dictatorship while allowing for partial reforms. Through a series of close analyses of four buildings now canonical of the period—the Camino Chapel designed in 1954, the Tarragona Government Building of 1956, the national pavilion of Expo 58, and the Pallars housing block for workers built in 1959—this dissertation makes buildings speak of the shifting politics of Franquismo and its governing techniques, of the dislocations of Catholicism that were essential to these changes, and of the distinct architectural culture that emerged within these processes. This history thus reveals the structural role certain buildings played in the advent of Spain’s Catholic technocracy, arguing that the intersection of aesthetics and politics assumed the paradoxical discursive form of silence.

This dissertation aims at describing the worldview and the ontological boundary work that descriptions of ”the information society” presuppose as well as understanding how these relate to technocratic descriptions of the world. The theoretical point of origin of this work is that worldviews are communicated, and that when this transpires, three worlds are related to (the objective, the social, and the subjective) which contain ideological components that make them plausible. The material that has been studied is public documents from 1994 – 2004. These materials have been analysed with the help of text analysis, where a reconstruction of the ideological components of the worldview is the objective. The results of the analysis show that these descriptions, first of all, presuppose an objective world where an ontological boundary between technology and values is drawn. Technology is driven by one form of logic and values are driven by another. Technology does not in itself contain values, but when put to use, only certain types of value can be created. The subsequent theoretical consequences are that these values (for instance effectiveness) are presented as objective, independent of value conflicts in society. Second, the analysis shows that descriptions partly presuppose a social world that is divided into a normative centre and a normative periphery, and partly a historicist description of historical development. These two ideological components provide a logical consequence, that in the social world, identifiable groups who live according to lifestyle patterns of the future can already be found today. Third, results show that descriptions presuppose a subjective world that is possible to change and direct. Man is to be made responsive to certain aspects of his existence and unresponsive toward others. This requires causing him to be responsive to change and unresponsive to that which hinders change. The logical consequences become a description of a system integrated information society where the individual is to adapt himself to changes on the system level. All in all, the three results of the study show that the world view which the descriptions presuppose have clear elements of technocracy and the art of social engineering.

Thesis (M.Arch.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 168-174). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Carbon Technocracy argues for the centrality of fossil fuel energy to the making of global industrial modernity and to the emergence of East Asian technocratic imaginaries in the first half of the twentieth century. It advances the premise that coal and later oil enabled not only the transformation of human society’s material foundations, but also allowed for new kinds of publics and politics. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations