ABSTRACT
Leaving aside the unappetizing concept of ‘stimulus shield’ and his endorsement of the dubious notion that social life can be understood in terms of rules, Schivelbusch’s project is an intriguing one. He wants to move from the humanist sociology exemplified in Elias’s work to a posthumanist sociology of people and things. Further, he wants to explore the inner human experience of technology, specifically the contours of what he calls ‘industrialized consciousness’—a terrain little explored in mainstream Anglo-American (or even French) science studies. We can follow him a little way to see what is at stake.
