[Draft. Forthcoming in the Cambridge Journal of Economics]
Andrew Feenberg
Abstract: The most effective way to silence criticism is a justification on the very terms of the likely critique. When an action is rationally justified, how can reason deny its legitimacy? This paper concerns critical strategies that have been employed for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique especially with respect to technology. Foucault addressed this problem in his theory of power/knowledge. This paper explores Marx’s anticipation of that approach in his critique of the “social rationality” of the market and technology. Marx got around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like the concept of underdetermination in his discussion of the length of the working day. There are hints of a critique of technology in his writings as well. In the 1960s and ‘70s, neo-Marxists and post-structuralists demanded radical changes in the technological rationality of advanced societies. Soon technical controversies spread, primarily through the influence of the environmental movement. The concept of underdetermination was finally formulated clearly in contemporary science and technology studies, but without explicit political purpose. Nevertheless, this revision of the academic understanding of technology contributes to weakening technocratic rationales for public policy. A new era of technical politics has begun.
The trajectory to which my title
refers suggests my intention of linking Marx’s writings to current technical
issues. I am primarily interested in the methodological implications of Marx’s
contribution rather than the details of his thought. Please keep this
qualification in mind as I discuss the theories of surplus value and
deskilling. I will also engage contemporary constructivist technology studies
along the way. There are interesting similarities between aspects of Marx’s
method and constructivism.
Why Marx? The question is reasonable
in the current intellectual context in which Marx’s economic thought is
generally dismissed as outdated and his historical significance diminished by
the fall of the
Technology studies emerged not out of
Marx but out of an earlier development of anti-positivist science studies. Epistemological
relativism triumphed in the wake of Kuhn’s famous book on scientific
revolutions as science came to be studied as a fundamentally social phenomenon.
The rejection of positivism in science
studies prepared the way for a break with determinism in technology studies.
Technology too, it turned out, was a social phenomenon and not an instrumental
application of universal knowledge. Constructivism aimed to liberate us from
the last myth, the myth of pure rationality, with the unstated purpose of
combating the authoritarianism of the experts.
Constructivism had the good fortune to
emerge at a moment of growing concern with environmental issues and the rise of
the Internet. As public understanding of technology grew more sophisticated,
scholarly study of technology found an unusually wide audience. However, the
revival of religious fundamentalism called forth a defense of traditional
rationalism. The Enlightenment struggle against superstition and intolerance is
not over and the weapons of Enlightenment are still needed, among them the
unwavering appeal to scientific truth. The scholarly debate headed toward
deadlock as the political context of discussion contaminated the intellectual
space with a toxic dose of reality.
I do not intend to address the
philosophical issue of relativism versus rationalism in this paper. I do not
believe it is necessary to resolve such vast questions to develop a powerful
critique of rationality as it is realized in social institutions such as
markets and technologies. I will argue that some aspects of Marx’s method point
the way to an alternative to the epistemological emphasis of current debates. Widening
the context of discussion to include Marx may help us free technology studies
from the heavy philosophical burden it inherits from its origins in science
studies. Marx allows us to maintain a critical stance in the framework of a social concept of rationality.
I would like to begin by contrasting
Marx with Foucault. Foucault is probably Marx’s most influential critic on the
left today. His theory is explicitly presented as an alternative to Marxism.
Marxism, he argues, still conceives of power as “sovereign,” that is to say, as
repressive. The Enlightenment notion that truth is above politics goes along
with this. These are, Foucault claims, outdated conceptions of both power and
knowledge.
In modern societies knowledge is
conjoined with power and together they are productive of individual
subjectivity and the social order. Disciplines such as criminology and
psychiatry arise along with the institutions of confinement that place their
human objects at their disposal. They reshape these objects through
disciplinary procedures and so create a modern society.
According to Foucault, power/knowledge
is a web of social forces and tensions in which everyone is caught as both
subject and object. This web is constructed around techniques, some of them
materialized in architecture or other devices, others embodied in standardized
behaviors. These do not so much coerce and suppress the individuals as guide them
toward the most productive use of their bodies. On this account, technology is
just one among many similar mechanisms of social control, all based on
pretensions to neutral knowledge, all having asymmetrical effects on social
power.
This explains why the social
imperatives of modernity are experienced as technical constraints rather than
as political coercion. Surveillance, disciplinary power, normalization, all
make modern life possible. They "condense" technical and social
functions at the level of everyday behavior, even before that functional
duality is transferred to the design of institutions and devices. Eventually
these constraints are embodied in structures that determine individual’s action
more effectively than rules and commands by determining their reflexes, skills
and attitudes. The Panopticon is Foucault’s one developed example of the place
of artifacts in his theory. Of it he writes,
The exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through those power relations (Foucault, 1977: 206-207).
Foucault claimed that a power based on
knowledge and embedded in social techniques and technology cannot be overthrown
by a political revolution. The state in its modern form exists through the
effects of power/knowledge and a change of policies and personnel would leave
these effects intact. What is possible is both less and more than such a
change, however revolutionary. Foucault argued for “the subversive
recodification of power relations” underlying the structure and methods of the
sciences in order to integrate the subjugated knowledge possessed by those on
the bottom of the hierarchy (Foucault: 1980: 123). The aim is not to abolish
power but to find a way "which would allow these games of power to be
played with a minimum of domination" (Foucault, 1988: 18; Feenberg, 2002:
chap. 3).
Foucault’s theory is enormously suggestive.
It is significant that he focuses on rational forms of domination not by
attacking science as such but by deconstructing those sciences in which human
beings are both object and subject. These social, political, medical, and
administrative sciences are deeply embedded in the power relations of modern societies.
Undermining their claims to purity both provides a guiding thread for
understanding modernity and theoretical support for new forms of political
resistance on the terrain of knowledge. All this is certainly an advance over
Marx. But
although some of Marx and Marxists’ discussions of class and the state conform
with Foucault’s notion of sovereignty, for Marx rational social arrangements
are just as biased by the effects of power as they are for Foucault.
In support of this claim I must first
explain what I mean by a “rational” social subsystem, and then revise the
notion of bias accordingly. Let me begin then with the concept of “social
rationality” which I have introduced to identify the peculiar character of many
mostly modern institutions (Feenberg, 2008).
It is obvious that no institution can be
rational in exactly the same way as science and mathematics. Institutions are
not held together by logical relations but by causal and symbolic forces that
lack the rigor of experiment and equation. Nevertheless, procedures that bear a
certain resemblance to those of science and mathematics operate in modern
societies with tremendous effects on the whole social system. Organizations apply
these procedures consciously and purposefully to gain control over social
processes and the symbolic environment.
Social rationality in this sense
depends on three such procedures. These are, exchange of equivalents,
classification and application of rules, and optimization of effort and
calculation of results. Each of these principles looks 'rational' as we
ordinarily understand the term. The market, like calculation, is an exchange of
equivalents. Bureaucracies resemble science in classifying objects and treating
them uniformly under rules of some sort. And like science they measures their
objects ever more carefully. Business, like technology, is based on optimizing
strategies. Social life in our time thus appears to mirror scientific and
technical procedures. This has consequences for the critique of social bias.
That critique is based on another quite different kind of rationality, a
dialectical rationality that enlarges contexts and connections in a process of
interpretation. A discussion of that alternative form of rationality lies
beyond the scope of this paper, however it will be constantly at work here.
We normally identify bias where
prejudices, emotions and pseudo-facts of one sort or another influence
judgments that ought to be based on objective standards. I call this
“substantive bias” because it rests on a content of belief such as, for example,
the idea that some races possess inferior intelligence. This concept of bias is
an inheritance of the Enlightenment which aimed its critique at narrative
legitimations of feudal and religious institutions. By contrast, the
Enlightenment appealed to rational foundations, facts and theories unbiased by
prejudice. There is no doubt that Enlightenment critique played and still plays
an important role in emancipatory politics. However it has a significant
limitation since it implies the neutrality and universality of systems such as
technology, bureaucracy and markets that claim a rational foundation.
The critique of a rational system such
as the market requires a different concept of bias. To explain that concept I
need to distinguish it from romantic critique, which attributes substantive
bias to rational systems and thereby denies the rationality of rationality as
such. A similar critique is found in some postmodernist, feminist and STS
theory. But whenever rationality is reduced to a non-rational origin such as
Western or patriarchal ideology, or mere power relations, its special
characteristics qua rational are overlooked.[1] This was not Marx's approach. He encountered it on the left of
his day, for example in Proudhon, who titled his most famous book Property Is Theft. But if
property really is theft, the coherence and survival of capitalism are
incomprehensible. No social order can be based on simple plunder, certainly not
one as complex and fragile as the capitalist system.
Marx's distinctive approach involved a
very different style of critique based on the discovery of what I call “formal
bias,” by which I mean a critique of the discriminatory effects of a rational
order. I will argue that this is the methodological contribution of Marx that
anticipates Foucault and contemporary STS.
Formal
bias only becomes visible when rational systems are situated in their context. It
is not a matter of prejudice and need not be defended with appeals to
pseudo-facts or narrative myths because in this case the system itself objectifies
the discriminatory principle. Criticism is silenced because the defender of the
system can demonstrate its fairness on the terms of substantive critique. For
example, a culturally biased test may discriminate effectively between populations,
but those who design, administer and grade the test need not themselves be
prejudiced for it to achieve a biased outcome.
Marx acknowledged the rational
coherence of the market economy. But already in 1844 he cites “a contemporary
economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces"
(Marx, 1963: 121). This fact suggests the hidden bias of the market which Marx
sets out to explain as a consequence of the rational structure of capitalism.
It is a difficult challenge. Habermas has succinctly summarized the problem Marx
faced: "The institution of the market promises that exchange relations
will be and are just owing to equivalence….The principle of reciprocity is now
the organizing principle of the sphere of production and reproduction in
itself" (Habermas, 1970: 97). In this passage Habermas explains the
astonishing coincidence of mathematical equivalence and moral reciprocity in
market relations. It is this equivalence that legitimates the market and makes
it seem both natural and good.
Marx overcame this legitimating
strategy in his theory of surplus value. I recall his argument here not to
revive Marxist economics but as an example of a methodological innovation that
has continuing validity and usefulness. In the ideal model of the capitalist
economy that Marx derives from his bourgeois predecessors goods are paid for on
the average at their value and their value consists in the labor required to
produce them. Labor power itself is a good and the labor required to produce it
is measured by the cost of food and other necessities. But because the
capitalist owns the factory he has the power to set the length of the working
day independent of the value of the labor performed within its compass. During
the long working day workers produce goods worth more than the cost of their
wages and so they enrich the capitalist to whom their product belongs.
Meanwhile, the workers themselves remain at a mere subsistence level sufficient
to reproduce their labor power.
Marx makes no reference to prejudices
or pseudo-facts in this critique of capitalism. Surplus value is produced by
the rational workings of the system itself. Property is not theft because labor
is paid at its value. This is why Marx objected to early union demands for a
fair wage. The problem is not with a specific rate of wages but with the
structure of the market. However Marx's argument does effectively refute the
normativity the market acquires when it is viewed as a pure exchange of
equivalents, outside the context in which it actually functions as a mechanism
of exploitation.
I want to turn now to the relation
between Marx’s conception of formal bias and his critique of technology. Marx
was not a rigorous technological determinist despite having written some famous
passages in which he says that the “forces of production” determine the
relations of production and all of social life. The bulk of his concrete
discussions of technology concern the harm caused by industrial work. These
passages seem to imply a critique of technology as such. But Marx rejected any
such imputation and blamed the problems on the capitalist employment of
machinery. But there are also a few passages in which technology is criticized
for its specifically capitalist character. He writes for example that science
"is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical
revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital" (Marx, 1906
reprint: 475). And further "it would be possible to write quite a history
of inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with
weapons against the revolts of the working class" (Marx, 1906 reprint:
47-48). These passages suggest the contingency of science and technology on the
interests of the capitalist class. Power/knowledge avant la lettre appears to be at
work in Marx (Feenberg, 2002: chap 2).
The industrial revolution is the first
time in history that basic economic production concerns members of the upper
classes. Capitalists possess literate skills and access to scientific
knowledge. At the same time they are in touch with the crafts in which
lower-class people are engaged. Their familiarity with these two worlds of
knowledge was one factor enabling them to restructure the labor process in order
to eliminate costly craft labor and to introduce machines. This
is the process of division of labor celebrated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Our everyday
sense of the word “technology” derives from this transition although of course earlier
crafts also employed more or less sophisticated technical means.
Smith emphasizes the technical
increase in efficiency, but there are other considerations of a political nature. As Andrew Ure wrote in 1835: “By the infirmity of human
nature it happens, that the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and
intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a
mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great
damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is,
through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people
to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity” (Ure, 1835: 18).
Competition drives the process of deskilling,
but it would not be an effective economic strategy in the absence of the
specific social relations of capitalism. Once labor becomes wage labor and its
tasks are parceled out, production units no longer have a quasi natural
character, rooted in community and family and supported by craft guilds and their
traditions. The workers have no interest in production in both senses of the
word, and even understanding the work plan becomes more and more difficult for
those who implement it. The capitalist is thus technically necessary. Without
his exercise of “power/knowledge” workers would slack off and coordination
would break down. Foucault explains this aspect of factory work with explicit
reference to Marx (Foucault, 1977: 175).
But Marx’s analysis goes further,
explaining how, in Foucault’s words, power relations come to “function in a
function.” Deskilling leads to mechanization. Once craft work is broken down
into its simplest elements and each element assigned to a specific worker in a
new division of labor, the potential role of machines in performing it becomes
evident. Much of the capitalists’ role can be objectified in such machinery. Thus
a social demand, in this case of capital, presides over the Industrial
Revolution and orients much innovation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Deskilling is such a general feature
of invention over the last few centuries that it appears to be essential to
progressive economic development. But in fact the history of capitalist
enterprise shows just how contingent it is on peculiar social conditions and
class conflicts, just as Marx supposed. What makes this difficult to perceive
is the technically rational form taken on by these contingent developments. As
a result old ideas about progress shared by Marxists and liberals alike
prevailed until the 1970s when Harry Braverman’s pathbreaking book Labor in Monopoly Capitalism
(1974) renewed Marx’s critique of deskilling.
David Noble followed with influential
studies of the role of deskilling in American industrialization. Noble’s famous
example of the automation of the machine tool industry has had a wide
influence. Machine tools can be automated in two different ways. An early
analog record/playback system was introduced by General Electric but it found
no buyers because it still relied on craft workers to record a program.
Management held out for digital systems that would translate directly from
engineering drawings to machine movements, completely cutting craftsmen out of
the loop. Noble’s argument exemplifies the workings of what constructivists
call underdetermination. Management’s choice between these systems was
ultimately decided by its ideological hostility to craft labor which
was supported by a long tradition of management science, and not by neutral
technical or economic reasons (Noble, 1984).
Noble does not claim that management
got what it wanted nor that the sort of deskilling prophesized by Smith and Ure
was actually achieved.[2] What is currently called “materiality” or the “agency” of
things enters into his account. In fact, the digital systems could not be
operated without help from skilled workers. Furthermore, the detailed working
out of this example does not reinstate the humanistic notion of sovereignty
criticized by Foucault. Like the Marxian sources on which it is based, Noble’s
argument carefully situates human action in the context of social, technical
and cognitive constraints and affordances.
The writings of Braverman, Noble and
others in this tradition helped free Marxists from a naïve view of capitalist
technological advance as a universal achievement. According to the new approach
forces and relations of production co-construct each other. This term,
“co-construction,” belongs to recent
constructivist technology studies which has rediscovered the Marxian
idea of the interdependence of the social and the technical. In this field
technology is conceived not as a pure product of inventive genius or as an
application of science but as a “construction” of social actors. The technical
underdetermination of artifacts leaves room for social choice between different
designs that have overlapping functions but better serve one or another social
interest. This means that context is not merely external to technology, but
actually penetrates its rationality, carrying social requirements into the very
workings of gears and levers, electric circuits and combustion chambers.
These concepts were introduced in an
influential article by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker that made the connection
between constructivism in science studies and a parallel approach to technology.
They illustrated their argument with the history of the bicycle. As in Noble’s
example of machine tools, so in this case two main designs were in competition.
One of these designs looked a lot like bicycles today. It was relatively safe
to ride but slow, useful only as a means of transportation. The other had a
high front wheel and was faster but less stable. It appealed to young sportsmen
who liked to race. The different designs thus corresponded to the requirements
of the different social actors. The triumph of the low wheelers resulted from
the introduction of air filled tires to reduce vibration. When these were tried
out in bicycle races, the low wheelers proved fast as well as stable and soon
became the preferred design. “Closure” was achieved, but the outcome was
contingent and not the result of “progress” in the sense in which that term is
understood in a deterministic context. Pinch and Bijker comment: “[T]he
different interpretations by social groups of the content of artifacts lead by
means of different chains of problems and solutions to different further
developments…” (Pinch and Bijker, 1987: 42).
Pinch and Bijker’s key point is the
influence of the social on “the content of the artifact itself” and not merely
on such external factors as the pace of its development or its use (Pinch and
Bijker, 1987: 42). This appears to parallel a similar constructivist relativism
in science studies but the parallel is misleading. Although similar in many
respects, as constructivists argue, facts and artifacts are quite different in the
most important respect. The “hardening” of natural scientific facts by
experiment and replication yields a “content” that is far more compelling than a
successful technological design. Of course the elements of engineering are
often firmly established by scientific methods and long empirical experience,
but they are a far cry from a finished artifact. They must be combined in
contingent combinations and it is in the course of this process that the
“interpretative flexibility” of technology becomes evident. The
underdetermination of the outcome is radical and obvious to technologists. Its
demonstration requires no subtle epistemological arguments. Foucault’s caution
in restricting his study to sciences such as psychiatry and criminology
reflected an appreciation of their similarly “soft” status.
As the deskilling contest clearly
shows, the social construction of technical artifacts is an intervention into
the lives of their users. The “scripts” inscribed in the artifacts govern their
usage and hence a large part of social behavior, in some cases even users’ way
of life. Users are configured by artifacts but in turn influence their design.
Interactions played out in the course of the diffusion of technologies co-construct
both human beings and the technologies themselves (Woolgar, 1991; Akrich, 1992;
Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). I have studied several cases in which these complex
relations between users and designers played a key role. In my study of the
French Minitel I showed how the very meaning of the system was transformed by
hackers who turned an information network designed to rationalize French
society into a communication network for the exchange of instant messages
between users seeking dates (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 7). The original program
which was designed to “configure” the users as more efficient members of an
“information society” was subverted as the users resignified the system as a
place of human encounter.
This very brief sketch of
constructivist technology studies does not do justice to the rich body of
research in the field but it gives a hint of its relevance to issues of great
social and political consequence. The central achievement of these theories is
the liberation of technology studies from deterministic models and the
introduction of a hermeneutic perspective. The new question of technology is
not about efficiency but about meaning.
From this standpoint, the history of
deskilling as Marxists analyze it is a hermeneutic contest between two
different visions of work and the worker, one promoted by capital and the other by
workers. Deskilling involves the realization of the capitalist interpretation
of work in the technical specifications of factory equipment. A new type of
society is built around this transformation.
I have introduced the term “technical
code” to refer to the general rules for translating such meanings between the language
of social actors and the technical languages of the day. In earlier work I
explored this concept in relation to child labor, a consequence of deskilling
which led to the construction of machines sized for operation and maintenance
by children. When factory owners were confronted with child labor legislation,
they protested that the “imperatives of technology” required the small workers.
The meaning of labor and hence of technology was at stake in the expulsion of
children from the factory (Feenberg, 1991: 127-131).
Although such arrangements tend to be
exported to
Marx hints at the possibility of a
socialist technical code that would liberate intelligence and skill. In the Grundrisse, for example, he
writes that labor under socialism must be "of a scientific and at the same
time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed
natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process
not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all
the forces of nature" (Marx, 1973: 612). This conception of socialist
labor explains why, in “The Critique of the
This implies a very different
evolution of technology under socialism. Presumably the “assembled producers,”
as Marx called the empowered workers, would make different technical choices
from the capitalists. A different technical code would be imposed by workers,
who would appear as actors in the technical domain. Although Marx left all this
rather vague, later Marxists have developed the argument for a democratic
technical system while also addressing the limitation of Marx’s formulation to
a proletariat that no longer exists in the form in which he knew it.
I want now to address the development
of the politics of technology critique in more recent times. I have tried to
show that Marx anticipated Foucault’s essential point, namely, that a critique
of modern civilization must include rationality in its purview. The structure
of wage labor and technology requires just such a critique. But these systems
are no longer confined to capitalist enterprise as they were in Marx’s day. In
the 20th century they spread to state institutions and eventually to communist
societies. This
shows that the factory was simply the initial site of a more general technical
politics. The first place in which technology was widely deployed was
the factory and so it was there that technical resistances first manifested
themselves. But today technology is involved in every aspect of life, including
domains unimagined by Marx such as leisure, education and even dating as we saw
with the Minitel. Once technology spreads over the whole surface of society, a
much wider range of technical struggles emerge, as is clear from the contemporary
politics of the environment, medicine, and computerization.[3] Foucault’s critique of social knowledge was one of several theoretical
initiatives inspired by this new situation.
The multiplication of scenes of
struggle shows that the bias of technological rationality is due not to
ownership but to what I call the “operational autonomy” of the capitalist and
his administrative successors. By operational autonomy I mean the freedom of
the owner or manager to make independent decisions regardless of the views or
interests of subordinate actors and the surrounding community. Operational
autonomy positions management in a technical relation to the world, safe from
the consequences of its own actions. There it is able to reproduce the
conditions of its own supremacy at each iteration of the technologies it
chooses and commands. Technocracy is an extension of such a system to society
as a whole in response to the spread of technology and management to every
sector of social life. A self-perpetuating dynamic emerges. We could employ
Thomas Hughes’ term and call this a kind of “momentum” acquired by modern organizations
as they expand and develop.
Unfortunately, the socialist movement remained
fixated on ownership and expected miracles from nationalizations without
democratization of technical relations. The neutrality of technology became
doctrine among Marxists as it was among capitalists and direct transfers of the
most oppressive Western technological designs formed the underpinnings of
industrialization in the
Revisionist Marxism in the 1960s and
70s developed a radical critique of modern civilization as a whole. The most
famous representative of this trend was Herbert Marcuse. He worked out the
complex of critical ideas that have by now become clichés: the stabilization of
the “one-dimensional” system through media propaganda, technocratic ideology,
privatization, consumerism, and the displacement of surplus aggression onto
racial or foreign scapegoats.
In addition, Marcuse challenged blind
faith in “progress” with a radical critique of technological rationality. In
the dominant ideology technology was represented as a pure application of
knowledge of nature, above political and social differences. The rational
character of technology served as its alibi, freeing it from responsibility and
placing it beyond controversy. Marcuse contested this image of neutral,
value free technology. Modern technology does differ from traditional crafts,
bound to the service of specific culturally secured values. But its liberation
from such values simply places it in the service of the dominant actors. This
aspect of Marcuse’s argument leads in my own work to the concept of formal
bias.
Marcuse was less concerned with the
problem of authority that preoccupied Foucault than with the intrinsic
limitations of modern scientific-technical rationality. His argument reprised
certain themes of the romantic critique of reason, such as its suspicion of
quantification, albeit in a political form. Marcuse contrasted a science and
technology of domination with an alternative realization of rationality
respectful of the developmental potential of nature and human beings. Such an alternative, Marcuse argued, would be
rooted in the imaginative understanding of the world and the sense of beauty,
themes that resonated with the counter-culture of the day (Feenberg, 2005:
chap. 5).
Marcuse’s argument thus culminates in
a positive alternative. He argued for "rupture with the continuum of
domination, the qualitative difference of socialism as a new form of way of
life, not only rational development of the productive forces, but also the
redirection of progress toward ending of the competitive struggle for
existence, not only abolition of poverty and toil, but also reconstruction of
the social and natural environment as a peaceful, beautiful universe: total
transvaluation of values, transformation of needs and goals. This would mean
not to regress in the technical progress, but to reconstruct the technical
apparatus in accordance with the needs of free men, guided by their own
consciousness and sensibility, by their autonomy" (Marcuse, 1970: 280).
Marcuse's ecstatic projection sounds
shockingly utopian today, but it provides a vision of a very different
technological future, and some sort of vision is needed if we are ever to see
the fundamental changes required by an adequate response to the environmental
crisis. Marcuse’s influence reached a highpoint in the 1970s when the
counter-culture promised a radical break with the
This historical background explains
the decline of the positivist rationalism and technocratic determinism that
achieved intellectual hegemony in the English speaking world after the Second
World War. The dramatic events of
the 1960s, followed
by the long slow rise of environmentalism, eroded the hegemonic certainties of
the post-war period. The possibility of alternatives, repeatedly illustrated by
successful environmental regulation, sapped the authority of technocratic
experts who claimed to know the one best way to do things. Rationality was no
longer one but multiple, at least in its socially concrete realizations, and so
subject to politics rather than over-ruling it in the name of a superior truth.
The changed situation of rationality
explains the credibility of the new social studies of technology that emerged
to prominence in the 1980s. By the end of the century academic study of
technology had abandoned determinism and instrumentalism in favor of various
constructivist alternatives. This depoliticized version of a critique of
technology introduced important methodological innovations as we have seen. But
constructivist social science was remarkably inhibited when it came to studying
itself. If it had violated this taboo it would have discovered the background
discussed here earlier and especially the importance of social struggles over
technology in giving its theoretical innovations significance beyond a
specialized audience.
This inhibition no doubt explains the
shock of the so-called “science wars,” in which a rearguard defense of typical
positivistic and technocratic theses confronted constructivists many of whom
were convinced, like the scientists they studied, that they were not
responsible for the politics of their research (Gross and Levitt, 1994). The
stakes were raised when attacks came from the left, the natural home of most
constructivist scholars. For example, Meera Nanda argues that post-modernism
and constructivism are operationalized by Hindu nationalists. She writes, “Neo-Hinduism
and Hindutva are reactionary modernist movements, intent on harnessing a
mindless and even dangerous technological modernisation for the advancement of
a traditionalist, deeply anti-secular and illiberal social agenda.
Nevertheless, they share a postmodernist philosophy of science that celebrates
the kind of contradictory mish-mash of science, spirituality, mysticism and
pure superstition that passes as ‘Vedic science’” (Nanda,
2004; see also Nanda, 1996). Whether these attacks on constructivism were entirely
justified is a question I will not address, but the weak response in the STS
community revealed real problems.
It
had evidently not occurred to constructivists that the relativism that made
their theory effective against technocracy made it useless against
fundamentalism and traditional forms of racism and sexism. The problem
was made insoluble by the identification of science and technology in a
supposedly unified “technoscience.” Unless science and technology are
distinguished there is no way to avoid the contradiction between a progressive,
democratic argument against the subjective bias of fundamentalism and the
parallel argument against the formal bias of technocracy.[4] To make matters worse, the STS community was at first
reluctant to make its anti-technocratic argument explicit. What Wiebe Bijker
once called the “academic detour” had led far from the main political road as
feminist critics noted (Wajman, 2004: 126). It took a while to find the way
back but eventually students of technology such as Bruno Latour and Bijker
himself engaged more openly with the core political issue, the relation of
technology to democracy (Latour, 1999; Bijker, 1996).[5] The theme of democratization of technology, an obvious
political implication of the thesis of underdetermination, thus began to
receive the attention it deserves. If this theme is pursued, the encounter of
technology studies and political theory may bring about a major reconfiguration
of the social sciences.
As Latour has argued, the exclusion of
technology from the social scientific concept of society is untenable. But once
technology enters the picture, the issue of rationality appears in a new guise.
It was Weber who introduced the concept of rationalization to explain many of
the processes Marx had earlier identified as central to modernity. But whereas
in Marx such processes were conceived as potentially multiple—capitalist or
socialist—Weber argued that they were the same for all modern societies. Now,
with the new focus on technology, we have a basis for questioning Weber’s
simplification. Because of the underdetermination of technology, rationalization
must reproduce the multiplicity of the social. There is no single homogeneous
outcome to technological development and so none to social development either.
The future, that seemed closed by the certainties of social science, opens up
anew. The question of democratization concerns the form in which social
influences on development will be exercised and institutionalized in the
rationalized domains.
This paper has concerned critical
strategies for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique
especially with respect to technology. When an action is rationally justified,
how can reason deny its legitimacy? Foucault addressed this problem in his
theory of power/knowledge. Marx anticipated that approach in his critique of
the “social rationality” of the market and technology. Marx’s discussion of the
length of the working day got around the silencing effect of social rationality
with something very much like the concept of underdetermination. There are
hints of a critique of capitalist technology in his writings as well. I have
introduced the distinction between substantive and formal bias to explain the
difference between critiques of prejudice and Foucault and Marx’s style of
critique. Rather than identifying factual errors, they enlarge the context of
explanation of the workings of underdetermined rational systems in such a way
as to reveal hidden biases.
In the 1970s, Marxists rediscovered Marx’s
critique against a background of rising political and cultural struggles. They
argued that the design of technologies such as the assembly line is shaped by
capitalism. At about the same time neo-Marxists and post-structuralists
demanded radical changes in the technological rationality of advanced
societies. The spread of technology into every nook and cranny of social life
provided a context in which the thought of Foucault and Marcuse achieved
widespread popularity. The subsequent political reaction reduced the influence
of their radical theories but also saw the emergence of an environmental
movement that focused attention on technology in new ways. Other social
movements appeared in medicine and around computerization that sharpened the
technological focus. In this changed context academic study of technology took
new paths. The concept of underdetermination was finally formulated clearly in
contemporary science and technology studies, but without explicit political
purpose. Nevertheless, this revision of the academic understanding of
technology contributes to weakening technocratic rationales for public policy.
A new era of technical politics has begun.
References
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[1] The risk of regression to which such approaches are exposed is very real: Christian fundamentalists have been able to appeal to science studies in defense of their right to teach “intelligent design” in the schools.
[2] It is true that new skills often arise as old ones are destroyed, but from the standpoint of contemporary actors, this is irrelevant. Managers seeking to cut labor costs and workers defending their jobs and way of life confront each other in the present regardless of what may happen in the future.
[3] I have offered examples of such struggles in several of my books: medicine (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 5), computerization (Feenberg, 1995: chap. 7), educational technology (Feenberg, 2002: chap. 5), environmentalism (Feenberg, 1999: chap. 3).
[4] Of course the distinction is not always sharp but like many other fuzzy distinctions it is nonetheless real and consequential. See (Feenberg, 2002: 171-174).
[5] I have attempted to develop a quasi-constructivist political theory of technology in (Feenberg, 1999: Part II)