The Rational Critique of Rationality
Andrew Feenberg (www.sfu.ca/~andrewf)
Modern societies are said to be rational in a very special sense that seems to distinguish them from premodern societies. Of course they are not rational in the same way as mathematics or physics, but something about the structure of modernity resembles rationality as we find it in disciplines such as these. The question is, what is this something?
One self-congratulatory answer has it that we are more
rational than our ancestors because we have achieved scientific knowledge of
nature where they had only myths. There is some truth in this but not much. Considering
the bizarre beliefs that are still popular even in the most advanced countries
it is clear that little has changed. For example, a majority of Americans
believe in angels but this does not prevent them from functioning in an
efficient modern way we think of as rational. What is more, people were capable
of making discoveries and improving technology long before modern science was
developed. Some sort of non-scientific rationality was involved in premodern
technical progress. Finally, it should be kept in mind that rationality is not
necessarily good nor even successful. In its social employment, the concept
describes a type of practice, not an end in itself nor even a guarantee of
instrumental effectiveness. Hitler’s
Another and more interesting answer to the question points out that modern social systems and organizations conform to principles that in some ways resemble our ideas about rationality as practiced in scientific disciplines. The three main practices are
1. exchange of equivalents,
2. classification and application of rules,
3. optimization of effort and calculation of results.
Each of these principles looks “scientific.” Calculation is an exchange of equivalents: the two sides of the equals sign are, precisely, equivalent. All scientific work proceeds by classifying objects and treating them uniformly under rules of some sort. And science measures its objects ever more carefully. Social life in our time has come to mirror these scientific procedures. I will call this structure “social rationality” by which I mean an institutional order of some sort characterized by one or another type of rational practice.
Wherever there are human beings one observes more or less rational individual behavior and instrumentally effective collective behavior. What makes social rationality special is the role of coordination media such as the market (principle 1) and formal organization and technology (principles 2 and 3). Thus while all three principles of rationality are at work in all societies, only in modern ones are they implemented by markets, organizations, and technologies on a large scale. This is what is distinctive about social rationality. Let’s consider this difference in more detail.
- Premodern producers generally bartered their goods and where markets existed they were fairly marginal. Under feudalism taxation rather than exchange accounted for most of the movement of goods. By contrast, the modern economy is organized around the exchange of money for an equivalent value in goods or labor.
- Traditional societies classify people and apply rules to them but the classifications and rules are handed down in a cultural tradition. In modern societies organizations such as corporations and government agencies construct the classifications and apply the rules. This makes for great flexibility: the system can change overnight rather than evolving slowly as culture changes. It is designed consciously, not inherited from the past.
- Some individuals in every society attempt to make their activities and techniques more efficient and measure their success. But only in ours is this the primary work of organizations and only in ours do we find constant progress in both efficiency and measurement.
In sum, a socially rational society is structured by markets, organizations and technologies around the three principles of rationality. In this it contrasts with regulation by systems of domination and subordination rather than equal exchange, informal cultural classifications and rules rather than formal ones, and traditional rules of thumb rather than carefully calculated optimizing strategies and techniques.
As Habermas has pointed out, modern rationality has both a technical and a normative dimension. This is particularly clear in the case of the market. In obeying the principle of equivalent exchange markets respect equality in both the mathematical and moral sense. An exchange that is numerically balanced is also fair. Furthermore, scientific rationality has a unique property: it builds consensus through argument rather than violence or bribery. Scientists agree because the force of the stronger arguments convinces most of the community, not because some have more guns or money than others. Rationalized institutions too can defend their structure and decisions by reference to reasons, although by no means such compelling ones as scientists adduce for their theories.
For a long time Western social thinkers believed that a rationalized society could be a pacified society that would resemble science not only in form but also in the dynamics of consensus building. But it has not proven so simple to eliminate the element of conflict in social life. Indeed, rationality itself has become the object of critical attacks.
Social criticism of rationality begins at the end of the 18th century when the principles of rationality are first applied systematically to human beings. Increasingly, the population appears as a resource to be used efficiently by organizations. Markets take precedence over more personal forms of appropriation and exchange. Technology appears as an independent force as it sheds the traditional value systems and institutions that had always contextualized it.
When human beings are viewed economically and technically their other capabilities and needs are ignored. The social and the individual stand opposed or rather the functionalization of the social makes it possible to be an individual in a new sense opposed to all function. Functionalization calls forth a romantic critique of the rational attitude toward the world exemplified in the proud claim of the Balzac’s character Vautrin, “I belong to the opposition called life.” The image of life versus mechanism reappears constantly in the critique of social rationality, not just in relation to technology but also markets and bureaucracies. But romanticism never succeeded in convincing any large number of people to give up the benefits of modernity despite the fact that capitalism, the economic system which generalized rational organization, turned out to be profoundly oppressive and unfair.
Another critique of social rationality stems from Marx. Marx was the first to understand the biased effects of equal exchange. While many of his socialist contemporaries agreed with Proudhon that “property is theft,” and hence not an actual exchange of equivalents, Marx dismissed such moralizing complaints and analyzed the workings of the market. His initial assumptions were based on the principle of equal exchange drawn from contemporary economic theory. According to this theory goods were valued by their labor content and traded for the most part in equivalents. The problem Marx confronted was how to explain the inequalities of capitalist society on the basis of this principle without recourse to implausible notions of merit or origin myths such as the social contract.
It is well known how Marx solved this problem. He argued that under the principle of equal exchange, the value of labor must be measured by the cost of its reproduction just like any other commodity. But the productive power of labor was applied during a working day longer than needed to produce goods equivalent to that cost. The difference, surplus value, accrued to the capitalist and generated the observable inequalities without theft or cheating as many socialists supposed.
What is interesting about this argument today is not so much the questionable content as the form: the demonstration that rational principles of social organization can yield a biased outcome. Marx showed that the capitalist played by the rules of equal exchange, thus affirming the coherence of the capitalist system, at least within certain historical limits, but he then went on to demystify its normative claim to fairness. He recognized the rationality of capitalist society while also uncovering its bias, thus separating the technical from the normative dimensions of rationality.
Why was it so difficult to develop a critique of the rationality of modern institutions such as markets and technology? Our intuitive sense of bias is shaped by the Enlightenment struggle against a traditional social order based on relations of domination and subordination. The critique of that social order identified what I call substantive bias, bias in social and psychological attitude, which designates some members of society as inferior for all sorts of factitious reasons such as lack of intelligence, self-discipline, “blood” or breeding, accent and dress, and so on. The Enlightenment questioned these pseudo-reasons as they applied to lower class males. The false substantive claims of the dominant ideology were demystified and equality asserted on that basis. This approach set a pattern that was adopted in the critique of discrimination against women, slaves, the colonized, homosexuals, and potentially any other subordinated group.
Marx was skeptical of this style of critique because it did not address the monumental fact of economic inequality. He focused on what was left uncriticized by Enlightenment critique. Since markets are fair and the element of rational calculation that characterizes them is confounded with our notion of universal, neutral scientific knowledge, rationality in its social form escapes criticism of its biased consequences. Marx’s methodological revolution consisted in circumventing this obstacle through a deeper and finer analysis of social forms of rationality. The most fundamental bias of the capitalist system was not due to irrational prejudices but to the way in which it implemented the rational principle of equal exchange.
I have introduced the concept of “formal bias” to describe prejudicial social arrangements of this type. Formal bias prevails wherever rationalized systems or institutions are structured in such a way as to favor a particular social group. Marx’s economic theory offers a first example of how this works. More recently, the concept of institutional discrimination has been developed to supplement the critique of individual prejudice. Practices such as red-lining in the mortgage and insurance business testify to the need for a concept of formal bias in race and gender politics. “Rational” classifications and rules based on racial or gender differences can be implemented in all innocence by unprejudiced individuals with highly prejudicial results. Critical theory of technology analyzes formal bias in technological design which, like the market, combines the rational principles of calculation and optimization with social determinants.
Marx’s critical method was not applied to technology in the years following the publication of Capital. Marx himself had focused primarily on the first of the principles of social rationality, the exchange of equivalents. The market is not an organization but a system or coordination medium and its movement has a lawful form. The idea of “laws of history” so fascinated 19th century socialists that it completely eclipsed Marx’s critique of technology. But Marx himself gave important indications of how his method could be extended to technology. He analyzed it under the heading of the production of relative surplus value. In this chapter of Capital he considered the role of cooperation, division of labor, and mechanization in the capitalist system. The method he applied to markets is applied here less rigorously to technology. He argues that the form taken by technical progress under capitalism accords with the needs of the enterprise. Invention is guided by the specific problems capitalists experience in controlling the labor force and not merely by the interest of the human species as a whole in better technology. It was only in the 1960s that labor process theory recovered this aspect of Marx’s thought and brought it up to date. While Marx’s contribution was ignored, Weber founded the field of organizational sociology on uncriticized capitalist assumptions and lost the Marxian insight into the role of technology and class. Influential successors such as Parsons compounded the error.
But Weber’s contribution is important as the first major attempt to thematize the problem of social rationality as such. His theory of rationalization explains the rise of “calculation and control” in modern societies. The theory of social rationality I propose is an extension and modification of this Weberian approach. Weber was most interested in the second and third principles of rationality, the application of rules and optimization as these characterize bureaucratic and business organizations. Control plays an especially important role in organizations since they operate to a considerable extent according to internal criteria of success applied from the top down. Bureaucracies, for example, establish rules under which employees are rewarded for performance. Calculation of accomplishment is often involved both in the reward structure and in efforts at streamlining the organization and its technologies.
Considered in the light of Weber, Marx reveals unsuspected
depths first explored in Lukács’ theory of reification. From this standpoint it
is possible to identify a significant continuity between Marx and the
Although the first generation of the
The period since World War II is characterized by the emergence of a politics of technology which has gradually refuted the old belief that a more rational society would be able to avoid conflict and reach agreement through a scientific consensus. Instead, we have seen the rapid proliferation of lawsuits, demonstrations, and political controversies over all sorts of technical questions. Money, power, and violence continue to play a role in decisions about technology. Students of Marxism were not surprised since these conflicts merely repeated in new arenas the struggles he analyzed in the 19th century.
Today we no longer expect technical progress to resemble the old image of scientists bending over an experimental apparatus and nodding their heads in agreement. Indeed, we no longer believe that even scientists find agreement so simple. Our model of technical advance increasingly resembles ordinary politics. Diverse interests now contend for influence over the design of technologies just as they have always fought for influence over legislation. Each alternative design of medical technologies, transportation systems, the Internet, educational technology, and so on has its advocates whose way of life or wealth depends on control of technical designs. They argue more or less rationally for their point of view and criticize each other. Technological controversies appear on the front pages of the newspapers daily and we are aware that we have entered a new era of technical politics.
This is why I have
reformulated the
It is possible to combine insights drawn from the
I call my combined approach “instrumentalization theory.” It is a critical version of rationalization theory that applies not just to technology but to any rationalized system or institution. All of them realize one or several of the three principles of social rationality under specific social, cultural and political conditions. Those conditions provide the decision rules which resolve technically underdetermined design choices in a biased manner. The critique of social rationality must therefore operate at two levels, the level of the basic rationalizing operations and the level of the power relations or socio-cultural conditions that specify definite designs. I call these two levels the primary and the secondary instrumentalization. They consist of interlinked aspects of technical objects and subjects that together build a world.
Instrumentalization Theory
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Functionalization |
Realization |
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Objectification |
decontextualization reduction |
systematization mediation |
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Subjectivation |
autonomization positioning |
vocation initiative |
The initial insight that opens up an object to technical control presupposes two conceptual operations. First the object must be decontextualized, split off from its original environment. And second, it must be simplified to bring to prominence just those aspects that can be functionalized in terms of a goal. These operations are performed by a detached subject that is autonomous, independent of its objects, and strategically positioned to make use of them.
Passing from the level of functional conceptualization to the actual making of a device brings in a host of new constraints and possibilities that are primarily due to the existing technical and social environment. The decontextualized object must be placed in the context of the pre-existing devices and systems before it can be developed. The simplifications it has undergone must be compensated by new mediations drawn from the ethical and aesthetic registers of the society in which it is to function. And the detached subject finds itself engaged with its objects vocationally and called on to exercise initiative in manipulating them. This brief description of the theory gives only a hint of developments described more fully in several of my books.
An example will help to make the relation between levels clear. Marx’s critique of political economy shows the consequences of replacing concrete human bonds of domination and subordination with formally equal market relations. This operation decontextualizes and simplifies natural and social elements for incorporation into a capitalist system of production and distribution. Things treated as raw materials are broken loose from their natural site and stripped down or processed to expose their one useful aspect in the context of production. In the production process they acquire new qualities suiting them to the human context for which they are destined in consumption. People are processed too. They are removed from the traditional domestic work context and relocated in factories. They cannot of course be stripped of their non-productive aspects like trees or minerals, but they can be obliged by the rules of the factory to expose only their productive qualities at work. These qualities are shaped by the demands of the job, including the demand for initiative in performing it. So reconfigured, goods and labor circulate on markets, freed from the “irrational” encrustations on the economy of a traditional society. But the rationality of capitalism is biased by the fact that the capitalist alone is authorized to set the length of the working day. This is a contingent feature of a market society, one which could have been designed differently under different social conditions. It is thus the equivalent of a biased design principle in the technological domain, resolving a technically underdetermined aspect of a device in accordance with the dominant social arrangements.
There is a further aspect to this process of rationalization which concerns the capitalist as socially rational subject. The individual capitalist is of course not likely to be very different from other people, but insofar as he acts out of an institutional base with its specific constraints, his practice has a remarkable characteristic: indifference to the social and natural environment within which optimization is pursued. Capitalism thus constructs a practical subject which lacks “humanity” in the traditional sense. This subject frees itself from social control and positions itself strategically to make a profit. On this condition it is able to achieve effective technical control of nature, labor and wherever possible markets.
An example drawn from the entirely different domain of domestic technology will help to complete the picture. Consider the design of a simple everyday object such as the refrigerator. To make a refrigerator, engineers work with basic components such as electric circuits and motors, insulation, gases of a special type, and so on combined in complex ways to generate and store cold. Each of these technologies can be broken down into even simpler ones until we arrive at the primitive decontextualized and simplified elements drawn from nature on which all technology is based. There appears to be very little of a social character about these simplest elements although a detailed history of each would reveal some sort of minimal social contingency. The primary instrumentalization is preponderant at this level and takes the form of sheer technical insight.
But just for that reason, just because these technical issues have been so thoroughly simplified and extracted from all contexts, knowledge of the elements is insufficient to completely determine design. For example, the all important question of size is not settled technically but on purely social grounds in terms of the likely needs of a standard family. Even the consideration of family size is not fully determining. In places where shopping is done daily on foot refrigerators tend to be smaller than where shopping is done weekly by automobile. Thus on essential matters, the technical design of this artifact depends on the social design of society. The refrigerator seamlessly combines these two entirely different registers of phenomena.
As can be seen from this example, at every stage in the elaboration of a technical device, from the original creation of its elements to its final finished form, more and more technically underdetermined design decisions are made on the basis of social constraints. The role of these secondary instrumentalizations grows constantly as we follow an invention from its earliest beginnings through the successive stages in which it is developed and implemented in a device able to circulates socially. Indeed, even after its release, a new device is still subject to further secondary instrumentalizations through user initiative and regulation. The resulting device is through and through determined by the world in which it was built. In this sense we can say it is socially constructed.
The secondary instrumentalization exhibits significant regularities over long periods. Standard ways of understanding individual devices and classes of devices emerge. This is called “black boxing” in constructivist studies of technology. Many of these standards reflect specific social demands that have succeeded in shaping design. These social standards form what I call the "technical code." The example of the refrigerator illustrates this notion. Its technical code determines such features as cubic feet of storage in function of the social principles governing the family. In some cases the technical code has a political character as for example in the parcellization and mechanization of labor in the industrial revolution. Foucault’s study of prisons offers another example of the operation of a politically charged technical code.
Technical codes are sometimes explicitly formulated in design requirements or regulations. But often they are implicit in culture, training, and design and need to be extracted by sociological analysis. In either case, the researcher must formulate the technical code in an ideal typical manner as a norm governing design. Such formulations help to identify the process of translation between the technical discourse and practice of experts and social, cultural, or political discourses. This process of translation is the reality of the technical code in contrast with the ideal-typical formulations which are merely research tools. The translation process is ongoing and fraught with difficulty but nevertheless largely effective. When it became clear that the standard refrigerant gas was destroying the ozone layer, environmentalists articulated public concern with skin cancer and soon this concern was translated into government regulations which were in turn translated into technical procedures implemented by engineers. The resulting designs were responsive to a new environmentally sensitive technical code.
The refrigerator example may appear uncritical but the sociology of domestic technology has been explored by feminist scholars in terms of the impact of the nuclear family on invention and design. Their feminist approach to technology studies proceeds implicitly as what I will call a critical theory of technology. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that critical theory of technology can situate the sort of work done in feminist technology studies in the context of a general social critique of rationality. The feminist argument depends on the distinction between the narrowly conceived technical properties of the domestic technologies, such as the speed or reliability with which they perform tasks, and the lifeworld context within which they are situated. The refrigerator reduces the time spent shopping but in a context in which household labor is still signified as largely feminine. Pictures of happy homemakers in advertisements confirm this cultural stereotype. The refrigerator is thus not only signified as a labor saving device but more concretely as a substitute for female labor. Of course there are other types of refrigerators and even the household model can do service in other contexts, but this observation simply refers us to different refrigerators. The fact that the device can move between cultural contexts does not authorize us to treat it as a self-sufficient thing out of any context whatsoever.
What we think of customarily as the “technical” abstracts from lifeworld contexts and so misrepresents both technology and society. What is true of refrigerators was just as true of the machines Marx analyzed in Capital. He saw the factory not only as a locus of productive activity but also as a life environment for its workers, and a destructive one at that. All rational systems have this double aspect as, on the one hand, a structure of operations based on one or several of the three principles of social rationality, and, on the other hand, as a complex lifeworld experienced by those enrolled in rational systems or organizations. The secondary instrumentalizations arise in that lifeworld and enter the technical process either as specifications reflecting earlier social struggles over design, or as expressions of users in the present.
As technology intrudes on more and more social settings, the resistant lifeworld generates ever more secondary instrumentalizations. In my earlier work I focused on two domains, human communication on computer networks and experimental medicine. In each case, a technocratic or scientific ethos presided over the construction of a new life environment. The French Minitel network, like the Internet, was introduced with the intent of enhancing the exchange of information, but both networks were pressed into service by users as communication systems. Similarly, AIDS patients perceived the design of early experiments in which they were involved as inhumanly restrictive. Because consistent cooperation could not be obtained under the prevailing protocols, patients were eventually able to force changes in experimental design. In each case those obliged to occupy a technical environment brought to it a very different self-understanding and very different needs from the designers’ expectations. Out of the confrontation of users and technical systems emerged a distinctive hybrid that served a broader range of human needs than was originally envisaged. I consider such changes to be democratic and progressive in character. They are essential to maintaining the openness of the technologized social world necessary for all kinds of struggle, including those that do not directly involve technology.
However, as the power of the state and corporations grows, it becomes more difficult for technical publics to intervene with democratic projects. Under these conditions it is tempting but highly exaggerated to identify technology with a dystopian system. There is a grain of truth in this which accounts for the pervasive influence of this attitude and the continuing interest in thinkers such as Heidegger and Ellul and their postmodern equivalents but I am skeptical for both theoretical and practical reasons. The secondary instrumentalization is externalized in their theories. In Heidegger’s terminology, the secondary instrumentalization would be merely ontic and subordinated to the ontological fundamentals revealed in the primary instrumentalization. The instrumentalization theory proposes a dialectical conception in which the technical and the social are moments in a totality rather than situated in a hierarchy of more and less fundamental. This opens the possibility of radical transformation through political action which is closed by the logic of dystopia.
For want of such a dialectical theory of technology, the
early
In conclusion, I would like to summarize this preliminary account of critical theory of technology in the following seven propositions:
1) the theory is a critique of social rationality in the domain of technology parallel to Marx’s critique of market rationality;
2) the theory is based on analysis of the formal bias of technology;
3) this bias is traced in design in the seamless combination of analytically distinguishable primary and secondary instrumentalizations;
4) technical elements are discovered at the level of the primary instrumentalization with minimal social constraints;
5) these elements are combined in formally biased systems and devices embodying a wider range of technical and social constraints described in the secondary instrumentalization;
6) specific technically coded configurations of secondary instrumentalizations resolve underdetermined aspects of technical design.
7) tensions between technological design and lifeworld contexts give rise to new demands which are eventually translated into new designs determined by modified technical codes.