Questioning Technology
Andrew Feenberg
Routledge Press
Preface
The time has come for an anti-essentialist philosophy of technology. We have had enough of timeless generalizations about technological imperatives, instrumental rationality, efficiency, enframing, and similar abstract categories. This book offers a sketch of a concrete alternative.
The illusion that technology is an alien force—for good or ill—that intrudes on our social life from a coldly rational beyond is maintained by the same kind of ignorance that bound men to the gold standard for centuries. The forces of the market were believed to transcend the will of peoples and nations. The economy was treated as a quasi-natural system with laws as rigid as the movements of the planets. The social nature of exchange had to be discovered against tremendous ideological resistance. Today it seems absurd that human societies renounced control of their own economic life to a second nature they had themselves created. Yet where technology is concerned we remain in willful submission to a second nature just as contingent on our own activities as the economy. Liberation from technological fetishism will follow the same course as liberation from economic fetishism. The same story will someday be told about machines that we tell today about markets.
Technology is the medium of daily life in modern societies. Every major technical change reverberates at many levels, economic, political, religious, cultural. Clearly, it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it. Yet insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, we will fail: an increasingly important dimension of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society. The fate of democracy is therefore bound up with our understanding of technology. The purpose of this book is to think that vital connection.
This is a proptitious moment for such a project. According to Francis Sejersted (Sejersted, 1995: 16) we are entering a new phase of normative reflection on technology informed by a long development “from technological determinism to social constructivism, and then on to a political theory of technology.” The reaction against determinism brought the contingency of technological development into focus, which in turn has opened the way to a reassertion of the political. This exactly situates the argument of this book. I will begin with the problem of determinism and the political reactions against it in the new left and the environmental movement, proceed to draw out the theoretical implications of that reaction, and then turn to basic problems in the renewal of philosophy of technology.
The issues raised here are of concern to people of all political persuasions, but I believe they have a special significance for the left. Marxism claimed most fundamentally that the technological mediation of work creates a new kind of lower class with an unprecedented potential for self-determination. The failure of predictions based on this claim has led to the eclipse of Marxism and the emergence of identity based movements. These new social movements generally signify themselves according to the actors involved, as women’s movements, movements for gay rights, of environmentalists, or professionals, or workers. Unfortunately, no unifying articulation has emerged through which these various movements can join together to offer a politically convincing alternative. The promising notion that radical democracy can serve this purpose has so far had little impact. It is so abstract it determines no substantial policies, and in fact does little more than certify the left credentials of the very divisions it hopes to overcome (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). But perhaps it can begin to take on content through the question of technology.
Obscured
in the identitarian classification of the new social
movements is the potentially unifying articulation supplied by technology,
which is often the stakes in their struggle. For example, when women demanded
changes in childbirth procedures, when AIDS patients demanded access to experimental
treatment, they challenged technical medicine to incorporate a wider range of
human needs in its structure. Environmentalists demanding changes in production
technology to preserve nature and human health should be able to recognize
themselves in such struggles. Similarly, when workers protest the
intensification of labor made possible by the computer and demand different
ways of realizing its benefits, they are attempting to change technology and
the preconceptions that are realized in its design. The computer users in
France and the
In all such democratic interventions, experts end up collaborating with a lay public in transforming technology, even if it be through a conflictual process. It is reasonable to assume that eventually such social control of technology will be institutionalized in more durable and effective forms. How to understand this prospect, its implications for democracy and technical rationality? That is the radical question of technology. Marx's answer was socialism, the administration of production by the assembled producers. And indeed, this question still takes us back to Marx, to the idea that technological mediation opens new possibilities for intervention from below. But the limitation of technology to production in Marx's day has long since been transcended. Only through a generalization of the radical question of technology to cover the whole surface of society does it again become relevant to our time. In this form it may someday provide a theme around which the left can again articulate a utopian vision of life in a redeemed modern society.
The
writing of this book has placed me in debt to a great many people. Francis Sejersted invited me several times to the TMV center for
research on technology and culture at the
I am also grateful to many others who helped directly or indirectly in the writing of this book: Phil Agre, Scott Noam Cook, Jerry Doppelt, Robert Pippin, Martin Jay, Torben Hviid Nielsen, Thomas Krogh, David Ingram, and Anne-Marie Feenberg.
Several chapters of this book are based on
published articles: “Heidegger, Habermas, and the Essence of Technology,”
Special Studies Series of the Center for Science & Technology Policy and
Ethics, Texas A&M University, 1997; “Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of
Technology,” Inquiry 39, 1996; “The Commoner-Ehrlich Debate:
Environmentalism and the Politics of Survival,” in D. Macauley,
ed., Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, Guilford Publications,
1996; “Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power and Democracy,” Inquiry
35, 1992; “Remembering the May Events,” Theory and Society, July
1978.
Technology, Philosophy, Politics
Determinism and Substantivism
In this introductory chapter, I will sketch the main themes of this book in the context of a brief account of the growth of interest in technology in the humanitistic disciplines. This process has not been an easy one and its full implications are still unclear.[1]
If the human significance of technology is largely unmapped territory, this is mainly due to the idealism of Western higher culture. Only recently have scholars outside the technical fields become widely interested in their problems and achievements. In earlier times the humanities rejected discourse on technology as unworthy. That tradition goes back to the ancient Greeks who lived in aristocratic societies in which the highest forms of activity were social, political, and theoretical rather than technical.
Humanist scholars first took technology seriously in the modern period, especially with the publication of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. However, as Langdon Winner explains, modern political theory subsumed technical activity under the economy and did not raise the same kinds of issues about rights and responsibilities in relation to it that are considered relevant to the state. Common sense instrumentalism treated it as a neutral means, requiring no particular philosophical explanation or justification. So once again technology was pushed aside; it was seen as an aspect of private life, and therefore irrelevant to the basic normative questions that concerned the thinkers of the great tradition in political theory such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke (Winner, 1995).
There is however another fateful path by which technology enters the larger conversation of modernity: the historicizing trend in the emerging biological and social sciences of the late 18th and 19th centuries. This trend was firmly rooted in the idea of progress, which found its surest guarantee in the promise of technology. By the end of the 19th century, under the influence of Marx and Darwin, progressivism had become technological determinism. Following the then common interpretation of these materialist masters, technical progress was believed to ground humanity’s advance toward freedom and happiness.
Note the link between humanism and determinism. Of course progressive thinkers were well aware of the existing social divisions that prevented humanity as such from coming forth as a concrete subject of its own history. However, they regarded competing social groups and nations as proxies for the human race and so ignored this minor detail. Their universalistic treatment of cultural differences was similarly expeditious. They assumed that the ends for which humans strive, with technology as a means, are permanent features of their biological constitution. Technology was thought to be neutral since it did not alter these natural ends, but merely shortened the path to them. This neutralization of technology removed it still further from political controversy. If technology merely fulfills nature’s mandate, then the value it realizes must be generic in scope. In fact this is the story that is so often told: technology’s advance is the advance of the human species. The editorial, “we” intervenes often in this story: “we” as human beings went to the moon.
The great success of modern technology in the early years of this century seemed to confirm this view. But that success also meant that technological decisions affected more and more of social life and had obvious political impacts. From this one can draw diametrically opposed conclusions: either politics becomes another branch of technology, or technology is recognized as political. The first alternative leads straight to technocracy. Public debate will be replaced by technical expertise; research rather than the uninformed opinion of the voters will identify the most efficient course of action. The idea of replacing traditional normative paradigms of politics with technical ones dates back to Saint-Simon, but it achieved its greatest popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s. The “end of ideology” was much discussed then as it is today for different reasons.
In opposition to this technocratic trend, there is a grand tradition of romantic protest against mechanization going back a century and more. These “substantive” theories of technology attribute a more than instrumental, a substantive, content to technical mediation. They argue that technology is not neutral but embodies specific values. Its spread is therefore not innocent. The tools we use shape our way of life in modern societies where technique has become all pervasive. In this situation, means and ends cannot be separated. How we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human.
Heidegger is the most prominent advocate of this position. In Heidegger’s view, our access to the real cannot be explained in terms of sensation. Rather, we encounter our world in action as a concrete whole, revealed and ordered in a definite manner that belongs to our epoch. Technology is a mode of “revealing,” a way in which what is appears. As the mode of revealing of our time, technology has an ontologically general import and is no mere instrumentality. It forms a culture of universal control. Nothing escapes it, not even its human makers. They, like the things they appropriate technically, are reduced to raw materials through the technological revealing. Everything loses its integrity as a part of a coherent world and is leveled down to an object of pure will (Heidegger, 1977a).
Something like this view was implied in Max Weber’s dystopian conception of an “iron cage” of rationalization. In his account modernity is characterized by a unique form of technical thought and action which threatens non-technical values as it extends itself ever deeper into social life. However, Weber did not specifically connect this process to technology. Jacques Ellul, another major substantive theorist, makes that link explicit, arguing that the “technical phenomenon” has become the defining characteristic of all modern societies regardless of political ideology. “Technique,” he asserts, “has become autonomous” (Ellul, 1964: 6). In Marshall McLuhan’s melodramatic phrase: technology has reduced us to the “sex organs of the machine world” (McLuhan, 1964: 46). Ellul is as pessimistic as Heidegger and calls for an improbable spiritual transformation in response to the domination of technology.
According to substantivism, modernity is more than a historical process; it is also an epistemological event that discloses the hidden secret of the essence of technology. And what was hidden? Rationality itself, the pure drive for efficiency, for increasing control and calculability. This process unfolds autonomously once technology is released from the restraints that surround it in premodern societies.
Substantive critique has affinities with determinism. For both, technological advance has an automatic and unilinear character. What makes substantivism so very gloomy, where determinism started out as a cheerful doctrine of progress, is the additional assumption that technology is inherently biased toward domination. Far from correcting its flaws further advance can only make things worse. I call this view essentialism. Essentialism holds that there is one and only one “essence” of technology and it is responsible for the chief problems of modern civilization. I will offer a critique of essentialism, which continues to set the terms of most philosophy of technology, and an alternative to it, in the concluding chapters of this book.
Left Dystopianism
Surprisingly, substantivism became a new popular culture of technology in the 1960s and 1970s, showing up not only in political discourse but in films and other media. In the United States, the dystopian viewpoint replaced traditional liberalism and conservatism to such an extent that current politics is still largely determined by vulgarized versions of substantivist categories and sensibility (Feenberg, 1995a: chap. 3).[2]
It is not easy to explain the dramatic shift in attitudes toward technology that occurred in the 1960s. By the end of the decade early enthusiasm for nuclear energy and the space program gave way to technophobic reaction. But it was not so much technology itself as the rising technocracy that provoked public hostility.
By “technocracy” I mean a wide-ranging administrative system that is legitimated by reference to scientific expertise rather than tradition, law, or the will of the people. To what extent technocratic administration is actually scientific is another matter. In some cases new knowledge and technology really does support a higher level of rationalization, but often a hocus-pocus of pseudo-scientific jargon and dubious quantifications is all that links the technocratic style to rational inquiry. In terms of social impact, the distinction is not so important: reliance on technocratic arguments evokes similar reactions from the administered whether the computer is really “down” or the employee behind the counter too lazy to consult it. The up-to-date excuse for inaction tells a tale all its own. What makes a society “technocratic” is its rhetoric rather than its practice. But the fact that the term is ideological does not mean it is without consequences. On the contrary.
That
those consequences were political was largely due to the technocratic arrogance
of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The Vietnam War was conceived by
the
These popular movements transformed the dystopian themes they shared with the critics of modernity. The cultural elitism of discouraged humanists gave way to populist demands for control that were incompatible with substantivism. This shift had a significant impact on thinking about technology. Part I of this book therefore includes two chapters on particularly revealing events and debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have chosen subjects which seemed important to me at the time and which shape the philosophy of technology presented in this book. I do not claim that these examples are typical, but I do believe that close attention to them opens a window on the revolution in thinking about technology that continues to this day.
The
French May Events was the culminating new left movement. In the Spring of 1968,
a national student protest began in
In chapter 3, I address a second domain in which technology emerged early as a political issue, the environment. I analyze in some detail the debate between Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner that divided the environmental movement in the early 1970s. Ehrlich emphasized slowing population growth while Commoner argued for technological change. This was one of the first serious attempts to introduce the question of technology into the environmental movement.[3] Commoner rejected anti-growth environmentalism in favor of democratic control of industrial development. The lasting significance of this debate lies in the sharp focus it brought to bear on the conservative political implications of deteminism in the environmental arena and the need for a new philosophy of technology emphasizing contingency and social shaping.
The new left called for democratic control over the direction and definition of progress, and reformulated socialist ideology on these terms. These socialist positions were more or less tied to traditional forms of working class struggle, and so may appear outdated today. But, as we will see, they also anticipated a new micropolitics of technology which engages the issue of progress in concrete struggles of a new type in domains such as computers, medicine, and the environment.
These movements of the ‘60s created a context and an audience for the break with technocratic determinism that had already begun in the theoretical domain in the works of Mumford and a few other sceptical observers of the postwar scene. Soon they were joined by a host of critics responding to the changed political climate.
Marcuse and Foucault stand out as representative philosophers of that period. They sketched the outlines of powerful critical theories that emphasized the role of scientistic ideologies and technological determinism in the formation of modern hegemonies (Marcuse, 1964; Foucault, 1977). They rejected the idea that there is a single path of progress based on a single technical rationality, and opened a space for philosophical reflection on alternative technology and social control of technological development. At the same time, they argued, apparently inconsistently, that modern forms of domination are essentially technical. I describe their position as a “left dystopian” critique of technology.
These thinkers were strongly influenced by substantivism. Marcuse was a student of Heidegger and clearly learned a good deal from him. Foucault too claimed to be a sort of Heideggerian. Thus they agree that technologies are not just means subservient to independently chosen ends but that they form a way of life, an environment. But Marcuse and Foucault differ with substantivism in introducing a more socially specific notion of domination. Although it sometimes seems so, they do not really claim that technology is autonomous. Rather, they relate systems of domination to the organization and distribution of social power and argue that technical development is socially contingent and could therefore lead to quite different outcomes in different social systems.
The
left dystopians reject essentialism and argue that we can build a different
future with modern technology. This position has a certain similarity to the
common sense view that technology is a neutral means available to serve any
end. The difference is that here the choices are not at the level of particular
means but at the level of whole
means-ends systems. I call the availability of technology for alternative
developments with different social consequences, its “ambivalence.” At stake in
the ambivalence of technology is not merely the limited range of uses supported
by a given technical design, but the full range of effects technological
systems possess and can be modified to possess. Not all of these effects belong
to any given technology through all the stages of its development, and not all
are “uses” in the usual sense. Some are contextual requirements of the
employment of a technology. Others are side-effects. All are relevant to
technical choices. Given the range and consequence of the effects for which
technologies are responsible, it is not surprising that often these choices are
political. The
Habermas, for example, treats technology as a general form of action that, while biased at the generic level, transcends particular political interests. As such, it is politically neutral in itself. Value controversy, and hence politics, belongs to the communicative sphere on which social life depends. Technology only acquires a political bias when it invades the communicative sphere. This is the “technization of the lifeworld.” It is reversible through reasserting the role of communication.
For Marcuse, technology is ideological where it imposes a system of domination, and forces extrinsic ends on human and natural materials in contradiction to their own intrinsic growth potential. What human beings and nature are and might become is subordinated to the interests of the system. This view has some similarity to substantivist critique, although Marcuse holds out the possibility of a radically transformed technology in the future that would be more respectful of its objects, that indeed would recognize nature as another subject (Marcuse, 1972: chap. 2). The debate between Habermas and Marcuse is the subject of chapter 6.
Foucault’s
critique of the social construction of rationality does duty for the
Regardless of these differences within the critical tradition, the notion of technology as ideology has definite political implications. If one can loosen up the public vision of technology, introduce contingency into it, technical elites will have to be more responsive to a democratically informed public will.[4] These theories thus have a demystificatory aspect which is sometimes viewed as anti-technological. But they also reject the traditional humanistic contempt for technology one still finds in Heidegger and Ellul. In left dystopianism, politics and technology finally meet in the demand for democratic intervention into technical affairs. This is a significant turning point that promises to enlarge the range of the democratic public sphere to encompass issues formerly conceived as “purely” technical. In Part II I attempt to develop and apply this new democratic conception of technology in the light of what social constructivism has taught us in the intervening years.
Social Constructivism
The new left and the left dystopian theories of 1960s and 1970s changed the boundaries of plausibility in thinking about science and technology. Where formerly challenges to the dominant positivism and determinism were easily dismissed as romantic irrationalism, they now gained a certain credibility.
With the decline of the left interest in dystopian critique declined as well, but the mainstream of technology studies retained its scepticism regarding the hegemonic claims of science and technology. Once early heroic expressions of a critical politics of technology were routinized, technology could be approached as a normal social phenomenon without political afterthoughts. The stage was set for the current view of technology as a dimension of society rather than as an external force acting on it from an epistemological or metaphysical beyond.
The influence of Kuhn and Feyerabend grew among social scientists in the 1980s and it became intellectually respectable to study the history and sociology of science and technology on terms similar to other cultural domains. This shift in attitude eventually led to the rise of constructivism and actor network theory. These new approaches reaffirmed two central notions of the dystopian critique, the link between means and ends and contingent development.
I will return to constructivism in more detail in chapter 4. For now, let me offer a rough sketch of this complex approach. Constructivism breaks with the standard view according to which social factors condition the pace of progress but not the very nature of technology itself. Many paths lead out from the first forms of a new technology. Some are well-trodden while others are quickly deserted. The “principle of symmetry” holds that there are always viable technical alternatives that might have been developed in place of the successful one. The difference lies not so muchin the superior efficiency of the successful designs, as in a variety of local circumstances that differentiate otherwise comparable technical achievements. Like other social achievements, artifacts succeed where they find support in the social environment (Pinch and Bijker, 1987).
Constructivism focuses on the social alliances that lie behind technical choices. Each configuration of components corresponds not only to a technical logic, but also to the social logic of its selection. A wide variety of social groups count as actors in technical development. Businessmen, technicians, customers, politicians, bureaucrats are all involved to one degree or another. They meet in the design process where they wield their influence by proffering or withholding resources, assigning purposes to devices, fitting them into prevailing technical arrangements to their own benefit, imposing new directions on existing technical means, and so on. The interests and worldview of the actors are expressed in the technologies they participate in designing.
The process that ultimately adapts a product to a socially recognized demand and thereby fixes its definition is called “closure.” Closure produces a “black box,” an artifact that is no longer called into question but is taken for granted. Before closure is achieved, it is obvious that social interests are at stake in the design process. But once the black box is closed, its social origins are quickly forgotten. Looking back from that later standpoint, the artifact appears purely technical, even inevitable. This is the origin of the deterministic illusion.
Constructivists believe that technology is social in much the same way as other institutions. It is neither neutral nor autonomous as many technologists and humanistic critics of technology have maintained. But if this is so, then technology must surely have political implications. In particular, specific technical choices rather than progress as such would be involved in the deskilling of work, the debasement of culture, and the bureaucratization of society. Constructivism could contribute to the study of the replacement of traditional forms of power, based on myths, rituals and coercion, with technologies of control and communication. It could lend support to Foucault and Marcuse’s dystopian critique of the notion that technical rationality sanctions domination under the rule of efficiency.
But most constructivist research so far has confined itself to the study of the strategic problems of building and winning acceptance for particular devices and systems. Studies tend to be narrowly focussed on the specific local groups involved in particular cases and lack any sense of the political context. Social resistance is rarely discusssed with the result that the emphasis of the research is often skewed toward a few official actors whose interventions are easy to document. The frequent rejection of macro-sociological concepts such as class and culture further armours the research against politics by making it almost impossible to introduce the broad society-wide factors that shape technology behind the backs of the actors.
This narrow empiricism goes along with a purely academic notion of progress in the field of technology studies. Kuhns’ break with positivism is often cited as a founding act. But Donna Haraway argues that the emergence of new approaches owes as much to the environmental and feminist movements, and, I would add, the contributions of thinkers such as Marcuse and Foucault (Darnovsky, 1991: 75-76). It is ironic that the currently dominant social theory of technology seems to have no grasp of the political conditions of its own credibility.[5]
To be sure, there is some justification for rejecting traditional concepts of politics. Contemporary technology studies would not be much advanced by rehashing outdated models in which engineers offer options while goals are neatly set by parliaments, and users confined to the market. Technological development actually involves another kind of politics, or rather, several other kinds of politics in which the actors cross all these boundaries between roles. And just because the rise of constructivism is so closely, if unconsciously, linked to increased resistance to the dominant technical institutions of our society, it can contribute to a necessary reconceptualization of the politics of technology. In chapter 5, I will show how actor networks can be interpreted as the basis for a revised political constructivism that incorporates micropolitical resistances in its understanding of technology. And in chapter 6, I apply this approach to debates within political theory over how best to restructure democracy for the technological age.
Toward Renewal in Social Philosophy
What Heidegger called “The Question of Technology” has a peculiar status in the academy today. After World War II, the humanities and social sciences were swept by a wave of technological determinism. If technology was not praised for modernizing us, it was blamed for the crisis of our culture. Determinism provided both optimists and pessimists with a fundamental account of modernity as a unified phenomenon. This approach has now been largely abandoned for a view that admits the possibility of significant “difference,” i.e. cultural variety in the reception and appropriation of modernity. Yet the breakdown of simplistic determinism has not led to the flowering of research in philosophy of technology one might hope for.
It is true that constructivist sociology has placed particular technologies on the agenda in new ways, but curiously, the basic questions of modernity posed by an earlier generation of theorists are rarely addressed in the social sciences in terms of the general problematic of technology. Where the old determinism over-estimated the independent impact of the artifactual on the social world, the new approach has so disaggregated the question of technology as to deprive it of philosophical significance. It has become matter for specialized research.[6] And for this very reason, most scholars in the humanities and in philosophy in particular now feel safe in ignoring technology altogether, except of course when they turn the key in the ignition.
As the memory of the 1960s faded, social philosophy took an entirely different path from social science and simply ignored technology’s broader social and cultural impact. Technology as such cancelled out as its normative implications were identified with the social and political institutions to which it was supposed to be merely instrumental. Thus Rawls and Nozick acquired tremendous influence in American philosophy in the 1970s and ‘80s despite the absence of any reference to technology in their work. After an early interest in technology, Habermas and most of his followers abandoned discussion of it to focus on other problems. Most of the work on Heidegger that deigns to notice the central importance of technology for his critique of metaphysics is exegetical. As a result, there have been few original contributions to philosophy of technology in recent years.
In abstaining from the philosophical debate over technology, philosophy left it to other disciplines, such as “postmodern” literary theory and cultural studies.[7] These approaches are associated with multiculturalism, which defends the very differences the earlier philosophy of technology believed to be threatened by progress. According to that tradition, as technology affects more and more of social life, less and less will remain free of its influence to constitute a cultural difference. Yet to the extent that technology is discussed philosophically today, the currently fashionable position claims exactly the contrary, namely, that difference is not only desirable, but ineffacable.
But multiculturalism cannot be taken for granted so long as theories of convergence in a singular model of modernity are not persuasively refuted. The demonstration, in the course of endlessly repeated case histories, that modern scientific-technical rationality is not the trans-cultural universal it was thought to be may advance the argument, but does not settle the question. Nor is the persistance of cultural particularity in this or that domain especially significant. Perhaps the Japanese and the Americans will disagree on the relative merits of sushi and hamburgers for generations to come, but if that is all that remains of cultural difference it has ceased to matter. The problem is to show how differences might be fundamental and not merely minor accidents certain to be effaced or marginalized in the future.
Epistemological relativism seems to be the predominant way of showing this in the postmodern framework. The new picture emerging from social studies of science and technology does give us excellent reasons for believing that what we call rationality is more similar than different from other cultural phenomena, and like them relative to social conditions. Nevertheless, it is implausible to dismiss it as merely a Western myth and to flatten all the distinctions which so obviously differentiate modern from premodern societies. There is something special captured in notions such as modernization, rationalization, and reification. Without such concepts, derived ultimately from Marx and Weber, we can make no sense of the historical process of the last few hundred years.[8] Yet these are “totalizing” concepts that seem to lead back to a deterministic view we are supposed to have transcended from our new culturalist perspective. Is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we choose between universal rationality and culturally or politically particularized values? That is the underlying question I hope to address in the final chapters of this book through a critique of the account of technical action in Habermas, Heidegger, and, as an instance of contemporary philosophy of technology, Albert Borgmann.
Essence and History: On Heidegger and Habermas
For these thinkers, the question of technology is not primarily epistemological but ontological. Social reality, or indeed Being as such, is at stake in the growth of a modern technological society. Recognition of the central importance of technical phenomena in Habermas’s early philosophy and in Heidegger’s later thought promised nothing less than a revoluiton in social theory. However, neither fulfilled the initial promise of their breakthrough. Both develop essentialist theories that fail to discriminate significantly different realizations of technical principles. As a result, technology rigidifies into destiny in their thought and the prospects for reform are narrowed to adjustments on the boundaries of the technical sphere. They hope that something—albeit a rather different something—can be preserved from the homogenizing effects of the radical extension of technical systems, but they give us little reason to share their hope. In the third part of the book, I will attempt to preserve these thinkers’ advance toward the critical integration of technical themes to philosophy without losing the conceptual space for imagining a radical reconstruction of modernity.
It may appear strange to discuss Habermas and Heidegger in the same breath, and especially to compare their views on technology since Habermas has written practically nothing on the subject in his major works of the last 25 years. But Habermas’s preoccupation with technocracy provides a link between his present concerns and his earlier views on technology. I believe there is enough similarity between his critique of systems rationality and Heidegger’s theory of the Gestell to justify a comparison.
That comparison reveals several interesting complementarities, but also a common problem. Both Habermas and Heidegger rely on the Weberian hypothesis that premodern and modern societies are distinguished by the degree to which previously unified domains such as technology and art have been differentiated from each other. And both argue that this differentiation has made possible scientific-technical progress while reifying the object of technical action and degrading it to a lower plane of being than the subject which acts on it. Each emphasizes a different aspect of this process, Heidegger the object, Habermas the subject. As I will try to show, together, these complementary emphases provide the basis for a powerful theory of technology. Yet they each develop their contribution in an essentially unhistorical way which is no longer credible.
In Heidegger and Habermas, modernity is governed by a very abstract concept of the essence of technical action. I call this view “essentialist” because it interprets a historically specific phenomenon in terms of a transhistorical conceptual construction. The weakness of this approach shows up most strikingly in problems with historical periodization. The construction of the distinction between the premodern and the modern in terms of essentialized characteristics of technical action is unconvincing. Are we really more “rational” or uniquely oriented toward control by comparison with earlier social formations? There is reason to doubt such blanket distinctions between eras and types of society.
The difficulty is inherent in the essentialist project: how to fix the historical flux in a singular essence? Two strategies are available: either deny all continuity and make of modern technology a unique phenomenon—Heidegger’s solution; or distinguish earlier from later stages in the history of technical action in terms of the degree to which it has purified itself of the admixture of other forms of action—Habermas’s solution.
Heidegger represents modern technology as radically different from the one other model of technical action he recognizes, premodern craft. He emphasizes the reduction of the object of modern technology to a decontextualized, fungible matter cut off from its own history. This reduction is value charged, or more precisely in Heideggerian terms, it brings “value” into being by cancelling the intrinsic potentialities of the object, which craft respected, and delivering it over to alien ends. The modern process of differentiation constitutes a sharp ontological break for Heidegger, a new dispensation, not a continuous social change. Modern technology is thus no merely contingent historical phenomenon but a stage in the history of being. Perhaps because of this ontologizing approach, Heidegger allows no room for a different technological future. Modern technology remains fixed in its eternal essence whatever happens next in history. Not technology itself but “technological thinking” will be transcended in a further stage in the history of being that we can only await passively. This essentializing tendency cancels the historical dimension of his theory.
For Habermas, on the contrary, modernity does not reveal being but human activity in a new and purer light. In premodern societies the various types of action are inextricably mixed together, with no clear distinction between technical, aesthetic, and ethical considerations. In modern societies, on the contrary, the truth of technical action, as objectivating and success oriented, is immediately accessible both practically and theoretically. At first Habermas identified technical action with technology, but in his later work he focusses on economic and political forms of success-oriented action which he treats much as he had earlier treated technology. In either case, because he continues to interpret technical action through the generic concept of instrumentality, he grants it a kind of neutrality in the limited sphere where its application is appropriate. Its political implications appear where it interferes with human communication in essential lifeworld domains such as the family or education. He ends up arguing that in modern societies the “coordination media,” money and power, extend ever more deeply into these domains to their detriment. His goal is the restoration of a healthy process of social communication capable of providing direction to market and administration and especially of limiting their influence.
Habermas’s notion of history is less idiosyncratic than Heidegger’s, but for him the culturally variable nature of technical action systems is not a question of rationality; he treats it as a minor sociological issue of the sort from which he routinely abstracts. His alternative thus offers an avowedly non-historical conception of technical rationality which effaces any fundamental difference between culturally distinct achievements in what he calls the “cognitive-instrumental” sphere.[9] All the important differences now come down to the degree of development on an apparently absolute scale and the boundaries between spheres.
Heidegger and Habermas claim that there is a level at which technical action can be considered as a pure expression of a certain type of rationality. However, as such, it is merely an abstraction. Real technical action always has a socially and historically specific content. What do they actually mean by the enframing of being or the objectivating, success oriented relation to nature? Can abstract definitions such as these serve the foundational purpose to which they are destined in these theories?
In chapter 7 I confront Habermas’s theory around these questions. I argue there that while the general framework of his media theory is useful, he fails to notice its relevance to technology, which has social consequences similar to money and power. The design and configuration of technology does more than merely accomplish our ends; it also organizes society and subordinates its members to a technocratic order. I argue that only by including technology in the media theory can we arrive at an adequate account of what Habermas calls the “technization” or “colonization” of the “lifeworld.”
But this addition to the Habermasian theory opens the door to a more radical revision. Constructivism shows that the process of technological development is not adequately characterized by a few essential features, but yields culturally and socially relative designs with political implications. The same argument can be extended to markets and administrations. But Habermas has no theory of the politics of design. A historically structured account of all the media is needed to open up the future which Habermas has prematurely foreclosed in an essentialized theory of modernity.
In chapters 8 and 9, I amplify this
approach with a theory of the essence of technology as a social phenomenon
quite different from Heidegger’s. Where philosophy of technology has long
sought to explain its object in terms of asocial categories such as the
[1]For
another more detailed account of these problems, see Mitcham
(1994).
[2]By
“dystopia” is meant the sort of negative utopia described in Huxley’s Brave
New World and Orwell’s 1984. See Aldridge (1984. 1978).
[3]In
addition to Commoner, another influential source of new thinking was
Schumacher’s notion of “appropriate technology.”
[4]For
a critique of this assumption, see Pippin (1995)
[5]Wiebe Bijker has recently taken up the challenge of drawing
out the implications of constructivism for democracy. See Bijker (1998).
[6]See,
for examples, Pinch, Hughes, and Bijker (1989).
[7]See,
for example, Penley and Ross (1991).
[8]It
is of course easy to renew the vocabulary in which these things are discussed,
but that is a far cry from actually breaking with the tradition.
[9]Am
I unfair to Habermas? His defenders gesture at a Habermasian philosophy of
technology that goes well beyond the limits I attribute to his position here.
However, to my knowledge no Habermasian has ever actually developed that
philosophy. So far it is only invoked as a theoretical potential in response to
criticism, not to do the work we expect of a philosophy of technology. Note,
however, that Habermas’s lapsus is almost universally
shared by those who reflect philosophically on modernity. (Among the main
exceptions, of course, are Heideggerians.)