Shenyang
Andrew Feenberg
These
lectures were delivered at
The
lectures are presented here in the order of delivery. I begin with two lectures
on Habermas and Marcuse in the hopes of contributing to the discussion of
Critical Theory in
Habermas or Marcuse: Two Types of Critique
Note on the Dangers of Conformism
I
want to preface these remarks on Habermas and Marcuse with a comment on your
situation here in
The
question for
Introduction: Two Types of Critique
The debate over technology between Marcuse
and Habermas marked a significant turning point in the history of the
Although he was certainly influenced by Adorno and even Heidegger, Marcuse was not the romantic technophobe he is often taken for.[1] To be sure, he argues that “technology is ideology” and that instrumental reason is linked to domination. But unlike Adorno and Heidegger, he thinks human action can change the epochal structure of technological rationality and the technological designs which flow from it. A new type of reason would generate new and more benign scientific discoveries and technologies. I will argue for a reasonable interpretation of his radical position in my next lecture.
According to Habermas technical or “success-oriented” action has certain characteristics which are appropriate in some spheres of life, inappropriate in others. Similarly, the pursuit of mutual understanding through communicative action has its own sphere in which it is the appropriate form of “action coordination.” Habermas’s approach implies that technology is neutral in its proper sphere, but outside that sphere causes various social pathologies. Although his position is powerfully argued, the idea that technology is neutral, even with Habermas’s qualifications, is reminiscent of the naive instrumentalism so effectively laid to rest in recent years by technology studies.
The question I address here is, what can we learn from these two thinkers assuming that we are neither metaphysicians nor instrumentalists, that we reject both a romantic critique of science and the neutrality of technology?
In the following discussion, I work through the argument in three phases. I start with Habermas’s critique of Marcuse in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (1970), the locus classicus of this debate. Then I consider the deeper presentation of similar themes in Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) where he reformulates his position in Weberian terms. Marcuse was not able to reply to these arguments so my procedure is anachronistic, but I will do my best to imagine how he might have responded on the basis of his own critique of Weber. Next, I discuss aspects of Habermas’s theory that can be reconstructed to take the Marcusian critique into account. Finally, I offer my own formulation of an alternative approach.
From “Secret Hopes” to New Sobriety
“All Power to the Imagination”
Marcuse follows Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in arguing
that both inner and outer nature are suppressed in the struggle for survival in
class society. The technology that developed under these conditions bears the
marks of a terrible history. It is inherently destructive and so its negative
consequences are not merely due to the contingent uses to which it is put under
capitalism. To carry any critical weight, this position must imply, if not an
original unity of man and nature, at least the existence of some natural forces
congruent with human needs. Like his
Although One-Dimensional Man (1964) is often compared to Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is far less pessimistic. In putting forward a more hopeful view, Marcuse appears to be influenced by Heidegger, although he does not acknowledge this influence, perhaps because of their deep political disagreements. In Heideggerian terms, Marcuse proposes a new disclosure of being through a revolutionary transformation of basic practices (Dreyfus, 1995). This would lead to a change in the very nature of instrumentality, which would be fundamentally modified by the abolition of class society and its associated performance principle. It would then be possible to create a new science and technology that would be fundamentally different, that would place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. Nature would be treated as another subject instead of as mere raw materials. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing nature’s inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for the sake of power and profit. Marcuse writes:
“Freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility—the demands of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (Marcuse, 1968: 19).
Aesthetic practice offers Marcuse a model of a transformed instrumentality, different from the “conquest” of nature characteristic of class society. Like the early twentieth century avant-garde, especially the surrealists, Marcuse believed that the separation of art from daily life could be transcended through fusing reason and imagination. Marcuse thus proposes the Aufhebung of the split between science and art in a new technical base. This notion recalls the slogan of the May Events, “All Power to the Imagination.”
Although this program sounds wild, it makes a kind of intuitive sense. For example, we are aware of the contrast between the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mies shows us technology as a manifestation of untrammeled power, while Wright's structures harmonize with nature and seek to integrate human beings with their environment.
The Neutrality of Technology
Habermas is not convinced. In “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (1970) he denounces the “secret hopes” of a whole generation of social thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Marcuse—whose implicit ideal was the harmony of man and nature. While he too is concerned about the technocratic tendencies of advanced societies, he attacks the very notion of a new science and technology as a romantic myth; the ideal of a technology based on communion with nature applies the model of human communication to a domain where only instrumental relations are possible.
In opposition to Marcuse’s historical interpretation of modern technological rationality, Habermas offers a theory of the transhistorical essence of technical action in general. At first he argued that “work” and “interaction” each have their own logic. Work is “success oriented;” it is a form of “purposive-rational action” aimed at controlling the world. On these terms, technological development is a “generic project,” “a ‘project’ of the human species as a whole,” not of some particular historical epoch like class society or of a particular class like the bourgeoisie (Habermas, 1970: 87). By contrast, interaction involves communication between subjects in the pursuit of common understanding. Technocracy results not from the nature of technology, but from an imbalance between these two action-types.
Habermas not only criticizes Marcuse, but also Weber, and by implication Heidegger as well, for identifying rationalization exclusively with the extension of technical control. He identifies a process of communicative rationalization that enhances human freedom, but which has been partially blocked in the course of modern development. While this seems right in a general way, in practice he is content to tinker with the boundaries of technical action systems while ignoring the all too obvious valuative bias of what goes on within them. So long as technical action remains limited to merely facilitating the complex interactions required by a modern society, it poses no problem. Indeed, to criticize technization in its proper place is anti-modern and regressive.
In defense of Marcuse, it should be said that he nowhere proposes that a qualitatively different technical rationality would substitute an interpersonal relationship to nature for the objectivity characteristic of technical action. It is Habermas who uses the phrase “fraternal relation to nature” to describe Marcuse’s views. Marcuse does advocate relating to nature as to another subject, but the concept of subjectivity implied here owes more to Aristotelian substance than to the idea of personhood. Marcuse does not recommend chatting with nature but, rather, recognizing it as possessing potentialities of its own with a certain inherent legitimacy. That recognition should be incorporated into the very structure of technical rationality.
Habermas would of course agree that technological development is influenced by social demands, but that is quite different from the notion that there are a variety of technical rationalities, as Marcuse believes. For example, ecologically sound technology is socially desirable, but technology as such remains essentially unchanged by this or any other particular realization. Technology, in short, will always be a non-social, objectivating relation to nature, oriented toward success and control. Marcuse argued, on the contrary, that the very essence of technology is at stake in ecological reform (Marcuse, 1992).
In any case, Habermas does not simply dismiss Marcuse, who had a considerable influence on his thinking. He finds in the concept of one-dimensionality the basis for a much better critique of technology than the one he rejects. This is Marcuse’s analysis of the overextension of technical modes of thinking and acting, an approach which Habermas elaborated as the “colonization of the lifeworld.” Habermas argued for the importance of bounding the technical sphere in order to give communicative rationality a chance to develop fully. There is something right about this conclusion, but it offers no concrete criteria for improving technology.
Paradoxically, although the germ of Habermas’s famous “colonization thesis” appears to derive at least in part from Marcuse’s critique of technology, technology itself drops out of the Habermasian equation at this point in time and never reappears. As I will show, Habermas’s theory could accommodate a critique of technology in principle, but the index of The Theory of Communicative Action does not even contain the word. This oversight is related to his treatment of technology as neutral in its own sphere. The neutrality thesis obscures the social dimensions of technology on the basis of which a critique could be developed.
What is the outcome of this first encounter? Despite the problems in his position, Habermas prevailed. Marcuse’s views were forgotten in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Of course Habermas did have some strong arguments, but he also had a favorable historical context. That context was the retreat from the utopian hopes of the ‘60s in the ‘80s, a kind of neue Sachlichkeit, or “new sobriety.” Habermas’s views suited a time when we tamed our aspirations.
Rationality in the Critique of Modernity
Weber and Habermas
Habermas distinguishes his own critique of the “incompleteness” of modernity from what he regards as the anti-modernism of the ‘60s radicals. Accordingly, The Theory of Communicative Action develops an implicit argument against Marcuse and the new left in the name of a redeemed modernity.
I will review here one important version of Habermas’s argument which I will explain in terms of Habermas’s figure 11 drawn from The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987: I, 238). Along the top, Habermas has listed the three “worlds” in which we participate as human beings, the objective world of things, the social world of people, the subjective world of feelings. We move constantly between the three worlds in our daily life. Along the side are listed the “basic attitudes” we can take up with respect to the three worlds: an objectivating attitude which treats everything, including people and feelings, as things; a norm-conformative attitude which views the worlds in terms of moral obligation; and an expressive attitude which approaches reality emotively.
Crossing the basic attitudes and worlds yields nine world-relations. Habermas follows Weber in claiming that only those world-relations can be rationalized that can be clearly differentiated and that build on their past achievements in a progressive developmental sequence. Modernity is based on precisely those rationalizable world-relations. They appear in the stepped double boxes: cognitive-instrumental rationality, moral-practical rationality, and aesthetic-practical rationality.
However, of the three possible domains of rationalization, only the objectivating relation to the objective and social worlds, which yields science, technology, markets, and administration, has been able fully to develop in capitalist societies. Habermas argues that the problems of capitalist modernity are due to the obstacles it places in the way of rationalization in the moral-practical sphere.
There are also three X’s (at 2.1, 3.2, 1.3)
on the chart which refer to non-rationalizable world relations. Two of these
are of interest to us. 2.1 is the norm-conformative relation to the objective
world, i.e. the fraternal relation to nature. Although he is not explicitly
mentioned here, Marcuse is obviously consigned to
A Marcusean Reply
How might Marcuse have replied? He could have drawn on the arguments against the neutrality of science and technology developed in his work from the 1960s (Marcuse 1964; Marcuse 1968). In Habermas as in Weber, scientific-technical rationality is non-social, neutral, and formal. By definition it excludes the social (which would be 1.2). It is neutral because it represents a species-wide interest, a cognitive-instrumental interest which overrides all group specific values. And it is formal as a result of the process of differentiation by which it abstracts itself from the various contents it mediates. In sum, science and technology represent the objective world in terms of the possibilities of understanding and control and are essentially disconnected from social interests or ideology.
In his essay on Weber, Marcuse argues that the apparent neutrality of the cognitive-instrumental sphere is a special kind of ideological illusion (Marcuse 1968). He concedes that technical principles can be formulated in abstraction from any content, that is to say, in abstraction from any interest or ideology. However, as such, they are merely abstractions. As soon as they enter reality, they take on a socially specific content relative to the “historical subject” that applies them.
Although Marcuse’s argument appears rather speculative—what is a historical subject?—it can be restated in simple terms. Efficiency, to take a particularly important example, is defined formally as the ratio of inputs to outputs. This definition would apply in a communist or a capitalist society, or even in an Amazonian tribe. It seems, therefore, to transcend the particularity of the social. However, concretely, when one actually gets down to applying the notion of efficiency, one must decide what kinds of things are possible inputs and outputs, who can offer and who acquire them and on what terms, what counts as discommodities, waste, and hazards, and so on. These are all socially specific, and so, therefore, is the concept of efficiency in any actual application. And insofar as the social is biased by a system of domination, so will be its efficient workings. As a general rule, formally rational systems must be practically contextualized in order to be used at all, and as soon as they are contextualized in a capitalist society, they incorporate capitalist values.
This approach is loosely related to Marx’s original critique of the market. Unlike many contemporary socialists, Marx did not deny that markets exhibit a rational order based on equal exchange. The problem with markets is not located at this level, but in their historical concretization in a form which couples equal exchange to the relentless growth of capital at the expense of the rest of society. That concrete form shapes economic growth patterns, technological development, law, and many other aspects of social life. A rational market—rational in the narrow formal sense—produces a society that is irrational on human terms.
Economists might concede the bias of actual market societies, but they would attribute the difference between ideal models and vulgar realities to accidental “market imperfections.” What they treat as a kind of external interference with the ideal-type of the market, Marx considers an essential feature of its operation under capitalism. Markets in their perfect form are simply an abstraction from one or another concrete realization in which they take on biases reflecting specific class interests. Thus it is not inconsistent for Engels to recommend reliance on the market under socialism, as he does in the case of agriculture (Engels, 1969). The class significance of the market is relative to the way in which its basic structures are realized.
Marcuse adopts a similar line in criticizing Weber’s notion of administrative rationality, a fundamental aspect of rationalization. Administration in the economic domain presupposes the separation of workers from the means of production. That separation eventually shapes technological design. Although Weber calls capitalist management and technology rational without qualification, they are so only in a specific context where workers do not own their own tools. This social context biases Weber’s concept of rationality despite his intention of elaborating a universal theory. The resulting slippage between the abstract formulation of the category and its concrete realization is ideological. Marcuse thus insists on distinguishing between rationality in general and a concrete, socially specific rationalization process: “pure” rationality is an abstraction from the life process of a historical subject. That process necessarily involves values that become integral to rationality as it is realized.
Norm and Technique
Habermas too finds Weber’s rationalization theory equivocating between abstract categories and concrete instances, but his critique differs from Marcuse’s. Habermas argues that a structure of rationality lies behind modern social development. The elements of this structure are realized in specific forms privileged by the dominant capitalist society. Weber overlooked systematic moments of potential normative rationalization suppressed by capitalism and as a result confused the limits of capitalism with the limits of rationality as such.
Because Habermas does not challenge Weber’s account of technical rationalization, he too appears to identify it with its specifically capitalist forms. Marcuse, on the contrary, attacks Weber’s understanding of technical rationalization itself. Weber’s error is not simply to identify all types of rationalization with technical rationalization, but more deeply to overlook the biasing of any and all technical rationality by social values. Weber’s account of science and technology as non-social and neutral, which Habermas shares, masks the interests that preside over their genesis and application. Hence Marcuse would consider even Habermas’s ideal of a balance between technical and communicative rationalization to be insufficiently critical.
I can imagine a Habermasian responding that these problems are mere sociological details inappropriate at the fundamental theoretical level. Raised at that level, they are a Trojan Horse for a romantic critique of rationality. The best way to keep the horse outside the city walls is to maintain a clear distinction between principle and application. Just as ethical principles must be applied if they are to enter reality, so must technical principles. That the applications never correspond exactly to principles is not a serious objection to formulating the latter and analyzing the logic of their operation. At that essential level, there is no risk of confusion between formal properties of rationality as such and particular social interests.
Marcuse’s theory is indeed a critique of rationality, but his argument is not with rational principles per se but with the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” that attributes reality to what is only an abstraction. Habermas’s notion of rationality is just such an abstraction. Concrete realizations of rationality gain a deceptive appearance of neutrality from their connection to this abstraction. Marcuse’s critique addresses this neutral form of objectivity which rationality assumes as it is realized under capitalism. The point of criticizing this form of objectivity is to bring technology under the judgment of normative principles, to raise its normative dimension to consciousness so that it can be discussed and challenged.
Indeed, as Habermas would agree, the use of technical alibis to justify what are in reality relations of force is the essential rhetorical strategy of technocracy. Typically, considerations of efficiency are invoked to remove issues from normative judgment and public discussion. But the moral norms themselves are distorted where their application is arbitrarily restricted. Thus our society's failure to judge work settings according to democratic norms, even as they are constantly judged in terms of managerial power, reacts back on our understanding of those norms and renders them hollow and “formalistic” in the bad sense. The point then is that the neutrality thesis blocks public dialogue about underdetermined technical alternatives. The distinction between principle and application is irrelevant to this problem.
Constructivism and Critical Theory
Marcuse’s critique of science and technology was presented in a speculative context, but its major claim—the social character of rational systems—is a commonplace of recent constructivist research on science and technology. The notion of underdetermination is central to this approach (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). Habermas himself at one time focused on this very phenomenon. In an early essay, he argued that science cannot help us decide between functionally equivalent technologies, but that values must intervene (Habermas, 1973: 270-271). He showed that the application of decision theory does not supply scientific criteria of choice, but merely introduces different valuative biases. Even in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” Habermas recognizes that “social interests still determine the direction, functions, and pace of technical progress” (Habermas, 1970: 105). He does not explain how this affirmation squares with his belief, expressed in the same essay, that technology is a “‘project’ of the human species as a whole” (Habermas, 1970: 87). Even this (no doubt resolvable) inconsistency seems to disappear in the later work where technology is defined as non-social.
But surely the earlier position was correct. If this is true, then what Habermas calls the fraternal relation to nature, 2.1., should not have an X over it. If 1.1, that is, the objective relation to the objective world, is already social, the distinction between it and 2.1 is softened. On the Marcusian view, instrumentality is not opposed to normativity since all the basic world relations have a normative dimension. Habermas thinks that Marcuse’s approach leads straight back to a teleological nature philosophy. What other meaning can there be to the notion of a normative relation to nature? Yet I find no evidence for this sort of thing in Marcuse. The real difference between their views lies along a different axis from that identified by Habermas. The issue is not whether to revive philosophy of nature; it concerns our self-understanding as subjects of technical action.
This is the argument of Steven Vogel, who points out that Habermas’s chart omits an obvious domain of normative relations to the objective world: the built environment. The question of what to build and how to build it engages us in normative judgments concerning factual states of affairs. While there is no science of such judgments, they are at least as capable of rationalization as the aesthetic judgments Habermas classifies under 3.1 on his chart (Vogel, 1996: 388). Here we can give a perfectly reasonable content to Marcuse’s demand for a new relation to nature.
Working in the tradition of humanistic geography, Augustin Berque has arrived independently at a similar conclusion. The typically modern distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity, nature and culture, occlude the realm Heidegger designated as “world,” the experienced reality in which we actually live. In geographic terms, that reality is landscape. Landscape is more than a set of natural features; it is also a symbolically invested habitat, an “écoumène,” which Berque defines as “the earth insofar as we inhabit it” (Berque, 1996: 12). Just as technology is neither purely natural nor purely social, so the nature to which it is applied also transcends such abstract distinctions. Berque concludes that “The ecosymbolicity of the écoumène...implies an ethic because all localities are always charged with human values....For good or ill, the human manner of inhabiting a territory can only be ethical” (Berque, 1996: 80-81).
Nature would be treated as another subject where humans took responsibility for the well-being of the materials they transform in creating the built environment. This is the significance of democratic interventions into technology which prefigure a new style of rationalization that internalizes unaccounted costs born by “nature,” i.e., some-thing or -body exploitable in the pursuit of power and profit. I call this “democratic rationalization” because it requires technical advances that can only be made in opposition to the technocracy. There is nothing about this idea that offends against the spirit of modern science. On the contrary, to carry out this program science is needed, as environmentalists have persuasively argued. Methodologically, the case is similar to medicine, which involves a normative relation to the objectified human body.
What is the result of this second phase of the debate? I think Marcuse wins this one. We are no longer in the new sobriety ‘80s, but have entered the era of social constructivism, and his views sound much more plausible than they did twenty or thirty years ago. However there are still problems with Marcuse’s position: Habermas’s scepticism about its speculative foundation is difficult to dismiss. Rather than simply returning to Marcuse’s original formulations, perhaps elements of his critical theory of technology can be reconstructed in a more credible framework. Does one really need a new science to get a Frank Lloyd Wright technology rather than a Mies van der Rohe technology? Couldn’t one work toward such a transformation gradually, using existing technical principles but reforming them, modifying them, applying them somewhat differently? Environmentalism has shown us that this is a practical approach to a long-term process of technological change.
In the remainder of this lecture I propose to reformulate the Marcusian critique inside a version of Habermas’s communication theory modified to include technology.
Reformulating the Media Theory
The Media Theory
Habermas’s media theory provides the basis for a synthesis. This theory explains modernity in terms of the emergence of differentiated “subsystems” based on rational forms such as exchange, law, and administration. The media concept is generalized from monetary exchange along lines proposed by Parsons. Habermas claims that only power resembles money closely enough to qualify as a full-fledged medium (Habermas, 1984, 1987: II, 274). The media make it possible for individuals to coordinate their behavior while pursuing individual success in an instrumental attitude toward the world. Media-steered interaction is an alternative basis for social organization to communicative action, to arriving at shared beliefs in the course of linguistic exchanges. Normative consensus plays no role on the market, where agents reach their ends without discussion. Administrative power too is exercised without the need for complex communication. Together, money and power “delinguistify” dimensions of social life by organizing interaction through objectifying behaviors. Roughly summarized, Habermas’s aim is to right the balance between the two types of rational coordination, both of which are required by a complex modern society (Habermas, 1984, 1987: II, 330).
The media theory allows Habermas to offer a much clearer explanation of technocracy than Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man. Habermas distinguishes between “system,” media regulated rational institutions, such as markets and administration, and “lifeworld,” the sphere of everyday communicative interactions in which such functions as child rearing, education, and public debate go on. According to Habermas, the central pathology of modern societies is the colonization of lifeworld by system. This involves the over-extension of success oriented action beyond its legitimate range and the consequent imposition of criteria of efficiency on the communicative sphere. The lifeworld contracts as the system expands into it and delinguistifies dimensions of social life which should be mediated by language.
But, surprisingly, even though he protests what he calls the “technization of the lifeworld,” Habermas scarcely mentions technology. That is an obvious oversight as Habermas himself admitted to me in conversation. Surely technology, too, organizes human action while minimizing the need for language. This blind spot is particularly puzzling since Habermas’s thought was shaped all along by his early critique of the positivist understanding of reason and its historical realization in a technocratic society. These arguments, developed especially in the essay “Technology and Science as Ideology,” form the basis of the theory of modern society Habermas has refined and enriched over the years. His distinction of system rationality and lifeworld is substituted in the structure of his theory for the original contrast of work and interaction, technique and communication. Thus his project is rooted in a critique of the type of action characteristic of technology, which has provided him with a model for his later interpretation of the specific modes of “purposive-rational action” that continue to concern him focally. Why, then, isn’t technology counted as a medium alongside money and power?
There is a strong objection to so enlarging the media theory, namely that technology involves causal relations to nature while the other media are essentially social. However impoverished, the codes that govern money and power are conventional and possess communicative significance, whereas those that govern technology seem to lack communicative content. Or, put in another way, technology “relieves” physical, not communicative effort.
In fact technology has several different types of communicative content. Some technologies, such as automobiles and desks, communicate the status of their owners (Forty, 1986); others, such as locks, communicate legal obligations; most technologies also communicate through the interfaces by which they are manipulated. A computer program, for example, transmits the designer’s conception of a field of human activity while also helping to solve problems arising in that field (Winograd, 1987: chap. 12). In any transportation system, technology can be found organizing large numbers of people without discussion; they need only follow the rules and the map. Again, workers in a well organized factory find their jobs almost automatically meshing through the design of the equipment and buildings—their action is coordinated—without much linguistic interaction.
Indeed, it is quite implausible to suggest as Habermas appears to that action coordination in the rationalized spheres of social life can be completely described by reference to money and power. Certainly no one in the field of management theory would subscribe to the view that a combination of monetary incentives and administrative rules suffices to organize production. The problem of motivation is far more complex than that, and unless the technical rationality of the job coordinates workers’ action harmoniously, mere rules will be impotent (Hammer and Champy 1993: chap. 5).
James Beniger has shown that these observations from management theory can be extended to modern societies as a whole. The bureaucratic structure and market systems of these societies rest on elaborate technological foundations. Beniger traces the roots of the “information society” back to the 19th century when basic innovations in information processing such as the telegraph and punch cards made it possible to handle the problems raised by high speed industrial production and rail transportation. In Beniger’s terms, coordination media “preprocess” human beings in the sense that they reduce the complexity of human inputs to social subsystems just as do money and power in Habermas (Beniger, 1986).
To reduce technology to a mere causal function is to miss the results of a generation of social science research. But if one cannot reduce technology to natural causality, why exclude it from the list of media which it resembles in so many respects? Of course it is quite different from money, the paradigm medium, but if the loose analogy works for power, I would argue that it can be extended to technology as well.
Value and Rationality
A Two Level Critique
If technology is included in the media theory, the boundaries Habermas wants to draw around money and power can be extended to it as well. It certainly makes sense to argue that technical mediation is appropriate in some spheres and inappropriate in others, just as Habermas claims for money and power. The treatment of technology as a medium improves Habermas’s theory of communicative action without shattering its framework. Nevertheless, it suggests some deeper problems in the theory which do place its framework under tension. I would like to address those problems in the concluding sections of this lecture.
The synthesis sketched so far concerns only the extent and the range of instrumental mediation and not technological design. In fact Habermas’s system theory offers no basis for criticizing the internal structure of any of the media. He can challenge their overextension into communicative domains but not their design in their own domain of competence. Nothing in his theory corresponds to Marcuse’s critique of administrative or technical rationality. But a critical theory of technology cannot ignore design. Whether the issue concerns child labor, medical research, computer mediated communication, or environmental impacts of technology, design has normative implications and is not simply a matter of efficiency.
What we need is a two-level critique of instrumentality. At one level I will follow Habermas and substantive critique in claiming that the media have general characteristics which qualify their application. This justifies the demand for boundaries on their range. But a second level critique is also needed because the design of the media is shaped by the hegemonic interests of the society they serve. Markets, administrations, technical devices are biased: the form in which they are realized embodies specific valuative choices. These designed-in biases leave a mark on the media even in those domains where they appropriately regulate affairs. Therefore, critique cannot cease at the boundary of the system but must extend deep inside it.
If Habermas does not pursue a parallel argument in relation to markets and bureaucracies, I believe this is due to a fundamental ambiguity he maintains between two different interpretations of the system/lifeworld dichotomy. Habermas argues that the distinction between system and lifeworld is analytic. No institution is a pure exemplification of one or the other category. While the types of action coordination characteristic of each—media steered or communicative—are distinct, they are always combined in various proportions in real situations. Thus the system is not itself a real social institution exclusively based on the media, but refers to actual institutions, such as the market or the state, in which media steered interactions predominate. Similarly, the lifeworld is not an exclusively communicative institution, but describes those actual institutions, such as the family, in which communication predominates. Surely Habermas is right to argue that there is a fundamental difference between institutions that are preponderantly shaped by markets or bureaucracies (and, I would add, technologies), and others in which personal relations and communicative interaction are primary. The fact of mixed motives and codes notwithstanding, without some such distinction one can make no sense at all of the process of modernization.
Although in principle Habermas avoids in this way a crude identification of system and lifeworld with actual institutions, in practice, the analytic distinctions tend to become indistinguishable from real ones. For instance, state and family end up exemplifying system and lifeworld despite Habermas’s precautions (Habermas, 1984, 1987: II, 310). But this identification blurs the range of application of the purified categories used to analyze world relations and social functions. The outcome is a tendency to neutralize the system and to treat it as embodying a universal rationality that has no bias.
Perhaps this also explains why Habermas does not consider technology to be a medium. Since there is no institutionally separate sphere, such as the market in which its influence is especially prominent, it seems to be ubiquitous. How then to identify it with an institutional base in which it would support a predominance of media-steered interaction? Habermas may have thought that technology’s contribution to the problems of modern society could be adequately captured by analysis of its employment in the market and administrative structures through which the colonization process advances. However, the theoretical disadvantages of thus dissolving technology into economics and politics far outweigh the advantages.
The Bias of the System
There is a deeper methodological failure behind Habermas’s neutralization of the system. In his usage, the term “system” refers in the first instance not to organizations but to the structure of interactions carried out in media such money or power. This is the social logic that generates the extended networks of modern societies. For example, money and power mediate the forms of wage labor and urban development, and it is this which makes the organization of a firm and a city possible in the first place. So far so good, but what is missing from Habermas’s account is any consideration of how organizations in turn structure and restructure the media, how they bias exchange and administration. Because Habermas does not consider this aspect of organizational activity, the media are treated as neutral realizations of a rational logic, and the social pathology associated with their over-extension is reduced to the neutralization of normative considerations.
This does not go far enough. We need a way of talking about designed-in norms of the sort that characterize rationalized institutions without losing the distinction between system and lifeworld. These norms enter media in media-specific forms, not as communicative understandings of the sort that characterize the lifeworld. If it is difficult to conceive of system rationality as normatively informed, this is because our conception of valuative bias is shaped by lifeworld contexts and experiences. We think of values as rooted in feelings or beliefs, as expressed or justified, as chosen or criticized. Values belong to the world of ‘ought’, in contrast to the factual world of ‘is’. We are unaccustomed to the idea that institutions based on system rationality realize objectified norms in devices and practices, and not merely in the individual beliefs or shared assumptions of their members.
We must distinguish between a functionalist understanding of technology in which technical devices stand in external relations to the social and its goals, and a hermeneutic approach for which devices possess complex meanings that include delegated norms and connotations. These valuative dimensions of technology are “embodied” in devices in something like the sense in which meanings are embodied in linguistic signs. Like signs technologies join an object (a sound or in the technological case, a device) to a sense which is not merely a subjective association, which truly belongs to that object insofar as it is grasped in its phenomenological reality and social effectivity.
Habermas’s difficulties stem from his fidelity to a functionalist account in which the analytic distinction between system and lifeworld ends up as a real distinction between an objective realm of technically rational means and a subjective realm of ends, values, meanings. It does not help much that he thinks valuative claims can be redeemed by communicative rationality. The problem is that they float free of technical rationality in such a way as to strip the system normatively bare. The gap between value and fact Habermas transcends in the world of talk is bigger than ever in the material world. By contrast, the hermeneutic approach distinguishes system and lifeworld not as matter and spirit, means and ends, but in terms of the different ways in which fact and value are joined in different types of social objects and discourses. From this standpoint, there is no place for an unconvincing notion of pure rationality.
Critical Theory of Technology
The critique of norms embodied in rational systems begins with Marx’s analysis of the market. Under the influence of Weber and Lukács, Critical theory attempted to extend the Marxian approach to bureaucracy, technology, and other rational institutions. The fundamental ambition of the critique was to bring these embodied norms to consciousness where they could be identified and challenged. Habermas’s notion of a nonsocial instrumental rationality puts that critique out of action. It reverses the theoretical revolution by which Marx attempted to bring philosophy down from the heaven of pure concepts to the real world, the social life process. This may explain the relentless pursuit of abstraction that is both Habermas’s strength and his weakness.
Where system design embodies normative biases that are taken for granted and placed beyond discussion, only a type of critique Habermas’s theory excludes can open up a truly free dialogue. In the case of technology, this critique is still undeveloped although some work has been done on the labor process, reproductive technologies, and the environment. As Marcuse argued already, the research shows that modern technological rationality incorporates domination in its very structure. Our technical disciplines and designs, especially in relation to labor, gender, and nature, are rooted in a hegemonic order.
The social theory of technology appears more plausible by contrast with Habermas’s as soon as one asks what he actually means by the essence of technology, i.e. the objectivating, success-oriented relation to nature. Is there enough substance to such a definition to imagine it implemented? Is it not rather an abstract classification so empty of content as to tolerate a wide range of realizations, including Marcuse’s notion of relating to nature as to another subject? Unless, that is, one smuggles in a lot of historically specific content. That is the only way one can get from the excessively general concept of a success-oriented relation to nature to the specific assertion that technology necessarily excludes respect for nature along the lines Marcuse proposes. Here Habermas repeats the very error of which he accuses Weber, identifying rationality in general with a specific historical realization of it.
The essence of technology can only be the sum of all the major determinations it exhibits in its various stages of development. That sum is sufficiently rich and complex to embrace numerous possibilities through shifts of emphasis and exclusions. This approach bears a formal resemblance to Habermas’s interpretation of modernity in terms of a structural model encompassing a variety of types of rationalization that can receive differing emphases in different societies (Habermas 1984, 1987: I, 238). However, I extend this approach downward into technology, which is only one component of Habermas’s model, in order to introduce variety at that level. The various technical rationalities that have appeared in the course of history would each be characterized by a formal bias associated with its specific configuration. A critical account of modern technology could be developed on this basis with a view to constructive change rather than romantic retreat.
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Marcuse’s Aesthetics of Technology
Introduction: Aesthetics and Politics
Starting
Points
I
arrived in
At
the first opportunity I asked Professor Marcuse to help me study Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time. He
accepted my proposal and we spent many Tuesday afternoons debating the meaning
of obscure passages in this book which, unbeknownst to me, had inspired Marcuse
to leave
One
afternoon as we left Marcuse’s office a magnificent sunset appeared before us.
Standing on the balcony of the
Zen Buddhists are supposed to achieve sudden enlightenment meditating on an unsolvable problem called a koan. Phenomenology seemed to collapse in the face of Marcuse’s stunning koan, but sudden enlightenment did not follow. It could not possibly have occurred to me then that the rejection of a phenomenological reduction that late afternoon confirmed yet again Marcuse’s decision to abandon Heidegger’s mentorship in 1933. He had found another way to understand beauty and its promise of happiness.
A few months later, my fellow graduate students and I created a magazine to publicize our anti-war views. Recall that this was early in the Vietnam War and the American public was still supportive. Dissent was the act of a small minority to which we belonged. We asked Marcuse for an article to start us off. He contributed “The Individual in the Great Society” (Marcuse 1966). This article described the suppression of individuality under the impact of technological advance. It ends with a convoluted passage I want to quote here as it offers a clue to my koan and the agenda of Marcuse’s later work which I try to understand in this lecture.
Under both aspects, the traditional concept of the individual, in its classic-liberal as well as Marxist form seems to be untenable — canceled (aufgehoben) by the historical development of productivity….Authentic individuality would remain the distinction of the creative artist, writer, or musician. The idea of making this creative potential general among the population at large militates against the very function and truth of the artistic creation as a form of expression …because it [art] implies dissociation from, and negation of, common sense and common values: ingression of a qualitatively different reality in the established one. In the case of the second alternative (fundamental transformation of the society), individuality would refer to an entirely new existential dimension: to a domain of play, experiment, and imagination which is outside the reaches of any policy and program today (Marcuse 2001, 80).
This
article was composed in 1965. It accurately foresaw the shipwreck of Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society on the rock of
Marcuse believed that the elimination of true individuality in “one-dimensional society” explained the absence of opposition. Individuality requires mental independence and a standard, a vision of a better world. The arts have always represented such an alternative. (Our magazine was called Alternatives.) In modern times a limited form of individuality became widely available. The Enlightenment opened a public sphere within which political ideals sustained a critical stance. Now the space of public debate was closing down. Once again individuality was to be found primarily in the aesthetic realm. For it to emerge from behind its old artistic borders, Marcuse claimed, it would have to take a far more radical form than in the past. The new individuals would realize the negative, critical content of art in the real world, overthrowing its common sense and devaluing its values.
What is truly innovative in Marcuse’s position is the hypothesis that once increasing wealth releases society from the struggle for existence, perception can transcend the given toward unrealized potentialities foreshadowed in art. Art has anticipated the realization of these potentialities in imagination for thousands of years. They “cannot possibly be given in the immediate experience which prevails in repressive societies. They are given rather as the horizon under which the immediately given forms of things appear as ‘negative,’ as denial of their inherent potentialities, their truth” (Marcuse 1972, 70). In such societies, the aesthetic imagination produces images that serve as the normative context of what is revealed in sensation. Now, in an advanced society, the sheer technical possibility of the realization of these norms destabilizes the structures of class rule and the underlying forms of experience and individuality on which it is based. At this higher stage of economic and technical development, the aesthetic ceases to be a “horizon” of appearance and begins to structure perception itself. The senses take on the aesthetic function in the full sense of the term. With this “new mode of experience” “the imagination [turns] into a meta-political power” (Marcuse 2001, 118).
Aesthetics
as the form of a new consciousness and sensibility! The generalization of the
oppositional force of beauty as social critique! What strange notions! I had no
idea that in 1918 Marcuse participated in the German Revolution as a member of
the Berlin Soldiers’ Council and shortly afterwards wrote a thesis on novels
featuring artists in conflict with society. For him the unity of political and
aesthetic opposition was no mere fantasy. But I also recall this personal
detail from my student days: on the wall of his dining room in
The
full implications of Marcuse’s ideas on individuality unfolded finally with the
rise of the New Left. In
We entered the Ecole and Marcuse addressed the hundred or more young artists gathered in the main assembly hall. It is easy to imagine the excitement of the author of a thesis on aesthetic resistance at the podium of this monument to “affirmative culture.” He was warmly received. French students celebrated the grandfathers of the revolution in preference to their fathers who they blamed for social ills. Marcuse made a short speech in French, greeting the students in the name of the American student movement and congratulating them on challenging “consumer society.” They seemed impressed by this echo from the depths of history although the Maoists in the audience were visibly puzzled by the reference to consumption.
When An Essay on Liberation appeared a year later it was dedicated to the French “militants,” the students and young workers in revolt. “The radical utopian character of their demands,” Marcuse wrote in the preface, “far surpasses the hypotheses of my essay” (Marcuse 1969a, ix). That book explored the generalization of aesthetic resistance that the earlier article had dismissed, in some detail. The boundaries of art had burst and aesthetics had become a new kind of politics with the transformation of the technical base of society as its goal.
Aestheticizing Technology
The incredible inflation of aesthetics in Marcuse's thought has two rather different motives. In the first place, he needs an experiential basis for identifying potentialities transcending the given. Second, he needs a more concrete and imaginatively rich value criterion than morality by which to measure the social world. Even if the advanced industrial society criticized in One-Dimensional Man could meet basic moral standards, it would still constitute a social universe hostile to human beings and nature. This is related to problems in its technical structure that must be met with aesthetically informed solutions.
The new sensibility of the New Left was supposed to accomplish these goals. It brought broadly conceived aesthetic criteria to bear on social life, inspiring demands for radical change (Marcuse, 1969: 28). Marcuse interprets this phenomenon repeatedly in different conceptual frameworks, once in Freudian terms as a recovery and release of erotic energies, a second time in terms of the early Marx’s concept of sensuousness, and a third time in terms of the concept of beauty, which he relates to the history of art, to Plato’s theory of recollection and to Kant's theory of the imagination. The constellation formed by these analyses raises the exciting but rather marginal cultural innovations of the 1960s to the level of a worldhistorical experiment in the political realization of artistic ideals. There are obvious problems with this view, but focusing on them may cause us to overlook what is most interesting in Marcuse's theory, namely his innovative approach to the politics of technology.
Walter Benjamin introduced the theme of the "aestheticization of politics" in a critique of Jünger's writings on modern war (Benjamin, 1979). It was been widely assumed ever since that there is some essential connection between aestheticization and fascism, to which Jünger was attracted. But Martin Jay points out that there are also progressive interpretations of the aestheticization of politics, for example Hannah Arendt's writings on Kant's aesthetic theory (Jay, 1993). Arendt attempted to show that what Kant called "reflective judgment" can be generalized from art to politics (Arendt, 1982: 106). Politics on this account is properly doxic rather than epistemic, a matter of opinion rather than knowledge, based on the imagination rather than on understanding, and precisely in this apparent deficiency lies its link to our freedom. Political judgment is not scientific but it does contain an appeal to the other for agreement. It is thus neither universally valid nor merely personal, but constructs an intersubjective bond through a special type of rational discourse.
To this example of a progressive aestheticization of politics cited by Jay, we can add Marcuse's radical politics of technology. In An Essay on Liberation (1969) Marcuse also turns to Kant for an approach to a social theory of the imagination. A transformed sensibility "free for the liberating exigencies of the imagination," arrives at very different ways of understanding and mastering the world (Marcuse, 1969: 31). It perceives potentialities in the objects themselves, as potentialities of those objects, and not as arbitrary desires or wishes of the subject. These potentialities are known through imaginatively informed aesthetic judgments of social reality. The essential qualities revealed in the imaginatively grasped experience of nature and the social world can guide the reconstruction of technology.
Marcuse thus holds out the possibility of a redeemed technology that would respect the potentialities of things and recognize the responsibility of human beings in the shaping of worlds. Marcuse’s new technology would enhance life rather than invent new means of destruction. It would be environmentally aware and treat nature with respect (Marcuse, 1992). Recognition of humanity’s place in the order of revealing requires valorizing the sensibility and imagination through which the potentialities of things are manifested. A receptive — Marcuse calls it a “feminist” — subjectivity would animate this technology, replacing the aggressive subject of the existing technological rationality (Marcuse, 1974).
There is a certain similarity between Marcuse’s project and that of Arendt. Is it a coincidence that both these Heidegger students affirm the disclosive power of art and attempt to transpose it to the political domain by drawing on Kant's third Critique? Where Arendt found a model of political judgment in Kant's theory of the imagination, Marcuse took the more radical route of applying that theory to technology. Just as Arendt found resources in Kant for validating the debates of the polis, so Marcuse found resources for bringing technology into the polis as one among many controversial issues to be decided there. This is a seemingly paradoxical approach: after all, isn't the technical precisely the most rigorous application of conceptual understanding, the very opposite of Marcuse’s political aesthetic?
Marcuse’s
theory of the new technology depends not only on Kant but also on the
Marcuse’s theory of the imagination is derived from the model of art but it paints not just the canvas but all of nature. With the abolition of scarcity in advanced societies, the artistic imagination can overflow the boundaries of art to occupy the place of the Kantian transcendental imagination. This is one way of interpreting the project of the avant gardes, which attempted at an early date to abolish the institution of art in order to realize its principles in everyday life. That project returns in the New Left. Responding to the revolt of the repressed sensibility, the New Left "invokes the sensuous power of the imagination" and projects a fundamental reorganization of the faculties. From its marginal position the imagination moves to the center of the stage as the integrative faculty reconciling the demands of art and technique and incorporating nature into history. In a liberated society it would become "productive" in reality, like the imagination of the artistic creator, and guide technical practice in the work of "pacifying existence."
"The rationality of art, its ability to 'project' existence, to define yet unrealized possibilities could then be envisaged as validated by and functioning in the scientific-technological transformation of the world" (Marcuse, 1964: 239).
The
liberated consciousness would promote the development of a science and
technology free to discover and realize the possibilities of things and men in
the protection and gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of
form and matter for the attainment of this goal. Technique would then tend to
become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between
imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific
thought, would be invalidated. Emergence of a new Reality Principle: under
which a new sensibility and a desublimated scientific intelligence would
combine in the creation of an aesthetic
ethos (Marcuse, 1969: 24).
Technology and Rationality
Technological Rationality
Marx claimed that at the end of the capitalist era social advance would be a condition for technical advance. But traditional Marxism reduced this Marxian idea to a complaint that capitalist society makes a bad use of technology and puts obstacles in the path of economic growth. This was not Marcuse's idea at all. On his account, growth of the existing technical base would be a disaster. This technology cannot simply be "used" to realize radical ends. What sense would it make to try to turn the assembly line into a scene of self-expression, or to broadcast propaganda for free thought? The systemic character of modern technology blocks recourse to it for these purposes. Technology has a logic of its own independent of the goals it serves. To the extent that this is true, merely changing goals would not change that logic, which is the source of the ultimate threat.
To make a difference at that level, not just the ends of production, but the means must be transformed insofar as they incorporate domination in their structure. A true alternative would change the base as well as the institutional superstructures. A postrevolutionary society could create a new science and technology that would place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. The new science and technology would treat nature as another subject instead of as mere raw materials (Marcuse, 1972: 65). Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing nature's inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for the sake of power and profit. Marcuse writes, “Freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility—the demands of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (Marcuse, 1969: 19).
This
emphasis on technical transformation distinguishes Marcuse from both Heidegger
and the rest of the
Marcuse's argument culminates in the demand for a radical change in technological rationality. But the very concept of technological rationality is obscure. The difficulty is at least partly his fault. He sometimes equates “technological rationality" with the ratio of technology in general, or the existing technology only, and he sometimes employs the term in modified forms such as "post-technological rationality" or the "technological rationality of art" to refer to a future liberated technē (Marcuse 1964, 235, xlviii, 238, 239). A common reading stemming from Habermas identifies Marcuse's notion with the generic interest in technical control, abstract efficiency (Habermas, 1970). On that reading, fundamental technological reform of the sort Marcuse advocates would be impossible, violating a basic condition of human existence.
In Habermas, technical reason, stripped down to its essential constituents, is sharply distinguished from other forms of thought and feeling. It is a quasi-transcendental or anthropologically general faculty, "blended" with other faculties in concrete situations but tending toward its pure form in highly differentiated modern societies. Judged from the standpoint of this generic theory of technical action Marcuse’s historical theory is incomprehensible or insignificant. On these terms, either his critique of technological rationality implies the need for an entirely new kind of technology that would not involve control and efficiency, a nonsensical idea, or he merely wrote in a confusing way about the need to apply technology to new purposes, a trivial idea. Here is the dilemma explained in more detail.
1) If the new aestheticized technology is based on completely new technical principles, then the whole theory is unbelievable. Who is going to invent those principles, and what will they be like? Although it sometimes sounds as though Marcuse intends a total break with the past, the revolution that interests him is not supposed to refute elementary arithmetic, change a decimal place in pi, or find aesthetically pleasing substitutes for the lever and the wheel. Nor would it, as Habermas suggests, require personal communication with nature rather than technical control of it. Marcuse does not believe it possible to replace technology as we know it with some sort of mystical union. That view he attributes to his old friend Norman Brown and distinguishes sharply from his own position (Marcuse, 1968: 238).
2) Perhaps Marcuse has more modest ambitions and merely hopes that current technology will be used to enhance rather than to destroy life. But if he intended nothing more innovative than this, it is difficult to figure out how practically his position differs from a simple change of goals. Of course we could make toys and medicine instead of weapons, but would that require fundamental technological change? If the new technology is simply a new application of the old it is difficult to see what all the hoopla is about. Indeed, on this interpretation Marcuse's position is indistinguishable from ordinary technological optimism, with its all too familiar technocratic implications (Alford, 1985: 175-176). But Marcuse himself consistently talks in terms of the need for a change in rationality and not merely in applications.
This is the Marcusian enigma that has bedeviled his critics. I want to suggest a different interpretation that, while it deflates Marcuse's speculative ambitions somewhat, at least does not take him for a dreamer. This interpretation accords with his own emphasis on the importance of situating abstract concepts like "rationality" in a concrete social context (Marcuse, 1968: 223-224). From that standpoint, his concept of technological rationality cannot be identical with the formal concepts of efficiency and control, but must have a content as a socially specific pattern of goal orientation. But nor can it be a mere ideological "reflection" for then it would have neither technical efficacy nor truth value.
The Forms of Reason
Marcuse was acutely aware of several likely misunderstandings of his work. He worried that he would be taken for a reactionary who condemns the whole project of Enlightenment in criticizing modern technology. He acknowledged the risk that his new theory of sensation would be confounded with spiritualistic re-enchantment, a mere projection of “secret hopes” onto a sublimely indifferent nature. Anticipating these criticisms, he writes that, “The critique of technology aims neither at a romantic regression nor at a spiritual restoration of ‘values.’ The oppressive features of technological society are not due to excessive materialism and technicism. On the contrary, it seems that the causes of the trouble are rather in the arrest of materialism and technological rationality, that is to say, in the restraints imposed on the materialization of values” (Marcuse, 2001: 57).
The notion of “materialization of values” is the counterpart to Marcuse’s critique of the neutrality of technology. Technology is not essentially value neutral but rather, under capitalism, the neutralization of the traditional values that governed it in earlier times adapts it to the pursuit of profit and power. These narrow capitalist values no longer respect the object, human beings, limits of any kind. Value free technology is “free” to treat everything and everyone as raw materials. The Heideggerian enframing reappears here seamlessly integrated to Marcuse’s Marxism.
In Heidegger this modern type of technology is contrasted with Greek technē and a similar contrast is implied in Marcuse’s critique. Technē combines objectively conceived values with technical principles in a logos. Marcuse proposes that the neutrality of technology can be overcome through restoring values to their place in the structure of technical reason. But in what would the new technical values be grounded? Ideology critique and cultural relativism have demystified the objective values in which the Greeks believed. There is no way “back to virtue,” as some philosophers have recently proposed. Instead, Marcuse argues that modern technology must be redesigned by the "productive imagination" selecting from a range of possibilities on the basis of a preference for human freedom and fulfillment, the affirmation of life. No doubt Marcuse's theory would be more sympathetically received today had he avoided such “unscientific” assumptions and either invoked a transcendental ground for values à la Habermas, or the freedom of the postmodern subject willfully to construct identities and realities.
Marcuse paid no attention to the latter
view which was only beginning its ascent during his last years, but he does
have an implicit answer to the Habermasian objection. His position is based on
the older
Marcuse
remained faithful to their fundamental insight, which Horkheimer expresses in
the notion that in modern times "the content of reason is reduced
arbitrarily" (Horkheimer, 1947: 20). Horkheimer calls the value neutral
rationality of the existing society “subjective reason.” It strips away the
value commitments of an earlier “objective reason” that was based on essential
insight. This earlier form of reason prevailed in the logos of the ancient arts. According to Horkheimer, “subjective”
and “objective” reason are not opposites or alternatives but fractured moments
of a totality that can only be anticipated today. He concludes that "The
task of philosophy is not stubbornly to play the one against the other, but to
foster a mutual critique and thus, if possible, to prepare in the intellectual
realm the reconciliation of the two in reality” (Horkheimer, 1947: 174). The
early
Habermas completely reverses this position. Indeed, he sees an ultimately salutary differentiation of reason from myth in precisely the phenomena condemned by his predecessors. Their conception, with its faith that we can find traces of the ideal in the real, could not be further from the over-burdened subjectivity of both transcendentalism and constructivism. It is true that Horkheimer, like Adorno, remained stubbornly bound to a negative dialectic, a pure critique. As Patrick Murray notes, their “reconciliation-without-identification between spirit and nature remains a promissory note” (Murray, 1982: 228).
Habermas dropped the promise. He restored a version of objective reason in a domain, communication, which he held separate from scientific-technical rationality. Normativity was saved but at the expense of reconciliation. Marcuse transgressed Horkheimer’s self-imposed limitation and went on to fulfill the promise. His redemption of technology reconciles the antinomial moments of rationality identified by Horkheimer.
Whereas for Habermas scientific-technical rationality responds to a pure interest in control, Marcuse argues that control is itself subordinated to the interest of life. He recognizes of course that technology can be used to destroy life, but, He writes, “Then we are this side of discourse and logic, for logic and discourse developed as instruments of the effort to ‘save’ and fulfill life” (Marcuse, 2001: 40). Marcuse thus posits a “final technological cause” (Marcuse, 1989: 124). “Discourse and logic,” subordinated to an objective purpose, are of course the logos. On this account Greek technē would be normal rather than modern “differentiated” “value free” technology. Indeed, Marcuse claims that “advanced industrial society is not defined by technological rationality, but rather by the opposite. Namely, by the blocking, by the arrest, and by the perversion of technological rationality…” (Marcuse, 2001: 84). In this passage “technological rationality” refers to the “inherent end and purpose of technology” throughout history, i.e. to serve human needs. With this in mind, “authentic” technical progress can be distinguished from its repressive simulacrum (Marcuse, 2001: 85).
This is the normative basis of the
critique of technology in One-Dimensional
Marcuse and Technology Studies
The environmental movement and the computerization of society have brought us into contact with technology in new ways Marcuse did not anticipate. They have made us far more aware of the contingency of design on social and political choices than we were a generation ago. At the same time, sociologists and historians of technology have shown that applications are not designed in function of abstract technical principles alone but emerge from concrete technical disciplines applied in social contexts. Naturally, those disciplines incorporate technical principles, but they include much besides. As social institutions, they operate under the influence of “actors,” social groups with the power to define problems and select solutions. Designs that flow from these sources accord with the interests, ideology and way of life of those groups. Of all the various ways in which a device can be designed to accomplish a certain purpose, that one will be chosen that satisfies both technical and social criteria.
Unfortunately, Marcuse never developed concepts at this concrete sociological level, but he did give a more abstract interpretation of technological rationality that can be applied in a social context. Social constructivism, actor network theory, and the study of large-scale technical systems have developed useful concepts that are anticipated by Marcuse or easily applied to the explanation of his thought. We can thus translate Marcuse’s insights into the basis for a radical sociology of technology. Here are some examples of anticipations and convergences that give a hint of this potential.
• The notion that technological design is not governed by efficiency or scientific principles but is decided by socially situated actors resembles Marcuse’s critique of the neutrality of technology and his notion of socially determined technological projects (Bijker, et al., 1987). Marcuse goes beyond current technology studies in facing the political implications of the non-neutrality of technology. If actors impose designs accommodated to their way of life, then surely we should judge the results in terms of some sort of normative criteria (Marcuse, 1964: 220ff).
• This approach to the social bias of technical decisions presupposes two further constructivist principles, the technical underdetermination of design and the interpretative flexibility of artifacts. It makes sense to analyze technology in social terms only if the meaning of artifacts is socially determined and contested, and workable alternatives are available (Pinch and Bijker, 1987). Marcuse presupposed something similar as the basis for his own notion of reconstruction of the technical base. I have tried in my own work to show how this presupposition can be made explicit and defended.
• Actor network theory proposes a concept of “delegation” according to which a value may be embodied either in discourse as a moral imperative, or in design through technical choices that enforce appropriate behavior. For example, the value of safety may be supported by a sign reminding users of a device to handle it carefully, or by a design which makes it impossible to use the device without taking the necessary precautions (Latour, 1992). Marcuse might be said to offer the “macro” version of this “micro” thesis according to which norms are embodied in devices and constrain (“script”) behavior (Marcuse, 1964: 9ff).
• Finally, the theory of large-scale technical systems explains how technologies such as electric power and the airline industry bind huge populations and things together in both causal and symbolic relations. This approach has parallels in the Heideggerian enframing and in Marcuse’s version of it. Some historians and sociologists of technology have in fact made the connection between Heidegger and their empirical research (Hughes, 1989; Gras, 1993). Marcuse adds a perspective on the political implications of the systematization of society.
I have introduced the concept of the “technical code” to explain Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality in a more concrete sociological context. The technical code consists in fundamental social imperatives in the form in which they are internalized by a technical culture. These imperatives — Marcuse would call them “a prioris” — appear in technical disciplines as standards and specifications that have an apparently neutral aspect. Husserl once said that “Tradition is forgetfulness of the origin.” This is certainly true of technical disciplines which live in blissful ignorance of their own past, proclaiming their autonomy for all to hear while historians uncover the many acts of power that shaped them. The history takes us back to the actors who struggled to impose their interests and vision through encoding emerging technologies (Marcuse, 1968: 215-216; Feenberg, 1999: 87-89). The process continues today and we need the concepts to understand it.
This theory of technical codes has implications for the relation of technology and values. We can no longer accept the Weberian conception of technology as a value free enterprise. Sociology of technology routinely tracks the influence of values on design. But this also calls into question the usual understanding of values. Are values, as is commonly supposed, subjective feelings rather than solid facts? Marcuse relativizes this distinction. He argues that values appear as values rather than as (technical) facts to the extent that they have been excluded from reality in the interests of a repressive organization of society. Technology itself could accommodate them were it “liberated” from the constraints of the existing society (Marcuse, 2001: 54).
We might reformulate this insight to say that design embodies only a subset of the values circulating in society at any given time. Those not so embodied appear discursively rather than technically, but the two forms of value are not irrevocably cut off from each other. The “ideological” values can enter the technical realm through different design choices (“delegations”) imposed by a different relation of political and social forces. This is an argument of particular importance for environmentalism. Conservative opponents of environmental reform routinely contrast “rational” technology with supposedly “irrational,” “emotional,” or “ideological” values. This contrast is spurious as a general rule if not in all particular cases.
Such fundamental social imperatives as environmental protection are beginning to shape an alternative technological rationality in Marcuse’s sense. These imperatives are the “technological a priori” embodied in the devices and systems that emerge from the culture and reinforce its basic values. As we have seen, Marcuse argues that life affirming values are actually internal to technology and are not an arbitrary imposition. While this claim is excessively general, it can be given a concrete content in terms of technical codes. Each such code affirms life within the limits of the technical knowledge and the repressive structure of the dominant regime. Ethical and aesthetic mediations play an essential role in this process, integrating technical principles to a design that coheres with social and natural values. What makes capitalism special is the progressive reduction and neutralization of such mediations wherever they conflict with a narrow pecuniary interest.
This reductive process is the source of the apparent purification of technological rationality in modern times, and not, as Weber and Habermas claim, the emergence of an original essence of technology from out of the undifferentiated social magma of premodern society. If capitalism is unique, that is not because it has freed technology from “non-technical” concerns. Rather, capitalism is the first social system to repress the underlying population primarily through technology rather than through religion, ritual, and violence, and the first to treat it as essentially neutral rather than governed by an inherent logos. In this sense “neutral” capitalist technology can be said to be “political” without mystification or risk of confusion.
Technology and Values
Marcuse and Political Philosophy
How plausible is Marcuse's project? It is easy to dismiss his aesthetic reference in the name of standard notions of discursive rationality. This seems to be the line taken by most critical theorists under the influence of Habermas. However, the result is a rather narrow version of political philosophy, more or less identified with argument over moral rights, which does not take us far toward comprehending the complexity of modern political life and the conflicts to which it gives rise. Must we conclude that contemporary Critical Theory considers creative responses to social and political problems irredeemably irrational? It is precisely a theory of the rationality of such responses which Marcuse offers in a strained but nevertheless suggestive attempt to understand the political and social creativity of the 1960s.
Marcuse’s approach differs fundamentally not only from Habermas’s but from liberal political philosophy which also focuses on procedural notions of democratic rights. That focus results from an exclusive concern with consensus as the basis of social life. Without some procedural agreement ordering the community, substantive disagreements degenerate into disruptive violence. Liberal political theory interprets the fact of consensus in modern societies, which do not have an established worldview, in terms of an ideal of rational agreement on democratic rights. Even if we disagree on everything else, at least we agree on the correct procedures for handling disagreements. While there is no doubt some truth in this approach, it is often justified by exaggerating the degree of dissensus in modern societies. The supposed normative chaos of modernity is largely a myth which justifies thinning out the claims of political theory to rights alone.
In recent years some philosophers have noted the poverty of this liberal theory of rights. But attempts to fill in the picture with a complementary idea of the "good" usually fall back on mere traditionalism clothed in the rhetoric of multiculturalism. The critique of proceduralism has merit, but since technology also supplies a background consensus that everywhere trumps tradition communitarians must ignore it to make their point. They are at one with liberalism in overlooking the central role of technology in organizing modern social life. This is not merely a practical matter.
The extensive coordinating functions of modern technology would break down without deep agreement on meanings and norms. This fact has become self-evident in the era of mass mobilization for consumption by the media. We can easily identify some of the chief elements of the technological consensus by simply watching television attentively. It is because we belong to this technological culture, as Heidegger pointed out in his own way, that we form a technological society. And it is precisely this technological culture which is incompatible with community. Transforming it is now the task.
I do not think Marcuse would have sympathized with communitarianism in any case. It would have made no sense to him to go back to the tight restrictions of traditional community at the current level of development. It is possible and necessary to go forward toward a greater measure of peace, freedom, and fulfillment. I suggest that Marcuse's notion of an aesthetic criterion for the new technology be interpreted as an attempt to articulate a substantive, future oriented conception of democracy.
Is such a future imaginable? Not if technology and humanity are reified as permanently opposed domains. Marcuse’s projection of a pacified society assumes that the “existential truth” of nature can be as widely perceived as the lies propagated by the media today (Marcuse, 1972: 69). The citizens of a free society would be informed not merely by conflicting opinions and tastes, but also by consensual notions of beauty, order, appropriateness. Aesthetic forms would enter daily life and shape a different experience and ultimately a different technology which would in turn reinforce that experience. Is it likely that a new type of aesthetic consensus would emerge in a benevolent social environment in which human beings were free, their basic needs satisfied, their creativity nurtured? Why assume that people in a liberated society would be any more likely to share an aesthetic consensus than they are in the unfree society of today?
While it would take us far afield to respond adequately, a word of protest is necessary. These objections presuppose that the aesthetic has exclusively to do with high art and that the disputatiousness of intellectuals and artists characterizes modern society as a whole. Nothing could be further from the truth. Walt Disney long ago established a universal aesthetic consensus. If the cultural elites feel left out and sadly unable to defend their preferences, that is their problem. The modern world establishes aesthetic values as have earlier societies and reinforces and generalizes them through incorporating them into artifacts of one sort and another. What is different today is the role of organizations. Relatively self-conscious and short-lived corporations and political parties rather than the eternal church do the job.
The evolution of sensibility is a vast underlying tide on which these modern organizations navigate. Marcuse suggests the possibility of an evolution that would be reinforced and generalized through changes in technological design. Once one grasps the force of the technological consensus underlying our way of life today, it is more plausible to imagine changes at that level winning widespread agreement. This is not a reason for such changes, of course, but it matters politically that they could be widely shared were they to occur, independent of the question of justification. To be sure, there are problems with Marcuse’s approach but at least it offers a properly modern solution to the conundrum of rights and goods while promising a path to the realization of more liberating projects than those of either tradition or business.
Aesthetics here is not a matter of contemplation, but should be interpreted in classical terms as an ontological category. In its application to human affairs, it expresses the reflexive significance of the actors' actions for their own existence. A society where homelessness, urban squalor, prisons, and war are commonplace defines itself by these "actions" on terms we can reasonably condemn on aesthetic grounds in this classical sense.
Nor is Marcuse's project so impractical as his very abstract language makes it appear. At one point, he mentions "gardens and parks and reservations" as a small example of the "liberating transformation" he awaits (Marcuse, 1964: 240). More significantly, I think we already have weak versions of modern technai in such fields as medicine, architecture, and urban and environmental planning. Technical cultures based to a significant degree on life enhancing values derived from a long history and a wide range of experiences contend in these fields with narrow technocratic ambitions and commercialism. Each of these disciplines posits an idealized essence, such as health, the home, the city, the natural balance. Democracy requires the public discussion and refinement of these ideals in a context freed from propaganda, advertising, and technocratic and determinist ideology. This is not yet possible, but despite the obvious limitations of these disciplines, they offer at least an imperfect model for the new technological rationality Marcuse advocates. Generalizing this form of technological rationality and controlling it through democratic political debate is no mere fantasy but a concrete project of resistance to techno-corporate power.
We are familiar today with two main kinds of politics. They are instrumental politics aimed at power, laws, and institutions, and identity politics through which individuals attempt to redefine their social roles and their place in society. I would argue that Marcuse, like the New Left itself, represents a third kind of politics. I call this a “civilizational politics,” a politics of collective self-definition that concerns not power, laws, and institutions, but the very meaning of our humanity. On these terms, the political question is: What kind of people are we, what kind of world do we want to live in, what can we expect as a basic minimum level of justice and equality in our affairs? The New Left replied that we cannot go on as before and in so doing it echoed Marcuse’s “great refusal” of advanced industrial society. Not out of generosity or personal self sacrifice but out of a larger sense of who and what we are, we need to acknowledge the mediocrity of the society and the injustices at its base. Ideologies that stand in the way, even if they be identified with "rationality" itself, must be overthrown. One widely distributed leaflet during the French May Events of 1968 announced, “Progress will be what we want it to be”. That in a nutshell is the hopeful political message Marcuse tried to send and it is not exhausted.
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Technology in a Global World
Introduction
Two Types of Technological Development
The department store was
introduced into
However, in one respect the Japanese store was quite different from its models: Mitsukoshi had tatami mat floors. This made for some unique problems. Japanese consumers did not usually remove their shoes to enter the small traditional stores in which they were accustomed to shop. Instead, they walked on paving or platforms near the entrance and faced counters behind which salesmen standing on tatami mats hawked their wares. One can still find a few such stores today. Although Mitsukoshi’s tatami mat floors were also unsuitable for shoes, customers had to enter the store to shop. And enter they did, sometimes many thousands each day.
At the entrance a check room took
charge of customers’ shoes and handed them slippers to use on the fragile
floors of the store. As the number of customers grew so did the strain on this
system. One day 500 shoes were misplaced and the historian of
This story tells us something we should know by now about technology: it is not merely a means to an end, a neutral tool, but reflects culture, ideology, politics. In this case, two very different nationally specific techniques of flooring came into conflict as an apparently unrelated change occurred in shopping habits. Neither wooden nor tatami mat floors can be considered technically superior, but each does have implications for the understanding of “inside” and “outside” in every area of social life, including, of course, shopping. It eventually became clear at Mitsukoshi that Western methods of distribution required Western floors.
The conflict between these
flooring techniques has long since been resolved in favor of Western methods in
most public spaces in
This story illustrates the idea of nationally specific branching development. Branching is a general feature of social and cultural development. Ideas, designs, and customs circulate easily, even among primitive societies, but they are realized in quite different ways as they travel. Although technical development is constrained to some extent by a causal logic, design in this domain too is underdetermined and a variety of possibilities are explored at the inception of any given line of development. Each design corresponds to the interests or vision of a different group of actors. In some cases the differences are quite considerable and several competing designs coexist for an extended period. In modern times, however, the market, political regulations, or corporate dominance dictate a decision for one or another design. Once the decision is consolidated, the winning branch is black boxed and placed beyond controversy and question.
It is precisely this last step which did not take place in the relations between national branches of design until quite recently. Poor communications and transport meant that national branches could coexist for centuries, even millennia, without much awareness of each other and without any possibility of decisive victory for one or another design. Globalization is the process of intensified interaction between national branches, leading to conflicts and decisions such as the one illustrated in the Mitsukoshi story.
However, conflict and decision is not the only consequence of a globalized world. Here is a second story that illustrates a different pattern I call “layered” development (Malm, 1971).
Shortly after the opening of
The need for an anthem was especially pressing in the Navy. Japanese officers were embarrassed by their inability to sing their own anthem at flag ceremonies at sea. The Navy therefore invited court musicians to train the Navy band in traditional Japanese music in hopes that among the performers a composer would be found. But the process was too slow and the Navy finally asked the court musicians themselves to supply it with suitable compositions. The results were again disappointing. The court musicians came up with a piece in a traditional mode arranged for performance by a traditional ensemble, hardly the sort of thing one would have ready and waiting in a stateroom on a Navy ship!
Around this time, Fenton was
replaced by a German bandmaster named Franz Eckert. Herr Eckert rose to the
occasion. He arranged the anthem supplied by the court for a Western band,
making suitable modifications for playability. In 1880,
This story is quite different from
the Mitsukoshi one. Like flooring, music had developed in
Here we do not have rooms of different styles side by side, but a true synthesis. The merging of traditions takes place in a layering process that is characteristic also of many types of social, cultural, and technological development. Often several branches can be combined by layering the demands of different actors over a single basic design. In the process what appeared to be conflicting conceptions turn out to be reconcilable after all. The anthem sounds Japanese played by a brass band. Similarly, modern Japanese politics, literature, painting, architecture, and philosophy emerged in Meiji out of a synthesis of native and Western techniques and visions.
Layering should not be conceived on the model of political compromise, although it does build alliances between groups with initially different or even hostile positions. Political compromise involves trade-offs in which each party gives up something to get something. In technological development, as in musical composition, indeed, wherever creative activities have a technical basis of some sort, alliances do not always require trade-offs. Ideally, clever innovations get around obstacles to combining functions and the layered product is better at everything it does, not compromised in its efficiency by trying to do too much. This is what the French philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon, calls “concretization” (Simondon, 1958: chap. 1). It is this layering process which gives rise to global technology, combining many national achievements in a single fund of world invention.
The Globalization of Development
Branching and layering are two fundamental developmental patterns. Their relations change as globalization proceeds. Elsewhere I have described two styles of design corresponding to different stages in this process. What I call “mediation centered design” characterizes the earlier stage, in which each nation develops its technology relatively independently of the others.[2] Of course, ideas do travel, but the overwhelming weight of particular national traditions insures that they will be incorporated into devices differently in different contexts. These differences are owing in large part to nationally specific ethical and aesthetic mediations that shape design. Thus each design “expresses” the national background against which it develops.
Globalization imposes a very different pattern which I call “system centered design.”[3] The globalizing economy develops around an international capital goods market on which each nation finds the elements it requires to construct the technologies it needs. This market moves building blocks such as gears, axles, electric wires, computer chips, and so on. These can be assembled in many different patterns.
The capital goods market is such a tremendous resource that once interchange between nations intensifies, no one attempts to bypass it. But when design is based on the assembly of prefabricated parts, it can no longer so easily accommodate different national cultures. Instead of expressing a cultural context, products tend more and more to be designed to fit harmoniously into the pre-existing system of parts and devices available on the capital goods market. Accommodation to national culture still occurs, of course, but it shares the field with a systematizing imperative that knows no national boundaries. Meanwhile, national culture expresses itself indirectly, in the contribution it makes to innovation on the capital goods markets themselves. I would like to develop these two consequences of globalization.
The shift toward system centered design has implications for the role of valuative mediations in the structure of modern, globalized technology. Traditional technologies generally fit well together. Japanese tatami mat floors, traditional architecture, eating and sleeping habits, shoes, all are of a piece. As such, they express a definite choice of way of life, a valuative framework rooted in Japanese culture. However, on purely technical terms, the links between the artifacts involved are relatively loose. It is true that houses need entryways in which to leave shoes, that futons must be spread on tatami mats, and so on, but adapting each of these artifacts to the others is not very constraining. The wide margin for choice makes it easy for cultural mediations to install themselves in technical design. Indeed, traditional crafts do not distinguish clearly between cultural and technical constraints. There is a “right way” to make things, a “technē,” and it conforms to both.
The globalization of technology changes all this. When design is system based, it must work with very tightly coupled systems of technical elements. Electric wires and sockets cannot be designed independently of the appliances that will use the electricity. Wheels, gears, pulleys, and so on come in sizes and types fixed by decisions made in their place of origin. A device using them must accommodate the results of those decisions.
System centered design thus imposes many constraints at an early stage in the design process, constraints that originate in the core countries of the world system. These constraints are imposed on peripheral nations participating in the globalizing process without regard for their national cultures. Furthermore, the very availability of certain types of capital goods reflects the national technological evolution and priorities of the core countries, not those of later recipients. Thus the effect of globalization is to push cultural constraints to the side, if not to eliminate them altogether. The products that result appear to be culturally “neutral” at first sight, although in fact they still embody cultural assumptions which become evident with wide use in peripheral contexts.
The computer is an obvious
example. For us Westerners, the keyboard appears to be technically neutral. But
had computers been invented and developed first in
These observations indicate the
weakness of national culture in a globalizing technological system, however,
there is another side to the story. Countries far from the core, such as
It is difficult to give examples of this feedback from national culture to capital goods’ markets. A cultural impulse realized technically looks just like any other technical artifact. Still, a cultural hermeneutics ought to be able to find the cultural traces in the technical domain.
Perhaps miniaturization could be
cited as a specific contribution reflecting Japanese culture. At least this is
the argument of O-Young Lee, whose book Smaller
Is Better: Japan’s Mastery of the Miniature (1984), argues that the triumph
of Japanese microelectronics is rooted in age old cultural impulses. The
impulse to miniaturize evident in bonzai, haiku
poetry, and other aspects of Japanese culture, appears in technical artifacts
too. Lee cites the early case of the folding fan. Flat fans invented in
Of course, once capital goods markets are flooded with miniaturized components, every country in the world can make small products without cultural afterthoughts. But if Lee is right, the origin of this trend would lie in a specific national culture. In a sense, aspects of that culture are communicated worldwide through the technical specifications of its products.
Nishida’s Theory of the Global World
In the first part of this paper I
have illustrated a thesis about the globalization of technology with stories
about
The context of Nishida’s argument
was the growing self-assertion of
The link between Nishida’s position and Japanese imperialism is thus complex and controversial. I have already contributed to that debate in several articles and will return briefly to this topic in the conclusion of this paper. However, my main interest here lies elsewhere, in the parallel I find between the structure of technological globalization as I have explained it above and Nishida’s conception of a “global world (sekaiteki sekai).” I will show that the contrast between branching and layering underlies this conception, although Nishida misses the technological implications of his approach.
Nishida argues that until modern
times, the world had what he calls a “horizontal” structure, that is it
consisted of nations lying side by side on a globe that separated rather than
united them. The concept of “world” was necessarily “abstract” during the long
period that preceded the modern age. By this Nishida means that “world” was a
concept only, not an active force in the lives of nations. This condition was
unusually prolonged in the case of
International commerce transformed this horizontal world by bringing all the nations into intense contact with each other. The result was the emergence of what Nishida calls a “vertical” world, a world in which nations struggle for pre-eminence. Every nation now participates actively in the life of its neighbors, and even quite remote nations, through war, trade, and the movement of people and ideas. But there is no harmonious fusion here but rather a hardening of identities that leads ultimately to war. In this context, nationalism emerges as a survival response to the threat of foreign domination.
Nishida has several other terminologies for this shift that sound rather odd to our contemporary ears but which are ultimately suggestive. Perhaps the best way to understand his approach is as a dialectic of conceptual frameworks, each one inadequate by itself to describe social reality, but able to do so all together in a mutually correcting system of categories. The complexity of Nishida’s argument is supposed, therefore, to correspond to the actual difficulty of thinking global sociality.
Nishida develops the contrast of
horizontal and vertical world further in terms of the relation of the “many” to
the “one” in space and time. The many nations dispersed in space enter into
interaction in the modern world. Interaction in history implies more than the
mechanical contact of externally related things. Each nation must “express”
itself in the world in the sense of enacting the meanings carried in its
culture. This can lead to conflict as nations attempt to impose their
perspective on all the others. But interaction also requires commonality. Two
completely alien entities cannot interact. At each stage in modern history a
common framework is supplied by a dominant nation that defines itself as a
unifying “world” for all the others. The unification involves the imposition of
a general form on the struggle of the particular nations. Nishida gives the
example of
The passage from the many to the
one is also reflected in the relations of space and time. The dispersal of the
nations in space, their “manyness,” is complemented
by the simultaneity of their co-existence in a unifying temporal dimension. The
struggles of the nations have an outcome which is this unity. Thus in modern
times, geography is subordinated to history. The unifying nation represents
time for this world and as such loses itself in the process of unification it
imposes.
The mechanical and the organic form yet another terminological couple Nishida explores. The mechanical world is made of externally related things dispersed in space. Mechanically related things can properly be called individual. Their multiplicity forms an “individual many” (kobutsuteki ta) (Nishida 1991, 29-31). The organic world consists of wholes oriented toward a telos in time. The whole is thus a subject of action, a “holistic one” (zentaiteki ichi) (Nishida 1991, 37-38). Society is not adequately described as mechanical because it forms a whole, and yet it is not organic because its members are fully independent individuals, not a herd. The undecidability of the mechanical and the organic gestures toward the originality of the social world, which cannot be represented by either concept because it embraces both.
Nishida introduces the concept of “place” (basho) in a final attempt to conceptualize this “self-contradictory” globalized world. Place in Nishida’s technical sense of the term is the “third” element or medium “in” which interacting agents meet. Had they nothing in common, they could not meet and interact. But what is it that holds them together? A separate entity would itself require a place to interact with the actors. The basho is thus not something external to the interaction but a structure of the interaction itself. This structure arises as each actor “negates itself” to become the “world” for the other, i.e. the place of the interaction (Nishida 1991, 30).
It is not easy to interpret this obscure formulation. It seems to mean that in acting, the self becomes an object for the other; it is encountered in the other’s path. But the self is not just any object, but the environment to which the other must react in asserting itself as subject. As the other reacts, it defines itself anew and so its identity depends on the action of the self. But the determination of the other by the self is only half the cycle; the action of the other has an equivalent impact on the self. Interaction is the endless switching of these roles, a circulation of self-transforming realizations (jikaku) achieved through contact with an other self (Nishida, 1970: 78-79, 134-135).
Nishida has two ways of talking
about the role of place in the modern world. Sometimes he writes as though the
globalizing nation serves as the “place” of interaction for the other nations
of the world, the scene of interaction. This place can be imposed by domination
or freely consented as cultural supremacy, the difference Nishida assumes
between
On the basis of this analysis, Nishida asserts the importance of all modern cultures. Western dominance is only a passing phase, about to give way to an age of Asian self-assertion. The destiny of the human race is to fruitfully combine Western and Eastern culture in a “contradictory self-identity.” This concept refers to a synthesis of (national) individuality and (global) totality in which the emerging world culture is supposed to consist.
There is a sense in which this global world constitutes a single being which changes through an inner dynamic. Thus the world “determines itself.” But the identities of the particular nations are not lost in this unified object. The resulting world culture will not replace national cultures. Something more subtle is involved. Nishida writes, “A true world culture will be formed only by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints, but simultaneously developing themselves through global mediation” (Nishida 1970, 254). World culture is a pure form, a “place” or field of interaction, and not a particularistic alternative to existing national cultures. They persist and are a continuing source of change and progress. The process of self-determination is thus free in the sense of being internally creative; it is not determined by extrinsic forces or atemporal laws. There is nothing “outside” the world that could influence or control it. Even the laws of natural science must be located inside the world as particular historically conditioned acts of thought (Nishida 1991, 36).
Here is a passage in which Nishida describes the global world as he envisages it: “Every nation/people is established on a historical foundation and possesses a world-historical mission, thereby having a historical life of its own. For nations/peoples to form a global world through self-realization and self-transcendence, each must first of all form a particular world in accordance with its own regional tradition. These particular worlds, each based on a historical foundation, unite to form a global world. Each nation/people lives its own unique historical life and at the same time joins in a united global world through carrying out a world historical mission” (Nishida 1965a, 428; Arisaka 1996, 101-102).
However, this cosmopolitan
argument culminates strangely in the claim that
The vagueness of this conclusion
is disturbing. Nishida explicitly condemns imperialism and argues that
But just as one can seriously
question the depth of the connection between Nazism and Heidegger’s thought, if
not his actions, similar doubts arise around Nishida’s nationalism. There is no
clear logical connection between his claims about
So far as I can tell, Nishida was
not bothered by this question, although he should have been. He claims that
Technology and Place
Despite these problems, I do not think this should be the last word on Nishida’s theory of globalization. Once its nationalistic excrescence is removed, the structure of the theory is truly interesting. Nishida’s basic claim is that the world has moved from a horizontal to a vertical structure, from indifferent co-existence in space to mutual involvement in time in a conflictual but creative process of global unification. The emerging unity does not efface national differences but incorporates them into an evolving world culture that is best defined as a “place” of encounter and dialogue. An common underlying framework makes possible the communication of nations amidst their conflicts.
This claim precisely parallels the analysis of the passage from branching to layered development presented in the first part of this paper. The various branches of technology in a spatially dispersed world finally meet in the global world of modern times. There they assert themselves and come into conflict, but there they also inform each other with ideas and inventions drawn from diverse national traditions. The outcome, global technology, forms a sort of “place” in Nishida’s sense, a scene on which the encounter between nations proceeds with global cultural consequences, but without eliminating the originality and difference of the constitutive national cultures. The layering process in which each culture expresses itself while at the same time contributing to a single fund of invention is thus precisely congruent with Nishida’s conception of world culture.
Nishida comes close to making some such connection. He understands that historical action is inextricably intertwined with technical creation. He explains that “Culture includes technique” (Nishida 1991, 61). Technique is an expression of a people’s spirit as it interacts with the environment, and through that interaction forms itself (Nishida 1991, 57; Nishida 1965c, 328). “We create things through technique and in creating them we create ourselves” (Nishida 1991, 33, Nishida 1965c, 297). Although Nishida did not do so, one can build on these observations and carry them a step further by relating this social conception of technique to his notion of global cultural interaction in the 20th Century.
Nishida himself was witness to
this process as it unfolded in
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Yoko Arisaka and Mayuko Uehara for generous help with translations and interpretation of Nishida. They have corrected many misunderstandings; those that remain are my own.
Bibliography
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Critical Theory of Technology
An Autobiographical Note
In
the mid 1960s I went to
Nevertheless, there were tremendous tensions of another type in this very conformist society, and they finally exploded the cozy world of the 1950s. The question was, what did those tensions mean, from what sources did they emerge, what was their object and destiny? Many of us who were living those tensions had a different answer from Marcuse. He followed his own teacher, Heidegger, more than he admitted to himself and to us in holding that the one-dimensional technological universe of advanced industrial society was a closed or nearly closed system in which opposition was impossible or nearly impossible (Marcuse 1964, xlvii). When he began to see evidence of widespread opposition, he theorized it as a new cultural dispensation — Heidegger would have said "revealing." As we read Marcuse then, it seemed that the source of this revealing lay in the instincts and was thus external to the one-dimensional society.
I
have recently completed a book on Heidegger and Marcuse in which I develop a
more sympathetic reading of Marcuse’s theory of revolution, but at the time
many of us thought that this theory was too negative and unhistorical (Feenberg
2004). As we created movements against the War in
I
recall writing a long essay for Marcuse in 1966 called "Beyond
One-Dimensionality" in which I tried to show how a one-dimensional society
could yield up a new dialectic. Although
my current work on technology is quite different from this early effort, the
pattern is similar. I am still looking for a way of identifying and explaining
internal tensions in a quasi-one-dimensional technological universe. In this my
work departs not only from the first generation of the
Under the influence of both Rawls and Habermas, political philosophy abstracts systematically from technology and so overlooks the dystopian potential of advanced society. It regards the technical sphere as a neutral background against which individuals and groups pursue personal and political goals. These goals are usually seen as more or less rationally justifiable ideas about rights, the good life, and so on. In this conception, technology simply cancels out as a constant and politics is a matter of opinion. As a philosopher of technology, I reject this view. What it means to be human is decided not just in our beliefs but in large part in the shape of our tools. And to the extent that we are able to plan and manage technical development through various public processes and private choices, we have some control over our own humanity.
After the 1960s the surviving sources of left initiative were such non-Marxist movements as feminism and environmentalism. The society which had been the object of global condemnation in the 1960s was now challenged in concrete and specific ways. Industrial pollution, childbirth practices, experimental treatment of AIDS, all were contested by these new social movements in terms of the consequences of technical designs for human lives, health, and dignity. Comparable issues appeared in the labor movement around the deskilling of production technology.
My first book on philosophy of technology, Critical Theory of Technology, was published in 1991. In this book I followed Marcuse in arguing that “technology is ideology”(Feenberg 1991). But I emphasized an aspect of Marcuse’s position that has not been widely noted, namely, his claim that the politics of technology depends on contingent features of technical design determined by a civilizational project, and are not due to the “essence” of technology in Heidegger’s sense. This approach suggests that different designs might support a more democratic society based on democratic self-organization in the technical sphere itself.
The argument of this book departed from Marcuse’s in an important respect. We are much more skeptical today of references to “nature” than in the period when Critical Theory was formulated. To avoid the naturalism and essentialism with which Marcuse is often (unfairly) charged I attempted to construct a non-ontological critique of technology that would nevertheless conserve the critical force of Marcuse’s ontological critique. I concluded that wherever social relations are mediated by modern technology, it should be possible to introduce more democratic controls and to redesign the technology to accommodate greater inputs of skill and initiative.
These abstract arguments were a reflection not only of my reading of Marcuse but also of an extraordinary opportunity I enjoyed to participate in another kind of revolution, the computer revolution. In 1982 I was asked to help create the first program of online education (Feenberg, 1993). At the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, we employed a computer network to communicate with students for an extended program of study long before the Internet was opened to the public. This involvement brought me directly into contact with an emerging technical field and obliged me to learn its rudiments. I witnessed the role of human action in orienting the development of technology. Democratic aspirations for technology made sense in this context as we reinvented the computer to serve the humane purposes of education. Later, when the automation of higher education on the Internet was proposed, I saw my own theory of the ambivalence of technology exemplified in practice. I analyze this example in detail in Transforming Technology (Feenberg 2002, chap. 5). I will briefly sketch that analysis in the conclusion to this talk.
Sociology
of technology was undergoing a revolution of its own in the 1980s with the
emergence of the contending schools of social constructivism and actor network
theory in
I now trace the tensions in the “one-dimensional” society to the difference in the way in which the world is experienced by those who administer it and those who are subject to it. Many years of struggles over technology in fields as diverse as medicine and environmentalism have shown that this difference is politically significant and prevents the closure Marcuse feared while also confounding the outdated schemas of traditional political philosophy.
Had I only known, Marcuse himself provided the basis for this analysis in one of his early essays, written under the influence of and in reaction to Heidegger. Marcuse asks, “is the world ‘the same’ even for all forms of Dasein present within a concrete historical situation? Obviously not. It is not only that the world of significance varies among particular contemporary cultural regions and groups, but also that, within any one of these, abysses of meaning may open up between different worlds Precisely in the most existentially essential behavior, no understanding exists between the world of the high-capitalist bourgeois and that of the small farmer or proletarian. Here the examination is forced to confront the question of the material constitution of historicity, a breakthrough that Heidegger neither achieves nor even gestures toward”(Marcuse 1978, 364-65).
The theory I am developing carries out the program implicit in these remarks. I conceive of technical arrangements as instituting a "world" in something like Heidegger's sense, a framework within which practices are generated and perceptions ordered. Different worlds, flowing from different technical arrangements and different positions within them, privilege some aspects of the human being and marginalize others. Goals flow from the nature and limits of worlds and not from arbitrary opinions. The clash between different worlds is inevitable in a society based on technological domination.
These arguments were developed in Alternative Modernity (1995) and Questioning Technology (1999). In these books I moved from a post-Marxist to what I call a “critical constructivist” position and attempted to develop a more empirical orientation toward the study of technology.[5] The new edition of Critical Theory of Technology (1991), entitled Transforming Technology (2002), brings the earlier exposition of the theory into line with this later position. The three books now present different aspects of the same basic theory.
A Sketch of the Theory
Technology and Finitude
I want to begin this preliminary sketch of my theory by recalling the most basic problematic of my work. Radical critics of technology, from Mumford and Marcuse on down to the present, generally agree that the rise of technocratic power East and West has overshadowed class struggle. I too argue that the central issue for politics today is the prevalence of technocratic administration and the threat it poses to the exercise of human agency. This leads me to emphasize the essentially hierarchical nature of technical action, the asymmetrical relation between actor and object which, when it overtakes large swaths of human relations, tends to create a dystopian system.
This
argument is meant to draw out the most basic implications of the
Technical action represents a partial escape from the human condition. We call an action “technical” when the impact on the object is out of all proportion to the return feedback affecting the actor. We hurtle two tons of metal down the freeway while sitting in comfort listening to Mozart or the Beatles. This typical instance of technical action is purposely framed here to dramatize the independence of actor from object. In the larger scheme of things, the driver on the freeway may be at peace in his car but the city he inhabits with millions of other drivers is his life environment and it is shaped by the automobile into a type of place which has major impacts on him. So the technical subject does not escape from the logic of finitude after all. But the reciprocity of finite action is dissipated or deferred in such a way as to create the space of a necessary illusion of transcendence.
Heidegger and Marcuse understand this illusion as the structure of modern experience. According to Heidegger’s history of being, the modern “revealing” is biased by a tendency to take every object as a potential raw material for technical action. Objects enter our experience only in so far as we notice their usefulness in the technological system. Release from this form of experience may come from a new mode of revealing but Heidegger has no idea how revealings come and go.
Like Marcuse, I relate the technological revealing not to the history of being, but to the consequences of persisting divisions between classes and between rulers and ruled in technically mediated institutions of all types. Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many. This is a possibility inscribed in the very structure of technical action which establishes a one way direction of cause and effect.
Technology is a two-sided phenomenon: on the one hand the operator, on the other the object. Where both operator and object are human beings, technical action is an exercise of power. Where, further, society is organized around technology, technological power is the principle form of power in the society. It is realized through designs which narrow the range of interests and concerns that can be represented by the normal functioning of the technology and the institutions which depend on it. This narrowing distorts the structure of experience and causes human suffering and damage to the natural environment.
The exercise of technical power evokes resistances of a new type immanent to the one-dimensional technical system. Those excluded from the design process eventually notice the undesirable consequences of technologies and protest. Opening up technology to a wider range of interests and concerns could lead to its redesign for greater compatibility with the human and natural limits on technical action. A democratic transformation from below can shorten the feedback loops from damaged human lives and nature and guide a radical reform of the technical sphere.
Instrumentalization Theory
Much philosophy of technology offers very abstract and unhistorical accounts of the essence of technology. These accounts appear painfully thin compared to the rich complexity revealed in social studies of technology. Yet technology has the distinguishing features sketched above and these have normative implications. As Marcuse argued in One-Dimensional Man, the choice of a technical rather than a political or moral solution to a social problem is politically and morally significant. The dilemma is sharply etched in political terms. Most essentialist philosophy of technology is critical of modernity, even anti-modern, while most empirical research on technologies ignores the larger issue of modernity and thus appears uncritical, even conformist, to philosophers of technology (Feenberg 2003).
I find it difficult to explain my solution to this dilemma as it crosses lines we are used to standing behind. These lines cleanly separate the substantivist critique of technology as we find it in Heidegger from the constructivism of many contemporary historians and sociologists. These two approaches are usually seen as totally opposed. Nevertheless, there is something obviously right in both. I have therefore attempted to combine their insights in a common framework which I call “instrumentalization theory.”
Instrumentalization theory holds that technology must be analyzed at two levels, the level of our original functional relation to reality and the level of design and implementation. At the first level, we seek and find affordances that can be mobilized in devices and systems by decontextualizing the objects of experience and reducing them to their useful properties. This involves a process of de-worlding in which objects are torn out of their original contexts and exposed to analysis and manipulation while subjects are positioned for distanced control. Modern societies are unique in de-worlding human beings in order to subject them to technical action—we call it management—and in prolonging the basic gesture of de-worlding theoretically in technical disciplines which become the basis for complex technical networks.
At the second level, we introduce designs that can be integrated with other already existing devices and systems and with various social constraints such as ethical and aesthetic principles. The primary level simplifies objects for incorporation into a device while the secondary level integrates the simplified objects to a natural and social environment. This involves a process which, following Heidegger, we can call “disclosure” or “revealing” of a world. Disclosing involves a complementary process of realization which qualifies the original functionalization by orienting it toward a new world involving those same objects and subjects.
These two levels are analytically distinguished. No matter how abstract the affordances identified at the primary level, they carry social content from the secondary level in the elementary contingencies of a particular approach to the materials. Similarly, secondary instrumentalizations such as design specifications presuppose the identification of the affordances to be assembled and concretized. This is an important point. Cutting down a tree to make lumber and building a house with it are not the primary and secondary instrumentalizations respectively. Cutting down a tree “decontextualizes” it, but in line with various technical, legal and aesthetic considerations determining what kinds of trees can become lumber of what size and shape and are salable as such. The act of cutting down the tree is thus not simply “primary” but involves both levels as one would expect of an analytic distinction.
Analysis at the first level is inspired by categories introduced by Heidegger and other substantivist critics of technology. However, because I do not ontologize those categories, nor treat them as a full account of the essence of technology, I believe I am able to avoid many of the problems associated with substantivism, particularly its anti-modernism. Analysis at the second level is inspired by empirical study of technology in the constructivist vein. I focus especially on the way actors perceive the meanings of the devices and systems they design and use. But again, I am selective in drawing on this tradition. I do not accept its exaggerated and largely rhetorical empiricism and its rejection of the categories of traditional social theory. Instead, I attempt to integrate its methodological insights to a more broadly conceived theory of modernity.
Culture
Philosophy of technology demystifies the claims to rational necessity and universality of technical decisions. In the 1980s, the constructivist turn in technology studies offered a methodologically fruitful approach to demonstrating this in a wide range of concrete cases. Constructivists show that many possible configurations of resources can yield a working device capable of efficiently fulfilling its function. The different interests of the various actors involved in design are reflected in subtle differences in function and preferences for one or another design of what is nominally the same device. Social choices intervene in the selection of the problem definition as well as its solution. Technology is socially relative and the outcome of technical choices is a world that supports the way of life of one or another influential social group. On these terms the technocratic tendencies of modern societies could be interpreted as an effect of limiting the groups able to intervene in design to technical experts and the corporate and politics elites they serve.
Constructivism presupposes that there are many different solutions to technical problems. Some sort of meta-ranking is therefore necessary to choose between them. In determinist and instrumentalist accounts, efficiency serves as the unique principle of meta-ranking. But contemporary technology studies contests that view and proposes that many factors besides efficiency play a role in design choice. Efficiency is not decisive in explaining the success or failure of alternative designs since several viable options usually compete at the inception of a line of development. Technology is “underdetermined” by the criterion of efficiency and responsive to the various particular interests that select among these options.
In my formulation of this thesis, I argue that the intervention of interests does not necessarily reduce efficiency, but biases its achievement according to a broader social program. I have introduced the concept of "technical code" to articulate this relationship between social and technical requirements. A technical code is the realization of an interest in a technically coherent solution to a problem.
Where such codes are reinforced by individuals’ perceived self-interest and law, their political import usually passes unnoticed. This is what it means to call a certain way of life culturally secured and a corresponding power hegemonic. Just as political philosophy problematizes cultural formations that have rooted themselves in law, so philosophy of technology problematizes formations that have successfully rooted themselves in technical codes.
This account helps to understand the nature of real world ethical controversies involving technology. Often these turn on the supposed opposition of current standards of technical efficiency and values. I have tried to show that this opposition is factitious, that often current technical methods or standards were once discursively formulated as values and at some time in the past translated into the technical codes we take for granted today. This point is quite important for answering the usual so-called practical objections to ethical arguments for social and technological reform.
Operational Autonomy
For many of critics of technological society, Marx is now irrelevant, an outdated critic of capitalist economics. I disagree. I believe Marx had important insights for philosophy of technology. He focused so exclusively on production because production was the principal domain of application of technology in his time. With the penetration of technical mediation into every sphere of social life, the contradictions and potentials he identified in technology follow as well. In my work I attempt to bring Marx’s theory to bear on general theme of technocratic power.
In
Marx the capitalist is ultimately distinguished not so much by ownership of
wealth as by control of the conditions of labor. The owner of a factory has not
merely an economic interest in what goes on within it, but also a technical
interest. By reorganizing the work process, he can increase production and
profits. Control of the work process, in turn, leads to new ideas for machinery
and the mechanization of industry follows in short order. This leads over time
to the invention of a specific type of machinery which deskills workers and
requires management. Management acts technically on persons, extending the
hierarchy of technical subject and object into human relations in pursuit of
efficiency. Eventually professional managers represent and in some sense
replace owners in control of the new industrial organizations. This is what
Marx qualifies as the impersonal domination inherent in capitalism in
contradistinction to the personal domination of earlier social formations. It
is a domination embodied in the design of tools and the organization of
production. In a final stage, which Marx did not anticipate, techniques of
management and organization and types of technology first applied to the
private sector are exported to the public sector where they influence fields
such as government administration, medicine, and education. The whole life
environment of society comes under the rule of technique. In this form the
essence of the capitalist system can be transferred to socialist regimes built
on the model of the
The entire development of modern societies is thus marked by the paradigm of unqualified control over the labor process on which capitalist industrialism rests. It is this control which orients technical development toward disempowering workers and the massification of the public. I call this control "operational autonomy," the freedom of the owner or his representative to make independent decisions about how to carry on the business of the organization, regardless of the views or interests of subordinate actors and the surrounding community. The operational autonomy of management and administration positions them in a technical relation to the world, safe from the consequences of their own actions. In addition, it enables them to reproduce the conditions of their own supremacy at each iteration of the technologies they command. 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. Technocracy armors itself against public pressures, sacrifices values, and ignores needs incompatible with its own reproduction and the perpetuation of its technical traditions.
The technocratic tendency of modern societies represents one possible path of development, a path that is peculiarly truncated by the demands of power. Like Dewey and, it may surprise you to learn, like Marcuse, I believe technology has other beneficial potentials that are suppressed under the capitalism and state socialism that could emerge along a different developmental path. In subjecting human beings to technical control at the expense of traditional modes of life while sharply restricting participation in design, technocracy perpetuates elite power structures inherited from the past in technically rational forms. In the process it mutilates not just human beings and nature, but technology as well. A different power structure would innovate a different technology with different consequences. It is in the context of technocracy that agency appears as a central democratic value not just for excluded minorities but for everyone.
Is this just a long detour back to the notion of the neutrality of technology? I do not believe so. Neutrality generally refers to the indifference of a specific means to the range of possible ends it can serve. If we assume that technology as we know it today is indifferent with respect to human ends in general, then indeed we have neutralized it. and placed it beyond possible controversy. Alternatively, it might be argued that technology as such is neutral with respect to all the ends that can be technically served. However, I do not hold either position. There is no such thing as technology as such. Today we employ this specific technology with limitations that are due not only to the state of our knowledge but also to the power structures that bias this knowledge and its applications. This really existing contemporary technology is not neutral but favors specific ends and obstructs others.
The larger implication of this approach has to do with the ethical limits of the technical codes elaborated under the rule of operational autonomy. The very same process in which capitalists and technocrats were freed to make technical decisions without regard for the needs of workers and communities generated a wealth of new “values,” ethical demands forced to seek voice discursively. Most fundamentally, democratization of technology is about finding new ways of privileging these excluded values and realizing them in the new technical arrangements.
A fuller realization of technology is possible and necessary. We are more and more frequently alerted to this necessity by the threatening side effects of technological advance. Technology “bites back,” as Edward Tenner reminds us, with fearful consequence as the deferred feedback loops that join technical subject and object become more obtrusive (Tenner 1996). The very success of our technology in modifying nature insures that these loops will grow shorter as we disturb nature more violently in attempting to control it. In a society such as ours, which is completely organized around technology, the threat to survival is clear.
Resistance
What can be done to reverse the tide? I argue that only the democratization of technology can help. This requires in the first instance shattering the illusion of transcendence by revealing the feedback loops to the technical actor. The spread of knowledge by itself is not enough to accomplish this. For knowledge to be taken seriously, the range of interests represented by the actor must be enlarged so as to make it more difficult to offload feedback from the object onto disempowered groups. But only a democratically constituted alliance of actors, embracing those very groups, is sufficiently exposed to the consequences its own actions to resist harmful projects and designs at the outset. Such a broadly constituted democratic technical alliance would take into account destructive effects of technology on the natural environment as well as on human beings.
Democratic movements in the technical sphere aim to constitute such alliances. For my account of these democratic resistances, I rely on the work of Michel de Certeau (de Certeau 1980). De Certeau offers an interesting interpretation of Foucault's theory of power which can be applied to highlight the two-sided nature of technology. He distinguishes between the strategies of groups with an institutional base from which to exercise power and the tactics of those subject to that power and who, lacking a base for acting continuously and legitimately, maneuver and improvise micropolitical resistances. Note that de Certeau does not personalize power as a possession of individuals but articulates the Foucauldian correlation of power and resistance. This works remarkably well as a way of thinking about immanent tensions within technically mediated organizations, not surprisingly given Foucault’s concern with institutions based on scientific-technical “regimes of truth.”
Technological systems impose technical management on human beings. Some manage, others are managed. These two positions correspond to de Certeau’s strategic and tactical standpoints. The world appears quite differently from these two positions. The strategic standpoint privileges considerations of control and efficiency and looks for affordances, precisely what Heidegger criticizes in technology. My most basic complaint about Heidegger is that he himself adopts unthinkingly the strategic standpoint on technology in order to condemn it. He sees it exclusively as a system of control and overlooks its role in the lives of those subordinate to it.
The tactical standpoint of those subordinates is far richer. It is the everyday lifeworld of a modern society in which devices form a nearly total environment. In this environment, the individuals identify and pursue meanings. Power is only tangentially at stake in most interactions, and when it becomes an issue, resistance is temporary and limited in scope by the position of the individuals in the system. Yet insofar as masses of individuals are enrolled into technical systems, resistances will inevitably arise and can weigh on the future design and configuration of the systems and their products.
Consider the example of air pollution. So long as those responsible for it could escape the health consequences of their actions to green suburbs, leaving poor urban dwellers to breath filthy air, there was little support for technical solutions to the problem. Pollution controls were seen as costly and unproductive by those with the power to implement them. Eventually, a democratic political process sparked by the spread of the problem and protests by the victims and their advocates legitimated the externalized interests of the victims. Only then was it possible to assemble a social subject including both rich and poor able to make the necessary reforms. This subject finally forced a redesign of the automobile and other sources of pollution, taking human health into account. This is an example of the politics of holistic design that will lead ultimately to a more holistic technological system.
An adequate understanding of the substance of our common life cannot ignore technology. How we configure and design cities, transportation systems, communication media, agriculture and industrial production is a political matter. And we are making more and more choices about health and knowledge in designing the technologies on which medicine and education increasingly rely. Furthermore, the kinds of things it seems plausible to propose as advances or alternatives are to a great extent conditioned by the failures of the existing technologies and the possibilities they suggest. The once controversial claim that technology is political now seems obvious.
An Application of the Theory
Terminal Subjects
I want to conclude these reflections with an example with which I am personally familiar, which I hope will illustrate the fruitfulness of my approach. I have been involved with the evolution of communication by computer since the early 1980s both as an active participant in innovation and as a researcher. I came to this technology with a background in modernity theory, specifically Heidegger and Marcuse, but it quickly became apparent that they offered little guidance in understanding computerization. Their theories emphasized the role of technologies in dominating nature and human beings. Heidegger dismissed the computer as the pure type of modernity’s machinery of control. Its de-worlding power reaches language itself which is reduced to the mere position of a switch (Heidegger 1998, 140).
But what we were witnessing in the early 1980s was something quite different, the contested emergence of the new communicative practices of online community. Subsequently, we have seen cultural critics inspired by modernity theory recycle the old approach for this new application, denouncing, for example, the supposed degradation of human communication on the Internet. Albert Borgmann argues that computer networks de-world the person, reducing human beings to a flow of data the “user” can easily control (Borgmann 1992, 108). The terminal subject is basically an asocial monster despite the appearance of interaction online. But that reaction presupposes that computers are actually a communication medium, if an inferior one, precisely the issue twenty years ago. The prior question that must therefore be posed concerns the emergence of the medium itself. Most recently the debate over computerization has touched higher education, where proposals for automated online learning have met determined faculty resistance in the name of human values. Meanwhile, actual online education is emerging as a new kind of communicative practice (Feenberg 2002 chap. 5).
The pattern of these debates is suggestive. Approaches base on modernity theory are uniformly negative and fail to explain the experience of participants in computer communication. But this experience can be analyzed in terms of instrumentalization theory. The computer simplifies a full blown person into a “user” in order to incorporate him or her into the network. Users are decontextualized in the sense that they are stripped of body and community in front of the terminal and positioned as detached technical subjects. At the same time, a highly simplified world is disclosed to the user which is open to the initiatives of rational consumers. They are called to exercise choice in this world.
The poverty of this world appears to be a function of the very radical de-worlding involved in computing. However, we will see that this is not the correct explanation of what actually occurs. Nevertheless, the critique is not entirely artificial; there are types of online activity that confirm it and certain powerful actors do seek enhanced control through computerization. But most modernity theorists overlook the struggles and innovations of users engaged in appropriating the medium to create online communities or legitimate educational innovations. In ignoring or dismissing these aspects of computerization, they fall back into a more or less disguised determinism.
The “posthumanist” approach to the computer inspired by commentators in cultural studies suffers from related problems. This approach often leads to a singular focus on the most “dehumanizing” aspects of computerization, such as anonymous communication, online role playing, and cybersex (Turkle 1995). Paradoxically, these aspects of the online experience are interpreted in a positive light as the transcendence of the “centered” self of modernity (Stone 1995). But such posthumanism is ultimately complicit with the humanistic critique of computerization it pretends to transcend in that it accepts a similar definition of the limits of online interaction. Again, what is missing is any sense of the transformations the technology undergoes at the hands of users animated by more traditional visions than one would suspect from this choice of themes (Feenberg and Barney 2004).
The effective synthesis of these various approaches would offer a more complete picture of computerization than any one of them alone. In my writings in this field I have tried to accomplish this. I set out not from a hypothesis about the essence of the computer, for example, that it privileges control or communication, humanist or posthumanist values, but rather from an analysis of the way in which such hypotheses influence the actors themselves, shaping design and usage.
The lifeworld of technology is the medium within which the actors engage with the computer. In this lifeworld, processes of interpretation are central. Technical resources are not simply pregiven but acquire their meaning through these processes. As computer networks developed, communication functions were often introduced by users rather than treated as normal affordances of the medium by the originators of the systems. In Latour’s language, the “collective” is re-formed around the contested constitution of the computer as this or that type of mediation responsive to this or that actor’s program. To make sense of this history, the competing visions of designers and users must be introduced as a significant shaping force. The contests between control and communication, humanism and posthumanism must be the focus of the study of innovations such as the Internet.
Online Education
Consider the case of the current struggle over the future of online education (Feenberg 2002, chap. 5). Over the past few years, corporate strategists, state legislators, top university administrators, and “futurologists” have lined up behind a vision of online education based on automation and deskilling. Their goal is to replace (at least for the masses) face-to-face teaching by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitely reproducible at decreasing unit cost, like CDs, videos, or software. The overhead of education would decline sharply and the education “business” would finally become profitable. This is “modernization” with a vengeance.
In opposition to this vision, faculty have mobilized in defense of the human touch. This humanistic opposition to computerization takes two very different forms. There are those who are opposed in principle to any electronic mediation of education. This position has no effect on the quality of computerization but only on its pace. But there are also numerous faculty who favor a model of online education that depends on human interaction on computer networks. On this side of the debate, a very different conception of modernity prevails. In this alternative conception, to be modern is to multiply opportunities for and modes of communication. The meaning of the computer shifts from a coldly rational information source to a communication medium, a support for human development and online community. This alternative can be traced down to the level of technical design, for example, the conception of educational software and the role of asynchronous discussion forums.
These approaches to online education can be analyzed in terms of the model of de-worlding and disclosing introduced above. Educational automation decontextualizes both the learner and the educational “product” by breaking them loose from the existing world of the university. The world disclosed on this basis confronts the learner as technical subject with menus, exercises, and questionnaires rather than with other human beings engaged in a shared learning process.
The faculty’s model of online education involves a much more complex secondary instrumentalization of the computer in the disclosure of a much richer world. The original positioning of the user is similar: the person facing a machine. But the machine is not a window onto an information mall but rather opens up onto a social world. The terminal subject is involved as a person in a new kind of social activity and is not limited by a set of canned menu options to the role of individual consumer. The corresponding software opens the range of the subject's initiative far more widely than an automated design. This is a more democratic conception of networking that engages it across a wider range of human needs.
The analysis of the dispute over educational networking reveals patterns which appear throughout modern society. In the domain of media, these patterns involve playing off primary and secondary instrumentalizations in different combinations that privilege either a technocratic model of control or a democratic model of communication. Characteristically, a technocratic notion of modernity inspires a positioning of the user that sharply restricts potential initiative, while a democratic conception enlarges initiative in more complex virtual worlds. Parallel analyses of production technology or environmental problems would reveal similar patterns that could be clarified by reference to the actors’ perspectives in similar ways.
Conclusion
Philosophy of technology has come a long way since Heidegger and Marcuse. Inspiring as are these thinkers, we need to devise our own response to the situation in which we find ourselves. Capitalism has survived its various crises and now organizes the entire globe in a fantastic web of connections with contradictory consequences. Manufacturing flows out of the advanced countries to the low wage periphery as diseases flow in. The Internet opens fantastic new opportunities for human communication, and is inundated with commercialism. Human rights proves a challenge to regressive customs in some countries while providing alibis for new imperialist ventures in others. Environmental awareness has never been greater, yet nothing much is done to address looming disasters such as global warming. Nuclear proliferation is finally fought with energy in a world in which more and more countries have good reasons for acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is sad that for the most part philosophy has nothing to contribute to the discussion of this astonishing situation. Philosophy of technology is marginalized in the profession with the result that philosophy itself has become ever more marginal to the culture. Unfortunately, for reasons social scientists ought to examine, most discussion of technology in the social sciences is politically toothless. But the importance of these issues cannot therefore be measured in purely professional terms.
Building an integrated and unified picture of our world has become far more difficult as technical advances break down the barriers between spheres of activity to which the division between disciplines corresponds. I believe that critical theory of technology offers a platform for reconciling many apparently conflicting strands of reflection on technology. Only through an approach that is both critical and empirically oriented is it possible to make sense of what is going on around us now. The first generation of Critical Theorists called for just such a synthesis of theoretical and empirical approaches.
Critical Theory was above all dedicated to interpreting the world in the light of its potentialities. Those potentialities are identified through serious study of what is. Empirical research can thus be more than a mere gathering of facts and can inform an argument with our times. Philosophy of technology can join together the two extremes – potentiality and actuality – norms and facts – in a way no other discipline can rival. It must challenge the disciplinary prejudices that confine research and study in narrow channels and open perspectives on the future.
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Modernity Theory and Technology Studies: Reflections on Bridging the Gap
Posing the Problem
Theories of modernity and technology studies have both made great strides in recent years, but remain quite disconnected despite the obvious overlap in their concerns. How can one expect to understand modernity without an adequate account of the technological developments that make it possible, and how can one study specific technologies without a theory of the larger society in which they develop? These questions have not even been posed, much less answered persuasively, by most leading contributors to the fields.
Modernity theory relies on the key notion of rationalization
to explain the uniqueness of modern societies. Rationalization refers to the
generalization of technical rationality as a cultural form, specifically, the
introduction of calculation and control into social processes with a consequent
increase in efficiency. But rationalization also reduces the normative and
qualitative richness of the traditional social world, exposing social reality
to technical manipulation. Modernity theories often claim that this reduction
impoverishes our relation to the world. Technological domination is a key theme
in this tradition, which includes the
Technology studies points out the social complexity of technology, the multiple actors involved with its creation and the consequent richness of the values embedded in design. But if technology and society are not substantial "things" belonging to separate spheres, it makes no sense to claim that technology dominates society and transforms its values. Rather, technology is a social phenomenon through and through, no more nor less significant than any other social phenomenon.
But technology studies loses part of the truth when it emphasizes only the social complexity and embeddedness of technology and minimizes the distinctive emphasis on loss of meaning and agency that accompanies technical rationalization. These trends depend on the differentiation of institutions such as corporations that wield technical rationality. Limited though that differentiation may be, it nevertheless makes it possible to grasp any concrete value or thing as a manipulable variable, and this includes human beings themselves. In failing to bring these controversial realities into focus, technology studies has sterilized itself politically.
Is it possible to find some truth in both these positions or are they mutually exclusive as they certainly appear to be at first sight? I believe a synthesis is possible, but only if the concept of technical rationality is freed from implicit positivistic assumptions. We need to explain how rationality operates more or less as modernity theory describes it even as it is intertwined with society through internal relations that determine its concrete realizations. This opens possibilities of agency and change closed to the stricter versions of modernity theory.
Science of Society and History of Science
The writings of Marx are surely the single most influential source of theories of modernity. His thought is usually identified with a universalistic faith in progress. At its core there is an intuition he shared with his century, the notion that a great divide forever separates premodern from modern societies. All later contrasts of Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft, organic vs. mechanical solidarity, traditional vs. post-traditional society, and so on, owe something to Marx’s canonical formulation of this idea in texts such as the Communist Manifesto and Capital.
If there is any one figure who has played a comparable role for contemporary technology studies, it is Thomas Kuhn (1970). Like all modern historians and social theorists, Kuhn writes somewhere in the long shadow cast by Marx as can be deduced from the place of “revolution” in the title of his major book, but his take on historical discontinuities is quite different from Marx’s. Kuhn did not reject the idea of radical discontinuities in history which, on the contrary, continues to shape his vision of the past. But where Marx took for granted the existence of a rationality gradient underlying the concept of modernity, Kuhn deconstructed the idea of a universal standard of rationality more or less identical with scientific reason and capable of transcending particular cultures and ordering them in a developmental sequence.
Kuhn had no intention of commenting on issues beyond his field, the history of science, but a critique of Marx is implied in his notion of scientific revolution insofar as the latter did believe that his own work was scientific and, more deeply, that rationality characterizes the institutions and forms of modernity. Thus just because Kuhn undermines the pretensions of science to access transhistorical truths, his work also undercuts Marxism and the modernity theory which inherited many Marxist assumptions. From that standpoint, it is clear that Kuhn is in some sense the nemesis of Marx, and the harbinger of what has come to be called “postmodernism.”
If Kuhnian relativism has the power to dissolve the self-certainty of science and technology, then what becomes of the notion of a rationalized society? In most modernity theories, rationalization appears as a spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once customary and ideological obstructions are removed. Technology studies, on the contrary, shows that efficiency is not a uniquely constraining motive of design and development, but that many social forces play a role. The thesis of “underdetermination” holds that there is no one rational solution to technical problems and this opens the technical sphere to these various influences. Technical development is not an arrow seeking its target, but a tree branching out in many directions. But if the criteria of progress themselves are in flux, societies cannot be located along a single continuum from the less to the more advanced. Like Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, but on the scale of society as a whole, constructivist technology studies complicate the notion of progress at the risk of dissolving it altogether.
System or Practice
Modernity as Differentiation
Modernity theory on the whole either continues to ignore technology or acknowledges it in an outmoded deterministic framework. Most revealing is the extreme but instructive case of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas has elaborated the most architectonically sophisticated theory of modernity without any reference at all to technology.
Habermas’s approach is based to a considerable extent on Weberian rationalization theory. According to Weber, modernity consists essentially in the differentiation of the various “cultural spheres.” The state, the market, religion, law, art, science, technology each become distinct domains with their own logic and institutional identity. Scientific-technical rationality is purified of religious and customary elements. Similarly, markets and administrations are liberated from the admixture of religious prejudices and family ties that bound them in the past. They emerge as what Habermas calls “systems” governed by an internal logic of equivalent exchange. Such systems organize an ever increasing share of daily life in modern societies (Habermas 1984, 1987). Where formerly individuals discussed how to act together for their own mutual benefit or to maintain customary rituals and roles, we moderns coordinate our actions with minimal communication through the quasi-automatic functioning of markets and administrations.
According to Habermas, the spread of such differentiated systems is the foundation of a complex modern society. But differentiation also releases everyday communicative interaction from the overwhelming burden of coordinating all social action. The communicative sphere, which Habermas calls the “lifeworld,” now emerges as a domain in its own right as well. This lifeworld includes the family, the public sphere, education and all the various contexts in which individuals are shaped as relatively autonomous members of society. It too, according to Habermas, is subject to a specific rationalization consisting in the emergence of democratic institutions and personal freedoms.
Habermas’s reformulation of Weber’s differentiation theory neutralizes rational systems. In the case of science and technology this puzzling retreat from a social account is carried to the point of caricature. Habermas claims that science and technology are based quite simply on a nonsocial “objectivating attitude” toward the natural world (Habermas 1984, 1987: I, 238). This would seem to leave no room at all for the social dimension of science and technology which has been shown over and over to shape the formulation of concepts and designs (Habermas 1986, 45, 91,187). On this account, it is difficult to see how a properly differentiated rationality could incorporate social values and attitudes except as sources of error or extrinsic goals governing “use.”
The effect of this approach is to liberate social theory from all the details of sociological and historical study of actual instances of rationality. No matter what story sociologists and historians have to tell about a particular market, administration, or, afortiori, technology, this is incidental to the philosophically abstracted forms of differentiated rationality. The real issue is not whether this or that contingent happening might have led to different practical results, for all that matters to social theory is the range of rational systems, the extent of their intrusions on the proper terrain of communicative action.
Habermas’s modernity theory is an important contribution, but it rests on a notion of differentiation which would surely be contested by most contemporary students of science and technology. Their major goal has been to show that “differentiation,” — Latour calls something similar “purification” — is an illusion, that the various forms of modern rationality belong to the continuum of daily practice rather than to a separate sphere (Latour 1991: 81).
Yet the main phenomena identified by the theory of modernity do certainly exist and require explanation. A puzzling impasse is reached in the interdisciplinary relationship around this problem. Technology study’s accounts of particular cases cannot be generalized to explain the systemic character of modernity, while modernity theory appears to be invalidated by what we have learned about the social character of rationality. I will turn now to corresponding problems in technology studies.
The Logic of Symmetry
Constructivism starts out from the opposite premise. Rationality is not pure but is always socially embedded. But somehow despite this promising beginning, constructivism ends up as an apolitical approach that disarms critique. I believe this is due to the famous constructivist “principle of symmetry.”
This principle is supposed to open science and technology to social explanation. It insures that the study of technological controversies is not biased by knowledge of the outcome (Bloor 1991, 7). Typically, the bias appears as an “asymmetrical” evaluation of the two sides of the controversy, ascribing “reason” to the winners and “prejudice,” “emotion,” “stubbornness,” “venality,” or some other irrational motive to the losers. Social explanation then applies only to those in error. Knowledge of the truth is explained not socially but epistemologically, as correspondence of thing and intellect. Getting rid of this biased, asymmetrical style of explanation has had fruitful results in science studies. But a similar bias is also presupposed by such basic concepts of modernity theory as rationalization and ideology which contrast asymmetrically with tradition and knowledge. These concepts too appear to be cancelled by the principle of symmetry.
But there is a risk in such even-handedness where technology is concerned: if the outcome cannot be invoked to judge the parties to the controversy, and if all their various motives and rhetorical assets are evaluated symmetrically, how are we to criticize mistakes and assign responsibility? Consider, for example, the analysis of the Challenger accident by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch (Collins and Pinch 1998, chap. 2). Recall that several engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company that designed the space shuttles, at first refused to endorse a cold weather lift off. They feared that the “O-rings” sealing the sections of the launcher, would not perform well at low temperatures. In the event they were proven right, but management overruled them to meet the schedule and the launch went ahead with disastrous results. The standard account of this controversy is asymmetrical, opposing reason—the engineers—to politics—the managers.
Collins and Pinch think otherwise. They show that the O-rings were simply one among many known problems in the Challenger’s design. Since no solid evidence was available justifying the canceling of the fateful flight, it was reasonable to go forward and not a heedless flaunting of a prescient warning. But the evidence Collins and Pinch offer could have supported a rather different conclusion had they evaluated it in a broader context. Their symmetrical account obscures the asymmetrical treatment of different types of evidence within the technical community they study. It is clear from their presentation that the controversy at Morton Thiokol was irresolvable because of the systematic demand for quantitative data and the denigration of observation, even that of an experienced engineer. The obvious explanation for this epistemological rigorism is the pressure to the meet the schedule. Absent this pressure, the managers might have taken seriously the observations of the engineers on the spot. Can an analysis of the incident abstain from criticizing this politically motivated bias?
We know from experience that quantitative measures are easily manipulated to get the answer demanded by the powers that be. Similar abuses of cost/benefit analysis are all too familiar. How can critical reason be brought to bear on these cases without applying sociological notions such as “ideology” which presuppose asymmetry?
Splitting the Difference
Interpretation and Worldhood
I now want to suggest one of several possible lines of argument leading to a partial resolution of the conflict between modernity theory and technology studies. The key point on which I will focus is the role of interpretation in these two disciplines. Where society is not studied as a law governed realm of causal interactions, it is usually considered to be a realm of meaning engaging interacting subjects of some kind, for example, subjects of consciousness or language. Interpretative understanding of society is thus an alternative to deterministic accounts, and hermeneutics appears as an explanatory model better suited to society than the nomological approach imitated from physical science.
The place of interpretation in technology studies should be obvious from the Kuhnian critique of the “myth of the given.” Data do not speak unambiguously but must be interpreted, and interpretation calls into play the very theories the data are supposed to verify. This hermeneutic circularity has social ontological implications when a similar approach is applied to technology. Technologies serve needs while also contributing to the emergence of the very needs they serve; human beings make technologies which in turn shape what it means to be human.
These circular relationships are familiar from hermeneutics. The famous “hermeneutic circle” describes the paradoxical nature of interpretative understanding: we can only understand what we already, to some degree, understand. A completely unfamiliar object would remain impenetrable. However, this circularity is not vicious since we can bootstrap our way to fuller understanding starting out from a minimal “pre-understanding,” “like using the pieces of a puzzle for its own understanding” (Palmer 1969, 25).
Pinch and Bijker’s famous analysis of the bicycle highlights the role of “interpretative flexibility” in the evolution of design. At the origin the bicycle had two different meanings for two different social groups. That difference in interpretation of a largely overlapping assemblage of parts yielded designs with distinctive social significance and consequence. Pinch and Bijker conclude that “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). But this means that there is no stable, pregiven telos of technological development because goals are variables, not constants, and technical devices themselves have no self-evident purpose.
Interpretation plays an equally important role for modernity theorists such as Habermas and Heidegger. Both thinkers rely on a contrast between scientific-technical rationality and the phenomenological approach to the articulation of human experience. They privilege the everyday “lifeworld” as an original realm within which human identity and the meaning of the real are first and most profoundly encountered.
For Heidegger worlds are realms of meaning and corresponding practices rather than collections of objects as in conventional usage. A world is “disclosed” according to Heidegger in the sense that the orientation of the subject opens up a coherent perspective on reality. Heideggerian words thus more nearly resembles our metaphoric concept of a “world of the theatre,” or a “Chinese world” than the literal meaning. Here interpretation is no specialized intellectual activity but the very basis of our existence as human beings. Heidegger emphasizes the role of art in disclosing worlds but if we follow the lead of technology studies we will include technology as well among the interventions that grant meanings to human communities.
Instrumentalization Theory
We now have two complementary premises drawn from the two theoretical traditions we are attempting to reconcile. On the one hand, the evolution of technologies depends on the interpretative practices of their users. On the other hand, human beings are essentially interpreters shaped by world-disclosing technologies. Human beings and their technologies are involved in a co-construction without origin. Modernity theory asks how this process operates when it is mediated by differentiated technical disciplines and aims at the “human control of human beings.” Technology studies keeps us focused on the essentially social nature of the technical rationality deployed in those disciplines. The hermeneutic perspective builds a bridge between these different perspectives.
A synthesis must enable us to understand the central role of technology in modern life as both technically rational in form and rich in socially specific content. This then is the program: to explain the social and cultural impact of technical rationality without losing track of the concrete social embodiment of actual devices and systems. Here is where the concept of world disclosure can be helpful, on the condition that the analysis be pursued in terms of the practical constitution of technical objects and subjects.
I have proposed what I call “instrumentalization theory” to effect such a synthesis (Feenberg 1999, chap. 9). Instrumentalization theory holds that disclosing worlds involves a complementary process of de-worlding inherent in technical action. This notion of de-worlding is derived from Heidegger’s late philosophy. The materials engaged in technical processes always already belong to a world which must be shattered as they are released for technical employment. The specific de-worlding effect of technical action touches not only the object but also the subject. The technical actor stands in an insulated, external position with respect to his or her objects. We thus distinguish technical manipulation from the reciprocal relations of everyday communication. Philosophical models of instrumental rationality are generally based on this aspect of the technical. It is, for example, highlighted in Habermas’s system/lifeworld distinction and Heidegger's critique of enframing.
Most modernity theory identifies de-worlding with the essence of technology, without regard for the complexity of its disclosive dimension. I conjecture that this identification is due to two features of the modern technical sphere. On the one hand, technical disciplines themselves incorporate social factors only in a stripped down abstract form. The most humane of values, for example compassion for the sick, is expressed technically in objective specifications such as a medical treatment protocol. On the other hand, modern technology has been structured around the extension of impersonal domination to human beings and nature in profound indifference to their needs and interests. This line of technical development depends on severely restricting the range of social considerations that can be brought to bear on design. Thus de-worlding looms especially large in the worlds disclosed in modern societies.
The duality of technical processes is reflected in the split between modernity theory and technology studies each of which emphasizes one half of the process. De-worlding is a salient feature of modern societies, which are constantly engaged in disassembling natural objects and traditional ways of doing things and substituting new technically rational ways. Focusing exclusively on the negative aspect of this process yields the dystopian critique we associate with thinkers like the later Heidegger. But de-worlding is only the other side of a process of disclosure which must be understood in social terms. Technology studies emphasizes this aspect of the process. The antinomy results from the inherently dialectical character of technical action, misunderstood unilaterally in each case.
Conclusion: Toward Synthesis
Let me conclude now by returning briefly to my starting point. I began by contrasting the theoretical revolutions of Marx and Kuhn and promising to bring them together with a method of analysis that would reconcile modernity theory and technology studies. Can a phenomenology of technical worlds do the job? Recall that Marx emphasized the discontinuity introduced into history by what has come to be called "rationalization," the emergence of modern societies based on markets, bureaucracies, and technologies. This view seemed to imply a universalism erasing all cultural difference. By contrast, Kuhn, or at least his followers, subverted the notion of progress implied in Marx's vision of an increasingly rational social process and offered us a history subordinate to culture.
I argue that rationalization describes the generalization of a particular type of de-worlding involved in technical action. That such de-worlding uproots nature and traditional ways is clear. But on this account, rationalization no longer stands opposed to culture as such but appears as a more or less creative expression of it, disclosing new worlds. In practice this means that there may be many paths of rationalization, each relative to a different cultural framework. Rationality is not an alternative to culture that can stand alone as the principle of a social order, for better or worse. Rather, rationality in its modern technical form mediates cultural expression in ways that can in principle realize a wide range of values. The poverty of the actual techno-culture must be traced not to the essence of technology but to other dimensions of our society such as the economic forces that dominate technical development, design, and the media. This insight challenges us to engage in what Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores have called "ontological designing," the self-conscious construction of technological worlds supporting a desirable conception of what it is to be human (Winograd and Flores 1987, 179).
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