Tokyo Lectures on Continental Philosophy of Technology

1. Introduction to Philosophy of Technology

I. What is philosophy of technology?

A. Branch of social philosophy

1. Not primarily epistemology: not philosophy of science

2. Not primarily ethics: not medical ethics, etc.

B. Modernity critique as main theme

1. modernity unique: central place of powerful techniques

2. breakdown of high/low culture division

3. technical mediation of social institutions

4. technical rationality as cultural system

C. Central problems

1. concretizations of traditional problems

2. the fate of individuality and freedom

3. rationality as both truth and power

4. my work: can democracy survive technology?

D. The chart as guide

II. Background: Instrumental Theory and the Humanities

A. A new field

1. Intro: Technology excluded from traditional philosophy

a. tradition of the humanities converged with

b. instrumentalist orthodoxy

2. humanities

a. antiquity: technical as beneath human dignity

b. modern times: technical, like economy, as natural

B. instrumentalism as spontaneous philosophy (in West)

1. means and ends are independent

2. technology is a neutral instrument, a pure means

3. based on universal knowledge, natural needs

4. hence it is apolitical, uncontroversial, generic in scope

5. subject to human control

6. social consequences as side effects

7. the generalization of this view as technocracy

III. Substantive theory

A. Intro: before 1960s humanists either

1. abstracted from this transparent background

2. or, rarely, attacked it in substantive theories

3. Heidegger, Ellul

4. cultural critique: modernity reveals limits of rationality

5. method: determinism, essentialism

B. Cultural critique

1. means and ends cannot be separated

a. our tools form our environment and way of life

b. we are inside the machine

c. how we do things determines who and what we are

d. technology has substantive value implications

2. social consequences as essential, not accidental

a. efficiency vs. tradition, human values, communication

b. example: family dinner: calories vs. ritual

C. Determinism

1. unilinear path of development (horizontal)

2. technology governing for social structure (vertical)

3. "imperatives" of technology

4. railroad and scheduling, factory and hierarchy

D. Essentialism

1. there is one and only one essence of technology

2. the truth of technology revealed by modernity

3. premodern accretions eliminated: ethics, aesthetics

4. rationalization: the drive for efficiency

5. this drive unfolds autonomously

6. from utopia to dystopia

7. transformation of man: "Only a God can save us now."

IV. New Critical Approaches

A. Left dystopian theories (1960s-1970s): Marcuse and Foucault

1. politicizing the cultural critique of modernity, technology

2. Heidegger’s influence: technology as substantive

3. new left vs. technocracy: technology as political

4. technology as ideology

5. but vague on alternatives

6. lack of agency in both

B. Constructivism (1980s-1990)

1. Latour, constructivists finally overcome positivism

2. analyze science, technology as social institutions

3. but: stick to empirical case studies for the most part

4. lack a theory of modernity

a. critique of positivism blocks access to idea of sociological rationalization

b. no dystopian sensibility

c. symmetries, relativism make it difficult to develop critique

C. Success of Critical Approaches

1. broad social acceptance due to political, technical change

2. new social movements and technology

a. environmentalism suggests alternative technologies

b. interactive model from computing changes man/machine paradigm

c. AIDS and networks

3. gradual penetration of humanities by technical issues

4. “cultural studies” of gender, race, technocracy problems

5. a new consensus (except in philosophy): technology is relevant, political

6. my work attempts to integrate these new factors to philosophy

D. Some implications

1. critique of the idea of a single technical rationality

2. break with essentialism and determinism

3. open a space for thinking about

a. alternative technology

b. democratic social control

4. redeeming modernity

E. Main aims of Questioning Technology

1. to explore the new situation of the question in politics and philosophy

2. the project: concretizing left dystopianism with constructivism

a. break with essentialism and determinism

b. critique of the idea of a single technical rationality

c. technology as ideology, as biased socially and tranformable as a system

d. reintroduce contingency into modernity

3. to argue for the possible democratization of technology

a. May Events: everything is possible, imagination in power

b. a reformist, gradualist version for this time: democratic interventions

2. Heidegger’s Essay on Technology

I. Introduction

A. The text

1. written in 1955

2. represents the later Heidegger

3. a philosophical critique of modernity

B. Difficulty of text

1. written very obscurely because:

2. presupposes other writings

3. complex use of German and Greek

4. subtle ideas, not very well connected

5. today: reading of the text

II. Technology as Revealing

A. The goal:

1. to prepare a free relationship to technology

2. by questioning technology’s essence

3. come back to free relationship at end

4. next step: what is essence?

5. preliminary provocation: the essence is not technological

6. this means: don’t look for it in instrumentality

B. The instrumental view of technology

1. a means and a human activity

2. leads to notion of mastery

3. distinguish correct from true

4. to get at the truth: what is the instrumental?

C. Nature of the instrumental

1. four causes explain it

2. causes as co-responsible, implicated

3. united by reflective gathering, the maker

4. no efficient cause appears here at all

D. How to understand the absence of efficient cause

1. techne as bringing something into appearance

2. Her-vor-bringen or coming into presence

3. this refers generally to a way of understanding being: aletheia

4. physis and poiesis: self-manifesting and manifesting through work

E. Revealing

1. such ways of understanding are revealings (Entbergen)

2. revealings as Heidegger’s substitute for consciousness

3. they are historical

F. Modes of Revealing

1. techne as a specific mode of revealing

2. an objective ideal of the thing pre-exists it

3. Greek way distorted in Roman understanding

4. not correctness, truth, not making, revealing

5. this prepares modernity

6. technology too as another mode of revealing

7. as such not a mere means

III. Modern Technology as Challenging-revealing

A. But does revealing apply to modern technology?

1. yes, but in a different way

2. nature challenged to supply energy for storage and use (Herausfordern)

3. challenging as ordering (stellen)

4. no prior ideal of thing but human plans

5. but plans must apply to a plannable reality

a. one can’t plan everything: a child’s future

b. what kind of reality can be planned?

B. Standing Reserve (Bestand)

1. the world revealed as object of technique

2. such a reality is raw materials or technical components (Bestand)

3. the system of technology

4. objectlessness

5. p. 16:

“The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely a water power supplier, derives out of the essence of the power station.”

6. man as part of the Bestand in two ways

a. as partially a thing within the system

b. and as called to challenge and order

c. this call places him beyond the system

7. as revealing, technology not a human activity

8. Enframing (Ge-stell) names this revealing insofar as it includes man as called

C. Conclusions:

1. Ge-stell and Her-vor-bringen as the two modes of revealing

2. instrumental view wrong because technology is neither a means nor a human activity

IV. Human Freedom and Destining

A. The problem:

1. to think man as essential to revealing

2. while understanding man as also revealed

3. and revealing as changing in history

4. this means no predefined human essence except as the site of revealing

5. but what is man’s fate as such a site?

6. this is the ultimate question of technology

B. The call as destining (Geschick)

1. word play on destiny and sending

2. the idea: historical dispensations

3. dispensations roughly modes of awareness

4. one does not choose the way one encounters the world

5. Heidegger’s ontological substitute for “culture”

C. Freedom

1. as such revealing presupposes human freedom

2. revealing presupposes “distance”

3. man “opens” a “space” for the world to appear

4. called clearing (Lichtung), transcendence

5. freedom as being beyond things, not just a thing

D. Two paths

1. man can be enslaved to the revealing

2. the real danger not machines but enslavement

a. man as pure orderer of Bestand

b. risks becoming Bestand

c. takes himself as lord of the earth

d. misunderstanding: man is called to Ge-stell

3. Concealment

a. all revealing also conceals in some way

b. enframing conceals by causing man to

b. lose sight of the call and his own nature

c. lose sight of poeisis, revealing, truth

4. or man can enter into a deeper relation to revealing

5. awareness of his dignity as the site of revealing

6. p. 26, 28

“...the other possibility...that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence his needed belonging to revealing.”

“The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”

V. The Saving Power

A. supposedly it grows where there is danger

1. most obscure part of essay

2. more filling in of gaps needed: a hypothesis about finitude

B. technology opens a new thought of essence

1. essence as what endures, the eternal ideas

2. missing link here: enframing eliminates essence as enduring in the old sense

3. remember Descartes’ wax

4. the only enduring thing left is revealing itself
5. word play gets us from enduring to granting

6. essence as a granting qua revealing: es gibt

C. Technology and man

1. revealing as such revealed by enframing

2. this means: man as needed and used by being

3. even by the enframing

4. missing link again:

a. Greeks knew revealing but not man as needed

b. this realization blocked by ancient concept of essence

c. modern perspective rigorously finitistic, so could recognize the role of man

d. but enframing blocks the realization

5. awareness of this is freedom expressed in “little things”

6. p. 33.

“We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power. Through this we are not yet saved. But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now and in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.”

7. this is the redemptive possibility of modernity

D. Technology and art

1. art possibly a more primal revealing

2. the saving power might be directly revealed in art

3. or perhaps generalization of technology will stimulate awareness of its limits

4. the question left in doubt

VI. Heidegger and Nihilism

A. The temptation

1. Heidegger was drawn to nihilism: Junger, Nietzsche

2. nihilism as the truly modern:

a. ending naive realism about nature, essence

b. God is dead: no place for the infinite

c. Heidegger shares this and so is modern

B. The refusal: presence and history

1. Heidegger rejects nihilism because:

2. the fact of presence means there is something that is not merely Bestand, man

3. man is historical, hence not absolute

4. beyond nihilism would lie a revealing of these ontological conditions as such

5. but Heidegger’s rejection of politics or any future oriented form of action blocks him

6. “Only a God can save us.”

3. Heidegger: Critique and Appreciation

I. Introduction to the five themes

A. Theme 1: rationalization and modernity

1. Heidegger’s theory a reinterpretation of the problematic of rationalization

2. familiar from sociology since Marx and Weber

B. Theme 2: ontic and ontological moments

1. distinction between ontic and ontological: facts vs. the structure that underlies them

2. Heidegger ontologizes the sociology

3. but there are peculiar relations between the two

C. Theme 3: the question concerning design

1. design irrelevant as merely ontic

2. but we can no longer believe this (environment)

D. Theme 4: the politics of technology

1. if design is significant and socially contingent

2. then politics plays a role in shaping modernity

E. Theme 5: recontextualization as gathering

1. enframing only half the story

2. design as a gathering that sets up worlds

II. The Themes

A. Theme 1: rationalization and modernity

1. in Weber

2. formal and substantive rationality

a. substantive: oriented toward a goal

b. formal: efficiency of means

3. the loss of ethical and aesthetic mediations

a. traditional craft combines efficiency with mediations

b. modern technology differentiated from them

4. reduction to primary qualities: Bestand

6. instrumentalization theory: decontextualization and systematization

B. Theme 2: ontic and ontological moments

1. the ontological difference: beings and being

2. technologies ontic, technology ontological

3. difference between design level and spirit

4. ontologizing rationalization

a. not just something humans do to a pre-existing reality

b. the revealing of the world

5. analytic dependencies:

a. extracting energy as ontic: a design

b. and ontological: paradigm of functionalization

c. the ontological as guide of ontic research

d. technology not a genus

e. technologies enact technology: power plant, computer

6. apriorism of the method: no theory of design

C. Theme 3: the question concerning design

1. Heidegger views technology as one

a. the two types of technique

b. essentialism: technologies predefined

c. contrasts with constructivist sociology

2. environmentalism, computers: the question of design

3. now we know: design opens different worlds

4. Heideggerians dismiss it as merely ontic

5. but this stance incredible today

6. a theory of the variety of technological worlds

D. Theme 4: the politics of technology

1. design is historically and socially contingent

2. it reflects culture and power relations

3. modernity not just enframing: reflexivity

4. bringing culture and power to consciousness

5. entry of technology into the public sphere

6. the question of a democratic politics of technology

E. Theme 5: recontextualization as gathering

1. borrowing from Heidegger

2. revealing as setting up of worlds

3. the role of the work of art

4. the thing and the region

5. recall gathering function of craftsman: dereification

6. gathering through technological design

7. this means: supplying contexts

a. systematization as a minimum context

b. ethical and aesthetic mediations as contexts

c. initiative: skill and democracy

d. internalization of constraints: regulation

8. ontological designing

III. Conclusion: After Heidegger

A. His contribution:

1. ontological conception of technology

a. a more fundamental analysis than means/ends

b. overcomes instrumentalism

c. points to the need for a systemic approach

d. technology as culture

2. a finitistic approach

a. we belong to any system on which we can act

b. hence no conquest of nature

c. technology as world revealing

B. His limitations:

1. critique too totalizing: dystopianism

2. blocks empirical study

3. disarms struggle for better technology, worlds

4. going beyond Heidegger.

4. Introduction to Marcuse

I. Critical Theory

A. Western Marxism

1. innovative German Marxists

2. tradition of Western Marxism: Lukács, Gramsci

a. revolutionary offensives

b. consciousness

c. Hegelianism

3. Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas

4. Phenomenology, existentialism, Western Marxism dominate postwar European thought till ‘70s

B. Critical theory: basic positions

1. failure of classical revolutionary model

2. Russia backward

3. state capitalism integrates proletariat

4. rise of mass media

5. rationality deficit

6. fascism: authoritarian mass character structure

7. advanced industrial society and fascism

8. dystopian models: Brave New World and 1984

C. Significance of Frankfurt School

1. end of deterministic Marxism, economism

2. a Marxist philosophy at a high intellectual level

3. reconnecting Marxism to freedom, individuality

4. critique of triumphs of technological society

a. dialectic of Enlightenment

b. critique of technology

D. Marcuse’s situation

1. left Germany after Hitler and stayed in US

2. Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany and became defenders of culture

3. Marcuse was touched by the student movement

4. 1968-early seventies, world famous: Marx, Mao, Marcuse!

5. unjustly forgotten today

6. his critical theory offered hope: styles change

II. Marcuse’s Basic Ideas

A. Surplus repression

1. Freud, Diderot: Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage

2. a certain degree of repression necessary

3. the amount is relative to scarcity

4. anything beyond the necessary is surplus

5. today the surplus grows with technology

6. the possible “pacification” of existence

7. the necessity of socialism

B. The integration of society

1. integration means system-like character

2. no longer split by necessary class struggle

3. the system “delivers the goods”

4. the incorporation of sex and leisure

5. the colonization of consciousness by the media

6. preservation of domination, competition

7. class rule, based on scarcity, continues with artificial motives

8. the system self-reproducing, self-expanding

9. emergence of total civilization of technique

10. recall Marx's original concept of alienation

C. Dystopia: Immanent and Transcending Demands

1. immanent: under horizon of established order

2. transcending means going beyond that horizon

3. transcending demands commonplace in past

4. rooted in particular unsatisfiable interests

5. "peace, bread, land"

6. particular interests "occasions" of total change

7. today particular interests absorbed by system

8. technical management of society

9. reform preserves the system

10. larger injustice of the system preserved too

D. True and false needs

1. the system fulfills needs so it is popular

2. critique must question the needs themselves

3. hence distinction between true and false needs

4. true needs life-affirming, reflect real interests

5. false needs are implanted by the system

6. desires shaped by media, social environment

7. critique of consumer society

8. contentment with surplus repression

9. the happy consciousness

E. The problem of elitism

1. the problems: why criticize?

2. what is the social base of critique?

3. moralism as elitist, arbitrary, paternalistic

4. but distortions can be traced

5. history shows evidence of mass deception

6. generations of struggle indicate true needs

7. psychic cost of technologically obsolete system

8. these are debatable issues, not dictates

9. civilizational politics questions ultimates

10. the real elitists: those who control the media

III. Existential Marxism

A. Heidegger-Marxismus

1. political views, true and false needs not opinions but modes of being in the world

2. the existential dimension in Marcuse

3. existential/existentiell in early Heidegger

4. authenticity recovers individuality vs. das Man

5. Marcuse accepts structure but changes content

6. existentiell appropriation as political problem

7. unity of theory and practice

8. philosophy must be appropriable by its time

9. social individuality

a. today’s crisis social and political

b. authenticity as resistance

c. philosophy must inform resistance

B. From Heidegger to Freud

1. from existential politics to Freudianism

2. Heidegger’s theory too abstract

3. Freud offers a content rich substitute

4. the instinct theory: character structure and society

5. life and death, love and agression

6. politics still not opinion but cathexes

7. the instincts as socially malleable: no biologism

8. needs as ontological: Marcuse on 1844 manuscripts

9. life vs. death in the 20th century

C. Ultimate ground: the concept of nature

1. no back to nature

2. repression refers us to nature as other of power

3. “nature” is historically constructed

4. we learn what we are and can be from history

5. nature and history mutually corrective

a. totally natural (human) nature, unthinkable

b. totally social society a dystopia, untrue to life

6. forward to nature: releasing surplus repression

7. the new sensibility

5. Marcuse’s Ontology

I. Introduction

A. Early Marcuse

1. a Heidegger student

2. attempts a synthesis of Heidegger, Lukacs, Marx’s manuscripts of 1844

3. known as Heidegger-Marxismus

4. later Marcuse: two links to Heidegger

5. Hegel replaces Heidegger

6. but existential and experiential emphasis remain

7. one-dimensionality resembles enframing

II. One-Dimensionality

A. Relation to Heidegger

1. very similar interpretation of Greek/modern eras

2. restatement of self-manifesting and challenging, hervorbringen and herausforderung

3. revealing of world to Dasein in Marcuse

4. what is new

a. disclosure relative to society, politics

b. emphasis on potentiality, essence

c. structures of need as disclosive

B. the Greek interpretation of reason

1. truth as disclosure in ancient thought (124)

2. contingent instance vs. essential nature: true and false modes of existence

3. essence as normative/ontological ideal

4. example: man as rational animal

5. the is is also an ought: potential

6. what is the ground of the ideal?

7. cultural and professional stereotypes (126)

8. modernity critical with respect to these

C. Modern technological rationality

1. has its source in a new stage of class society

a. class domination no longer based on a traditional culture

b. success of the system in delivering the goods

c. transcending demands as technical problems

2. the technological apriori: "enframing" of world

3. rejection of essence for empirical reality

4. understood through formal universals

a. distinguish formal from substantive universal

b. formal as qualities, substantive as essence

5. operationalization of world as object of control

6. clean separation of norms and reality, ends and means: neutrality

7. critique of neutrality: potentials and "values"

8. class power reflected in science and philosophy

9. technology as ideology

D. The Hegelian reinterpretation

1. progressive political alternative

a. disappearance of static essences final

b. historical reconstruction of essence

2. Hegelian-Marxist solution

3. essence as internal tensions within reality

4. “For Hegel, the existence of a thing’s real possibility consists in the ‘existing manifold of circumstances which relate to it.’” (N. p. 82)

5. category of real possibility unites:

a. context, connections

b. the process of development

6. potential is not mere ideal but is made to be in reality itself

7. but what are the criteria of true potentiality?

8. historicism: no natural criterion, teleology, final goal of history

9. life affirmation as intrinsic demand of subjects

10. this demand historically concrete

a. reflected in actual struggles

b. present negatively in pathologies, distortions

c. implicit in technical resources: surplus repression

III. The Existential-Aesthetic Solution

A. Ethics or aesthetics?

1. why not ethics

a. as opinion superficial, impotent

b. as conscience personal, tragic

c. Hegelian-Marxist skepticism about ethics

d. a new ethos, not an ethics

2. civilizational politics

a. not reform or political revolution but civilizational change

b. cannot come from abstract demands

c. traditional Marxism located it in interests

d. the integration of interests today

e. must be located now in sensibility

f. aesthetics concerns sensibility

3. Marcuse’s two aesthetics

1. aesthetics as art: the negative

2. aesthetics as the senses: new sensibility

B. Affirmative culture

1. art in the bourgeois era

2. framing art, derealizing essence

3. the split between reason and imagination

4. the Siren song

5. overcoming the split on the basis of modern technology

6. aesthetic judgment as political reason

7. the avant-garde

a. the attack on the institution of art

b. poetry is in the streets

c. Marcuse and the May Events

d. philosophy and life

C. The new sensibility

1. explaining the new left: a deeper resistance

2. existential need for a new society

3. the new sensibility as a revolt of nature against surplus repression

4. the new left as catalyst

5. existential contagion of new transcending demands

D. Successor science and technology

1. eschatology of reason

2. life affirmation as basis of a new revealing

3. science, technology must recognize potentialities

4. but Marcuse rejects qualitative science and return to nature or Greek ontology

5. technology can be transformed in response to the public demands

6. science would change on its own in a new social environment

F. Critique

1. vagueness of the solution (Habermas's critique as romantic)

2. potentiality: which is the right one?

3. indifference of public: triumph of one-dimensionality

6. Instrumentalization Theory

I. Technological Rationality

A. Heidegger and Marcuse on technological rationality

1. modernity as rationality become culture

2. cultural critique as critique of the limits of rationality

3. the difference: can rationality be transformed?

4. Heidegger says no, Marcuse yes

B. The program

1. turning Marcuse’s answer back on Heidegger

2. the result: a new theory of the essence of technology as historical

II. Primary and Secondary Instrumentalization (see QT, p. 208)

A. Recall Heidegger’s approach: a phenomenology of technical action

1. technique in the lifeworld

2. gathering in craft vs. technological enframing

3. historical discontinuity obscures overlaps between types of technical activity

4. the two types together exemplify the main dimensions of technique

B. The material cause reconsidered: Decontextualization and Reduction

1. what is presupposed: the prior approach to the material qua material

2. the objectifying attitude: functionalization

3. decontextualization and reduction to primary qualities in enframing theory

C. Gestell: Systematization

1. the material once formed must be coupled with other formed materials and nature

2. Heidegger includes this only for modern technology

3. I call it systematization

4. its importance greatest in modern technology, but it is present in craft too

D. The final and formal causes reconsidered: Mediation

1. material formed by ethical and aesthetic mediations

2. these integrate it to society

3. their greater importance in premodernity characterizes craft

E. The efficient cause reconsidered

1. complexity of the craftsman’s role

2. performs initial functionalization of material

3. also performs realization through systematization and mediation

4. the subject of objectification as both functionalizing and realizing

F. Functionalizing subject: Autonomization and Positioning

1. characterized by pseudo-autonomy: man the god

2. in Heidegger appears in relation to modern technology: but who made the silver?

3. positioning in Marcuse (Lukacs): action as adaptation

4. autonomy and positioning as general characteristics of technical action

5. take on exaggerated importance in modernity

G. Subject of realization: Vocation and Initiative

1. in Heidegger appears only in craft

2. characterized by gathering

3. who gathers and how is left vague in Heidegger

4. vocation and initiative correspond to autonomy and positioning

5. strength of vocation, initiative in premodern, weakness in modern societies

H. Transforming technology

1. the shifting relations between primary and second instrumentalization

2. a historical concept of essence

3. different emphases could be liberating

4. role of systematization with nature, skill

7. Introduction to Habermas

I. Habermas’s Approach

A. Habermas

1. a second generation Frankfurt School thinker

2. advocate of rationality, liberal constitutionalism, modernity

3. reforms needed: enhancement of communication vs. technocratic tendencies

B. Relation to Heidegger, Marcuse, and Foucault

1. his generation and Nazism

2. this determines his attitudes: legalism rather than radicalism

3. left fascism vs. social democracy

4. rejection of cultural-critical attitude toward technology and science

5. rejection of reconstruction of essence, aesthetic solutions (later hints on this)

6. rejection also of power discourse for normative discourse: Foucault

7. Rawls and American liberalism, Habermas and social democracy

C. Communication theory

1. introduces communication theory into Critical Theory

2. reframes Marxist categories

3. restates basic Critical Theory concepts

a. dialectic of Enlightenment: instrumental vs. objective reason

b. from objective reason to the presuppositions of communication

c. the application: technocracy problem and one-dimensionality

II. Habermas and Marcuse: two critiques of science and technology as ideology

A. Marcuse’s first critique of science and technology

1. science and technology as ideology: substantive bias

a. science and technology appear ideologically neutral: mere means

b. technocracy based on this pretension to neutrality

c. science and technology incorporate domination in methods and structure

d. the transcendental apriori derived from historically given relations

e. the need for a new science and technology that respects potentialities

2. Habermas’s critique

a. new science and technology refer to fraternal relation to nature

b. this implies communicative interaction with nature: secret hopes

c. conclusion depends on identification of instrumental control and domination

d. instrumental control a generic property of the human species

e. cannot therefore be related to a particular substantive bias

f. control and domination distinct and fraternal relation to nature irrelevant

g. but this critique unfair: respect for nature in Marcuse not communicative

B. Marcuse’s second critique of technocracy

1. legitimation under advanced capitalism

a. under competitive capitalism legitimation by natural laws of market

b. gives rise to instability, intense class conflict

c. class conflict absorbed by state intervention to stabilize economy

d. state still regulates the economy in private interest

e. this shifts legitimation problem to state

f. this can no longer be obscured by “natural” market

g. of course myth can no longer serve

h. state legitimates itself by reference to technical expertise

2. Habermas’s interpretation

a. not transcendental basis of science and technology, but extent of their reach

b. science and technology are ideology in the “place” of legitimation

c. they translate all practical problems into technical problems

d. this dissolves public sphere, depoliticizes masses

e. the condition for success of advanced capitalism: technocracy

III. Work and Interaction, Technical subsystems and Institutional Framework

A. Reconstruction of Marxism

1. forces/relations of production, base/superstructure model and liberal capitalism

2. no longer applies under advanced capitalism because of state intervention

3. Marxist categories are displacements of generic ones

4. forces=work, relations=interaction

a. purposive rational action: success oriented (forces, base)

b. communicative rationality: consensual norms (relations, superstructures)

c. ideal speech situation and quasi-transcendental norms of communication

d. real speech distorted to some extent but implies norms

5. technocracy requirement of advanced capitalism places them in tension

6. challenging the practical as such

7. this is technocratic “distortion” of communication corresponding to class struggle

B. Modernity theory

1. this framework used to define modernity

2. distinguish technical subsystems from institutional framework

a. an analytic distinction

b. a question of proportion of influence of action types

c. but secondary influences tend to drop out (more next class on this)

3. in traditional society institutional framework predominates

4. this means traditional norms (myths) structure society, limit technical subsystems

5. in modern society technical subsystems become autonomous, predominate

a. first in form of market

b. now as scientific-technical regulation

c. note neo-liberalism as pseudo-ideology

6. market rationality provides basis for critique of tradition: rationalization

7. scientific-technical rationality trades critical function for legitimating function “At the stage of their scientific-technical development, then, the forces of production appear to enter a new constellation with the relations of production. Now they no longer function as the basis of a critique of prevailing legitimations in the interest of political enlightenment, but become instead the basis of legitimation” (84).

8. the end of the progressive dynamic of capitalism

9. technocracy: scientific-technical rationality as culture: dystopia

“When technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality--a ‘world’” (90).

C. Communicative rationalization

1. the problem is to recover communicative rationality

2. is this possible? yes if you take into account dual nature of rationalization

a. rationalization of technical subsystems: market, state

b. rationalization of communicative social structures: family, democracy, etc.

3. one-sided emphasis of modern rationalization can be corrected

4. lack of a clear conception of by whom and how

5. next class we will see how this is related to absence of a theory of technology

8. Habermas and Double Aspect Theory

I. Double Aspect Theory

A. Methodological implications

1. note double aspect theory of mind/body relation

2. double aspect theory finds them in the same entity “taken” in different ways

3. analytic or real distinction

4. an equivalent at the social level: normative (practical)/technical relation

5. dualism would hold that these are distinct social domains

6. double aspect theory sees them as different aspects of the same phenomena

B. Modernity and double aspects

1. modernity no longer has separate communicative legitimation such as myth

2. legitimation through reciprocity as first form:

“Even this bourgeois ideology of justice, by adopting the category of reciprocity [equal exchange], still employs a relation of communicative action as the basis of legitimation. But the principle of reciprocity is now the organizing principle of the sphere of production and reproduction itself” (97).

3. this is its peculiar neutral or formal “rationality” that shelters it from critique

4. scientific-technical rationality similar: “the double function of scientific-technical progress (as productive force and as ideology)” (90).

5. efficiency as both technical and practical norm

C. Modern recovery of the practical

1. the temptation: to posit a separate practical sphere once again

2. the impotence of ethics and discursive ideology: trade-offs

3. from ethics to ethos: the technical as unsurpassable cultural base

4. ethics must “sink down” into the technical to become ethos

D. “Modernity requirements”

1. exigencies: reflection on norms and material realization of norms

2. double aspects: translations between ethics and the technical: nets and dolphins

3. tension between them: question of timing, emphasis, reification

4. capitalism partially suppresses reflection but a modern society need not do so

E. Underdetermination

1. requirements imply that technology is technically underdetermined

2. technical underdetermination means efficiency always already constrained

3. there are always normatively distinct technical alternatives (QT, p. 81)

4. theories in technology studies

a. controversy studies in constructivism

b. “delegation” and “scripts” in Latour

c. “technical code”

F. Marcuse’s position

1. a true double aspect theory

2. contingency of technical design

a. design relative to the form of technological rationality

b. technological rationality embodies lifeworld values

c. change in rationality reflected in “new” science, technology

“The new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization” (232).

3. the recovery of practical at political level reflected in technology

4. but note the vagueness

II. Habermas and Double Aspect Theory

A. Habermas’s ambiguities

1. admits underdetermination

"It is true that social interests still determine the direction, functions, and pace of technical progress. But these interests define the social system so much as a whole that they coincide with the interest in maintaining the system." (105)

2. public discussion might change the "direction, functions, and pace of technical progress"

3. Habermas also endorses Gehlen’s view of technique as a generic project

4. this has deterministic implications in Habermas: no new technology possible

5. later Habermas

a. insufficiency of early emphasis on forms of action

b. problems explaining markets, organization and state

c. switch from action forms to forms of coordination

d. market as model, generalized to state

e. agreement on norms (lifeworld) or mediated action (systems)

f. methodological dualism: hermeneutics and systems theory

g. but elimination of reference to technology

B. Contradiction in Habermas

1. Analytic and real distinctions

a. on one side generic categories of work/interaction: clear conceptual distinction

b. the technical subsystems, institutional framework distinction

c. on sociological side: an analytic distinction within institutions

d. mixing, predominance at sociological level

e. later analytic distinction: lifeworld and system

f. later sociological distinction: family vs. bureaucracy, etc.

g. but markets/bureaucracy and family/public sphere treated as exemplars

h. generic distinctions transferred to real institutions

2. world relations chart (Theory of Communicative Action, I, 238)

a. world relations distinguished analytically as “pragmatic” universals

b. generic properties of human relations to language, other speakers, world

c. 9 possible relations

d. rationalization requires cumulative development of results

e. possible in areas such as science, technology, ethics

d. not possible in social relation to nature or aesthetic relation to society: the x’s

f. Marcuse and counterculture fall under the x’s

3. Three problems with the chart

a. chart draws conclusions about institutional rationalization from analytic distinctions

b. justified by the differentiation thesis

c. but differentiation of technical disciplines and real institutions not the same

d. differentiation does not make analytic distinctions “real” enough

e. science and technology as nonsocial

f. this eliminates them from social theory: positivism

g. but technology is a medium of action coordination (see QT, 171)

h. exclusion of technology arbitrary, limits scope of theory

C. Habermas’s “idealism”

1. underdetermination fails in Habermas

2. principle of social control of systems lost in practice: workers’ control example

3. for this reason ethics appears outside the technical sphere

4. the critique of systems confined to their reach, not their design and structure

5. Habermasian legitimation falls short of second modernity requirement

6. reflection but no material realization

7. his conclusion appears as “mere” idealism

D. Saving Habermas

1. restore difference between analytic and real distinctions

2. add technology

3. restore underdetermination of systems

4. develop normative aspect of technical networks through media theory

9. Nietzsche and Foucault

I. Nietzche’s influence

A. Switch from German to French theory

1. Germans: norms vs. power

a. in Heidegger around authenticity

b. in Marcuse around essence

c. in Habermas around communicative ethics

d. in left context, Nietzsche perceived as critic of conformism, mass society

2. French: norms as power

a. French Nietzscheans: Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.

b. suspicion of ethical formalism: legitimacy as a ploy of power

c. epistemological relativism

d. in left context, Nietzsche perceived as critic of science and morality

3. Nietzche’s radical operationalism

a. end of Aristotelian substance

b. when lightning flashes, the lightning is the flash, not a substance behind it

c. anticipates pragmatism: a thing is the difference it makes

d. ontological significance of action

a. action is essentially strategic: the will to power

4. Nietzche’s perspectivism

a. end of view from nowhere, cogito

b. truth is not the object of a willless, timeless knower

c. death of God: no place of the absolute

d. requires involvement and perspective: interpretation

e. perspective not merely cognitive

f. way of being in the world

g. defines the real as such

h the greatest power: to establish the true, the real

i. absence of place of the absolute makes this the only truth, reality

5. Genealogy

a. institutions, events, etc. constituted in their function by power

b. historical research as reconstruction of processes of interpretation

c. the genealogy of morals as construction of the human: no human nature

d. the genealogy of science as history of power/knowledge: no absolutes

II. Foucault

A. Foucault's background

1. trained in history, philosophy of science

2. Foucault’s interest in human (social) sciences

3. his project: study of criminology, medicine, sociology, etc.

4. this study requires an understanding of the relation of power to knowledge

B. Power

1. premodern power is sovereign, possession, repressive

2. stands opposed to truth

3. this model forms our common sense but it is out of date

4. modern power as a universal network of asymmetric relations

5. everyone involved, dispersal of power into every institution

6. power produces governable, useful subjects

a. domination as concentrations of asymmetrical relations

b. governmentality as availability of individuals for domination

7. the subject not presocial vis a vis of power, but social construction of power

8. yet Foucault insists that only a free subject can be dominated

9. later attempt to correct emphasis

C. Epistemological implications

1. Nietzchean notion of will to truth: attaining truth implies wielding power

2. radical operationalism

a. end of Aristotelian substance

b. when lightning flashes, the lightning is the flash, not a substance behind it

c. anticipates pragmatism: a thing is the difference it makes

d. ontological significance of action

e. action is essentially strategic: the will to power

3. truth as a thing of this (social) world, not a nonsocial relation to reality

4. modern power relations accumulate in institutions that dominate society

5. these dominant institutions require systematized forms of knowledge

6. objectification through power relations as condition of human sciences

7. Foucault goes further: “man” as object is a product of modern power systems

8. modern dispersal of power as quasi-transcendental precondition of human sciences

9. the method: social technologies embodied in discourses, practices, devices

D. Disciplinary Society

1. modern society a society of normalization, disciplinary society

2. dystopian resonances going back to Heidegger, similar to Marcuse

3. disciplinary institutions: prison, factory, school, etc.

4. some typical procedures: record keeping, drilling, testing

5. the individual case is recorded, normalized through these procedures

6. the essential role of the gaze

E. The Rationalization of punishment

1. the prison study: most influential of Foucault’s genealogies

2. the changing nature of punishment

3. transition from theater of power to imprisonment, rehabilitation

4. individualization of the criminal

5. the science of criminology emerges around the new object

6. the technologization of punishment

a. the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham

b. technical arrangements establish power as visibility

c. double aspects:

"The exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through those power relations" (Foucault, 1977, 206-207).

F. The Politics of Genealogy

1. anti-technocratic thrust: power and domination

2. French technocracy: traditional administration and modernization

3. project gains an audience through the May Events

4. opposition to communist party's Marxism

5. no totalizing vision or state strategy but dispersed social resistances

6. rejection of role of universal intellectual for specific intellectuals

7. “subjugated knowledges” as perspective of dominated

8. not to eliminate power but to play games of power with less domination

10. Latour’s Democratic Politics of Technology

I. Latour’s background

A. Latour, Constructivism, and Foucault

1. leading French science studies scholar

2. Actor Network Theory: Callon, Latour

3. Latour acknowledges no direct influence of Foucault

4. strong resemblances

a. radical operationalism

b. science as strategic operation: no cogito, pure reason

c. opposition to technocracy

5. extends social study of science to natural science

6. this responds to a sense that ‘technoscience’ has joined nature and society

7. a radical revision of social constructivism

II. Social Constructivism

A. Research strategy

1. empirical sociological research

2. transpose research methods from science to technology

3. critique of determinism, parallels critique of positivism

4. technology as socially determined

B. Basic concepts in science studies

1. controversy studies of natural science

2. interpretive flexibility: observations can be explained differently

3. underdetermination: rationality insufficient to explain belief

4. hence social and cultural factors always play a role

5. symmetry: look at losers and winners with same approach

C. Deconstructing truth

1. this leads to relativism

2. closure and black boxing as a new definition of truth

3. forward and backward glance: Whig history

4. the Janus head

5. nature cannot decide controversies because it is their outcome

6. first principle of symmetry

7. outcomes determined by rhetorical procedures

8. strategic action not pure cognition

D. Applied to technology:

1. branching development rather than unilinear progress

2. technology as a product of negotiations among actors

3. difficulty of specifying actors

4. problem definition in flux relative to actors

5. so definition of success up in the air

6. black boxing finally occurs

7. determinism as the illusion of the backward glance

8. rewriting history looking forward

9. the bicycle example illustrates these principles

III. Latour’s Actor Networks

A. Symmetry of humans and nonhumans

1. constructivist temptation of sociological reductionism

2. but this implies that society is absolutely definable and defines nature

3. the deconstruction must embrace the social, the human

4. primitive term is the actant: anything which “acts”

5. humans not the only subjects

6. “natural” objects and humans as actants

7. networks of actants (also called “collectives”): simplification, enrollment

8. operationally considered science, technology as networks

B. Ontological consequences

1. networks define the real

2. nature and society derived from network

3. what is called nature and society the outcome, not premise

4. history of networks as ultimate reality

5. Whitehead’s metaphysics: nature has history too

6. Pasteur’s discovery

C. Political consequences

1. networks constituted by power

2. truth as an imposed perspective

3. science, technology as quasi-religious orthodoxy

4. how is resistance possible?

5. no normative universals, no reference to nature as such

6. Latour’s operational solution: keeping the collective open: but why?

7. my “utopia of technique” as example

11. Beyond the Enlightenment Controversy

I. Habermas, Foucault, Latour on Rational Action

A. Institutional focus

1. technical or “goal rational” action as a basis of modern social organization

2. Habermas focusses on markets, bureaucracies

3. Foucault focusses on disciplinary institutions

4. Latour focusses on scientific-technical institutions

5. critique identifies the limits or dangers of these as total forms of life

B. The program

1. but each theory is incomplete

2. synthesize them in a general theory of rational action

3. the result: democratic perspectives on modernity

II. The Enlightenment Controversy

A. French Theory vs. Habermas

1. Habermas attacked Foucault for Nietzchean hostility to Enlightenment

a. Foucault’s pure power political perspective anti-democratic

b. Foucault lacks normative theory to justify his politics

2. Foucault did not defend his position explicitly

a. instead wrote on Kant’s theory of Enlightenment

b. argued that genealogy continued Kantian critique

c. referred to growth of capacities: Nietzsche’s interesting animal

3. Latour’s position

a. not involved in the debate

b. critique of Habermas’s “purification”

c. social character of all science and technology

B. The controversy revisited

1. French theories show that Habermas’s systems are not neutral, nonsocial

2. help to understand emerging technical politics

a. technical mediation creates new publics

b. resistances arise from “users,” “clients,” “victims” as actors

c. subjugated knowledges inspire resistances

d. general conclusion: enrollment in a network gives counter-power

C. Critique of Foucault and Latour

1. limits of radical operationalism: no norms, no basis for resistance

2. subjectivity is produced by power (Foucault)

3. the human, nature produced by the network (Latour)

4. how is resistance possible, why isn’t socialization total?

5. Foucault: vague references to nature (life force), no theory possible in Latour

6. what are the criteria of resistance, what are the norms of critique?

7. vague anti-technocratic bias

8. Foucault resists power, Latour insists on holding the collective open, but why?

III. Networks, Power, Systems

A. Limitations of the network concept

1. a strategy of argument: build up from Latour’s network concept

2. networks are linked complexes of elements

3. presented under neutral terms like enrollment, programs

4. the dilemma that is obscured

a. attributing teleological programs to networks while

b. defining networks in causal terms

c. but the two don’t completely correspond

d. calling side effects, breakdowns, programs of things is confusing

5. missing: theories of domination, lifeworld, instrumental rationalization

6. filling in the gaps and generalizing the theory

6. the usefulness of networks as a starting point: building up to a synthesis

B. What is left out I: the Foucauldian moment

1. domination: systematic asymmetries of power

2. a pale vestige in the idea of scientific autonomy, point of passage

3. networks lack a theory of political domination beyond technocracy worry

4. enrollment through “simplification”: but what is that for humans?

5. requires Foucault’s “governmentality” through disciplinary techniques

6. imposition of program: a kind of rationalization theory

7. distinguish “networks” from (human) program based organizations

8. networks are the causally linked contexts of organizations, institutions

9. networks as the sea in which organizations swim

C. What is left out II: the hermeneutic of the lifeworld

1. networks as world constituting: recall Heidegger, Marcuse, Habermas

2. hermeneutic dimension of networks in constructivism, Latour

a. beyond evolution of problem solving techniques, evolution of problem definitions

b. problem definitions related to actors

c. dual aspects: sociogram and technogram

d. sociogram as complex of interests reflected in problem definition: programs

3. limitations of confining the hermeneutic to problems

4. the lifeworld as cultural framework of networks

a. problem definitions presuppose shared meanings

b. these emerge in lifeworld through practices, (distorted) communicative action

c. meanings go beyond problem definition to define a way of life

5. subordinate actors play a major role in lifeworld

6. changing practices, meanings influence iterative design processes

7. double aspects meet in historical evolution of design

8. new programs emerge in history

D. The missing element: Why the Lifeworld is Unfocused

1. Habermas’s distinction between social, system reproduction

2. strategic action sufficient for system reproduction

3. Habermas criticizes Foucault for only recognizing strategic action

4. social reproduction: communicative production of individuality

5. a basis for resistances, criteria of resistance

E. What is left out III: the Habermasian moment

1. Foucault, Network theory lack a theory of rationalization

2. double aspects: power/knowledge theorized but not “rationalization”

3. power, domination, reproduction of systems

a. how do rational institutions reproduce themselves?

b. in Foucault apparently by domination

c. hence no clear distinction of power and domination in Foucault

d. rationalization as more than power, as self-reproducing order

4. rationalization must exist or modernity is pure domination

5. Habermas’s media explain rationalization

6. media are the systemic reciprocities that make organizations possible

F. Revising Habermas

1. conclusion of Habermas lectures provides a context

a. leaves out technology

b. neutralizes systems and withdraws them from the social lifeworld

c. media have no power dimension at all

d. media lack contingency of Latour’s networks, Foucault’s power relations

e. restore difference between analytic and real distinctions: underdetermination

2. revision I: technology coordinates action like money and power

a. it is underdetermined technically

b. its design reflects power relations: assembly line

c. like technology, markets, administrations are underdetermined

3. revision II: system and lifeworld interpenetrate: predominance, yes, separation, no

a. systems have communicative dimensions, political implications

b. cultural meanings, power embodied in specific designs

c. example of management efficiency: no efficiency as such

12. Theoretical-Political Frontiers

I. Generalizing the double aspect theory

A. A theoretical frontier

1. the technical and the social as aspects

2. interpreted here as system and lifeworld

3. the media concept extended to technology

4. extending the technological analysis to markets and administration

5. institutional creation similar to creation of artifacts

5. technical application obvious, but also material framework, design of institutions

6. architecture as a mediating case

B. Toward a general theory of objectification

1. can we use these concepts to develop a general social theory?

2. media concept an abstraction realized in concrete networks

3. the realization only possible through governmentality

4. institutionalized media have a power as well a systemic-instrumental character

5. modern organization presupposes power based governmentality, rationalized media

6. this is how modern societies are held together as instrumentally (more or less) rational complexes

II. Democratic perspectives

A. our theory makes the design of objectifications contingent on social practices

B. technology as world constituting

1. in Heidegger and Marcuse as revealing of being

2. in Foucault and Latour as linked networks constituting social subject, objects

C. reflexivity of modernity must extend to world constitution

1. bourgeois revolutions extend reflexivity to state, law

2. socialism was supposed to extend it to the economy

3. mixed economies testify to partial truth of Marx’s analysis

D. a different perspective on socialism

1. Marx’s innovation was recognition of the significance of technical mediation

2. new culture, type of lower class, possibilities of democratic control

3. technical mediation now general: education, medicine, leisure, etc.

4. the new socialist program not merely economic but general too

E. present situation

1. accounting for progressive possibilities of modernity

2. speculative conclusion in absence of agents, political means

3. but note gradualistic emergence of technical public sphere

4. this is not optimism, but refusal of dystopian pessimism

home: www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg