Technology, Modernity, and Democracy

Essays by Andrew Feenberg

Eduardo Beira, Andrew Feenberg

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786607201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This important collection of essays by Andrew Feenberg presents his critical theory of technology, an innovative approach to philosophy and sociology of technology based on a synthesis of ideas drawn from STS and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. According to critical theory of technology, technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic, but are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. Feenberg explores how they can be developed and adapted to more or less democratic values and institutions, and how their future is subject to social action, negotiation and reinterpretation. Technologies bring with them a particular "rationality," sets of rules and implied ways of behaving and thinking which, despite their profound influence on institutions, ideas and actions, can be transformed in a process of democratic rationalization. Feenberg argues that the emergence of human communication on the Internet and the environmental movement offer abundant examples of public interventions that have reshaped technologies originally designed for different purposes. This volume includes chapters on citizenship and critical theory of technology, philosophy of technology and modernity, and Heidegger and Marcuse, two of the most prominent philosophers of technology.

Part I

The Philosophy of Technology

Chapter One

Encountering Technology1

Starting at the Beginning

In this talk, I would like to introduce myself and describe some of the background to the development of my approach to the study of technology. I was born in New York City during World War II. My father was a prominent theoretical physicist who studied quantum mechanics in Germany and returned to the United States where he participated in the revolutionary scientific developments of the 1930s and 1940s. I grew up surrounded by scientists and their apparatuses. Cyclotrons and nuclear reactors were part of my childhood. I have fond memories of visiting “the lab” where the glassblower made toys for me and where later I worked for a summer as a “computer,” entering mysterious numbers into an adding machine. I am a rare student of science and technology who was actually raised on the subject.

This gives me a somewhat different perspective than the currently fashionable emphasis on the ordinariness of scientific research. I have always known that science was a human activity—it went on in my house—and yet the scientists I knew believed science to be significantly different from most other human activities. Recent attempts to iron out the differences with a relativistic epistemology seem quite artificial and unconvincing. Science is surely not “pure,” but relativism is essentially irrelevant, not much different from the claim that Bach’s music is relative to his time. The point is obvious and gives rise to interesting research, but it is ultimately trivial: the music remains, irreducible to the circumstances of its creation. Scientific truths have a similar status as products of supreme crafts that transcend the ordinary events from which they arise.

On a less elevated note, science, especially experimental science, involves a great deal of technical cleverness. Perhaps this is why throughout my childhood I was encouraged to be clever. I was sent to carpentry school as a small boy and learned to make little tables and wastebaskets under the direction of a very stern old carpenter. Innocently enacting an outdated cliché, I took apart clocks and machines and learned to handle chemicals, use a microscope, make a crystal radio, and suchlike.

On a visit to Hiroshima, I was shocked by the realization that the atom bomb that had destroyed the city was a product of the very cleverness I was encouraged to develop as a boy, applied by brilliant scientists and engineers. Truly, cleverness is the greatest human power, but not the greatest achievement. After the war, Hans Bethe bemoaned the fact that he and his colleagues at Los Alamos had been clever rather than wise. The course of twentieth-century technological advance certainly proves him right.

By the time I reached college, I was mainly interested in literature and philosophy. The writings of René Girard and Gabriel Marcel had a tremendous influence on me. I studied Husserl, Heidegger, and Western Marxism. This was the early 1960s and the United States still lay under the pall of McCarthyism. The oppressive social and political conformism of the times is unimaginable today. Culture and critique were totally marginal in this environment. I longed to escape America for Europe and spent several years studying at the Sorbonne. But this hybrid identity posed a problem: how to find an authentic relation to my two traditions. Technology appeared to hold the answer insofar as it was a particular achievement of the America in which I was raised, questioned in interesting ways in the Europe where I had studied. This intersection determined my lifelong interest in philosophy of technology.

At first, I approached the issue of technology through the concept of dystopia. The elimination of political opposition in advanced industrial society is an effect of technology, both its gigantic productivity and the ideology of progress that accompanies it. In the 1960s, it seemed we were headed for Brave New World. Marcuse was the thinker of this moment. But paradoxically the dystopian perspective provoked mass opposition in the new left and the counterculture. By the late 1960s, the system confronted a significant challenge.

I was studying in France in 1968 with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Goldmann, and Jacques Derrida when the most powerful new-left movement of the decade broke out and I suddenly found myself at the center of a revolution. During May of that year, a student revolt was the catalyst for a general strike that shut down the entire country. The French government came close to collapsing and only the loyalty of the troops saved it.

This movement seemed to me to be the end of dystopia and the beginning of a new type of socialism. In 1968, we fought for a general democratization of economic and technical institutions, not the system that prevailed in communist countries at that time. We substituted the idea of self-management for the orthodox Marxist concept of socialism.2

Although the French government still confronted a traditional Left opposition, France was well on the way to becoming an American-style consumer society. And yet it came quite close to a revolutionary transformation under an ideological banner emphasizing solidarity, democracy, and social control over economic and technical institutions. I came out of this movement convinced that there must be a way of reformulating Marxist theory to account for this unprecedented revolt in an advanced capitalist society. I wrote a first book on the early Marx and Lukács in search of resources in the Marxist tradition for interpreting this new situation (Feenberg 1986).

From Lukács I learned to distinguish rationality as a cognitive procedure from rationality as a cultural form. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the “great divide” that separates modernity from premodernity without falling into conservative and ethnocentric self-congratulation. The ability to reason belongs to the genetic heritage of all normal human beings and all cultures exhibit its effects in various ways. But modern scientific-technical rationality, as a specific type of rationality, uniquely emphasizes unusual procedures such as quantification that are not common to all cultures. When these procedures are instituted everywhere in technologies, bureaucracies, and markets, a wholly new type of society is created. This society is legitimated ideologically by its rational grounds rather than by narrative myths, and that too is new. Critique must break through the illusion of rational necessity that is the ideological foundation of the system.

Lukács introduced the term reification to refer to the process in which human relations are objectified as things. He understood this process as the production of the social world in a rational form, subject to laws such as those of political economy, and technically manipulable. The relation of the worker to the machine is the model of practice in a law-governed social world. The rational system is autonomous, self-acting, and requires only tending from human agents. The worker cannot change the logic of the machine, only position him- or herself correctly in front of it. Lukács generalized from this example to understand the structure of practice in every area in advanced capitalism. The entrepreneur on the stock market, the employee in the bureaucracy, the intellectual in the discipline, all accept the law of their reified institution and attempt to manipulate it to advantage. But Lukács believed the working class was capable of coming together, recognizing its own role in creating the reified society, and transforming it.

How did Lukács explain the unique cognitive and political potential of the working class? He argued that the type of rationality exemplified by capitalist economics and technology would meet an immanent limit. Rational forms that pretended to autonomy came up against their intrinsic link to a content that overflowed them on all sides. This content was the life process of the members of the society, shaped but not fulfilled by the forms. As Lukács explained, a formal economic category such as wages appears to the businessperson as a variable in calculations of profit and loss, but from the worker’s perspective, its quantitative ups and downs are of vital significance for concrete health and happiness. Lukács believed that workers could penetrate the reified veil of the economy on the basis of their experience of the limit of the forms, and uncover potentialities blocked by capitalism.

Of course, by 1968, and certainly by now, the traditional Marxist representation of the working class no longer corresponded to reality. But the general idea of a dereification of rational forms, the translation of fixed and frozen institutions back into the processes of human relations from which they arose, seemed to be verified by the May Events. The slogans “Everything Is Possible” and “All Power to the Imagination” flowed directly from this dereifying impulse.

It was on these terms that I understood or perhaps misunderstood the early work of those in the field of science and technology studies (STS) with whom I soon became acquainted. They offered empirical support to the critique of scientism, determinism, and the ideology of progress I found in Lukács and the Frankfurt school. They also placed technology in a central position as a mediation in the process of human relations, both shaping that process and shaped by it.3

My rather idiosyncratic appropriation of STS generalized from Lukács’s argument to construct a new theory of technical politics. The problem was still the one Lukács posed of the critical force of the consciousness of dominated groups in technically mediated institutions. Once those caught up in the technical networks of the society realize their own collective role in creating and sustaining those networks, they can criticize and change them. This is not a romantic return to the immediate, to emotion versus reason, but rather a dialectical passage through the rationalized forms to an alternative configuration of the networks they make possible. These insights helped me to see the theoretical interest of my own involvements in technical politics, which I’ll sketch next.

I should warn you that I’m not a sociologist or anthropologist. The concrete cases I’ve studied were not chosen out of simple curiosity or for their scholarly significance. They have all grown out of my experience as an insider in various unusual organizations. Since I have always been situated within the field of my study, I have a point of view. I have not so much “followed the actors,” in Latour’s phrase, as acted and reflected on the results from my situated vantage point. I can’t say whether this is more of an advantage or disadvantage, but I know it is a condition of my own ability to gain insight and do research. In what follows I would like to describe the involvements that served as a background to my theoretical work. These are matters from which we normally abstract in writing up our research, the “backstage” apparatus hidden from the audience. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to bring it forward for once to see what it looks like in the light of day.

I will discuss three cases. They concern medical research on human subjects, online education, and computer networking in France. All three cases have in common a polarity between a technocratic and a democratic logic. In each case I have been involved in democratic initiatives. As you’ll see, the strategy emerging from these cases does not oppose human beings to machines, but rather attempts to incorporate underserved human needs into the technical codes that preside over design. In these cases, narrowing the range of needs served is a condition for the exercise of elite power through the technical network. Democratic interventions aim at widening that range and reducing asymmetries of power. Thus the “question of technology” in these cases is not about a substantive characteristic of technology as such but rather concerns the image of the human each technical system presupposes and shapes through the needs it serves. But let me turn now to the cases.

Three Case Histories

1. Controversy in Medicine

I was politically active until the late 1970s when the sharply divided American Left finally succeeded in committing suicide. I still felt like an activist even though my energy no longer had any obvious political outlet. A neurologist of my acquaintance invited me to help him create a medical research foundation to study an incurable disease. The Center for Neurologic Study hoped to find a cure for ALS (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”) through drug trials organized with particular attention to patient rights. There is still no effective treatment for this poorly understood disease, and most patients die within a few years of diagnosis. Richard Smith, the doctor primarily responsible for the Center, had already begun holding patient meetings to inform patients about their illness and to promote the exchange of social support and ideas for symptomatic treatments. These patient meetings promised a favorable scene on which to obtain the informed consent required for legitimate experimentation. Through these meetings, we organized patients to participate collectively and vicariously in medical experiments with the intention of empowering them with both knowledge and enhanced care.4

I studied medical ethics and medical sociology as we worked on developing our innovative experimental system. I gradually came to realize that we were engaged with the same issues that had interested me in technology. The medical system is a vast technical institution in which individual patients are all too often lost. This is particularly true of experimental medicine, which patients sometimes confuse with standard treatment and invest with unrealistic expectations. Yet patient demand for experimentation in the case of incurable fatal disease is very strong. The hope of cure needs to be tempered by a sense of the slow progress of science, but that makes it more difficult to recr...