Technology, Modernity, And Democracy: Essays

173 Pages·2018·1.338 MB·English

by  Andrew Feenberg, Eduardo Beira

Technology, Modernity,
and Democracy
Reinventing Critical Theory
Series Editors:
Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Villanova University
Yannik Thiem, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Villanova University
The Reinventing Critical Theory series publishes cutting edge work that seeks
to reinvent critical social theory for the 21st century. It serves as a platform
for new research in critical philosophy that examines the political, social,
historical, anthropological, psychological, technological, religious, aesthetic
and/or economic dynamics shaping the contemporary situation. Books in
the series provide alternative accounts and points of view regarding the de-
velopment of critical social theory, put critical theory in dialogue with other
intellectual traditions around the world and/or advance new, radical forms of
pluralist critical theory that contest the current hegemonic order.
Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
by Brian Milstein
Resistance and Decolonization by Amílcar Cabral,
translated by Dan Wood
Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro
edited by Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen
Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency
by Joshua Ramey
Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology
edited by Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skafish
The Invention of the Visible: The Image in Light of the Arts
by Patrick Vauday, translated by Jared Bly
Metaphors of Invention and Dissension
by Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Technology, Modernity,
and Democracy
Essays by Andrew Feenberg
Edited by Eduardo Beira
and Andrew Feenberg
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
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Selection and editorial matter © Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg, 2018
Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0719-5
PB 978-1-7866-0721-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available
ISBN 978-1-78660-719-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78660-721-8 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78660-720-1 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Eduardo Beira
Introduction 1
Andrew Feenberg
PART I: PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
1 Encountering Technology 13
2 Ten Paradoxes of Technology 37
3 What Is Philosophy of Technology? 55
PART II: TECHNICAL CITIZENSHIP
4 Technoscience and Democracy 67
5 Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society 81
6 Function and Meaning: The Double Aspects of Technology 95
PART III: HEIDEGGER AND MARCUSE
7 Heidegger and Marcuse: On Reification and Concrete Philosophy 117
8 The Politics of Meaning: Modernity, Technology, and Rationality 127
v
vi Contents
Notes 147
References 151
Proper Name Index 157
Concept Index 159
Preface
Eduardo Beira
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This book brings together essays by Andrew Feenberg written mostly during
the last decade concerning the question of technology. The book is divided into
three parts. Part I, Philosophy of Technology, includes three essays introducing
critical theory of technology and comparing it with other approaches. Part II,
Technical Citizenship, consists of three essays that offer a deeper analysis of
the issues of modernity and discuss the opportunities for human agency in a
modern society where technology is ubiquitous. Part III, Heidegger and Mar-
cuse, includes articles on the relation of these two classic critics of technology.
My original motivation for editing this book arose from the need for a
modern book about philosophy of technology (in Portuguese language) suit-
able for graduate courses, especially in schools of engineering. This idea
drove my previous translation of these essays into Portuguese for the first
edition of this book. Andrew Feenberg has collaborated on the English edi-
tion of this book, which first appeared in Portuguese, and has written a new
introductory essay.
Confusion between science and technology and the trend of the “method-
ological scientization” of technology has harmful effects on the culture of
engineering, and not only there, biasing academic scholarship and distort-
ing the understanding of design and development. The emergence of the
“technosciences” has further obscured the scene. This “scientization” is a
kind of second wave of the technocracy movement that began in the twen-
ties and continued until the sixties of the last century. In the first version of
technocracy, only specialized technicians (especially engineers) could man-
age a society based on machinery, applying technical management methods
vii
viii Preface
to society itself and eliminating traditional politics. In this second wave,
it is not engineers and technicians who are supposed to dominate society,
but “scientists” (in a broad sense) applying their research methods for the
validation and diffusion of knowledge. But this new conception of technoc-
racy ignores the fact that technology has completely different foundations,
functions, and users from science, and so requires different methods from
those of scientific research.
The English philosopher Mary Midgley made a strong criticism of this
“omnicompetent” science as a “naive academic imperialism” willing to trans-
form “science” into a comprehensive ideology ensuring inevitable progress.1
But technology is neither scientific nor a direct product of science. It is essen-
tially a social product that, of course, employs some scientific knowledge. It
is obvious that these frameworks have very different implications for design,
development, diffusion, and change.
Future engineers and technologists must have experience with views of
technology that go beyond the narrow horizon of pure technical knowledge.
This selection of texts by Feenberg intends to serve that purpose: to offer
a philosophical view of social and technical rationality that opens doors to
a democratic agency and integrates social actors into the discussion and
the project of technology. This allows us to hope for a progressive human-
ization of technology in a society that balances its demands with those of
the natural environment. And it justifies the hope that we can overcome
catastrophic and anti-human views of technology that lead to the design
and deployment of potentially dangerous technologies. Understanding the
paradoxes of technology can help us distinguish its useful functions from
its dangerous risks.
THE CONTEXT:
CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY
The last decades saw important changes in technologies: devices became
smaller (miniaturization), more flexible and intelligent (digitalization), and
more affordable and personal (democratization). Technology changed from
the mechanical/chemical paradigm to the electronic/biological one.
Throughout most of the world until a few decades ago, a normal citizen
owned few modern technological devices. During the 1910s cars began the
process of democratization of ownership with Henry Ford’s mass production
on the assembly line. After the Second World War, the “white revolution” of
home appliances began, but it took decades for ownership of technological
devices to become a mass phenomenon rather than an exclusive privilege
Preface ix
of elite classes. Technologies of mass transportation and communication
networks, as well as utilities and factories are owned by elites, and com-
mon citizens “rent” access to them or buy their products. Nowadays these
products have themselves become sophisticated technological devices incor-
porating a high level of advanced technology that promises more and more
networking capabilities and higher levels of interdependence. Their owners
can now influence the technology itself due to their power as a mass able
to protest and choose various configurations and options in the technologies
that surround them.
Feedback from new more or less anonymous users can now influence the
evolution of technology, as well as corporate interests, in consumer electron-
ics, in some medical technologies, food, energy, and so on. “Smartphones”
may well be the paradigm of advanced and ubiquitous personal technology,
a node in complex telecom and information systems, fruit of digital tech-
nologies with variable geometries of functions, values, and meanings. The
increasing ease of personalization of devices, especially of their interfaces
with the social world, creates room for embedding more values and meanings
into technical devices.
The public image of technology has changed a lot. It may be interesting
to recall here an illustration by Walter Murch (1907–1967) for a book by
Stuart Chase, published in 1929, about men and machines.2 Feenberg cites
and reproduces Murch’s work in chapter 2 of this book. The cover of one of
Feenberg’s books (Questioning Technology, 1999) is a painting by Murch
(Carburetor, 1957). In figure 0.1 below, the small man in the middle of giant
mechanical gears powered by cosmic energies suggests an equivocal restless-
ness about the position of man in a world dominated by technology. But it is
obvious that the mechanical image of technology and energy represented here
is outdated by contemporary paradigms.
Murch produced this image during his early years, when he was still an art
student in New York. In turn, Stuart Chase (1888–1985), the author of the
book Murch illustrated, was an ambivalent technological enthusiast: on the
one hand, he was a believer in technocracy (the main issue of the book Murch
illustrated), and, on the other hand, he was a precursor of public policies of
consumer protection opposed to false advertising and other abuses.
Nowadays social actors have access to the technical mediations they need
to find solutions to the social pathologies associated with technologies. They
can inform advanced technologies with daily experiences. Public acceptance
of this symbiosis of user experiences with specialized technical knowledge
is something new that begins to balance the previous trend for the total au-
tonomy and dominant power of the specialist in the design of technological
solutions.