Technology, Modernity, and Democracy

* Book: Technology, Modernity, and Democracy. Essays by Andrew Feenberg. Rowman and Littlefield, 2018

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Description

"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."

Reading notes by Michel Bauwens

In 2006, I printed out various essays by Andrew Feenberg, which may not be identical to those chosen in this 2018 selection, but will nevertheless be informative about Andrew Feenberg's general approach and ideas. His general aim seems to be to apply Critical Theory to an understanding of technology.

As noted in a seperate note on a essay,

- i.e. Reflections on the Role of Technology in the 20th Century

Feenberg divides the philosophy of technology in two camps:

   - 1) a dystopian, held by Heidegger and Marcuse, and now by Baudrillard and Virilio and Albert Bergman. In some ways, they reflect a nostalgia for a idealized past
   - 2) it is this that is rejected by the non-modern or the postmodern approaces. According to these actors, like Bruno Latour and Donna Harraway, we have gone through dystopia and have come out on the other side

Feenberg also gives a double definition of modernity:

   - 1) as opposed to tradition, and thus referring to the accomplishments of science and technology, which are universal, though they first appearded in the West
   - 2) as the expression of a particular 'Western' tradition, but which is 'masquerading' as universalism, and has been charged by postmodernism for doing so

- Feenberg notes the powerlessness of the postmodern critique, and proposes to go more deeply by using a Critical Theory of Technology.

Feenberg's approach starts from a series of methodological assumptions, described here under four principiples:

- 1) HERMENEUTIC CONSTRUCTIVISM

- Technology is not the product of a unique technical rationality, but of a combination of technical and social factors, which should be studied not only with the empirical methods of the social sciences, but also with the interpretative methods of the humanities. The latter to uncover the meaning of technological objects.

- 2) HISTORICISM

- How the professions have defined history, blinds them to the deep impact of public opinion. Technology is far more able to incorporate social values.

- 3) TECHNICAL DEMOCRACY

- A democratic public sphere sensitive to technical affairs is a necessity and is already shown to exist in the concern for environmental and biotechnical matters. Also important is the 're-appropriation' of.technology by users.

- 4) META THEORY

- Technologies decontextualize objects and then recontextualize them, a process which is differentiation in modernity (and not in premodernity ?). This allows for a deconstructive critique of technology and therefore shows a freedom from determinism.

In the introduction to the Chinese translation of his book on 'Alternative Modernity', Feenberg argues against technological determinism. Technology is not driven by a universal rationality but by social actors, and thus it has become part of democratic decision-making and wants to release the hitherto 'subjugated knowledge'.

Critical Theory Essay

Feenberg distinguishes between essentialist critiques of technology (Heidegger, Mumford, Marcuse), which qre often anti-modern, from the constructiist studies of technology, often seen as uncritical. His aim is to combine the strength of both, in a Instrumentalization Theory

Instrumentalization Theory

Instrumentalization Theory holds that technology must be analyzed from two levels:

   - 1)  at the level of our original functional relation to reality,  i.e. attention to the de-worldling of objects, torn from their original context, subject to control and manipulation
   - 2) at the level of design and implementation

The primary level simplifies objects for incorporation in a device, while the secondary level integrates the simplified objects to a natural and social environment.

Analysis of the first level is inspired by categories introduced by Heidegger and other substantivists critics - but without its anti-modernism, while analyses at the second level is inspired by the empirical stud of technology in a constructivist vein.

Constructivism presupposes that there are different solutions to technological problems, which reflects the different interests of the various actors involved, but usually favors isolated experts working for the corporate and political elites. It denies efficiency is the primary method of meta-ranking. "Technology is 'undetermined' by the criterion of efficiency". Technical codes already incorporate the dominant values and interests, and 'hide' them. Marx had already discovered the impersonal domination inherent in capitalism which differs from the personal domination of earlier social formations.

He did not foresee the extension of the technical mgt of human resources to the entire social field: "The whole life environment of society comes under the rule of technique.". Feenberg calls this the operational autonomy of management, which does not integrate subordinated actors in decision-making. It reproduces itself through technology. But this technology is only one possible path of development, truncated as it is by the demands of power.

A different power structure would bring differential technological paths into existence. There is no such thing as technology as such. Therefore, Feenberg calls for a democratic movement in the technical sphere to create alliances that would take into account the destructive effects of the technology on human beings and the environment.

He relies on De Certeau for this account of democratic resistances, because he incorporates the viewpoints of those subordinated to technical management, something Heidegger fails to do. An example is pollution control for automobiles, something implemented only after a political subject arose who demanded it to be mandatory. The same failure can be seen in the anti-modernist critics of the de-worldization seen in computerization and internetization, for example as online education. They see only a 'terminal subject', i.e. user, being controlled.

They do not see what the subjects are doing in the technological lifeworld, and the meanings, processes and relations they are constructing:

- "As computer networks developed, communication functions were often introduced by users." The collective itself re-constituted itself around the contested formation of the computer." (Latour)