Andrew Feenberg

Subversive rationalization: Technology, power, and democracy 1

This paper argues, against technological and economic determinism, that the dominant model of industrial society is politically contingent. The idea that technical decisions are significantly constrained by ‘rationality’ ‐ either technical or economic ‐ is shown to be groundless. Constructivist and hermeneutic approaches to technology show that modern societies are inherently available for a different type of development in a different cultural framework. It is possible that, in the future, those who today are subordinated to technologys rhythms and demands will be able to control it and to determine its evolution. I call the process of creating such a society ‘subversive rationalization’ because it requires technological advances that can only be made in opposition to the dominant hegemony.

Technology and the politics of knowledge

Preface Acknowledgments I. Technology as Ideology 1. Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy/Andrew Feenberg 2. New Science, New Nature: The Habermas-Marcuse Debate Revisited/Steven Vogel 3. On the Notion of Technology as Ideology/Robert B. Pippin II. Technology and the Moral Order 4. Citizen Virtues in a Technological Order/Langdon Winner 5. The Moral Significance of the Material Culture/Albert Borgmann III. The Question of Heidegger 6. Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology/Hubert L. Dreyfus 7. Heidegger and the Design of Computer Systems/Terry Winograd 8. Heidegger on Technology and Democracy/Tom Rockmore IV. Media Theories: The Politics of Seeing 9. Image Technologies and Traditional Culture/Don Ihde 10. Technology and the Civil Epistemology of Drmocracy/Yaron Ezrahi V. Feminist Perspectives: Knowledge and Bodies 11. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective/Donna Haraway 12. Knowledge, Bodies, and Values: Reproductive Technologies and Their Scientific Context/Helen E. Longino VI. Eccentric Positions 13. Sade, the Mechanization of the Libertine Body, and the Crisis of Reason/Marcel Henaff 14. The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendts Philosophy of Science and Technology/Pieter Tijmes VII. The Human and the Non-Human 15. Gilbert Simondons Plea for a Philosophy of Technology/Paul Dumouchel 16. A Door Must Either Be Open or Shut: A Little Philosophy of Techniques/Bruno Latour Contributors Index

Virtual Community: No ‘Killer Implication’

NEW MEDIA, NEW COMMUNITIES Thirty-five years after Licklider and Taylor (1968) first envisioned virtual communities, and exactly 10 years after Rheingold (1993) popularized the concept, online sociability is a fact of everyday life. According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report (2001), 84 percent of all American internet users contacted an online group at least once and 79 percent of these users remained in regular contact with at least one group. Pew noted that more people participated in these groups than bought things online. Are all online groups virtual communities? The answer depends of course on the definition of community. If face-to-face contact is required by definition, then obviously no community can form online. We prefer to approach the question from the standpoint of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community: ‘All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’ (1983: 18) Thus, some sort of virtuality is a normal aspect of community life, regardless of the nature of the medium on which it relies. Anderson argues that communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Communication media play a central role in determining the different styles in which communities have been imagined throughout history. The great sacred communities of the past (Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, the Middle Kingdom) were imagined through the medium of a sacred language and script. The birth of the imagined community of the nation involved two ‘new media’, the novel and the newspaper, that flowered in Europe in the 18th century (see Anderson, 1983). Broadcast media added a new dynamic to the imagined community new media & society

Marcuse or Habermas: Two critiques of technology 1

The debate between Marcuse and Habermas over technology marked a significant turning point in the history of the Frankfurt School. After the 1960s Habermass influence grew as Marcuses declined and Critical Theory adopted a far less Utopian stance. Recently there has been a revival of quite radical technology criticism in the environmental movement and under the influence of Foucault and constructivism. This article takes a new look at the earlier debate from the standpoint of these recent developments. While much of Habermass argument remains persuasive, his defense of modernity now seems to concede far too much to the claims of autonomous technology. His essentialist picture of technology as an application of a purely instrumental form of nonsocial rationality is less plausible after a decade of historicizing research in technology studies. The article argues that Marcuse was right after all to claim that technology is socially determined even if he was unable to develop his insight fruitfully. The ar...

The online patient meeting

Studies have shown the importance of social support for health, and the value of patient support groups. Today we are seeing a further development of the idea of the patient meeting: online discussions on the internet and other computer networks. This paper reports on the online activities of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The paper explores key questions in the evaluation of online patient meetings, such as the ability of patients to discuss their problems frankly, the availability and accuracy of advice, the spread and control of rumours.

Rationalizing Play: A Critical Theory of Digital Gaming

This article constructs a new framework for the study of games as sites of social rationalization, applying Feenbergs critical theory of technology. We begin by making the case for a consideration of games as systems of social rationality, akin to other modern systems such as capitalist markets and bureaucratic organizations. We then present a conceptualization of play as a process through which the player focuses attention away from the undifferentiated action of everyday life toward a differentiated sphere of playful activity. This approach reveals how the experience of play changes as it becomes rationalized through the technological mediation and widespread standardization that occurs as games become large-scale social practices. We propose a theory of the rationalization of play (ludification), which outlines the key components of socially rationalized games, which we then apply to the specific example of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

What Is Philosophy of Technology

In this chapter I attempt to answer the question posed in the title from two standpoints, first historically and then in terms of contemporary options in the field, the various different theories that are currently under discussion.1 But before I begin, I would like to clear up a common misunderstanding: philosophy of technology is not closely related to philosophy of science. Science and technology share a similar type of rationality based on empirical observation and knowledge of natural causality, but technology is concerned with usefulness rather than truth. Where science seeks to know, technology seeks to control. However, this is by no means the whole story.

Critical Theory of Communication Technology: Introduction to the Special Section

The debate over the contribution of new communication technology to democracy is far from settled. Some point to the empowering effects of online discussion and fund-raising on recent electoral campaigns in the United States to argue that the Internet will restore the public sphere. Others claim that the Internet is just a virtual mall, a final extension of capitalist rationalization into every corner of our lives, a trend supported by an ever denser web of surveillance technologies threatening individual autonomy in the advanced societies of the West. This introduction to the special section on critical theory of communication technology argues for the democratic thesis with some qualifications. The most important contribution of new technology to democracy is not necessarily its effects on the conventional political process but rather its ability to assemble a public around technical networks that enroll individuals scattered over wide geographical areas. Communities of medical patients, video game players, musical performers, and many other groups have emerged on the Internet with surprising consequences. New forms of resistance correlate with the rationalizing tendencies of a technologized society.

From Critical Theory of Technology to the Rational Critique of Rationality

This paper explores the sense in which modern societies can be said to be rational. Social rationality cannot be understood on the model of an idealized image of scientific method. Neither science nor society conforms to this image. Nevertheless, critique is routinely silenced by neo‐liberal and technocratic arguments that appeal to social simulacra of science. This paper develops a critical strategy for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique. Romantic rejection of reason has proven less effective than strategies that conceptualize modern artefacts, systems, and organizations as rationally underdetermined. This approach first appears in Marx’s analysis of capitalist economics. Although he lacks the concept of underdetermination, Marx gets around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like it in his discussion of the length of the working day. Frankfurt School Critical Theory later blended romantic elements with Marxian ones in a suggestive but ambiguous mixture. The concept of underdetermination reappears in contemporary science and technology studies, now clearly articulated and philosophically and sociologically elaborated. But somewhere along the way the critical thrust was diluted. Critical theory of technology attempts to recover that thrust. Here its approach is generalized to cover the three main forms of social rationality.

The critical theory of technology

Feenberg discusses the possibility of a radical reform of industrial society. He challenges the assumption that modern society, with its emphasis on technological reasoning, has condemned its members to mindless work and subservience to the dictates of management. In doing so, he presents a new interpretation of the relationship between technology, rationality, and democracy.