“Can we conceive an industrial society based on democratic participation in which individual freedom is not market freedom and in which social responsibility is not exercised through coercive regulation?” (p. 5). Individual freedom coercive regulation social responsibility – these terms used by Andrew Feenberg in the second edition of Transforming Technology are not typically in the current debate around technology. Do these patently unfashionable concepts tell us anything surprising and new about contemporary technology or has the rapid explosion of cyber‐culture invalidated anything Feenberg can glean from the rapidly yellowing pages of his library?
Transforming Technology is set against the background of the perennial debate around whether technology has innately dangerous consequences for humans, or is simply a neutral tool that should not be evaluated in the language of moral philosophy. This is indeed a difficult dilemma – should we project our all too human concerns with ethics and morality onto our tools, or should we abandon any talk of politics when considering a hammer, chemical weapons or nano‐technology? Feenberg is uncomfortable with each of these approaches. Instead, he suggests that we need to see technology as something that is connected with human political and social projects. At the same time we should not risk the temptation of seeing technology as something good or bad in itself. Feenberg is indeed right to point out that most of the political and social projects of modern life are carried out by technologies. Technologies from an automobile to a fountain pen whir away to achieve social ends in an apparently faceless manner. These technologies that are such a central part of our social life confront us in the most immediate and violent way, as objects. They confront us with such immediacy and objectivity that we are forced to change our actions. The telephone survey worker can only enter data about peoples voting preferences one way when they are confronted by an object like database, which will not yield to their passions and pains. The way we move about the city is shaped by the configuration of roads. An employee performance appraisal system tells a human resource manager who they should or should not hire. At the same time, each of these technologies also have deeply political implications because they play a role in shaping social processes. The telephone researcher's database shape who we think are viable candidates in an election, roads shape how we can use public space, and an employment appraisal system shapes who gets hired and fired in a firm. This sets us a strange tension for Feenberg – how is it that an apparently stable object can be infused to its core with political implications?
In order to explain this tension, Feenberg opens his book by reviewing the major approaches to developing a social theory of technology. Instrumental views of technology as merely a tool, and substantive views of technology as innately good or bad are quickly rejected (pp. 5‐8). In place of these Feenberg recommends a critical theory of technology. He argues that technologies are structures that exceed our subjective wishes by shaping and directing, or ability to actively use them. This does not mean human interests are not embedded within a given technology. Rather, the shape of technology we use is not preordained, but are actively chosen by people. Indeed, a “critical theory argues that technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an “ambivalent” process of development, suspended between different possibilities” (p. 15). In order to understand the ambivalent nature of technology, Feenberg heeds the critique of technocratic society found in the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Feenberg laments the fact that the Frankfurt School “which began with a philosophically informed critique of contemporary social trends is now frequently left out of the growing debate over technology” (p. 14). However, he is not carried away with this lamentation for dead masters. He recognizes that although Frankfurt School of Critical Theory will certainly furnish one with the philosophical starting point in the critique of a technocratic society, “one simply cannot return to the formulations of Adorno or Marcuse as though the tremendous ferment around environmentalism, medical technology, and computerization has changed nothing of significance” (p. 14). In order to understand this ferment Feenberg trawls contemporary theoretical approaches to technology. Currently fashionable theories of post‐humanism (e.g. Haraway, 1996), and actor network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987), are briefly considered. These are dismissed because their political project of fluid relations between subjects and objects assumes that the only relation of power thrown up by contemporary technology is the blurring or elimination of relations between subjects and objects. Both actor network theory and cyborg theory are accused of leading to a destruction of the crucial political dialectic between subject and object, leaving us with no marking points of different. We are left to wallow in a situation of “sublime nothingness about which nothing can be said, that night in which all cows are black” (p. 30).
Dismissing the project of breaking down the subject‐object dialectic may seem to many contemporary commentators to be a misinformed one. After‐all, isn't it such dualisms which stop us from developing hybrid identities, throwing off the oppressive weight of the human, and finally heeding Nietzsche's rallying cry for the Übermensch? Perhaps not. For Feenberg the liquidation of the subject/object split leads to a kind of empiricism where we are only able to describe and relay the actor‐networks which have established a domination in the field of truth making. Because of the immanence of truth, we only have the words at hand. Because the object becomes one actor among many, we are unable to make an appeal to a truth that transcends all the dominant announcements in a given field. Without the possibility of truth all the heretic that we are left with is the dominant technologies and arguments of the day. The only political option available would involve further developing these means of domination and exploring all the horrible erotics that may be associated. Without a transcendental truth which continually and necessarily exceeds our specific statements about this truth, the only resource people have who are not on the side of the dominant conjecture are arguments that will inevitably prove them wrong once again. The liquid politics pursued by post‐humanism may claim to disarm many of the scientists’ claims, but it also removes one of the few weapons which are on the side of the dominated. Under such a postmodern scientific regime, an activist may “protest the repressive implications of the essentializing assumptions underlying her society, but apparently not in the name of natural equality or human rights” (p. 31). And it is precisely here that we locate the rub of post‐humanism et al; by doing away with a transcendental object we are given the democratic right of speaking endless of our varied perspectives on a given technology. What we are not allowed is the freedom that the silent space of the transcendental truth allows. It is this silent space that gives the endless democratic conversation a source of potential justification beyond its own continuation. The transcendental gives democratic debate about technology something to aim at. This something is continually lacking because any subjective conjecture always falls short. Each conjecture will never be completely filled in or take over the space the transcendental truth. The only hope Feenberg has for a politics which does not follow the road of an endless demotic conversation crammed with is subjective conjecture, is to reclaim the transcendental object of truth, and place it back into a dualistic relationship with the subject.
Once Feenberg has gone through his dialectical tap dance of recovering the object from current debates, he is faced with the question of how to develop a politics of contemporary technology. In order to do this he begins by building a theoretical basis that puts technology at the center of relations of social domination. Feenberg finds this in a tradition of radical thought stretching from Marx (Chapter 2) through to Marcuse and Foucault (Chapter 3). In the work of Marx is located a demonstration of how technologies are not simply neutral tools, but are linked into already existing social structures of domination, in particular capitalism. By being linked to such structures, technologies become central in the reproduction of the relations of domination between workers and capital. Feenberg uses Harry Braverman's (1974) famous analysis of the labor process to show how technologies (such as the production line) are often installed not so much for purely technical reasons (higher input/output ratios), but to facilitate the control of capital and management over workers. This happens as all the previously tacit skills of workers are extracted, codified and then encoded into the production line. No longer does the process of making a car require a highly skilled mechanic who is paid relatively well. To make a car, it is now possible to employ barely literal newcomers for a fraction of the price. Feenberg feels that Marx does not go far enough – he recognizes the importance of technology in the accumulation process, but he continues to see it as a mere appendage in the reproduction of an economic system. This is troubling, because many of the technologies that shape and control our lives are not directly connected to accumulation motives. Rather, they appear to be linked with the broad requirement of developing technical control over a modern population. In order to adequately think through these dynamics of technical control, Feenberg draws on Marcuse's analysis of technocratic society and Foucault's analysis of modern technologies of control. In each of these theorists he locates an analytical framework that recognizes how modern societies operate through a range of technologies that shape our engagements and experiences of social life. Indeed, each of these shows how the techniques of power appear to be based on an ongoing dialectic between power and knowledge, ideology and science, where one term never quite succeeds. Contemporary forms of knowledge are true because of the dominance they have achieved and vice‐versa. Indeed, technologies like the photocopier, the human resource management system, or the shopping mall are at the very center of capitalist forms of domination: Capitalist social and technical requirements are condensed in a “technological rationality” or “regime of truth” that brings the construction and interpretation of technical systems into conformity with requirements of a system of domination (p. 76). Being a good dialectician, once relations of power are located within power/knowledge practices, Feenberg asks questions about resistance. If power/knowledge infuses every aspect of social life in service of the reproduction of relations of domination, how is it possible to understand these relations of domination? In order to answer this question, he points out that the code of domination never completely over‐writes all uses of technology. Because technology is ambivalent, it may be put to a number of other political uses. This certainly opens up a space for using technology in ways that may not bolster certain forms of domination. Critical theory opens up technology to contestation “by recovering the forgotten contexts and developing a historically concrete understanding of technology” (p. 82).
After charting a critical strategy, the book makes a movement away from analysis and judgments of theory towards a more sustained questioning of how the ambivalent dialectic of technology may actually be played out in pressing contemporary concerns. The first contemporary issue taken up is the post‐industrial debate. This discussion draws out a strand that runs through studies that posed the question of what happens to workers when there is a profound technological change. In considering this question Feenberg challenges the all too prevalent utopian or dystopian views of automation, to point towards the ambivalence and potentiality within it. Using Zuboff's (1988) classic study of the rise of computer mediated work we see how computer systems are often used not so much to increase productivity as to increase control over the work process through the introduction of surveillance technologies. This negative ambivalence is counter‐posed against a more positive articulation of ambivalence in the case of a computer mediated conferencing system that was introduced at Digital Equipment Corporation. Feenberg optimistically reassures us that employees at Digital were able to use the system for whatever purpose they liked. Because of the relatively democratic rules surrounding this conferencing system, there was an explosion of computer‐mediated discussion of issues as diverse as restaurants, sports, and even Heidegger's theory of technology.
In a similar fashion the following chapter argued that the design of expert systems is also ambivalent. To illustrate this point, Feenberg turns to a discussion of artificial intelligence. He charts how some working in this field have been developing computer systems that are aimed at the increase in social control by abstracting previous tacit knowledge into equations. Others see artificial intelligence in much the same way as human though – as a kind of action instead of a logical equation (e.g. Winograd and Flores, 1987). According to this approach computers are not seen to be calculators, but machines for acting within language. This leads to the image of technical systems that do not think in the place of human actors, but are designed to think with us. What becomes adamantly clear in this chapter is that computer systems design is akin to the design of political systems. There can be more or less dominating systems because “the place computers are intended to hold in social life is intimately connected with their design. Systems designed for hierarchical control are congruent with rationalistic assumptions that treat the computer as an automaton intended to command or replace workers in decision‐making role. Democratically designs systems instead must respond to the communicative dimension of the computer” (p. 107).
The final example Feenberg takes to illustrate the ambivalence of technology is online education, particularly in universities. The chapter begins with a recognition of the increasingly prevalent use of the Internet conforms to current methods of education and institutions like universities, which deliver them. We are reassumed, once again, that this does not inevitably lead to the death of scholarship or the rise of the McUniversity. Feenberg assured the nervous academic reader that just like any confrontation with technology, the use of Web‐based learning is ambivalent. The technology of the Internet may be deployed to make education into a technocratic commodity, delivered to students in bite‐sized modules. Online education may also be used as part of a profoundly liberatory project that aims at a spread of the information resources that had been previously locked up in universities, only to be accessed by the privileged few. Perhaps this awareness of the ambivalent practicalities of online education is where Feenberg shows his point most clearly. Instead of approaching something like online education as a radical reordering of screens and spleens (as post‐humanism would), we see technology in a light that is instantly recognized as political. Online education can be about increasing input/output ratios. It also may be about the process of attempting to open up education. By framing it in this way the reader is immediately made aware of the opportunities that lie within our ambivalent technologies.
The most valuable message Feenberg has for the post‐humanized reader is that the tradition of Hegelian critical theory will continue to yield important insights into the nature and possibilities of technology. In particular, we are cautioned against doing away with the space between human actors and technical objects by reducing everything to the status of an actor. Indeed, by reducing this gap we miss the avowed objective of radicalizing and democratizing technology. Instead, we may be unwittingly doing away with the space in which the politics of technology can operate. It is this space between subjective attempts to use technology and incorporate it into various schemes and the very object of the inexhaustible possibility of technology, where ambivalence may arise. It is this space into which politics may enter. Perhaps it is even within this troubled space that the precious glint of hope may catch our eye.
