#andrew feenberg

On Public-Facing Scholarship

Marcuse diverges from Heidegger in arguing that the congruence of science, technology and society is ultimately rooted in the social requirements of capitalism and the world it projects. As such science and technology cannot transcend that world. Rather, they are destined to reproduce it by their very structure. They are thus inherently conservative, not because they are ideological in the usual sense of the term, or because their understanding of nature is false. Marcuse never calls into question the cognitive value of science and technology. Rather, they are conservative because they are intrinsically adjusted to serving a social order which views being as the stuff of domination. Thus “Technology has become the great vehicle of reification” (Marcuse 1964, 108).

Society is a technological phenomenon as well as a social one, or rather, there are only social phenomena because technology is there to mediate human relations. ..The problem isn’t the quantitative one of “over-consumption,” but the qualitative one of what to consume and how to organize consumption. ..materializing new “ends” in technology itself.. Confusion about technology is a result of the ambiguous status of rationality in the technical domain.. the market, but today we are aware of others. In fact technical rationality has spread over the whole surface of society.. ..All technologies are ambivalent, subject to different paths of development. At any point in a technological trajectory a break can occur and a new path open. This depends on the political and social environment, not on the technology taken in isolation. This is as true of automation as of any other technology. When we learned that software could record the keystrokes of data entry clerks and secretaries, and count the number of errors, we already knew enough. ... We can’t rely on administration to replace markets, and technical progress is no guarantor of emancipation. ..Many progressive, radical movements on the fringes of society express a lot of imagination but lack transformative power. ..that emancipatory change is a many-sided, complex social-historical transformation process ..The demand for total equality leads to silliness and paralysis. ..the technical system is not like a political movement because it is based on difficult intellectual achievements inherited from the past and transmitted by education and training. ..The long term outcome of continual dialogue is likely to be a substantial rise in the level of general technical culture and the replacement of deskilled systems by more interesting and humane processes..

..nature longs for its perfecting through a gentler approach ..The point of these changes is not to achieve virtuous poverty but to “deliver the goods” in a new less destructive form. ..– the complete annihilation of technology, as in the extreme example of anarcho-primitivism...

[...] technology is not independent from “experience”, and, consequently, cannot be thought of as the outcome of instrumental rationality alone. [...]