Andrew Feenberg

The neo-liberal reform of the university has had a huge impact on higher education and promises still more changes in the future. Many of these changes have had a negative impact on academic careers, values, and the educational experience. Educational technology plays an important role in the defense of neo-liberal reform, less through actual accomplishment than as a rhetorical justification for supposed “progress.” This paper outlines the main claims and consequences of this rhetorical strategy and its actual effects on the university to date.

1. Thomson's critique: Despite the efforts of his followers to show that Heidegger had a progressive theory of technology, his work is clouded by nostalgia. His positive contribution is a fragmentary opening toward a phenomenology of daily technical practice, which I use to develop de Certeau's distinction between the strategic control of technical systems and their tactical usage by subordinates. Heidegger himself made no such application of his own phenomenological approach. 2. Stump's critique: Can an ontological essentialism and a historically oriented constructivism be combined as Questioning Technology attempts to do? Stump claims they cannot, but assumes that I accept far more ontological and epistemological baggage from each position than I do. In fact, what I retain from essentialism is primarily the analysis of the basic technical relation to reality, and from constructivism, historical and hermeneutic methods of analysis of the realization of that relation in actual systems and devices. These elements of the two theories are compatible.

In his critique of my book Heidegger and Marcuse, Jeff Kochan (2006) asserts that I am committed to the possibility of private knowledge, transcendent truths, and individualism. In this reply I argue that he has misinterpreted my analysis of the Challenger disaster and Marcuse’s work. Because I do not dismiss Roger Boisjoly’s doubts about the Challenger launch, Kochan believes that I have abandoned a social concept of knowledge for a reliance on the private knowledge of a single individual. In fact, I consider Boisjoly’s observations just as social, if not as scientific, as the results of rigorous scientific study. Kochan’s reliance on a principle of symmetry derived from science studies to explain such politically charged technological controversies tends to mask the role of power and ideology in social life. Kochan interprets Marcuse as a failed Heideggerian who regresses from Heidegger’s social conception of human being to traditional individualism. I am accused of sharing this view. This interpretation overlooks the importance of the Hegelian–Marxist category of ‘real possibility’ in Marcuse’s work and so mistakes his critique of conformist politics for individualist romanticism. Marcuse always attempted to ground radical opposition in a community of struggle without abandoning the heritage of a long critical tradition. This view I willingly share. Keywords: Philosophy of technology; Principle of symmetry; Challenger disaster; Herbert Marcuse; Martin Heidegger; Knowledge .

ResumoEste artigo defende que a teoria da concretização de Gilbert Simondon é útil tanto para os estudos sobre ciência e tecnologia quanto para a teoria política. Por "concretização", Simondon compreende o processo de multiplicação de funções propiciadas pelas estruturas de um dispositivo. Ele oferece o exemplo do motor com resfriamento a ar, que combina resfriamento e contenção em uma única estrutura, a caixa do motor. A concretização contrasta com projetos "abstratos", que acrescentam estruturas para cada função, complicando o dispositivo e reduzindo sua eficiência. De acordo com Simondon, a evolução normal das tecnologias pode ser acompanhada através de suas sucessivas concretizações. O propósito deste artigo é concretizar em um único sistema de referência conceitual as noções funcionalmente distintas de "concretização" em Simondon e de "atores" nos ECT. Essa combinação tem aplicações políticas importantes. Ela mostra como demandas aparentemente contraditórias podem ser reconciliadas através de inovação. Por exemplo, diz-se frequentemente que acrescentar novas funções ambientais a tecnologias existentes implicará na troca da eficiência pela ideologia. Ao invés disso, o novo sistema de referência conceitual abre-nos uma perspectiva de transformação radical da tecnologia requerida pela modernização e sustentabilidade ecológicas. Ao fazer isso, ele sugere um modo de reconstruir a "crítica racional da razão" da Escola de Frankfurt e a noção de "racionalidade tecnológica" de Marcuse.This article argues that Gilbert Simondon's theory of concretization is useful for both science and technology studies and political theory. By "concretization" Simondon means the process of multiplying the functions served by the structures of a device. He gives the example of the air cooled engine which combines cooling and containment in a single structure, the engine case. Concretization contrasts with "abstract" designs that add structures for each function, complicating the device and reducing its efficiency. According to Simondon the normal evolution of technologies can be traced in successive concretizations. The aim of this paper is to concretize in a single conceptual framework the functionally distinct notions of "concretization" in Simondon and "actors" in STS. The combination has important political applications. It shows how apparently contradictory demands can be reconciled through innovation. For example, we are often told that adding new environmental functions to existing technologies will trade off ideology for efficiency. Instead, the new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests a way of reconstructing the Frankfurt School's "rational critique of reason" and Marcuse's notion of "technological rationality"

As we rapidly approach the 50th year of the much‐celebrated ‘cognitive revolution’, it is worth reflecting on its widespread impact on individual disciplines and areas of multidisciplinary endeavour. Of specific concern in this paper is the example of the influence of cognitivism's equation of mind and computer in education. Within education, this paper focuses on a particular area of concern to which both mind and computer are simultaneously central: educational technology. It examines the profound and lasting effect of cognitive science on our understandings of the educational potential of information and communication technologies, and further argues that recent and multiple ‘signs of discontent’, ‘crises’ and even ‘failures’ in cognitive science and psychology should result in changes in these understandings. It concludes by suggesting new directions that educational technology research might take in the light of this crisis of cognitivsm.

Modern societies are shaped to a significant extent by socially rational institutions, arrangements, and technologies. A purely functional understanding of these rationalized structures eliminates the element of meaning from social life. Ellul, Heidegger and the Frankfurt School focused on this impoverishment and associate it with the spread of technology. But recent technology studies offer a different perspective which can be joined to the formulation of the social critique in the writings of Herbert Marcuse

We live in a world of technical systems, designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by a personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization without historical precedent. It overshadows traditional democratic institutions and largely determines our way of life. Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason reconstructs the idea of democracy for this brave new world. The author draws on the tradition of radical social criticism represented by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School as well as contemporary Science and Technology Studies. The social critics recognized the role of instrumental rationality in modern societies, but they did not analyze any actual technologies in detail, nor did they develop a convincing theory of democratic resistance to the new forms of domination by rational systems. STS has developed methods of analysis for a fine-grained study of technology. Technosystem brings these methods to bear on the resistances emerging in the world described by the radical social critics of the Frankfurt School.--

The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason--scientific knowledge, technical rationality--and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet and the environmental movement. He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time

Marcuse argues that society must be evaluated in terms of its unrealized potentialities. Potentialities are formulated by the imagination, which has an essential cognitive function in revealing what things might be. Utopian thinking, thinking that transcends the given facts toward their potentialities, is thus rational in Marcuse’s view. His explanation for this claim draws on Hegel, Marx, and phenomenology. With Freud, Marcuse elaborates the historical limits and possibilities of the imagination as an expression of Eros. Utopia is the historical realization in a refashioned world of the rational contents of the imagination.

In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse synthesized a wide range of ideas from the early Lukács, Husserl, Heidegger, and his colleagues, Horkheimer and Adorno. This synthesis is the culmination of the tradition of radical modernity critique that rose to prominence in the 1960s, providing the ideological basis for the New Left and its successor movements such as feminism and environmentalism. I develop an approach to this tradition in terms of the relation of function to meaning as it is reflected in the thought of Lukács and Heidegger. The paper concludes with an account of the relation between this theoretical heritage and contemporary technical politics.

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s “rational critique of reason.”

In this text I discuss the fundamental problem of human finitude. This is an issue that comes up in both sources of Western ethical tradition, both the Judaic and the Greek source. The ancient wisdom teaches human finitude and enjoins human beings to avoid hubris, the belief that they are gods. Despite, or rather because of the many advances in technology that have occurred in the past century, we can still draw on this tradition for wisdom. The text is divided into three parts: ontological finitude, epistemological finitude and democracy as recognition of finitude. A systems-theoretic concept of human action and the concept of “entangled hierarchy” are introduced to explain the relevance of finitude to technology.

Marcuse was the face of the Frankfurt School during the 1960s and '70s. His eclipse led, among other unfortunate consequences, to the disappearance of his critique of science and technology. That critique is based on an experiential ontology that derives in part from Marcuse’s background in phenomenology. In this paper I trace the roots of that ontology in his early interpretation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. One-Dimensional Man takes up the phenomenological critique in a Marxist vein. This critique is newly relevant now that we face impending environmental catastrophe due to climate change. Thus the study of Marcuse today is not simply academic, but once again politically significant.