Andrew Feenberg

Book Symposium on Andrew Feenberg’s Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity Content Type Journal Article Pages 203-226 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0017-8 Authors Inmaculada de Melo-Martín, Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA David B. Ingram, Loyola University Chicago, 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60626, USA Sally Wyatt, e-Humanities Group, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) & Maastricht University, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, The Netherlands Yoko Arisaka, Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover, Gerberstrasse 26, 30169 Hannover, Germany Andrew Feenberg, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3, Canada Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 2

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.

The aim of this inquiry is to investigate Heidegger's ontology of technology. We will show that this ontology is aporetic. In Heidegger's key technical essays, ?The question concerning technology? and its earlier versions ?Enframing? and ?The danger?, enframing is described as the ontological basis of modern life. But the account of enframing is ambiguous. Sometimes it is described as totally binding and at other times it appears to allow for exceptions. This oscillation between, what we will call total enframing and partial enframing, is underscored in the work of two influential scholars of Heidegger's later thought, Hubert Dreyfus and Iain Thomson. We will show that like Heidegger, Dreyfus and Thomson unwittingly perpetuate this dilemma that ultimately covers up the aporetic structure of enframing

In One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse followed Husserl in arguing that modern natural science translates concepts and practices from the Lebenswelt, the everyday lifeworld. Marcuse claimed that a socialist revolution would change that life-world and transform natural science. He anticipated a new concept of reason that would incorporate potentialities experienced in the lifeworld. Teleological aspects of everyday experience would be “materialized” by science. Marcuse’s critique of social science employs a similar concept of translation. The notion that changes in the lifeworld would enable the social sciences to incorporate potentialities is more plausible than these speculations about a successor natural science. But Marcuse’s assumption that such changes would occur after a socialist revolution has been overtaken by the actual development of social movements challenging the socially embedded technosciences. The reciprocal interaction between science and society in the struggle for a liveable world is now a present phenomenon, no longer a distant revolutionary prospect.

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.”

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.

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.

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.--