Quotes from Ch. 7: Critical Theories of Technology

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) [Adorno and Horkheimer] argue that instrumentality is in itself a form of domination, that controlling objects violates their integrity and distorts the inner nature of the dominating subject. If this is so, then technology is not neutral, and simply using it commits one to a valuative stance. (151)

Reform technology is the concern of a second approach which I call design critique. Design critique holds that social interests or cultural values influence the realization of technical principles. (152)

For some, it is Christian or masculinist values that have given us the impression that we can "conquer" nature, a belief that shows up in ecologically unsound technical designs; for others it is capitalist values that have turned technology into an instrument of domination of labor and exploitation of nature (White, 1972; Merchant, 1980; Braverman, 1974). (152)

The question I address here is: what can we learn from Marcuse and Habermas assuming that we are neither metaphysicians nor instrumentalists, that we reject both a romantic critique of science and the neutrality of technology? (153)

Marcuse proposes a new disclosure of being through a revolutionary transformation of basic practices (Dreyfus, 1995). This would lead to a change in the very nature of instrumentality, which would be fundamentally modified by the abolition of class society and its associated performance principle. It would then be possible to create a new science and technology that would place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. Nature would be treated as another subject instead of as mere raw materials. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through realizing nature's inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for the sake of power and profit. (154)

While [Habermas] too is concerned about the technocratic tendencies of advanced societies, he attacks the very notion of a new science and technology as a romantic myth; the ideal of a technology based on communion with nature applies the model of human communication to a domain of strictly instrumental relations. (155)

Apparently, a new and better society can be had by tinkering with the boundaries of technical action systems. So long as technical action remains limited to merely facilitating the complex interactions required by a modern society, it poses no threat. Indeed, to criticize technization in its proper place is anti-modern and regressive. (156)

Marcuse does advocate relating to nature as to another subject, but the concept of subjectivity implied here owes more to Aristotelian substance than to the idea of personhood. He does not recommend chatting with nature but, rather, recognizing it as possessing potentialities of its own with a certain inherent legitimacy. That recognition should be incorporated into the very structure of technical rationality. (156)

As a general rule, formally rational systems must be practically contextualized in order to be used, and as soon as they are contextualized in a capitalist society, they incorporate capitalist values. (160) *Marcuse's critique of Habermas's theory that "science and technology are essentially indifferent to interests and ideology and represent the objective world in terms of the possibilities of understanding and control" (159-60).

The real difference between [Habermas's and Marcuse's] views lies along a different axis. The issue is not, as Habermas thinks, whether to revive a philosophy of nature; it concerns our self-understanding as subjects of technical action. (164)

Habermas distinguishes between system, media regulated rational institutions, such as markets and administration, and lifeworld, the sphere of everyday communicative interactions in which such functions as child rearing, education, and public debate go on. (167)

According to Habermas, the central pathology of modern societies is the colonization of lifeworld by system. This involves the overextension of success-oriented action beyond its legitimate range and the consequent imposition of criteria of efficiency on the communicative sphere. The lifeworld contracts as the system expands into it and delinguistifies dimensions of social life which should be mediated by language. (167)

In fact technology has several different types of communicative content. [. . .] In any transportation system, technology can be found organizing large numbers of people without discussion; they need only follow the rules and the map. Similarly, workers in a well organized factory find their jobs almost automatically meshing through the design of the equipment and buildings--their action is coordinated--without much linguistic interaction. (168)

But a critical theory of technology cannot ignore design. Whether the issue concerns child labor, medical research, computer mediated communication, or environmental impacts of technology, design has normative implications and is not simply a matter of efficiency. (173)

As Marcuse had already argued, the research shows that modern technological rationality incorporates domination in its very structure. Our technical disciplines and designs, especially in relation to labor, gender, and nature, are rooted in a hegemonic order. (178)

Consider, for example, the passage from craft to industrial production: productivity increased rapidly, a quantitative change of great significance that appears purely technical, but just as importantly, secondary instrumentalizations such as word design, management, and working life suffered a profound qualitative transformation. These transformations are not merely sociological accretions on a presocial relation to nature, or unintended consequences of technological change, but are essential to industrialization considered precisely in its technical aspect. They result from a technical code that privileges deskilling as a fundamental strategy of mechanization from Arkwright down to the present. (179)

The essence of technology can only be the sum of all the major determinations it exhibits in its various stages of development. That sum is sufficiently rich and complex to embrace numerous possibilities through shifts of emphasis among the primary and secondary instrumentalizations. (179)

Pure technical principles do not define actual technologies. They must be concretized through a technically realized conception of the good which particularizes them and establishes them systematically in the life process of a society. Every instantiation of technical principles is socially specific, just as Habermas claims of law. (180)