Quotes from Ch. 8: The Critical Theory of Technology

Such moral reformism has the advantage of assuming the self-evidences of the age. The formal mediations introduced by capitalism are not challenged, but their effects are compensated. (166)

[Marx and Weber's] theories emphasize the self-expanding character of formal mediation and expose the conflict between the dynamic of rationalization inherent in the system and substantive correctives. Since these correctives are by nature formally irrational, they create social tensions likely to be resolved at a later stage through the sacrifice of "ideals" for practical efficiency. (166)

We do not normally think of formal systems as essentially implicated in their own applications. Rather, the repressive employment of such systems appears to proceed from the subject who makes a bad use of them just as one might pick up a rock and throw it at a passerby. (169)

• How do we get around the subject's seemingly inherent desire for domination?

Formal universals decontextualize their objects in both time and space, evacuating their "content" and abstracting from their developmental dynamics. Instead of transcending the given toward its essential potentialities, this type of universality classifies or quantifies objects in terms of the function they can be made to serve in an instrumental system imposed on them from without. (169)

The decontextualizing practice of formal abstraction transforms its objects into mere means, an operation that prejudices their status as much as any valuative choice. (170)

This is why formal systems are intrinsically available as a power base. In cutting the essential connections between objects and their contexts, formal abstraction ignores an important dimension of reality, the inner tensions that open possibilities of progressive development. Instead, objects are conceptualized as fixed and frozen, unchanging in themselves but available for manipulation from above. (170)

Not political power but scientists' own evolving categories inspire new types of questions and new theories, generated spontaneously in the course of research by scientists themselves. (173)

The point is not that science is purer than technology, but that the holistic criteria of change relevant to the critique of technology may not apply to science, or not in the same way. (175)

Marcuse does not propose a conversation with nature but argues for a technology developed and applied with understanding of the inherent potentialities of its medium, the raw materials and context it presupposes. Such an approach would bear a certain resemblance to aesthetic practice, and would promise a new type of technology that does not conquer nature, but reconciles human beings with the natural environment in which they live. (177)

However, there is another less commonplace sense in which bias can be attributed to technology. This more subtle form of bias consists in applying the same standard to individuals who cannot be compared or under conditions that favor some at the expense of others. This type of bias is often difficult to identify because the application of a single standard gives the appearance of fairness. In this case neutrality is not the opposite of bias but its essential precondition. (180)

• But in technological terms, this bias is not that of the technology but of the designers of said technology.

When applied to the organization of labor, these four attributes of technology yield an alienated system. The hegemony of capital does not rest on a particular technique of social control, but more fundamentally on the technical reconstruction of the entire field of social relations within which it operates. (188)

The decontextualized individuals and institutions that emerge from this fragmented practice can only be organized by agents who dominate them from above. Thus the decontextualization of labor opens the space of operational autonomy occupied by modern hegemonics. (188)

A socialist technical code would be oriented toward the reintegration of the secondary qualities and contexts of both the subjects and objects of capitalistic technique. [. . .] This can be accomplished by multiplying the technical systems that are brought to bear on design to take into account more and more of the essential features of the object of technology, the needs of the operators, and the requirements of the environment. (191)

The point is not that capitalism (or its communist imitators) are incapable of gradually solving many of their current problems through reactive crisis avoidance. But the need for a general overhaul of technology is ever more apparent, and that overhaul is incompatible with the continued existence of a system of control from above based on social fragmentation. (191)

Because they do not participate in the original networks of design choice, workers' interests can only be incorporated later through a posteriori regulations that sometimes appear to conflict with the direction of technical progress. But workers are not so much opposed to the advance of technology as they are to a system in which they are the objects rather than the subjects of progress. (191)

Some environmentalists argue that the problems caused by modern technology can only be solved by returning to more primitive conditions. This position belongs to a long tradition of antitechnological critique that denounces the alienation of modern society from nature. (195)

The critical concept of totality aids in identifying the contingency of the existing technological system, the points at which it can be invested with new values and bent to new purposes. Those points are to be found where the fragmentation of the established system maintains an alienated power. (196)

We take the reification of technology for granted today, but the present system is completely artificial. Never before have human beings organized their practice in fragments and left the integration of the bits and pieces to chance. (196)

What is required, rather, is a return on the rational basis to the recognition of the natural and human constraints on technical development. (197)

We need only gain insight into the form of the process of mediation. As the structure of a new social practice, this mediating activity opens infinite possibilities, as opposed to foreclosing the future in some preconceived utopia. Freedom lies in this lack of determinancy. (198)

Quotes from Ch. 7: The Promise of Civilzational Change

It is not easy to reconstruct Marx's theory of the path to this result, but I will argue that it consists in three transitional processes that correspond roughly to the three factors of change identified in the previous chapter: socialization, democratization, and innovation.

1. The socialization of the means of production, accompanied by the early substitution of planning for markets in the allocation of large scale productive forces and cultural capital.
2. The radical democratization of society through an end to the vast economic, social, and political inequalities characteristic of class societies.
3. A new pattern of technological progress yielding innovations that overcome the sharp division of mental and manual labor characteristic of capitalism. (142)

Democratic control of industry is a condition for generating an interest in a new direction of technological progress. In other words, democracy itself is a "productive force" of a new type, shaping innovation in a future socialist society. (143)

Because civilizational change effectively redefines what it is to be human, it has consequences for both ethical and economic advance. (147)

The economic circle is squared by the creation of an industrial perpetuum mobile that feeds off the very resources it consumes. The socialist labor process will be based on a synergism of the demand for skilled labor and the growth of human powers in leisure. A primary leisure activity, pursued for its own sake, increases the value of labor and so can be freely converted into an economic input. (150)

• Seems idealistic. This would be wonderful if the only jobs that needed to be done were those that people enjoyed doing in their spare time. However, there are jobs, realities of life, that I can't imagine anybody wanting to do or spend their free time immersed in. Trash collection, sanitary processing of waste materials...
  

But given the disqualifying effects of the capitalist division of labor, how can workers organize the firm? They need not all be experts to play a role in corporate governance, but they must at least have capacities equivalent to those that enable investors to handle their investments, and work together in shaping policy and selecting managers. Absent these capacities, socialization either remains purely formal, or leads to disastrous mistakes. (151)

Clearly, education is the answer. Social ownership must extend beyond machines, buildings, and land to include the monopolized knowledge required for the management of industry. (151)

The scope and importance of education would broaden accordingly, and in this context the acquisition of knowledge and skill would no longer appear as a subtraction from individual welfare but as a component of it. Education would be uncoupled from society's economic needs and from individuals' investment strategies; it would become the driving force in social and technological change. Industrial society would bootstrap out of the knowledge deficit to a condition in which more and more individuals possessed the cultural qualifications corresponding to their social responsibilities. (153)

Quotes from Ch. 6: The Dilemma of Development

According to the ancient tradition of Western political theory, societies cannot achieve both civic virtue and material prosperity. (117)

There is a flaw in human nature: released by riches from a common struggle with nature, people grow soft and lost the spirit of self-sacrifice required for life in a free society. (117)

New reasons are advanced to show that in industrial societies the satisfaction of material needs is fundamentally incompatible with the progress of human freedom. (117)

The reconciliation of legitimacy and efficiency in the democratic state is the modern utopia par excellence, nowhere so far fully realized. The reason for this difficulty lies in the contradiction of participation and expertise, the two foundations of the system. They are supposed to be reconciled in the subordination of administration to democratically established policies, but in fact the unequal distribution of administrative power turns out to be increasingly subversive of equal participation. (118)

The idea that industrial technology is irredeemable is essentially determinist. To claim that society must choose between industry and craft is to concede that the existing industrial system is the only possible one. Clearly, this is entirely different from arguing for the reconstruction of the system through the incorporation of new values into industrial design. (125)

Critical theory of technology generalizes from such cases to a position that contradicts determinism on each of its two these, first, the notion that technological development occurs along a single fixed track according to immanent criteria of progress, and second, that social institutions must adapt to technological developments. In contrast, the nondeterministic position asserts that:

1. Technological development is overdetermined by both technical and social criteria of progress, and can therefore branch in any of several different directions depending on the prevailing hegemony.
2. While social institutions adapt to technological development, the process of adaptation is reciprocal, and technology changes in response to the conditions in which it finds itself as much as it influences them. (130)

Fleron argues that technology is not neutral but like any artifact embodies the cultural values of the society in which it was first created. Technology transfer is therefore more than an economic exchange; it is also a process of cultural diffusion in which machines serve as vectors for the spread of values of the more advanced societies to the less advanced. (131)

A transition to socialism can come out of an alliance of professional and technical elites with the underlying population to revise technical codes. (139)

Quotes from Ch. 5: Postindustrial Discourses

Computers are useful, in fact, not only for control but also for communication, and any technology that enhances human contact has democratic potentialities. (91-2)

A strategy of automation that took advantage of the computer's communicative capabilities would attenuate the distinction between mental and manual labor. In this version of computerization, new forms of sociability emerge around the new technology, which becomes a medium for democratic self-organization. (92)

• The Internet?

Roughly formulated, the problem concerns the similarities and differences between human thought and information processing. To the extent that similarities can be found, computerized automata can replace people for many sophisticated purposes. To the extent that differences are found, greater philosophical precision is introduced into the notion of human thinking, clearly distinguished from manmade simulacra. (96-7)

• Indicates a general misunderstanding of the basic way computers work. The sophistication of human thought is not programmable simply because we cannot put parameters on the type of complex judgment humans engage in when thinking. Looking at various attempts to simulate this (fingerprint recognition, facial recognition, voice recognition, etc.) have indicated a level of sophistication that we simply cannot replicate with current technology. In short, I don't think we need to be worrying about computers taking over the world, just yet. It makes a great storyline for a movie, but otherwise, it's just science fiction.
  

But living things are "programmed" by genetic materials which are themselves the objects on which the genetic program operates. And, although some mental operations are describable in terms of the metaphor of external programming, the brain as a system largely "creates" itself by operating on its own states, more like a neo-connectionist neural network than an ordinary computer. These are, in short, self-programming beings, an apparent contradiction in terms. (103)

But however "intelligent" it may appear to be, the computer is not a mind, but "a structured dynamic communication medium that is qualitatively different from earlier media such as print and telephones." It is the programmer, those who help prepare the program, and those with whom it is applied who are engaged in communication, not the computer system. (107)

Philosophy must reconceptualize social and technical action on the basis of a radical acceptance of human finitude: the cognition that our actions on the world are ultimately actions on ourselves, on our way of being in the world and on our very nature. (113)

Quotes from Ch. 4: The Bias of Technology

The division of labor is a civilizational issue, affecting not merely workers' productivity and working conditions but their very identity. (65)

If this is true, socio-technical transformation cannot be conceived in terms of instrumental categories because the very act of using technology reproduces what is supposed to be transformed. (65)

This is the paradox of reform from above: since technology is not neutral but fundamentally biased toward a particular hegemony, all action undertaken within its framework tends to reproduce that hegemony. (65)

According to Foucault, power/knowledge is a web of social forces and tensions in which everyone is caught as both subject and object. This web is constructed around techniques, some of them materialized in machines, architecture, or other devices, others embodied in standardized forms of behavior that do not so much coerce and suppress the individuals as guide them toward the most productive use of their bodies. (71)

Capitalism is a kind of collective automaton, the parts of which are human beings organized into a self-reproducing, self-expanding web of dependencies. (73)

When [Marcuse] writes, for example, that science is "political" or that technology is "ideological," he makes the strong point that "technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put." (75)

The revolutionary significance of capitalism lies in the fact that its hegemony is based on simply reproducing its own operational autonomy through appropriate technical decisions. This is sufficient because power in modern societies can be wielded through technical control without titles of nobility or religious sanctions. (79)

Operational autonomy is the power to make strategic choices among alternative rationalizations without regard for either customary practice, workers' preferences, or the impact of decisions on their households. Whatever other goals capitalists pursue, all viable strategies implemented from their peculiar position in the social system must reproduce their operational autonomy. (79)

The essentially social character of technology lies not in the logic of its inner workings, but in the relation of that logic to a social context. (82)

Struggles over control of technical activities can now be reconceptualized as tactical responses in the margin of maneuver of the dominated. Just because a measure of discretion is association with the effective implementation of any plan, the use the dominated make of their position in the system is inherently difficult to foresee and control. (89)

• Opportunity for subversion and agency for those dominated by technology?

In sum, technology opens a space within which action can be functionalized in either one of two social orders, capitalism or socialism. It is an ambivalent or "multistable" system that can be organized around at least two hegemonies, two poles of power between which it can "tilt." (89)

Quotes from Ch. 3: Contradictions of the Transition

An undemocratic power such as that of the capitalist class, eliminates institutional and technical innovations that threaten its control. Since, under socialism, workers are in charge they can change the very nature of technology, which, for the first time in history, concerns a ruling class with an interest in democracy on the workplace. (43)

When they found that early experiments in workers' control reduced efficiency, they did not consider adapting the conditions of production to a new social requirements but rather quickly reintroduced "one man" management. [. . .] Authoritarian economic control appeared as necessary to most socialists as it had to capitalists before them. [. . .] Once "order" was restored in the USSR, workers had no power base from which to resist the imposition of arbitrary dictatorship, as they had at earlier phases in the Revolution. (48-9)

Whether rightly or wrongly, they [the Soviets] came to believe that mass participation in administration caused intolerable disorganization or production, and they turned to more traditional administrative methods that relied on hired experts with proven competences. (52)

• Interesting because this is my concern with democratizing the production of technology. Am interested to see how Feenberg reconciles this issue.

The bases of capitalist control are twofold, a system of ownership and a system of administration. Striking down the first without touching the second leaves the state in possession of all the powers of the capitalist class, heir to the operational autonomy won by capitalists through generations of successful class struggle against workers. The consequences are obvious. In an industrial society, control of industry, transportation, and communications is a tremendous source of power; in the hands of workers' councils it would have guaranteed respect for the claims of the social movement and most likely individual rights as well. In the hands of government officials, it cleared the field for police dictatorship. (53)

• Not sure I see the difference between "workers' councils" and "government officials." Both are ruling bodies--perhaps the workers' councils are supposed to be more interested in the rights of laborers, but it's still a class of people in control of all the rest. How is this fundamentally different and therefore superior? Both seem just as susceptible to corruption and self-serving tendencies.
  

The solution to the problem of exercising power from above is contained in the very division of labor Marx criticized, and so any system based on top down control will inevitably reproduce that division of labor, whatever its ostensible policy or purpose. (54)

The costs of public participation are said to be excessively high; democracy and technology are incompatible values. But without some form of democratic control from below, technology will continue to serve as a power base for the elite. (59)

Quotes from Ch. 2: Minimalist Marxism

The distribution of culture is in large part a function of the division of labor. Although society becomes more complex, most jobs remain simple or become even simpler as crafts and professions are deskilled. Despite the growing emphasis on credentialing in management, the gap between the level of culture required to understand the social world grows ever larger. Technological advance not only subordinates workers to capital, but disenfranchises them. Society has no incentive to teach and they have none to learn the knowledge that would qualify them to participate in the social decisions that concern them. This is the knowledge deficit. (28)

The capitalist's hierarchical status is further enhanced by the authority he exercises in the name of the group in coordinating its activities, and by his role in supplying members of the group with tools and equipment. The capitalist acquires the operational autonomy to reproduce his own leadership through these activities in which his leadership essentially consists. The collective laborer is thus a form of social organization in which the whole dominates its parts through the activity of one of those parts. (28-9)

Marx was not a technological determinist, they claim, but classified work relations as well as technologies as forces of production and treated both as contingent on social interests. On this account, socialism must change the very machinery of production and not just its ownership. (31)

In fact there is no such thing as technology "in itself" since technologies exist as such only in the context of one or another sort of employment. This is why every significant dimension of technology can be considered a "use" of some sort. (31)

What Feenberg calls Marx's "product critique": "Although the advance of technology has the potential to serve the human race as a whole, under capitalism its contribution to human welfare is largely squandered on the production of luxuries and war" (32).

Marx's "process critique": "Under capitalism, technology is applied destructively because the pursuit of maximum profit and the maintenance of capitalist power on the workplace conflicts with the protection of the workers and the environment from the hazards of industrial production" (33).

According to this design critique, the nature of capitalist technology is shaped by the same bias that governs other aspects of capitalist production, such as management. (34)

These passages seem to say that technology is shaped in its design and development by the social purposes of capital, particularly by the need to maintain a division of labor that keeps the labor force safely under control. (34)

Technological progress achieves advances of general utility, but the concrete form in which these advances are realized is through and through determined by the social power under which they are made and insures that they also serve the interests of that power. (34-5)

According to this view, technology is a dependent variable in the social system, shaped to a purpose by the dominant class, and subject to reshaping to new purposes under a new hegemony. (35)

The class that decides on the course of industrial progress governs the future out of the present. (36)