Questioning Technology.pdf

Feenberg’s Questioning Technology

Douglas Kellner

Questioning Technology

by Andrew Feenberg

New York and London, Routledge, 1999

A NDREW FEENBERG’S Questioning Technology (1999) is his third

book in a series of studies which undertake to provide critical theor-

etical and democratic political perspectives to engage technology in

the contemporary era. In Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Feenberg

draws on neo-Marxian and other critical theories of technology, especially

the Frankfurt School, to criticize determinist and essentialist theories, and

to discuss both how the labor process, science and technology are consti-

tuted as forms of domination of nature and human beings, and how they

could be democratically transformed as part of a program of radical social

transformation. In Alternative Modernity (1995), Feenberg turns to focus on

constructivist theories and the ways that individuals and groups can recon-

struct technology to make it serve more humane and democratic goals. His

most recent book draws on his earlier work while polemically developing his

own positions within contemporary debates over technology.

For Feenberg, technology is the most important issue of our era. It is

a major constituent of contemporary society and is intimately connected with

politics, economics, culture, and all forms of social and personal life. He

opens Questioning Technology by arguing that over the last centuries demo-

cratic movements have called for debate and political control over increas-

ing areas of social life. This process began with public debate over issues

concerning the state, politics and law under the impact of the Enlightenment

and democratic revolutions. It next took the form of movements to demo-

cratize management and control of the market and the economy under the

inﬂuence of Marxism and the socialist and labor movements (p. viif). Public

debate and control over education and medicine emerged in the 19th

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century, while in this century, Feenberg suggests, democratic discussion

concerning technology, its nature, effects, social management and recon-

struction, is a fundamental issue for the present age.

In theorizing technology, Feenberg carries out sustained attacks on

technological determinism and essentialist theories. Technological deter-

minism follows a similar logic to economic determinism and both, Feenberg

suggests, have pernicious philosophical and political implications. If the

market economy is a quasi-natural organism, subject to its own laws and

autonomy, attempts at management or control can be dismissed as interfer-

ence with the natural order. Likewise, if technology is an autonomous force

impervious to political control, attempting to manage or reconstruct it is

either a foolish or a hopeless enterprise.

Theories of technological determinism emerged after the Second World

War which either celebrated technology’s modernizing features or blamed it

for the crisis of Western civilization (e.g. Heidegger, Ellul, etc.). Determin-

ist theories thus devolved into essentialism, of both a negative and positive

sort. Theorists such as Heidegger, Ellul and their followers attributed a nega-

tive essence to technology, seeing it as a force of domination and totali-

tarianism. On this view, technology is a demiurge of the modern world, an

autonomous juggernaut immune to democratic control or humane recon-

struction, a framework or Gestell (Heidegger), that constitutes the very struc-

ture of the modern world and lived experience. This dystopic and

technophobic essentialism is contrasted to a technophilic essentialism, in

which technology is characterized positively as reasonable control of nature,

as a force of efﬁciency, rationality and progress.

Technological essentialism, Feenberg notes, has given way in the con-

temporary era to constructivist views, which conceive of technology as

socially constructed, as dependent on speciﬁc social structures and cultural

values, thus robbing it of its independent force and power. Social construc-

tivism sees the creation and development of technology as subject to con-

tingent social factors and decisions, analyzing the speciﬁc individuals and

groups who construct various technologies (pp. 10ff). It rightly sees the

matrix of social interests and groups that goes into the construction of tech-

nologies, but its micro-descriptive and empiricist dimensions often bracket

out certain overarching social imperatives and political interests. Hence,

social constructivist theories separate analysis of technology from theories

of society and engage in empirical description of speciﬁc technologies. Such

theories abandon a more systemic and historical optic which theorizes

technology as a key constituent of the contemporary world and which

attempts to articulate and critically engage its deﬁning features and major

effects. ‘Thus, although constructivist sociology has placed particular tech-

nologies on the agenda in new ways, the basic questions of modernity posed

by an earlier generation of theorists are rarely addressed today in terms of

the general problematic of technology’ (pp. 11–12).

Feenberg wishes to combine a form of constructivism with more

systematic and socially critical views of technology such as are found in

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theorists like Marcuse and Foucault, who engage the links between tech-

nology and power, who critically dissect the ways that technology serves the

interests of social domination and who open the space for discussion of

alternative forms of technology. Feenberg links social theory and philosophy

to overcome one-sided approaches which either essentialize technology or

reduce it to social facts. Thus, he attempts to mediate between philosophi-

cal substantivist and social science-oriented constructivist views, criticizing

philosophical essentialists, such as Heidegger, Ellul and Habermas for their

reductive, determinist and excessively abstract views of technology. Yet

Feenberg also criticizes constructionist views which solely see technology

as a neutral instrument, which propose merely descriptive accounts of

speciﬁc technologies in disparate historical contexts, and which renounce

broad philosophical or critical perspectives.

Democratization and the Reconstruction of Technology and

Society

Feenberg, then, wants to merge philosophical and sociological theories of

the role of technology in modernity with reﬂection on actual technologies, to

combine social theory and social research, philosophy and critique, analy-

sis and reconstruction. One of his key contributions to theorizing technology

is connecting philosophically oriented social theory of technology with

theories of democratization. He notes that while technology is seen as a

major power in contemporary society, it is often said to be incompatible with

democracy. Feenberg, however, wants to demonstrate how technology can be

part of a process of societal democratization and how technology itself can

be restructured to meet basic human needs. In this process technologies

should be created to help produce a more democratic and egalitarian society,

thus focusing on the potential for the social reconstruction of society and

technology.

Rejecting all determinist and reductivist theories of technology which

would ascribe to it an abstract essence, Feenberg sees technology as a con-

tested ﬁeld where individuals and social groups can struggle to inﬂuence

and change technological design, uses and meanings. In this conception, the

very construction of technology is thus subject to democratic debate and

contestation. Feenberg sees technology neither as determining nor as

neutral, arguing that democratization requires radical technical as well as

political change. He argues convincingly that there can be no genuinely

democratic and progressive political change without technical change,

without the reconstruction of technology, and, vice-versa, no radical change

of technology without democratic political change. In his view, the two are

vitally interconnected and radical social reconstruction should aim at once

at the transformation of society and technology.

Thus, Feenberg develops a dialectical approach to technology that per-

ceives both negative and positive uses and effects, seeing technology as an

always contested ﬁeld that can be reconstructed to serve human needs and

goals. Consequently, he develops a position that falls neither into naive

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technological optimism, nor prey to rigid technological determinism and

technophobia. Rejecting dystopic positions that would simply repudiate

technology tout court , Feenberg argues that it is more productive to focus on

its reconstruction rather than its viliﬁcation. He claims that post-1960s

struggles have put in question absolute faith in science and technology, and

the individuals and institutions which develop and implement them. With a

public questioning technology, demanding changes and in some cases carry-

ing them out, technology is thus more ﬂexible, transformable and amenable

to democratic debate and reconstruction than previous theories had indi-

cated.

In his major works, Feenberg succeeds in combining the articulation

of theoretical and cultural perspectives on technology with concrete studies

of struggles over the control and construction of technologies. In chapter 2

of Questioning Technology , he suggests how the events of May 1968 in

France, which he sees as the high point of the New Left, involved contesta-

tion of technocracy. This involved critique of technical control of the work-

place, education, government and culture by technocratic elites, and

programs for more democratic participation and self-management. Likewise,

he argues in chapter 3 that the most progressive elements in the ecology

movement – Barry Commoner is his example – call for less polluting, more

sustainable technologies; hence, the sort of environmentalism with which

Feenberg aligns himself calls for the reconstruction of the technological

environment and not just less production, population and reformist practices

(though these demands too have their value, as Feenberg points out,

pp. 68ff).

Feenberg is very skilled at marshalling examples and case studies to

illustrate his theoretical and political arguments. As examples of the recon-

struction of technology to serve social and human needs in his earlier

Alternative Modernity , he provided studies of how French consumers trans-

formed the Minitel Videotext system from an information database to an

interactive system of communication articulating popular desires and needs

(1995: 123–66). The French telephone system initially provided a Minitel

telephone/computer apparatus to each customer free of charge that would

allow individuals to tap into databases to get weather and railway infor-

mation, news bulletins and other forms of information. It was intended to

help enable the French to interact in a high-tech economy and thus to aid

the process of French modernization. In practice, however, individuals

hacked into bulletin boards which were reconﬁgured to allow message

posting, and eventually generated split-screen chatlines that enabled

diverse forms of social interaction and connection. This expropriation shows

how individuals could reconﬁgure technology to serve their own purposes,

which may have been at odds with the interests and goals of those who

designed the technology. Feenberg’s example concerns how the French

people used Minitel to engage in interpersonal discussion, to facilitate

sexual adventures or to promote political projects, rather than just to

consume ofﬁcially provided information.

Kellner – Feenberg’s Questioning Technology

159

Feenberg also provided studies of how women struggled for alternative

childbirth technologies and practices, how AIDS patients fought for alterna-

tive medicine and health care, and how Japanese critiques of technology

contain conceptions of alternative models of modernity and modernization

(1995). In Questioning Technology , Feenberg marshals copious examples of

actual reconstruction of technology to demonstrate that his project of democ-

ratizing technology is grounded in actual struggles. In these ways, he is able

to counter pessimistic and dystopic perspectives that technology cannot be

changed, that it is the fate of the modern world to live in an ‘iron cage’ of

technological domination (Heidegger and Max Weber). To subvert this form

of determinism, Feenberg provides case studies and examples that indicate

that technology is subject to democratic debate and transformation and can

be reconstructed to fulﬁll human needs. In his examples, technology is seen

as subject to contestation, reconstruction and democratic participation

which directs it to serve human and social needs and not just hegemonic

societal interests. His examples show how technological apparatuses that

were devised by elites according to economic, technical and functional

requirements could be resisted by groups involved in the technical systems

and reconﬁgured to better serve their own needs. Both appropriation of tech-

nical knowledge and tools for purposes opposed to their original design and

implementation, and the expropriation and reconstruction of technologies

and technical practices to serve counter-goals and values, show that tech-

nology is more complex, ﬂexible and subject to contestation and recon-

struction than many existing theories and critiques allow. This sort of

analysis suggests the need for more multi-layered theories of how technolo-

gies are introduced, implemented and developed, and subject to subversion

and reconstruction.

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Technology

I have suggested that the strength of Feenberg’s approach is his integration

of the development of philosophically grounded perspectives on technology

with concrete studies of actual construction and reconstruction of salient

technologies along with proposals for making the design and use of tech-

nology an issue of political debate and democratic politics. In the second

part of Questioning Technology , Feenberg spells out his concept of ‘demo-

cratic rationalization’ that includes popular participation in the adventure of

technology, inserts agency into technical systems and provides openings for

the democratization of technology. In the third part of his book he turns to

developing his philosophical perspectives in discussions of technology and

modernity and his efforts to develop a critical theory of technology.

In polemicizing against essentialist conceptions of technology that

reduce it to technique, instrumentality, Gestell , efﬁciency and the like, Feen-

berg argues for an approach that ‘provides a systematic locus for the socio-

cultural variables that actually diversify its historical realizations’ (p. 201).

Feenberg proposes a distinction between ‘the functional constitution of tech-

nical objects and subjects, which I call the “primary instrumentalization,”

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