Andrew Feenberg
Can Technology Incorporate Values? Marcuse's Answer to the
Question of the Age
(Text of a paper for the conference on The Legacy of Herbert
Marcuse, University of California, Berkeley, November 7, 1998)
Prologue
Why delve back into the philosophical past to reanimate Marcuse's theory
of technology. Wasn't he an old technophobe, an opaque Marxist ideologue,
a pre-post-modern elitist? What can we still learn from him that hasn't been
refuted by a new generation of computer savvy techno-commentators or better
formulated by Baudrillard?
I ask these impertinent questions to motivate this paper, which is not merely
commemorative in intent. On the contrary, I believe that Marcuse is fundamentally
important for us today as one of the first thinkers who not only faced the
tragic implications of modern technology but also formulated a technological
response. Whether that response is entirely successful is less important
than the new relation to technology it implies. This is what I want to bring
out in the reflections which follow.
The Question of the Age
The problem of the relation of technique to values appears for the first time
in Plato's Gorgias. In this dialogue, Socrates debates the nature of the
techne, or "art," of rhetoric. He distinguishes between true arts that
are based on a logos, and what he calls in the English translation mere
knacks, empiriae in Greek, that is, rules of thumb based on experience
but without an underlying rationale.
For Plato, such a rationale or logos necessarily includes a reference
to the good served by the art. If the art is shipbuilding, its logos
will not only instruct the builder in putting together boards in some sort
of arrangement, but more specifically will guide him in making a ship that
is strong and safe. The doctor's art includes not only various notions about
herbs but also a curative mission that governs their use.
In this, these arts are different from a mere knack of combining pieces of
wood or herbs without an underlying order and purpose. Technical logic and
values are joined in true arts while knacks serve merely subjective purposes.
But because we are prone to accept appearances for reality, and pursue pleasure
instead of the good, for each art there is some knack that imitates its effects
and misleads its victims. Medicine correlates with cosmetics, which gives
the appearance of health without the reality. Rhetoric, the power to substitute
appearance for reality in language, is the supreme and most dangerous knack.
In a debate on shipbuilding or medicine, the orator will silence the expert
every time. Means triumph over ends.
The most articulate advocate of the knack of rhetoric in the Gorgias
is Callicles, who has an unlimited appetite for power and pleasure and intends
to get them through his mastery of the tricks of language. That ambition
was not merely a personal idiosyncrasy is clear from a reading of Aristophanes,
Thucydides and other contemporary authors, all of whom denounced the moral
degeneration and egoism of the imperialistic Athens of the late 5th Century.
The Athenians acted as though their military effectiveness justified the
possession and exercise of power over their neighbors. Plato's version of
the question of his age was thus, quite simply, does might make right? His
answer to this question is the basis of rational ethical thought in the West.
In one sense Plato's idea of techne seems obvious. Technologies are
in fact subordinated to purposes which appear in the technical disciplines
as a guide to resources and procedures. A software engineer working for
Rolls-Royce Aircraft explained to me that 10 percent of his time was spent
writing software to control the engines and 90 percent was spent testing
it to insure the safety of those who fly in the airplanes he designs. Plato
would no doubt approve: the logos is at work at Rolls-Royce.
Yet we moderns can no longer generalize from such examples as Plato did.
For every aircraft designer, there is a bomb builder somewhere. We can still
relate to Plato's emphasis on the need for a rationale, a logos, but
we're not so sure it includes an idea of the good. In fact we tend to think
of technologies as normless, as serving subjective purposes very much as
did Plato's knacks. What has happened to disconnect techne and value
in modern times?
The foremost theoretician of our modern view is Max Weber. Weber distinguished
between substantive and formal rationality in a way that corresponds in one
significant respect to Plato's distinction between techne and knack.
Substantive rationality posits a good and adjusts means to the attainment
of it. Many public institutions work on this basis: universal education is
a good which determines appropriate means, that is, classrooms and teachers.
Formal rationality is concerned uniquely with the efficiency of means and
contains no reference to a good. Its ends come from outside it, from its
users. Thus formal rationality is value neutral, like the Platonic
empiria. Modernization consists in the triumph of formal rationality
over a more or less substantively rational order inherited from the past.
The market is the primary instrument of this transformation, substituting
the cash nexus for the planned pursuit of values. Bureaucracy and management
are other domains in which formal rationality eventually prevails.
The knack in Plato is subservient to the power drive of the individual subject,
Callicles, for example. No larger meaning prevails through this purely individual
subjectivity. Callicles' triumph could only lead to tyranny and the anarchic
reaction that follows. Value neutrality in Weber implies a similarly subjective
purpose, however market and political processes do provide it with a larger
meaning of some sort. The question is what is that meaning? Weber himself
was rather pessimistic. He foresaw an iron cage of bureaucracy closing on
Western civilization. The logic of the technical means employed in Western
society had prevailed over Enlightenment values of freedom and individuality.
An order was emerging that lacked any higher purpose or significance, but
that was, at least, an order. This is what Weber meant by the "differentiation"
of spheres. Now the empiria has its own logic as a system of means
institutionalized in markets and bureaucracies, and that logic will impose
itself independent of human will and any conception of the good. This is
the difference between the individual tyranny Plato feared, and the tyranny
of rational means that haunted Weber.
Weber's peculiarly modern brand of pessimism reaches its paroxysm with Heidegger.
Writing a generation after Weber, Heidegger shifts the emphasis from markets
and bureaucracy to technology. His iron cage is a system of research and
development, a technoscience. Heidegger argues that reality is fundamentally
restructured by this technoscience in a way that strips it completely of
its instrinsic potentialities and exposes it to domination in service to
subjective ends. The overall effect of this process is to destroy both man
and nature. A world "enframed" by technology is radically alien and hostile.
Even the modern Callicles is caught in the system he thinks he masters.
Technoscience is otherwise dangerous than rhetoric or markets. The danger
is not merely in nuclear weapons or some similar threat to survival, but
in the obliteration of humanity's special status and dignity as the being
through whom the world takes on intelligibility and meaning; for human beings
have become mere raw materials like the nature they pretend to dominate.
Plato would not have been entirely surprised although the shift in accent,
from the abuse of empiria by its users to the inherent destructiveness
of technology itself, is peculiarly modern. This shift results from the fact
that technology does not merely manipulate appearances in language but imposes
itself on reality as a system. In Heidegger, the question of the age is therefore
reformulated. Now we are less concerned about the justification of political
power than with the sheer challenge of its sublime presence as technology.
Our question is: can we live with technology, i.e. with power in its modern
form? The ethical problem of right and might is superceded by the ontological
problem of the destructive transformation technology operates on both its
users and its objects. We are less worried about whether Callicles' descendants
are justified than with whether the world they dominate can survive the means
set in motion by their vaulting ambition.
At this point, we seem to have come full circle. Value neutral technology turns
out to contain a value in itself after all, and that value is pure domination.
This is the paradox of Heidegger's position. As he writes, "The outstanding feature
of modern technology lies in the fact that it is not at all any longer merely
'means' and no longer merely stands in 'service' for others, but instead...unfolds
a specific character of domination" (Quoted in Zimmerman, 1990: 214).
The Tyranny of Reason
This background sets the stage for a discussion of Marcuse's theory of technology.
Marcuse was of course a student of Heidegger and deeply influenced by classical
philosophy as well. His approach to the question of the age was not so different
from Plato's and Heidegger's. He too was concerned about the triumph of apparently
normless means over ends, of domination over every other value. He too wondered
how we could survive our own drive toward power over nature now that it was objectified
in a system and no longer restrained by a logos.
As with Heidegger's critique, so with Marcuse's, the chief theoretical difficulty
lies in the simultaneous assertion of the neutrality of technology and its
bias toward domination. How can merely neutral means favor domination over
liberation? Isn't the neutrality of the means a guarantee of its indifference
with respect to ends?
Marcuse takes up these questions most explicitly in One-Dimensional Man
(1964). He returns there to the understanding of reason and truth in
classical ontology for a response. For the ancient Greeks reason is the faculty
which distinguishes between true and false not only in the realm of propositions
but also in the realm of being itself. All being aspires to its end, to a
perfected form which realizes its finality, its purpose. Actual being is
imperfect and hence false. The rational judgment of such being therefore
implies an imperative: the is is also an ought.
This ontological conception of reason explains the Platonic notion of
techne. The role of the arts is to bring existence to its essential
form. Implicit in every art is a finality which corresponds to the perfection
of its objects. The art of government aims to make men just; the art of education
strives to develop the rational faculty that is the human essence. No such
finality is implicit in modern technology. Modern technical reason aims at
classification, quantification, and control. It recognizes only empirical
existence as real. The tension between true and false being that points beyond
the empirical has no meaning for it. What ancient ontology takes for an intrinsic
finality--the perfected form of things--is treated as a personal preference
by modern reason. This reason flattens out the difference between the inherent
potentialities of things and merely subjective desires. This is the reason
that is at the basis of modern science and technology.
Modern reason is said to be value-neutral in the sense that any and all goals
can be achieved through rational means. However, this neutrality also shows
up in the refusal to distinguish between preferences and potentialities.
For example, an analysis of the state conducted on classical terms would
relate it immediately to ethical ends, e.g. justice. The modern approach,
since Machiavelli, focuses exclusively on the machinery of coercion and consent
without regard for the purpose of the whole. But how can the end of government,
justice, be placed on the same plane as the will to power of a Callicles?
A bias reveals itself in this equivalence, a bias which is all to the benefit
of Callicles whose ambition is now taken no less seriously than a true public
purpose since both are regarded as merely subjective. It is this abstention
from any judgement as to what is accidental and what essential that is the
original violence of modern reason, which places it in the service of the
status quo.
The class system benefits from this refusal to identify potentialities in
the empirically given. Its survival rests on suppressing the potential for
a pacified and egalitarian social order made possible by technological advance.
In so far as domination is built into the inherited structure of society,
Marcuse argues, formal rationality contributes to maintaining and reproducing
it.
The world of work is the chief domain in which the class system depends on
the continuity of domination. If workers' self-government and self-actualization
are treated as subjective preferences rather than as a human potentials,
they lose the normative force to counter capital's drive for profit and
efficiency. That drive, embodied in a technology requiring deskilling and
top down management, seemingly refutes these supposedly subjective humanitarian
ends. Self-government and self-actualization on an assembly line remain the
merest fantasies while real products roll off the line and prove its worth.
This is what Marcuse meant when he wrote "Theoretical reason, remaining pure
and neutral, entered into the service of practical reason....Today, domination
perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology that as
technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of expanding
political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture" (1964: 158).
While the general lines of Marcuse's critique of value neutrality have a
certain similarity to Heidegger's, Marcuse sticks much closer to the classical
ontological demand for finality. As a result, his thinking is far more positive
and accessible than his teachers'. Starting out from actual suffering and
struggles under technological domination, Marcuse, unlike Heidegger, responded
to the reasonable demand for a concrete solution, an alternative. Somehow
the suppressed potentials must be released to free development.
Marxism seemed ready-made to explain how, but history has overtaken its emphasis
on property relations and its technological optimism. Modern technology cannot
simply be set in motion to realize radical ends. The logic of its normal
operations contradicts them. What sense would it make to try to turn the
assembly line into a scene of self-expression, or to broadcast propaganda
for culture and free thought? The systemic character of modern technology
blocks recourse to it for these purposes. Marcuse concluded that science
and technology need to be reformed at the most fundamental level, the level
of technological rationality itself. He wrote: "Freedom indeed depends largely
on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily
obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom,
science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals;
they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibilitythe demands
of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation,
product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms
of a human universe without exploitation and toil" (Marcuse, 1969: 19).
Not just the ends of production, but the means must be transformed
insofar as they incorporate domination in their structure. A true alternative
would have to change the material base as well as the institutional
superstructures. This is a radical departure from traditional Marxism. Marx,
Engels, and Lenin condemned the existing society for its inability to develop
the existing technological base to the utmost. The problem today, Marcuse
argued, is not so much to develop that base as to use it to create a new
and different base.
This emphasis on transformation also distinguishes Marcuse's critique of
technology from both Heidegger and most of the Frankfurt School. True, technology
has the power and consequences Heidegger and Adorno denounce, but it also
continues to hold a promise. In Heidegger the most one can hope for is a
"free relation to technology," a salutary change in attitude; and Adorno
offers little more with his concept of Enlightenment tempered by "mindfulness
of nature." Far more radical, Marcuse calls for change in the very nature
of instrumentality, which would be fundamentally modified by the abolition
of class society and its associated performance principle. Thus Marcuse gives
the question of the age a further twist. It is not only an ontological question
of what technology is making of us; that question needs to be posed, to be
sure, but we must also ask the political question of what we can make of
technology.
The Return to Techne
Marcuse argued that the health and well being of the objective world is in
our hands, and our own survival and happiness depends on recognizing its
potentialities rather than dominating it destructively. A postrevolutionary
society could create a new science and technology which would achieve this
goal and place us in harmony rather than in conflict with nature. The new
science and technology would treat nature as another subject instead of as
mere raw materials. Human beings would learn to achieve their aims through
realizing natures inherent potentialities instead of laying it waste for
the sake of power and profit.
Implicit in this approach is a modern revival of the classical conception
of techne. Technology is to be reconstructed around a conception of
the good, in Marcuse's terminology, around Eros. The new technical
logos must include a grasp of essences, and technology must be oriented
toward realizing inherent potentialities. As Marcuse writes, "What is at
stake is the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements
in the technological process. The new ends, as technical ends, would then
operate in the project and in the construction of the machinery, and not
only in its utilization" (1964: 232). Marcuse thus demanded the reversal
of the process of neutralization by which formal rationality had been split
off from substantive rationality and subserved to domination.
But much as we might like to revive the ancient concept of techne,
it rests on an outdated ontology with socially conformist implications. The
standards in terms of which potentialities were assigned to things in antiquity
were community standards, accepted uncritically by philosophers. For example,
it seemed obvious that "man is a rational animal" to philosophers whose society
valued contemplation over work. Greek philosophy betrayed an unconscious
fidelity to historically surpassable limitations of its society. Modern
philosophy cannot proceed in this naive fashion but demands reasons, ultimate
grounds. How can Marcuse justify a normative conception of potentiality?
What, for example, are the grounds for preferring enhanced freedom on the
workplace to class domination?
Marcuse's response to this question was to historicize the notion of essence.
This is not so implausible as it sounds. The Greek conception of the thing,
substance, was not static. It included an inherent movement toward higher
forms. In fact the Greek word "dynamis," translated as "potential," already
implies a kind of energy and striving. These higher forms could be identified
by a special kind of abstractive intelligence that stripped away contingent
features (125-126). The struggle of being for form is negatively evident
in experience itself, in the suffering and striving world the internal tensions
of which reason analyzes.
Ancient philosophy joined Logos to Eros in its combination
of theoretical abstraction and striving toward the good. But it lacked historical
self-consciousness. The temporal dynamic it found in things was specific
to an individual or species. Each type of thing had its own essence, and,
although these essences were objects of striving, they themselves did not
exist in time. Hence ancient philosophy arrived at a static conception of
essence that could even take the form of eternal ideas.
Today such an unhistorical conception of essence is unacceptable. Not just
individual things are caught up in time, but essences as well. This is especially
obvious in our modern understanding of human affairs. We have learned that
human beings make themselves and their world in the course of history. If
we are to revive the language of essence today, its conceptualization must
follow rather than lead the observation of that history. Marcuse's ambition
was thus to reconstruct both Logos and Eros as historical
categories, that is, to reinterpret the observable tensions in reality as
part of a larger historical process.
This Marcusean historicism avoids an exclusively rationalistic conception
of the grounds for identifying potentialities, and links his thought to the
materialism and anti-utopianism of the Marxist tradition. Dialectics, as
a logic of the interconnections and contexts revealed in historical strife,
offers a modern alternative to ancient dogmatism. Thus despite Marcuse's
references to essences, biology, instincts, and suchlike, he never entertained
a static conception of human nature. Criteria of social advance such as ending
unnecessary suffering are not grounded on biology or derived from an ideal
of man, but are rather reflections of actual demands and struggles.
Marcuse calls the most general dialectical concepts critical or "substantive"
universals. These universals are not quite ideals in the usual sense but
function as the conceptual articulation of social tensions that reveal repression
and constraint. For example, the "ideal" of freedom, understood as free
development of an autonomous object, simply validates the striving to realize
potentialities. The content of a universal such as this derives from tensions
in reality rather than from a preconceived speculative notion or an uncritically
accepted social consensus.
Still, this historical dimension of dialectics is insufficient by itself
to ground the theory. Actual struggles may teach us the existence of repressed
potentialities that could be realized in a freer society. But the articulation
of the content of those potentialities and the ranking of some above others,
presupposes concepts, a language, a tradition that are not entirely reducible
to those struggles. There remains a gap between empirical reality with all
its internal tensions and the vision of a better society. Marcuse fills that
gap with three dialectical mediations: an analysis of the technically feasible
improvements in the human situation under the given conditions; the heritage
of the Western philosophical tradition in which the substantive universals
first developed and acquired their basic contours; and the projections of
an imaginative reason free to encounter reality aesthetically. The theoretical
heritage, going back to the Greeks, is translated into practical terms by
a modern techne that responds to the internal tensions in reality
with technical solutions guided by aesthetic experience.
Technology and Aesthetics
Why aesthetics? Surely this is a strange place to look for a solution to
the problems of modern technology. Yet consider the difficulties of Marcuse's
position. Technology, he has argued, is a powerful system with a logic of
its own independent of the goals it serves and which dominates everything
it touches. That logic is rooted in the refusal to recognize inherent potentials;
all goals are attributed to human subjectivity. To the extent that this is
true, merely changing goals would not change that logic, which is the source
of the ultimate threat. To make a difference at that level, technology must
be transformed to recognize inherent potentialities.
But Marcuse also accepts the modern view that essences can neither be based
on existing traditions and community standards nor speculatively derived
in a metaphysics of some sort. What he calls "one-dimensional thinking" plays
out that modern skepticism by rejecting the idea of essence altogether and
remaining at the level of empirical observation. It thereby avoids
tradition-bound conformism and outdated metaphysics but only by sharing the
premises of technological thinking. It can recognize inherent potentialities
no more than can technology and so offers no guidance to technological reform.
How then can technology be informed with essential values? To what can Marcuse
appeal for criteria?
While these difficult theoretical problems set the stage, it is the twin
influences on his thought, the Frankfurt School and phenomenology, that suggest
an aesthetic solution. From the Frankfurt School, Marcuse derived the notion
of a richer, original mode of experience that was shattered by the narrowed
focus of the struggle for survival in class society. The realm of art was
differentiated out as the imagination and reason split apart in this context.
Reason became technical while the imagination conserved images of a perfected
existence, a persistant negativity that was safely confined to a marginal
artistic realm. From phenomenology, Marcuse derived the notion of an "aesthetic
Lebenswelt" as the locus of a different order of experience which
reveals the aesthetic qualities of objects. Aesthetic experience is a
marginalized domain today, put out of action when it comes to matters of
importance such as technical mastery of the environment, but it can become
central in a liberated society.
Marcuse's primary phenomenological influence appears to be Heidegger, although
he scarcely acknowledges him, perhaps because of their deep political
disagreements. Like Heidegger he sees technology as more than technical,
as more even than political; it is the form of modern experience itself,
the prinicipal way in which the world is revealed. For both philosophers
"technology" thus extends its reach far beyond the bounds of actual equipment.
It signifies a way of thinking and a style of practice involving a
quasi-transcendental restructuring of reality as an object of technical control.
Release from this form of experience can only come through another form of
experience. In Heideggerian terms, as Dreyfus explains them, Marcuse calls
for a new disclosure of being through a transformation of basic practices
(Dreyfus, 1995).
These phenomenological considerations explain why the existing instrumental
reason cannot serve radical ends. These "ends" are not merely goals to be
sought with appropriate technical means, but the apriori forms of a new type
of experience belonging to a new social order. For these ends to operate
in the structure of the machinery, as Marcuse requires, they must first appear
in the structure of the objects themselves, as essences, and not as the desires
or wishes of subjects.
How are essences apprehended in aesthetic experience? This is the question
of the mode of abstraction appropriate to a modern reconstruction of the
concept of essence. Once metaphysics and tradition are ruled out of order,
it is only through the imaginative grasp of reality that reason can go beyond
the mere cataloguing and quantification of objects in the pursuit of control
toward an appreciation of their essential truth. Reflection on aesthetic
experience supports a type of rational judgement that can identify the
significant "Form" of reality, distinguishing essence from accident, higher
potentiality from mutilated empirical existence. Following Hegel, Marcuse
calls this abstractive act associated with aesthetic perception an "aesthetic
reduction" (1964: 239). It consists in stripping away the contingent aspects
of objects that restrict and stunt them in order to get at what they could
be if released to their free development.
The aesthetic reduction carries the dialectical theory of essence beyond
theory; it verifies at the theoretical level the claims of aesthetic experience
and translates that experience into positive images. Here beauty is the symbol
of the good, the disclosure of being in its fullness. The imagination overflows
the boundaries of class society and, in becoming "productive," guides technical
practice in the work of "pacifying existence." A transformed reason "free
for the liberating exigencies of the imagination," arrives at very different
ways of mastering the world (1969: 31).
Artistic practice offers Marcuse a model of a transformed instrumentality
different from the conquest of nature characteristic of class society. Like
the early twentieth century artistic avant-gardes, Marcuse believed that
the age old split between aesthetic experience and daily life could be
transcended through fusing reason and imagination. Science and art would
be joined in the creation of a new technical base. This notion recalls the
slogan of the French May Events, All Power to the Imagination, and in fact
An Essay on Liberation (1969) is dedicated to the young militants
of May 68.
Making Sense of Marcuse
All this hangs together at the level of pure theory, but concretely, what
would a modern techne be like? Marcuse argues that it would incorporates
values in its very structure, that it would be essentially oriented toward
a good. But what would that mean in practice? Most of Marcuse's critics have
wavered between two obvious possibilities.
1) If the new aestheticized technological rationality will have to be based
on completely new technical principles, then the whole theory is quite
unbelievable. Who is going to invent those principles, and what will they
be like? But although it sometimes sounds as though Marcuse intends a total
break with the past, the transformation of technological rationality that
interested him was not supposed to refute elementary arithmetic, change a
decimal place in pi, or find aesthetically pleasing substitutes for
the lever and the wheel. Nor would it, as Habermas has suggested, require
personal communication with nature rather than technical control of it. Marcuse
did not believe it possible to replace technology with some sort of mystical
unity of man and nature. That is the view he attributes to his old friend
Norman Brown and distinguishes sharply from his own materialist position.
2) Perhaps Marcuse had more modest ambitions and merely hoped that technology
as we know it would be used to enhance rather than to destroy life. But if
he intended nothing more innovative than this, it is difficult to figure
out how practically his position differs from a simple change of goals.
Of course we could get rid of assembly lines and commercials, but would that
require truly fundamental technological change? If the new technology
is simply a collection of new applications based on the existing technical
principles, then it is difficult to see what all the hoopla is about. But
Marcuse himself rejects this modest position and consistently talks in terms
of the need for a change in instrumental rationality and not merely in
technological applications.
Neither of these interpretations accords with the texts, which explicitly
reject them both. This is the Marcusean enigma that has bedevilled all of
his interpreters. I can see only one solution to it. It is not a solution
Marcuse himself formulated, but I think he could have accepted it, that it
is consistent with his thought.
The difficulty interpreting Marcuse stems from the confusion of terms and
levels to which his formulations lend themselves. The key term "technological
rationality" is sometimes equated with the ratio of technology in
general, or the existing technology only, or sometimes employed in modified
forms such as "post-technological rationality" to refer to a future liberated
techne. Furthermore, because Marcuse analyzes no concrete examples,
it is not easy to disentangle his concept of technological rationality from
two other more familiar dimensions of technology, namely, basic technical
principles, and concrete applications. Yet it must surely be different from
both or Marcuse would have used ordinary language to refer to it. What, then,
is it supposed to be?
A commonplace reading stemming from Habermas identifies "technological
rationality" in Marcuse with the generic interest in technical control, abstract
efficiency. But this leads straight to the two unacceptable interpetations
sketched above: either Marcuse meant for us to invent a new kind of technology
that would not involve control and efficiency at all, a nonsensical idea,
or he merely wrote in a confusing way about the need to apply technological
control and efficiency to new purposes, a trivial idea.
I suggest a different interpretation that at least does not take Marcuse
for a dreamer or an obscurantist, and that accords with his own emphasis
on the importance of situating abstract concepts like "efficiency" in a concrete
social context. From that standpoint, his concept of technological rationality
cannot be identical with the formal concepts of efficiency and control, but
must have a social content as a socially specific pattern of goal orientation.
There is in fact a need for such a concept, intermediary between the formal
principles of economics and engineering and the applications of those principles
in actual devices and systems. Technical principles only become historically
active through a culture of technology. Applications are not designed in
function of abstract technical principles alone but incorporate those principles
only as they are embodied in concrete technical disciplines. As social
institutions, those disciplines operate under various types of constraints,
including social imperatives which influence their formulation of technical
problems and solutions and show up in the applications they design.
I suspect that what Marcuse meant by his term "technological rationality"
was the most fundamental social imperatives in the form in which they
are internalized by a technical culture. Such fundamental imperatives
tie technology not just to a particular local experience but to consistent
features of basic social formations such as class society, capitalism, socialism.
They are embodied in the technical devices and systems that emerge from that
culture and reinforce its basic values. In this sense technology can be said
to be "political" without mystification or risk of confusion.
I can make sense of Marcuse's theory if it is conceived on these terms. At
the level of the concrete historical forms of technical culture, there is
room for a variety of different rationalities, and it is up to us to judge
between them and chose the best. None are truly "neutral," not even modern
technology which is no longer oriented toward a good in Plato's sense. Each
embodies a historical project, a particular way of resolving the technically
underdetermined aspects of the design of devices and systems.
It is true that capitalist technological rationality emerged through the
destruction of inherited technai based on traditional values incompatible
with the new system of production. It declared its "neutrality" over against
the essences toward which these values oriented earlier technai. It
is this abstention from essentializing that gives modern technology its peculiar
positivist self-understanding and makes it appear to be "pure" of social
influences. However, as Marcuse argued, the rejection of essentialized goals
accomodated other values linked to problems of control of labor and resources
encountered by capitalism in the course of its development. Far from being
value neutral, modern technology is rooted in a specific valuative framework
just like all other technologies. It differs only in that its most basic
link to values is not explicitly formulated as an end as in a techne,
but implicit in its systems of control.
Marcuse's appeal to aesthetic experience for a new locus of technological
values was an attempt to introduce the claims of human beings and nature
for a greater measure of peace, freedom, and fulfillment into the construction
of technological rationality. The return of techne on a modern basis
would not overthrow the technical principles underlying the existing
technological rationality, but reorder them around other social imperatives
and no doubt eventually lead to the discovery of new ones.
As we have seen, Marcuse was led to an aesthetic criterion for the technical
logos in an attempt to reconstruct the concept of essence in a modern
theoretical context. It is certainly possible to disagree with this criterion,
but if one rejects Marcuse's approach, it seems to me one should be prepared
to offer another one. For, the question of the age remains the one he addressed.
Let me reformulate it in conclusion: how are we to bring technology under
the conscious control of normative principles rather than moving blindly
forward under the momentum of an inherited system shaped by scarcities and
struggles that can now be overcome in the rich and powerful society technology
itself has created?
