Andrew Feenberg
Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power and Freedom1
I. The Limits of Democratic Theory
Technology is one of the major
sources of public power in modern societies. So far as decisions affecting our
daily lives are concerned, political democracy is largely overshadowed by the
enormous power wielded by the masters of technical systems: corporate and
military leaders, and professional associations of groups such as physicians and
engineers. They have far more to do with control over patterns of urban growth,
the design of dwellings and transportation systems, the selection of
innovations, our experience as employees, patients, and consumers, than all the
governmental institutions of our society put together.
Marx saw this situation coming in the
middle of the 19th Century. He argued that traditional democratic theory erred
in treating the economy as an extra-political domain ruled by natural laws such
as the law of supply and demand. He claimed that we will remain disenfranchised
and alienated so long as we have no say in industrial decision-making. Democracy
must be extended from the political domain into the world of work. This is the
underlying demand behind the idea of socialism.
Modern societies have been challenged
by this demand for over a century. Democratic political theory offers no
persuasive reason of principle to reject it. Indeed, many democratic theorists
endorse it.2 What is more, in a number of countries socialist
parliamentary victories or revolutions have brought parties to power dedicated
to achieving it. Yet today we do not appear to be much closer to democratizing
industrialism than in Marx's time.
This
state of affairs is usually explained in one of the following two ways.
On the one hand, the common sense view
argues that modern technology is incompatible with workplace democracy.
Democratic theory cannot reasonably press for reforms that would destroy the
economic foundations of society. For evidence, consider the Soviet case:
although they were socialists, the communists did not democratize industry, and
the current democratization of Soviet society extends only to the factory gate.
At least in the ex-Soviet Union, everyone can agree on the need for
authoritarian industrial management.
On
the other hand, a minority of radical theorists claim that technology is not
responsible for the concentration of industrial power. That is a political
matter, due to the victory of capitalist and communist elites in struggles with
the underlying population. No doubt modern technology lends itself to
authoritarian administration, but in a different social context it could just as
well be operated democratically.
In
what follows, I will argue for a qualified version of this second position,
somewhat different from both the usual Marxist and democratic formulations. The
qualification concerns the role of technology, which I see as neither
determining nor as neutral. I will argue that modern forms of hegemony are based
on the technical mediation of a variety of social activities, whether it be
production or medicine, education or the military, and that, consequently, the
democratization of our society requires radical technical as well as political
change.
This is a controversial
position. The common sense view of technology limits democracy to the state. By
contrast, I believe that unless democracy can be extended beyond its traditional
bounds into the technically mediated domains of social life, its use value will
continue to decline, participation will wither, and the institutions we identify
with a free society will gradually disappear.
Let me turn now to the background to my
argument. I will begin by presenting an overview of various theories that claim
that insofar as modern societies depend on technology, they require
authoritarian hierarchy. These theories presuppose a form of technological
determinism which is refuted by historical and sociological arguments I will
briefly summarize. I will then present a sketch of a non-deterministic theory of
modern society I call "critical theory of technology." This alternative approach
emphasizes contextual aspects of technology ignored by the dominant view. I will
argue that technology is not just the rational control of nature; both its
development and impact are intrinsically social. I will then show that this view
undermines the customary reliance on efficiency as a criterion of technological
development. That conclusion, in turn, opens broad possibilities of change
foreclosed by the usual understanding of technology.
II. Dystopian Modernity
Max Weber's famous theory of
rationalization is the original argument against industrial democracy. The title
of this paper implies a provocative reversal of Weber's conclusions. He defined
rationalization as the increasing role of calculation and control in social
life, a trend leading to what he called the "iron cage" of
bureaucracy.3 "Democratic" rationalization is thus a contradiction in
terms.
Once traditionalist struggle
against rationalization has been defeated, further resistance in a Weberian
universe can only reaffirm irrational life forces against routine and drab
predictability. This is not a democratic program but a romantic anti-dystopian
one, the sort of thing that is already foreshadowed in Dostoievsky's Notes
from Underground and various back to nature ideologies.
My title is meant to reject the
dichotomy between rational hierarchy and irrational protest implicit in Weber's
position. If authoritarian social hierarchy is truly a contingent dimension of
technical progress, as I believe, and not a technical necessity, then there must
be an alternative way of rationalizing society that democratizes rather than
centralizes control. We need not go underground or native to preserve threatened
values such as freedom and individuality.
But the most powerful critiques of
modern technological society follow directly in Weber's footsteps in rejecting
this possibility. I am thinking of Heidegger's formulation of "the question of
technology" and Ellul's theory of "the technical phenomenon."4
According to these theories, we have become little more than objects of
technique, incorporated into the mechanism we have created. As Marshall McLuhan
once put it, technology has reduced us to the "sex organs of machines." The only
hope is a vaguely evoked spiritual renewal that is too abstract to inform a new
technical practice.
These are
interesting theories, important for their contribution to opening a space of
reflection on modern technology. I will return to Heidegger’s argument in
the conclusion to this paper. But first, to advance my own argument, I will
concentrate on the principal flaw of dystopianism, the identification of
technology in general with the specific technologies that have developed in the
last century in the West. These are technologies of conquest that pretend to an
unprecedented autonomy; their social sources and impacts are hidden. I will
argue that this type of technology is a particular feature of our society and
not a universal dimension of "modernity" as such.
III. Technological Determinism
Determinism rests on the assumption
that technologies have an autonomous functional logic that can be explained
without reference to society. Technology is presumably social only through the
purpose it serves, and purposes are in the mind of the beholder. Technology
would thus resemble science and mathematics by its intrinsic independence of the
social world.
Yet unlike science and
mathematics, technology has immediate and powerful social impacts. It would seem
that society's fate is at least partially dependent on a non-social factor which
influences it without suffering a reciprocal influence. This is what is meant by
"technological determinism." Such a deterministic view of technology is
commonplace in business and government, where it is often assumed that progress
is an exogenous force influencing society rather than an expression of changes
in culture and values.
The dystopian
visions of modernity I have been describing are also deterministic. If we want
to affirm the democratic potentialities of modern industrialism, we will
therefore have to challenge their deterministic premises. These I will call the
thesis of unilinear progress, and the thesis of determination by the base. Here
is a brief summary of these two positions.
1) Technical progress appears to follow
a unilinear course, a fixed track, from less to more advanced configurations.
Although this conclusion seems obvious from a backward glance at the development
of any familiar technical object, in fact it is based on two claims of unequal
plausibility: first, that technical progress proceeds from lower to higher
levels of development; and second, that that development follows a single
sequence of necessary stages. As we will see, the first claim is independent of
the second and not necessarily deterministic.
2) Technological determinism also
affirms that social institutions must adapt to the "imperatives" of the
technological base. This view, which no doubt has its source in a certain
reading of Marx, is now part of the common sense of the social
sciences.5 Below, I will discuss one of its implications in detail:
the supposed "trade-off" between prosperity and environmental values.
These two theses of technological
determinism present decontextualized, self-generating technology as the unique
foundation of modern society. Determinism thus implies that our technology and
its corresponding institutional structures are universal, indeed, planetary in
scope. There may be many forms of tribal society, many feudalisms, even many
forms of early capitalism, but there is only one modernity and it is exemplified
in our society for good or ill. Developing societies should take note: as Marx
once said, calling the attention of his backward German compatriots to British
advances: "De te fabula narratur"-- of you the tale is told.6
IV. Constructivism
The implications of determinism
appear so obvious that it is surprising to discover that neither of its two
theses can withstand close scrutiny. Yet contemporary sociology of technology
undermines the first thesis of unilinear progress while historical precedents
are unkind to the second thesis of determination by the base.
Recent constructivist sociology of
technology grows out of new social studies of science. These studies challenge
our tendency to exempt scientific theories from the sort of sociological
examination to which we submit non-scientific beliefs. They affirm the
"principle of symmetry," according to which all contending beliefs are subject
to the same type of social explanation regardless of their truth or
falsity.7 A similar approach to technology rejects the usual
assumption that technologies succeed on purely functional grounds.
Constructivism argues that theories and
technologies are underdetermined by scientific and technical criteria.
Concretely, this means two things: first, there is generally a surplus of
workable solutions to any given problem, and social actors make the final choice
among a batch of technically viable options; and second, the problem-definition
often changes in the course of solution. The latter point is the more conclusive
but also more difficult of the two.
Two
sociologists of technology, Pinch and Bijker, illustrate it with the early
history of the bicycle.8 The object we take to be a self-evident
"black box" actually started out as two very different devices, a sportsman's
racer and a utilitarian transportation vehicle. The high front wheel of the
sportsman's bike was necessary at the time to attain high speeds, but it also
caused instability. Equal sized wheels made for a safer but less exciting ride.
These two designs met different needs and were in fact different technologies
with many shared elements. Pinch and Bijker call this original ambiguity of the
object designated as a "bicycle," "interpretative flexibility."
Eventually the "safety" design won out,
and it benefited from all the later advances that occurred in the field. In
retrospect, it seems as though the high wheelers were a clumsy and less
efficient stage in a progressive development leading through the old "safety"
bicycle to current designs. In fact the high wheeler and the safety shared the
field for years and neither was a stage in the other's development. The high
wheeler represents a possible alternative path of bicycle development that
addressed different problems at the origin.
Determinism is a species of Whig
history which makes it seem as though the end of the story was inevitable from
the very beginning by projecting the abstract technical logic of the finished
object back into the past as a cause of development. That approach confuses our
understanding of the past and stifles the imagination of a different future.
Constructivism can open up that future, although its practitioners have
hesitated so far to engage the larger social issues implied in their
method.9
V. Indeterminism
If the thesis of unilinear progress
falls, the collapse of the notion of determination by the technological base
cannot be far behind. Yet it is still frequently invoked in contemporary
political debates.
I shall return to
these debates later in this paper. For now, let us consider the remarkable
anticipation of current attitudes in the struggle over the length of the workday
and child labor in mid-19th Century England. The debate on the Factory Bill of
1844 is entirely structured around the deterministic opposition of technological
imperatives and ideology. Lord Ashley, the chief advocate of regulation,
protests in the name of familial ideology that "The tendency of the various
improvements in machinery is to supersede the employment of adult males, and
substitute in its place, the labour of children and females. What will be the
effect on future generations, if their tender frames be subjected, without
limitation or control, to such destructive
agencies?"10
He went on to deplore the decline of the
family consequent upon the employment of women, which "disturbs the order of
nature," and deprives children of proper upbringing. "It matters not whether it
be prince or peasant, all that is best, all that is lasting in the character of
a man, he has learnt at his mother's knees." Lord Ashley was outraged to find
that "females not only perform the labour, but occupy the places of men; they
are forming various clubs and associations, and gradually acquiring all those
privileges which are held to be the proper portion of the male sex....they meet
together to drink, sing, and smoke; they use, it is stated, the lowest, most
brutal, and most disgusting language
imaginable...”
Proposals to
abolish child labor met with consternation on the part of factory owners, who
regarded the little worker as an "imperative" of the technologies created to
employ him. They denounced the "inefficiency" of using full-grown workers to
accomplish tasks done as well or better by children, and they predicted all the
usual catastrophic economic consequences--increased poverty, unemployment, loss
of international competitiveness--from the substitution of more costly adult
labor. Their eloquent representative, Sir J. Graham, therefore urged caution:
"We have arrived at a state of society when without commerce and manufactures
this great community cannot be maintained. Let us, as far as we can, mitigate
the evils arising out of this highly artificial state of society; but let us
take care to adopt no step that may be fatal to commerce and
manufactures."
He further explained that
a reduction in the workday for women and children would conflict with the
depreciation cycle of machinery and lead to lower wages and trade problems. He
concluded that "in the close race of competition which our manufacturers are now
running with foreign competitors...such a step would be fatal...." Regulation,
he and his fellows maintained in words that echo still, is based on a "false
principle of humanity, which in the end is certain to defeat itself." One might
almost believe that Ludd had risen again in the person of Lord Ashley: the issue
is not really the length of the workday "but it is in principle an argument to
get rid of the whole system of factory labour." Similar protestations are heard
today on behalf of industries threatened with what they call environmental
"Luddism."
Yet what actually happened
once the regulators succeeded in imposing limitations on the work day and
expelling children from the factory? Did the violated imperatives of technology
come back to haunt them? Not at all. Regulation led to an intensification of
factory labor that was incompatible with the earlier conditions in any case.
Children ceased to be workers and were redefined socially as learners and
consumers. Consequently, they entered the labor market with higher levels of
skill and discipline that were soon presupposed by technological design. As a
result no one is nostalgic for a return to the good old days when inflation was
held down by child labor. That is simply not an option, (at least not in the
developed capitalist world).
This
example shows the tremendous flexibility of the technical system. It is not
rigidly constraining but on the contrary can adapt to a variety of social
demands. This conclusion should not be surprising given the responsiveness of
technology to social redefinition discussed previously. It means that technology
is just another dependent social variable, albeit an increasingly important one,
and not the key to the riddle of history.
Determinism, I have argued, is
characterized by the principles of unilinear progress and determination by the
base; if determinism is wrong, then technology research must be guided by the
following two contrary principles. In the first place, technological development
is not unilinear but branches in many directions, and could reach generally
higher levels along more than one different track. And, secondly, technological
development is not determining for society but is overdetermined by both
technical and social factors.
The
political significance of this position should also be clear by now. In a
society where determinism stands guard on the frontiers of democracy,
indeterminism cannot but be political. If technology has many unexplored
potentialities, no technological imperatives dictate the current social
hierarchy. Rather, technology is a scene of social struggle, a "parliament of
things," on which civilizational alternatives contend.
VI. Interpreting Technology
In the next sections of this paper,
I would like to present several major themes of a non-determinist approach to
technology. The picture sketched so far implies a significant change in our
definition of technology. It can no longer be considered as a collection of
devices, nor, more generally, as the sum of rational means. These are
tendentious definitions that make technology seem more functional and less
social than in fact it is.
As a social
object, technology ought to be subject to interpretation like any other cultural
artifact but it is generally excluded from humanistic study. We are assured that
its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a
hermeneutically interpretable meaning. At most humanistic methods might
illuminate extrinsic aspects of technology, such as packaging and advertising,
or popular reactions to controversial innovations such as nuclear power or
surrogate motherhood. Technological determinism draws its force from this
attitude. If one ignores most of the connections between technology and society,
it is no wonder that technology then appears to be self-generating.
Technical objects have two hermeneutic
dimensions that I call their social meaning and their cultural
horizon.11 The role of social meaning is clear in the case of the
bicycle introduced above. We have seen that the construction of the bicycle was
controlled in the first instance by a contest of interpretations: was it to be a
sportsman's toy or a means of transportation? Design features such as wheel size
also served to signify it as one or another type of object.12
It might be objected that this is
merely an initial disagreement over goals with no hermeneutic significance. Once
the object is stabilized, the engineer has the last word on its nature, and the
humanist interpreter is out of luck. This is the view of most engineers and
managers; they readily grasp the concept of "goal" but they have no place for
"meaning."
In fact the dichotomy of
goal and meaning is a product of functionalist professional culture, which is
itself rooted in the structure of the modern economy. The concept of "goal"
strips technology bare of social contexts, focussing engineers and managers on
just what they need to know to do their job.
A fuller picture is conveyed, however,
by studying the social role of the technical object and the lifestyles it makes
possible. That picture places the abstract notion of "goal" in its concrete
social context. It makes technology's contextual causes and consequences visible
rather than obscuring them behind an impoverished functionalism.
The functionalist point of view yields
a decontextualized temporal cross-section in the life of the object. As we have
seen, determinism claims implausibly to be able to get from one such momentary
configuration of the object to the next on purely technical terms. But in the
real world all sorts of unpredictable attitudes crystallize around technical
objects and influence later design changes. The engineer may think these are
extrinsic to the device he or she is working on, but they are its very substance
as a historically evolving phenomenon.
These facts are recognized to a certain
extent in the technical fields themselves, especially in computers. Here we have
a contemporary version of the dilemma of the bicycle discussed above. Progress
of a generalized sort in speed, power, and memory goes on apace while corporate
planners struggle with the question of what it is all for. Technical development
does not point definitively toward any particular path. Instead, it opens
branches, and the final determination of the "right" branch is not within the
competence of engineering because it is simply not inscribed in the nature of
the technology.
I have studied a
particularly clear example of the complexity of the relation between the
technical function and meaning of the computer in the case of French
videotex.13 Called Teletel, this system was designed to bring
France into the Information Age by giving telephone subscribers access to data
bases. Fearing that consumers would reject anything resembling office equipment,
the telephone company attempted to redefine the computer's social image; it was
no longer to appear as a calculating device for professionals but was to become
an informational network for all.
The
telephone company designed a new type of terminal, the Minitel, to look
and feel like an adjunct to the domestic telephone. The telephonic disguise
suggested to some users that they ought to be able to talk to each other on the
network. Soon the Minitel underwent a further redefinition at the hands
of these users, many of whom employed it primarily for anonymous on-line
chatting with other users in the search for amusement, companionship, and sex.
Thus the design of the Minitel
invited communications applications which the company's engineers had not
intended when they set about improving the flow of information in French
society. Those applications, in turn, connoted the Minitel as a means of
personal encounter, the very opposite of the rationalistic project for which it
was originally created. The "cold" computer became a "hot" new medium.
At issue in the transformation is not
only the computer's narrowly conceived technical function, but the very nature
of the advanced society it makes possible. Does networking open the doors to the
Information Age where, as rational consumers hungry for data, we pursue
strategies of optimization? Or is it a postmodern technology that emerges from
the breakdown of institutional and sentimental stability, reflecting, in
Lyotard's words, the "atomisation of society into flexible networks of language
games?"14 In this case technology is not merely the servant of some
predefined social purpose; it is an environment within which a way of life is
elaborated.
In sum, differences in the
way social groups interpret and use technical objects are not merely extrinsic
but make a difference in the nature of the objects themselves. What the
object is for the groups that ultimately decide its fate determines what
it becomes as it is redesigned and improved over time. If this is true,
then we can only understand technological development by studying the
sociopolitical situation of the various groups involved in it.
VII. Technological Hegemony
In addition to the sort of
assumptions about individual technical objects we have been discussing so far,
that situation also includes broader assumptions about social values. This is
where the study of the cultural horizon of technology comes in. This second
hermeneutic dimension of technology is the basis of modern forms of social
hegemony; it is particularly relevant to our original question concerning the
inevitability of hierarchy in technological society.
As I will use the term, hegemony is a
form of domination so deeply rooted in social life that it seems natural to
those it dominates. One might also define it as that aspect of the distribution
of social power which has the force of culture behind it.
The term "horizon" refers to culturally
general assumptions that form the unquestioned background to every aspect of
life.15 Some of these support the prevailing hegemony. For example,
in feudal societies, the "chain of being" established hierarchy in the fabric of
God's universe and protected the caste relations of the society from challenge.
Under this horizon, peasants revolted in the name of the King, the only
imaginable source of power. Rationalization is our modern horizon, and
technological design is the key to its effectiveness as the basis of modern
hegemonies.
Technological development
is constrained by cultural norms originating in economics, ideology, religion
and tradition. We discussed earlier how assumptions about the age composition of
the labor force entered into the design of 19th century production technology.
Such assumptions seem so natural and obvious they often lie below the threshold
of conscious awareness.
This is the
point of Herbert Marcuse's important critique of Weber.16 Marcuse
shows that the concept of rationalization confounds the control of labor by
management with control of nature by technology. The search for control of
nature is generic, but management only arises against a specific social
background, the capitalist wage system. Workers have no immediate interest in
output in this system, unlike earlier forms of farm and craft labor, since their
wage is not essentially linked to the income of the firm. Control of human
beings becomes all-important in this context.
Through mechanization, some of the
control functions are eventually transferred from human overseers and
parcellized work practices to machines. Machine design is thus socially relative
in a way that Weber never recognized, and the "technological rationality" it
embodies is not universal but particular to capitalism. In fact, it is the
horizon of all the existing industrial societies, communist as well as
capitalist, insofar as they are managed from above. (In a later section, I
discuss a generalized application of this approach in terms of what I call the
"technical code.")
If Marcuse is right,
it ought to be possible to trace the impress of class relations in the very
design of production technology as has indeed been shown by such Marxist
students of the labor process as Harry Braverman and David Noble.17
The assembly line offers a particularly clear instance because it achieves
traditional management goals, such as deskilling and pacing work, through
technical design. Its technologically enforced labor discipline increases
productivity and profits by increasing control. However, the assembly line only
appears as technical progress in a specific social context. It would not be
perceived as an advance in an economy based on workers' cooperatives in which
labor discipline was more self-imposed than imposed from above. In such a
society, a different technological rationality would dictate different ways of
increasing productivity.18
This example shows that technological
rationality is not merely a belief, an ideology, but is effectively incorporated
into the structure of machines. Machine design mirrors back the social factors
operative in the prevailing rationality. The fact that the argument for the
social relativity of modern technology originated in a Marxist context has
obscured its most radical implications. We are not dealing here with a mere
critique of the property system, but have extended the force of that critique
down into the technical "base." This approach goes well beyond the old economic
distinction between capitalism and socialism, market and plan. Instead, one
arrives at a very different distinction between societies in which power rests
on the technical mediation of social activities and those that democratize
technical control and, correspondingly, technological design.
VIII. Double Aspect Theory
The argument to this point might be
summarized as a claim that social meaning and functional rationality are
inextricably intertwined dimensions of technology. They are not ontologically
distinct, for example, with meaning in the observer's mind and rationality in
the technology proper. Rather they are "double aspects" of the same underlying
technical object, each aspect revealed by a specific contextualization.
Functional rationality, like
scientific-technical rationality in general, isolates objects from their
original context in order to incorporate them into theoretical or functional
systems. The institutions that support this procedure, such as laboratories and
research centers, themselves form a special context with their own practices and
links to various social agencies and powers. The notion of "pure" rationality
arises when the work of decontextualization is not itself grasped as a social
activity reflecting social interests.
Technologies are selected by these
interests from among many possible configurations. Guiding the selection process
are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define
the horizon under which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology
offers a material validation of the cultural horizon to which it has been
pre-formed. I call this the "bias" of technology: apparently neutral, functional
rationality is enlisted in support of a hegemony. The more technology society
employs, the more significant is this support.
As Foucault argues in his theory of
"power\knowledge" modern forms of oppression are not so much based on false
ideologies as on the specific technical "truths" which form the basis of the
dominant hegemony and which reproduce it.19 So long as the
contingency of the choice of “truth” remains hidden, the
deterministic image of a technically justified social order is projected.
The legitimating effectiveness of
technology depends on unconsciousness of the cultural-political horizon under
which it was designed. A recontextualizing critique of technology can uncover
that horizon, demystify the illusion of technical necessity, and expose the
relativity of the prevailing technical choices.
IX. The Social Relativity of
Efficiency
These issues appear with
particular force in the environmental movement today. Many environmentalists
argue for technical changes that would protect nature and in the process improve
human life as well. Such changes would enhance efficiency in broad terms by
reducing harmful and costly side effects of technology. However, this program is
very difficult to impose in a capitalist society. There is a tendency to deflect
criticism from technological processes to products and people, from apriori
prevention to aposteriori clean-up. These preferred strategies are generally
costly and reduce efficiency under the horizon of the given technology. This
situation has political consequences.
Restoring the environment after it has
been damaged is a form of collective consumption, financed by taxes or higher
prices. These approaches dominate public awareness. This is why environmentalism
is generally perceived as a cost involving trade-offs, and not as a
rationalization increasing over-all efficiency. But in a modern society,
obsessed by economic well-being, that perception is damning. Economists and
businessmen are fond of explaining the price we must pay in inflation and
unemployment for worshipping at Nature's shrine instead of Mammon's. Poverty
awaits those who will not adjust their social and political expectations to
technology.
This trade-off model has
environmentalists grasping at straws for a strategy. Some hold out the pious
hope that people will turn from economic to spiritual values in the face of the
mounting problems of industrial society. Others expect enlightened dictators to
impose technological reform even if a greedy populace shirks its duty. It is
difficult to decide which of these solutions is more improbable, but both are
incompatible with basic democratic values.20
The trade-off model confronts us with
dilemmas--environmentally sound technology vs. prosperity, workers' satisfaction
and control vs. productivity, etc.--where what we need are syntheses. Unless the
problems of modern industrialism can be solved in ways that both enhance public
welfare and win public support, there is little reason to hope that they will
ever be solved. But how can technological reform be reconciled with prosperity
when it places a variety of new limits on the economy?
The child labor case shows how apparent
dilemmas arise on the boundaries of cultural change, specifically, where the
social definition of major technologies is in transition. In such situations,
social groups excluded from the original design network articulate their
unrepresented interests politically. New values the outsiders believe would
enhance their welfare appear as mere ideology to insiders who are adequately
represented by the existing designs.
This is a difference of perspective,
not of nature. Yet the illusion of esssential conflict is renewed whenever major
social changes affect technology. At first, satisfying the demands of new groups
after the fact has visible costs and, if it is done clumsily, will indeed reduce
efficiency until better designs are found. But usually better designs can be
found and what appeared to be an insuperable barrier to growth dissolves in the
face of technological change.
This
situation indicates the essential difference between economic exchange and
technique. Exchange is all about trade-offs: more of A means less of B. But the
aim of technical advance is precisely to avoid such dilemmas by elegant designs
that optimize several variables at once. A single clevery conceived mechanism
may correspond to many different social demands, one structure to many
functions.21 Design is not a zero-sum economic game but an ambivalent
cultural process that serves a multiplicity of values and social groups without
necessarily sacrificing efficiency.
X. The Technical Code
That these conflicts over social
control of technology are not new can be seen from the interesting case of the
"bursting boilers."22 Steamboat boilers were the first technology
regulated in the United States. In the early 19th-century the steamboat was a
major form of transportation similar to the automobile or airlines today.
Steamboats were necessary in a big country without paved roads and lots of
rivers and canals. But steamboats frequently blew up when the boilers weakened
with age or were pushed too hard. After several particularly murderous accidents
in 1816, the city of Philadelphia consulted with experts on how to design safer
boilers, the first time an American governmental institution interested itself
in the problem. In 1837, at the request of Congress the Franklin Institute
issued a detailed report and recommendations based on rigorous study of boiler
construction. Congress was tempted to impose a safe boiler code on the industry
but boilermakers and steamboat owners resisted and government hesitated to
interfere with private property.
It
took from that first inquiry in 1816 to 1852 for Congress to pass effective laws
regulating the construction of boilers. In that time 5000 people were killed in
accidents on steamboats. Is this many casualties or few? Consumers evidently
were not too alarmed to continue traveling by riverboat in ever increasing
numbers. Understandably, the ship owners interpreted this as a vote of
confidence and protested the excessive cost of safer designs. Yet politicians
also won votes demanding safety.
The
accident rate fell dramatically once technical changes such as thicker walls and
safety valves were mandated. Legislation would hardly have been necessary to
achieve this outcome had it been technically determined. But in fact boiler
design was relative to a social judgment about safety. That judgment could have
been made on strictly market grounds, as the shippers wished, or politically,
with differing technical results. In either case, those results
constitute a proper boiler. What a boiler "is" was thus defined through a
long process of political struggle culminating finally in uniform codes issued
by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
This example shows just how technology
adapts to social change. What I call the "technical code" of the object mediates
the process. That code responds to the cultural horizon of the society at the
level of technical design. Quite down-to-earth technical parameters such as the
choice and processing of materials are socially specified by the code.
The illusion of technical necessity arises from the fact that the code is thus
literally "cast in iron," at least in the case of boilers.23
Conservative anti-regulatory social
philosophies are based on this illusion. They forget that the design process
always already incorporates standards of safety and environmental compatibility;
similarly, all technologies support some basic level of user or worker
initiative. A properly made technical object simply must meet these
standards to be recognized as such. We do not treat conformity as an expensive
add-on, but regard it as an intrinsic production cost. Raising the standards
means altering the definition of the object, not paying a price for an
alternative good or ideological value as the trade-off model holds.
But what of the much discussed
cost/benefit ratio of design changes such as those mandated by environmental or
other similar legislation? These calculations have some application to
transitional situations, before technological advances responding to new values
fundamentally alter the terms of the problem. But all too often, the results
depend on economists' very rough estimates of the monetary value of such things
as a day of trout fishing or an asthma attack. If made without prejudice, these
estimates may well help to prioritize policy alternatives. But one cannot
legitimately generalize from such policy applications to a universal theory of
the costs of regulation.
Such fetishism
of efficiency ignores our ordinary understanding of the concept which alone is
relevant to social decision-making. In that everyday sense, efficiency concerns
the narrow range of values that economic actors routinely affect by their
decisions. Unproblematic aspects of technology are not included. In theory one
can decompose any technical object and account for each of its elements in terms
of the goals it meets, whether it be safety, speed, reliability, etc., but in
practice no one is interested in opening the "black box" to see what is inside.
For example, once the boiler code is
established, such things as the thickness of a wall or the design of a safety
valve appear as essential to the object. The cost of these features is not
broken out as the specific "price" of safety and compared unfavorably with a
more efficient but less secure version of the technology. Violating the code in
order to lower costs is a crime, not a trade-off. And since all further progress
takes place on the basis of the new safety standard, soon no one looks back to
the good old days of cheaper, insecure designs.
Design standards are only controversial
while they are in flux. Resolved conflicts over technology are quickly
forgotten. Their outcomes, a welter of taken-for-granted technical and legal
standards, are embodied in a stable code, and form the background against which
economic actors manipulate the unstable portions of the environment in the
pursuit of efficiency. The code is not varied in real world economic
calculations but treated as a fixed input.
Anticipating the stabilization of a new
code, one can often ignore contemporary arguments that will soon be silenced by
the emergence of a new horizon of efficiency calculations. This is what happened
with boiler design and child labor; presumably, the current debates on
environmentalism will have a similar history, and we will someday mock those who
object to cleaner air as a "false principle of humanity" that violates
technological imperatives.
Non-economic
values intersect the economy in the technical code. The examples we are dealing
with illustrate this point clearly. The legal standards that regulate workers'
economic activity have a significant impact on every aspect of their lives. In
the child labor case, regulation helped to widen educational opportunities with
consequences that are not primarily economic in character. In the riverboat
case, Americans gradually chose high levels of security and boiler design came
to reflect that choice. Ultimately, this was no trade-off of one good for
another, but a non-economic decision about the value of human life and the
responsibilities of government.
Technology is thus not merely a means
to an end; technical design standards define major portions of the social
environment, such as urban and built spaces, workplaces, medical activities and
expectations, life patterns, and so on. The economic significance of technical
change often pales beside its wider human implications in framing a way of life.
In such cases, regulation defines the cultural framework of the economy;
it is not an act in the economy.
XI. Heidegger's "Essence" of
Technology
The theory sketched here
suggests the possibility of a general reform of technology. But dystopian
critics object that the mere fact of pursuing efficiency or technical
effectiveness already does inadmissible violence to human beings and nature.
Universal functionalization destroys the integrity of all that is. As Heidegger
argues, an "objectless" world of mere resources replaces a world of "things"
treated with respect for their own sake as the gathering places of our manifold
engagements with "being."24
This critique gains force from the
actual perils with which modern technology threatens the world today. But my
suspicions are aroused by Heidegger's famous contrast between a dam on the Rhine
and a Greek chalice. It would be difficult to find a more tendentious
comparison. No doubt modern technology is immensely more destructive than any
other. And Heidegger is right to argue that means are not truly neutral, that
their substantive content affects society independent of the goals they serve.
But I have argued here that this content is not essentially destructive;
rather, it is a matter of design and social insertion.
However, Heidegger rejects any merely
social diagnosis of the ills of technological societies and claims that the
source of their problems dates back at least to Plato, that modern societies
merely realize a telos immanent in Western metaphysics from the
beginning. His originality consists in pointing out that the ambition to control
being is itself a way of being and hence subordinate at some deeper level to an
ontological dispensation beyond human control. But the overall effect of his
critique is to condemn human agency, at least in modern times, and to confuse
essential differences between types of technological development.
Heidegger distinguishes between the
ontological problem of technology, which can only be addressed by
achieving what he calls "a free relation" to technology, and the merely
ontic solutions proposed by reformers who wish to change technology
itself. This distinction may have seemed more interesting in years gone by than
it does today. In effect, Heidegger is asking for nothing more than a change in
attitude toward the selfsame technical world. But that is an idealistic solution
in the bad sense, and one which a generation of environmental action would seem
decisively to refute.
Confronted with
this argument, Heidegger's defenders usually point out that his critique of
technology is not merely concerned with human attitudes but with the way being
reveals itself. Roughly translated out of Heidegger's language, this means that
the modern world has a technological form in something like the sense in which,
for example, the medieval world had a religious form. Form is no mere question
of attitude but takes on a material life of its own: power plants are the gothic
cathedrals of our time. But this interpretation of Heidegger's thought raises
the expectation that he will offer criteria for a reform of technology. For
example, his analysis of the tendency of modern technology to accumulate and
store up nature's powers suggests the superiority of another technology that
would not challenge nature in Promethean fashion.
Unfortunately, Heidegger's argument is
developed at such a high level of abstraction he literally cannot discriminate
between electricity and atom bombs, agricultural techniques and the Holocaust.
In a 1949 lecture, he asserted: "Agriculture is now the mechanized food
industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers
and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the
same as the production of hydrogen bombs.”25 All are merely
different expressions of the identical enframing which we are called to
transcend through the recovery of a deeper relation to being. And since
Heidegger rejects technical regression while leaving no room for a better
technological future, it is difficult to see in what that relation would consist
beyond a mere change of attitude.
XII. History or
Metaphysics
Heidegger is perfectly
aware that technical activity was not "metaphysical" in his sense until
recently. He must therefore sharply distinguish modern technology from all
earlier forms of technique, obscuring the many real connections and
continuities. I would argue, on the contrary, that what is new about modern
technology can only be understood against the background of the traditional
technical world from which it developed. Furthermore, the saving potential of
modern technology can only be realized by recapturing certain traditional
features of technique. Perhaps this is why theories that treat modern technology
as a unique phenomenon lead to such pessimistic conclusions.
Modern technology differs from earlier
technical practices through significant shifts in emphasis rather than
generically. There is nothing unprecedented in its chief features, such as the
reduction of objects to raw materials, the use of precise measurement and plans,
the technical control of some human beings by others, large scales of operation.
It is the centrality of these features that is new, and of course the
consequences of that are truly without precedent.
What does a broader historical picture
of technology show? The privileged dimensions of modern technology appear in a
larger context that includes many currently subordinated features that were
defining for it in former times. For example, until the generalization of
Taylorism, technical life was essentially about the choice of a vocation.
Technology was associated with a way of life, with specific forms of personal
development, virtues, etc. Only the success of capitalist deskilling finally
reduced these human dimensions of technique to marginal phenomena.
Similarly, modern management has
replaced the traditional collegiality of the guilds with new forms of technical
control. Just as vocational investment in work continues in certain exceptional
settings, so collegiality survives in a few professional or cooperative
workplaces. Numerous historical studies show that these older forms are not so
much incompatible with the "esssence" of technology as with capitalist
economics. Given a different social context and a different path of technical
development, it might be possible to recover these traditional technical values
and organizational forms in new ways in a future evolution of modern
technological society.
Technology is an
elaborate complex of related activities that crystallizes around tool making and
using in every society. Matters such as the transmission of techniques or the
management of its natural consequences are not extrinsic to technology per se
but are dimensions of it. When, in modern societies, it becomes advantageous to
minimize these aspects of technology, that too is a way of accomodating it to a
certain social demand, not the revelation of its pre-existing "esssence." In so
far as it makes sense to talk about an essence of technology at all, it must
embrace the whole field revealed by historical study, and not only a few traits
ethnocentrically privileged by our society.
There is an interesting text in which
Heidegger shows us a jug "gathering" the contexts in which it was created and
functions. This image could be applied to technology as well, and in fact there
is one brief passage in which Heidegger so interprets a highway bridge. Indeed,
there is no reason why modern technology cannot also "gather" its multiple
contexts, albeit with less romantic pathos than jugs and chalices. This is in
fact one way of interpreting contemporary demands for such things as
environmentally sound technology, applications of medical technology that
respect human freedom and dignity, urban designs that create humane living
spaces, production methods that protect workers' health and offer scope for
their intelligence, and so on. What are these demands if not a call to
reconstruct modern technology so that it gathers a wider range of contexts to
itself rather than reducing its natural, human and social environment to mere
resources?
Heidegger would not take
these alternatives very seriously because he reifies modern technology as
something separate from society, as an inherently contextless force aiming at
pure power. If this is the "essence" of technology, reform would be merely
extrinsic. But at this point Heidegger's position converges with the very
Prometheanism he rejects. Both depend on the narrow definition of technology
that, at least since Bacon and Descartes, has emphasized its destiny to control
the world to the exclusion of its equally essential contextual embeddedness. I
believe that this definition reflects the capitalist environment in which modern
technology first developed.
The
exemplary modern master of technology is the entrepreneur, singlemindedly
focussed on production and profit. The enterprise is a radically
decontextualized platform for action, without the traditional responsibilities
for persons and places that went with technical power in the past. It is the
autonomy of the enterprise that makes it possible to distinguish so sharply
between intended and unintended consequences, between goals and contextual
effects, and to ignore the latter.
The
narrow focus of modern technology meets the needs of a particular hegemony; it
is not a metaphysical condition. Under that hegemony technological design is
unusually decontextualized and destructive. It is that hegemony that is called
to account, not technology per se, when we point out that today technical means
form an increasingly threatening life environment. It is that hegemony, as it
has embodied itself in technology, that must be challenged in the struggle for
technological reform.
XIII.
Democratic Rationalization
For
generations faith in progress was supported by two widely held beliefs: that
technical necessity dictates the path of development, and that the pursuit of
efficiency provides a basis for identifying that path. I have argued here that
both these beliefs are false, and that furthermore, they are ideologies employed
to justify restrictions on opportunities to participate in the institutions of
industrial society. I conclude that we can achieve a new type of technological
society that can support a broader range of values. Democracy is one of the
chief values a redesigned industrialism could better serve.
What does it mean to democratize
technology? The problem is not primarily one of legal rights but of initiative
and participation. Legal forms may eventually routinize claims that are asserted
informally at first, but the forms will remain hollow unless they emerge from
the experience and needs of individuals resisting a specifically technological
hegemony.
That resistance takes many
forms, from union struggles over health and safety in nuclear power plants to
community struggles over toxic waste disposal to political demands for
regulation of reproductive technologies. These movements alert us to the need to
take technological externalities into account and demand design changes
responsive to the enlarged context revealed in that accounting.
Such technological controversies have
become an inescapable feature of contemporary political life, laying out the
parameters for official "technology assessment."26 They prefigure the
creation of a new public sphere embracing the technical background of social
life, and a new style of rationalization that internalizes unaccounted costs
born by "nature," i.e., some-thing or -body exploitable in the pursuit of
profit. Here respect for nature is not antagonistic to technology but enhances
efficiency in broad terms.
As these
controversies become commonplace, surprising new forms of resistance and new
types of demands emerge alongside them. Networking has given rise to one among
many such innovative public reactions to technology. Individuals who are
incorporated into new types of technical networks have learned to resist through
the net itself in order to influence the powers that control it. This is not a
contest for wealth or administrative power, but a struggle to subvert the
technical practices, procedures and designs structuring everyday life.
The example of the Minitel can serve as
a model of this new approach. In France, the computer was politicized as soon as
the government attempted to introduce a highly rationalistic information system
to the general public. Users "hacked" the network in which they were inserted
and altered its functioning, introducing human communication on a vast scale
where only the centralized distribution of information had been planned.
It is instructive to compare this case
to the movements of AIDS patients.27 Just as a rationalistic
conception of the computer tends to occlude its communicative potentialities, so
in medicine, caring functions have become mere side effects of treatment, which
is itself understood in exclusively technical terms. Patients become objects of
this technique, more or less "compliant" to management by physicians. The
incorporation of thousands of incurably ill AIDS patients into this system
destabilized it and exposed it to new challenges.
The key issue was access to
experimental treatment. In effect, clinical research is one way in which a
highly technologized medical system can care for those it cannot yet cure. But
until quite recently access to medical experiments has been severly restricted
by paternalistic concern for patients' welfare. AIDS patients were able to open
up access because the networks of contagion in which they were caught were
parallelled by social networks that were already mobilized around gay rights at
the time the disease was first diagnosed.
Instead of participating in medicine
individually as objects of a technical practice, they challenged it collectively
and politically. They "hacked" the medical system and turned it to new purposes.
Their struggle represents a counter tendency to the technocratic organization of
medicine, an attempt at a recovery of its symbolic dimension and caring
functions.
As in the case of the
Minitel, it is not obvious how to evaluate this challenge in terms of the
customary concept of politics. Nor do these subtle struggles against the growth
of silence in technological societies appear significant from the standpoint of
the reactionary ideologies that contend noisily with capitalist modernism today.
Yet the demand for communication these movements represent is so fundamental
that it can serve as a touchstone for the adequacy of our concept of politics to
the technological age.
These
resistances, like the environmental movement, challenge the horizon of
rationality under which technology is currently designed. Rationalization in our
society responds to a particular definition of technology as a means to the goal
of profit and power. A broader understanding of technology suggests a very
different notion of rationalization based on responsibility for the human and
natural contexts of technical action. I call this "democratic rationalization"
because it requires technological advances that can only be made in opposition
to the dominant hegemony. It represents an alternative to both the ongoing
celebration of technocracy triumphant and the gloomy Heideggerian counterclaim
that "Only a God can save us" from techno-cultural disaster.28
Is democratic rationalization in this
sense socialist? There is certainly room for discussion of the connection
between this new technological agenda and the old idea of socialism. I believe
there is significant continuity. In socialist theory, workers' lives and dignity
stood for the larger contexts modern technology ignores. The destruction of
their minds and bodies on the workplace was viewed as a contingent consequence
of capitalist technical design. The implication that socialist societies might
design a very different technology under a different cultural horizon was
perhaps given only lip service, but at least it was formulated as a goal.
We can make a similar argument today
over a wider range of contexts in a broader variety of institutional settings
with considerably more urgency. I am inclined to call such a position socialist
and to hope that in time it can replace the image of socialism projected by the
failed communist experiment.
More
important than this terminological question is the substantive point I have been
trying to make. Why has democracy not been extended to technically mediated
domains of social life despite a century of struggles? Is it because technology
excludes democracy, or because it has been used to suppress it? The weight of
the argument supports the second conclusion. Technology can support more than
one type of technological civilization, and may someday be incorporated into a
more democratic society than ours.
1. This paper expands a presentation of my book, Critical Theory of Technology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), delivered at the American Philosophical
Association, Dec. 28, 1991,and first published
in an earlier version in Inquiry35: 3 / 4, 1992.
2. See, for example, Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a
Transformation of American Society (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1983);
Frank Cunningham, Democratic Theory and Socialism (Cambridge Univ. Press,
1987).
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
T. Parsons, trans. (New York: Scribners, 1958), pp. 181-82.
4. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, W. Lovitt, trans.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1977); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society,
J. Wilkinson, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1964).
5. Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 188-195.
6. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Modern Library, 1906), p. 13.
7. See, for example, David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 175-79. For a general presentation of constructivism,
see Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1987.
8. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, "The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts:
or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit
Each Other," Social Studies of Science, no. 14, 1984.
9. See Langdon's Winner's blistering critique of the characteristic limitations
of the position, entitled, "Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty:
Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology," The Technology of
Discovery and the Discovery of Technology: Proceedings of the Sixth International
Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (Blacksburg, Va.:
The Society for Philosophy and Technology, 1991).
10. Hansard's Debates, Third Series: Parliamentary Debates 1830-1891,
vol. LXXIII, 1844 (Feb. 22-Apr. 22). The quoted passages are found between pp.
1088 and 1123.
11. A useful starting point for the development of a hermeneutics of technology
is offered by Paul Ricoeur in "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered
as a Text," P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science:
A Reader (Berkeley: Univ. of California, Press, 1979).
12. Michel de Certeau used the phrase "rhetorics of technology" to refer to
the representations and practices that contextualize technologies and assign
them a social meaning. De Certeau chose the term "rhetoric" because that meaning
is not simply present at hand but communicates a content that can be articulated
by studying the connotations technology evokes. See the special issue of Traverse,
no. 26, Oct. 1982, entitled Les Rhetoriques de la Technologie, and, in
that issue, especially Marc Guillaume's article, Telespectres, pp. 22-23.
13. See chapter 7, "From Information to Communication: The French Experience
with Videotex," in Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
14. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne (Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1979), p. 34.
15. For an approach to social theory based on this notion (called, however,
doxa, by the author), see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of
Practice, R. Nice, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), pp.
164-70.
16. Herbert Marcuse, "Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Marx Weber,"
in Negations, trans. J. Shapiro, (Boston: Beacon, 1968).
17. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review,
1974); David Noble, Forces of Production (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984).
18. Bernard Gendron and Nancy Holstrom, "Marx, Machinery and Alienation," Research
in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 2, 1979.
19. Foucault's most persuasive presentation of this view is Surveiller et
Punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
20. See, for example, Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect
(New York: Norton, 1975). For a review of these issues in some of their earliest
formulations, see Andrew Feenberg, "Beyond the Politics of Survival," Theory
and Society, no. 7, 1979.
21. This aspect of technology, called "concretization," is explained in Gilbert
Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958),
chap. 1.
22. John G. Burke, "Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power," M. Kranzberg and
W. Davenport, eds. Technology and Culture (New York: New American Library,
1972).
23. The technical code expresses the "standpoint" of the dominant social groups
at the level of design and engineering.It is thus relative to a social position
without for that matter being a mere ideology or psychological disposition.
As I will argue in the last section of this paper, struggle for socio-technical
change can emerge from the subordinated standpoints of those dominated within
technological systems. For more on the concept of standpoint epistemology, see
Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1991).
24. The texts by Heidegger discussed here are, in order, "The Question Concerning
Technology," op. cit.; "The Thing," and “Building Dwelling Thinking”
in Poetry, Language, Thought, A. Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper
& Row, 1971).
25. Quoted in T. Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), p. 241.
26. Alberto Cambrosio and Camille Limoges, "Controversies as Governing Processes
in Technology Assessment," in Technology Analysis & Strategic Management,
vol. 3, no. 4, 1991.
27. For more on the problem of AIDS in this context, see Andrew Feenberg, "On
Being a Human Subject: Interest and Obligation in the Experimental Treatment
of Incurable Disease," The Philosophical Forum, vol. xxiii, no. 3, Spring
1992.
28. "Only a God Can Save Us Now,"
Martin Heidegger interviewed in Der Spiegel, translated by D. Schendler,
Graduate Philosophy Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, Winter 1977.