As usual, let me first post a rough draft of the essay.
I had originally planned to write about Heidegger, but Heidegger’s articles are really too ethereal; when I read them, it’s all clouds and fog, impossible to get a grip on… Among the philosophy of technology thinkers discussed so far, aside from Marx, Feenberg is still the one most to my taste, though Ellul and Mumford are also worthy of respect.
[US]Andrew Feenberg: Critique of Technology, translated by Han Lianqing and Cao Guanfǎ, Peking University Press,2005
Preface, p. 1, v, (first sentence) Must humanity submit to the harsh logic of machines? Or can technology be fundamentally redesigned so that it serves its creators better? This is the ultimate question concerning the future of industrial civilization.[①]
Preface, p. 1, v, Determinists claim that there is no such alternative, arguing that technological progress always leads to the same result everywhere.………… But if alternatives do in fact exist, then choosing among them would have political implications.[②]
Preface, p. 2, vi, The first edition of Critique of Technology addressed these issues on the basis of a radical philosophy of technology, by reconstructing the idea of socialism.[③]
Preface, p. 4, viii, The former Soviet Union can rightly claim Marx for suspending industrial planning, employment guarantees, and low-cost basic necessities, but none of the following stems from Marx: the nationalization of the entire economy (even in industries such as agriculture where the technical conditions were not suitable), the total bureaucratization of social life, political and police dictatorship, slave labor and mass murder, and the degeneration of art into propaganda.[④]
Preface, p. 5, ix, Marx believed that the state could become the principal agent of radical technological transformation, but the historical experience of communism has shown that this view of Marx’s was limited.[⑤]
p. 3, p. 1 I think the root of the debasement of labor, education, and the environment lies not in technology itself, but in the anti-democratic values that control technological development.[⑥]
p. 4, p. 1 Fundamental change requires a democratic transformation of technology. Historically, such a transformation has been called “socialism,”[⑦]
p. 4, p. 2 Technology has become so pervasive that this consensus leaves little room for dissent. Controversies over a few emotionally charged human-rights issues such as abortion conceal the emptiness of public debate and the lack of historical perspective and utopian alternatives. p. 4, p. 3 Quoting Karl Mannheim: “After a long, tortuous, and heroic development, when history is no longer blind fate and increasingly becomes human beings’ own creation, with the abandonment of utopia, precisely at the highest stage of consciousness, human beings will lose the will to shape history themselves. And with that, they will also lose the ability to understand history.”[⑧]
p. 5, p. 4 I believe that critical theory of technology, while opening up the prospect of fundamental change, will preserve the strengths of both theories. (instrumentalism and substantivism)[⑨]
p. 8, p. 7 Although the instrumental theory and the substantive theory of technology differ in many ways, both take an “accept it or abandon it” attitude toward technology. On the one hand, if technology is merely a tool and has nothing to do with values, then the design of technology is not a matter for political debate; what needs to be discussed is only the scope and efficiency of technological application. On the other hand, if technology is a means of domination by culture, then we are destined either to push technology in a dystopian direction or to retreat to a more primitive way of life. In either case, we cannot change technology: in all these theories, technology is fate. Reason in the form of technology lies beyond human intervention or correction.[⑩]
p. 10, p. 10 Schemes for limiting technology seem unconvincing. If we choose certain areas and do not allow technology to enter, isn’t that a more subtle form of technological control?…………religion as a kind of super-technology…………how, exactly, are we to escape the technological realm?////——For an individual, what capacity is not technology? The various capacities human beings possess, even the capacity to use language to communicate and think, can all be called “technology.” But what makes a human being human is not merely technological capacity; more importantly, it is the capacity to “choose,” that is, “freedom,” which is harder still to call a technology.[11]
p. 14, p. 15 In choosing our technologies, we become what we are, and this in turn shapes our future choices. The act of choosing today has already been permeated by technology, and therefore cannot be understood in the sense of the free “use” described by instrumental theory. Even so, critical theory denies that modernity can be fixed once and for all by our atomistic, authoritarian, and consumerist culture. The choice of civilization is not determined by autonomous technology, but can be influenced by human action.[12]
p. 14, p. 16 Although it shares these points with instrumentalism, critical theory rejects the neutrality of technology and holds that “technological rationality has become political rationality”[13]
p. 17, p. 19 The substantivist view leads to its negative judgment, and at the same time ultimately reveals why Heidegger hoped that the Nazis could mystically transform our relation to technology from above, thereby achieving his goal. By contrast, we need a democratic transformation from below.[14]
p. 19, p. 21 The goal of a good society should be to enable human beings to fully realize their potential. Therefore, the most important question to ask of modern society is: what understanding of human life is embodied in the dominant technological programs? Here I argue that current technological programs constrain human development.[15]
p. 21, p. 23 In deterministic and instrumentalist interpretations, efficiency is the sole principle of the metaranking. But contemporary technology studies oppose this view, arguing that in addition to efficiency, many other factors play a role in design choices.[16]
p. 60, p. 72 The actual development of the former Soviet Union proves that socialism cannot be implemented by law or administrative decree. Socialism is not a policy, but a social movement of change that can only be created from below.[17]
p. 63, p. 76 The instrumental theory of technology has a commonsensical assumption: that the subject of action—for example, the worker or the state—can be defined independently of their means, … from another angle, the agent is the means of its own action.[18]
p. 81, p. 97 I will borrow a distinction from Weber’s theory of rationality to name these types of bias, … “substantive” and “formal”[19]
p. 130, p. 163 Resisting the automated trend in education is not simply a matter of indulging in the sentimental nostalgia of Mr. Chips. Rather, it is a question of different civilizational designs on different institutional bases. ////——The key point is that people’s “choice” of online education models is not based on efficiency, nor is it some irrational impulse; rather, it is based on a set of cultural and value-based considerations about “what education is.”[20]
p. 141, p. 178 A better society need not be inefficient and poor. This position concedes too much to the dominant ideology. Means-end rationality is unquestionably an inescapable aspect of modernity, but in cultures that measure success differently, define the proper scope of optimization differently, and aim to achieve different goals, means-end rationality will yield very different results. In this way, the view that achieving ecological and democratic goals must necessarily lead to economic backwardness is theoretically untenable.[21]
p. 142, pp. 179–180 Technology does not set insurmountable obstacles to the pursuit of “humanist” values. There is no reason technology cannot be reconstructed according to the values of a socialist society.[22]
p. 144, p. 182 Socialism is desirable and possible, not the inevitable next stage of history.[23]////——a real utopia.
p. 146, p. 184 Socialism is less a political alternative than a civilizational alternative. (p. 165, p. 210 This civilization, like capitalism, is coherent and rational, but it has its own way.)[24]
p. 170, p. 217 Civilizational change will ultimately promote scientific change without the danger of any more Lysenkoist incidents. It is not political power, but the categories and perceptions developed by scientists themselves in an entirely new social environment, that will stimulate new kinds of questions and new theories arising spontaneously in the course of their research.[25]
p. 176, p. 223 In traditional societies, technology is always embedded in the larger framework of social relations. Technical practice must not only satisfy values external to technology—which is true of all societies, including capitalist society—but also, and more than that, technology is contextualized in practice, and those practices define technology’s place within the surrounding system of nontechnical action. … Although actors can rationalize the technologies they use, the larger systems in which those technologies are embedded resist rationalization and are not governed by criteria of efficiency. Capitalist labor organization is no longer embedded in the various social subsystems it serves, nor is it controlled by nontechnical forms of action such as religion or paternal moral authority. Capitalism liberates technology from these internal controls and organizes labor, along with other realms of the expanding social system, in pursuit of efficiency and power. Thus, although technology itself has many similar characteristics in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, only in the latter does it become a universal human fate.[26]
p. 177, p. 224 decontextualization simplification autonomization positioning[27]
p. 187, p. 236 Is there a way to restore the ruptured unity of society and nature while also avoiding the moral costs of romantic escapism? Or are we doomed forever to oscillate between these poles of primitive and modern, solidarity and individuality, being ruled by nature and ruling nature? This is the problem critical theory of technology must ultimately address. … not a retreat to nature, but an advance to nature.[28]
[US]Andrew Feenberg: Alternative Modernity, translated by Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press,2003
p. 1 Two understandings of “modernity,” Americanization[29]
p. 4 The empirical evidence provided by social constructivism shows that technological development is not fatefully determined by a universal rationality, but depends on a wide variety of social factors.[30]
p. 15 Technology contains the achievements of normative consensus in the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural spheres, rather than merely pure efficiency or the frenzy of user-firstism to seize everything. To fail to see this is to accept the positivist demand for surface values, and to exaggerate the difference between premodern and modern societies.[31]
p. 24 In positivism, reason is universal and not constrained by social and historical conditions.[32]
p. 205 Yasunari Kawabata’s novels point out more forcefully than Japanese exceptionalism the inadequacy of any view that simply equates rationalization with Westernization. Go had already reached the level of a rational system long before Europeans arrived; it itself formed a complete culture of strategic action, and comparable Western notions are subtly different.[33]
p. 206 But Nishida clearly pointed out that different cultures can produce different types of rational social order.[34]
p. 268 What attracts me to Marcuse and Nishida is not that they relativized the content of rational belief, but that they relativized rational form itself.[35]////——The problem with technological rationality is not the thinking form of efficiency-seeking itself, but rather taking that thinking form to be the only form of rationality.
Zhu Chunyan: Research on Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology, Northeastern University Press, 2006
p. 83 “A real utopia”[36]
p. 129 The theory of “democratic rationalization” is not limited to the transformation of technology itself; its aim is to expand human communication in the technological design process so as to bring into play human creativity. That is to say, in the process of designing and using technology, designers and users from different social positions communicate with one another about their needs and conceptions of technology, so that technology reflects more people’s interests and satisfies more people’s needs. In Feenberg’s words, in this way we can establish a democratic society in which the progress of technology serves the progress of communication. This is precisely the essence of the new democratic technopolitics Feenberg envisions.
p. 124 One important defect in current democratic theory is that it “excludes technology from democratic issues.”[37]
//////////////////
Asking “What are we to do?” is not, in itself, “operationalism”; nor does believing that “human beings can make choices” amount to human-centrism. Even if we say that technology really is an irresistible “destiny,” and that technology is not created by human beings but, on the contrary, human beings are shaped by technology, so what? Does that mean we can no longer speak of our own “choices”? It is like saying that if we believe in a deterministic worldview, and believe that human beings are nothing more than plural “nothings” or even a heap of atoms, do we therefore no longer have the right to speak of free will? This way of thinking is in fact still reductionist. Indeed, even if we say that spirit can ultimately be “reduced” to material phenomena (or that matter determines spirit), that does not mean spirit is merely material phenomena, and still less that ethical questions can be reduced to physics. Similarly, even if we say that technology determines culture, that technology is not a human creation, or that the destiny of technology cannot be escaped, none of this can cancel the discussion of how people “choose.”
Is not the technological substance theory that denies or evades “choice” also a theory of value neutrality? Yet just as it is difficult to discuss ethical questions without free will, if there is no “choice,” where does the question of “value” come from? — … — Only when we can speak of making a decision about some action can we then speak of whether choosing to do so is good or bad. Just as in a society where there is no “exchange” available for choice—meaning, that is to say, that people may have no choice over what they exchange for what, how much they exchange, or how they exchange it—all things are already given, the question of value (in the economic sense) will not arise; if we have never had any way to choose, where would the question of value come from?
One profound effect that technological rationality has brought to ethics is precisely the abstraction and essentialization of “value,” and the forgetting of “choice.” Just as in economics, the emergence of “value” originally depends on concrete, real activities of production, use, and return, capitalism has turned value into a symbol, thereby stripping it away from concrete activities. “Money,” as the symbolic marker of value, is no longer merely a medium of exchange; it has become the aim of exchange, and has become value itself. In a similar way, in ethics people are increasingly moving away from those “choice” questions that have concrete situations, and instead reducing the question of choice to a mere, abstract matter of calculating and measuring value! If we wish to transcend technological rationality, we should first step out of our excessive fixations on “value” and let the question of “choice” return to our field of vision.
(Formal prejudice) The result of the universalization and homogenization of criteria is that, even if human reason can still make “choices,” it can only calculate and choose according to a single, objective standard of rationality (for example, efficiency). Such choice is therefore no longer dependent on human beings, but is merely related to that set of mechanical, externally imposed procedures and standards. Or rather, people can ultimately only choose between submitting to “reason” or throwing in their lot with irrationality.
Technology and evolution
The environment to which technology “adapts” is not the natural environment, but the humanistic environment.
The guidance of human technological development and human domestication of animals and plants.
Laissez-faire, or selecting breeding stock according to a single criterion (efficiency) = the law of the jungle; multiple criteria (culture, values)
Technological system—ecological system, a theory of mutualistic symbiosis, Gaia, changing the environment, breaking down the binary opposition between human beings and the environment.
Domestication of dogs, cattle, and plants. (Dogs: assisting hunting, police tracking, guarding the home, food, pets… Cattle: plowing, meat, milk, leather)
The principle of abundance is impossible; not all possible technological forms will necessarily arise, just as not all biological forms will appear. Neanderthals.
The binary opposition between human beings and the environment: is humanity enslaving the environment, or is the environment enslaving humanity? Marx, the unity of nature and humanity
Technology transfer. Why did mass production arise in the United States? Technology transfer and social systems. Japanese manufacturing and Japanese culture, lifetime employment. Printer obsolescence.
Under the capitalist market system: technological elites, control by capitalists, technopolitics. The third way for philosophy of technology requires a third way for political economy.
Pessimists no longer pursue democracy. Marcuse praised hierarchy; Heidegger threw in his lot with the Nazis
/////////////////
A German composition dated August 12, 1835—“Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession.” In this essay, Marx at the very outset brought the grave issue of choice before people: “Choice is what distinguishes man far more from other creatures, but at the same time it is also an act that can destroy a person’s life, wreck all his plans, and plunge him into misfortune.”[38]
As Marx put it, a person’s thoughts, like his relations in society, “have already begun in some measure to determine themselves before we are capable of deciding them.”[39]
From the standpoint of the sublation of alienation, the *Manuscripts* also offered an argument for Marx’s ideal future communist society. Marx said: “Communism is the positive sublation of private property, that is, of human self-alienation, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is therefore the complete and conscious return of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a return which is accomplished wholly, and consciously, and which preserves all the wealth of previous development. This communism, as completed naturalism, is humanism, and as completed humanism, is naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. It is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”[40]
[①] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[②] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[③] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[④] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑤] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑥] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑦] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑧] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑨] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[⑩] [US] Andrew Feenberg:
*Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[11] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[12] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[13] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[14] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[15] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[16] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[17] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[18] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[19] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[20] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[21] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[22] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[23] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[24] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[25] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[26] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[27] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[28] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Critical Theory of Technology*, trans. Han Lianqing and Cao Guofa, Peking University Press, 2005,
[29] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[30] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[31] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[32] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[33] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[34] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[35] [US] Andrew Feenberg: *Selectable Modernity*, trans. Lu Jun, Yan Geng, et al., China Social Sciences Press, 2003,
[36] Zhu Chunyan: *A Study of Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology*, Northeastern University Press, 2006,
[37] Zhu Chunyan: *A Study of Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology*, Northeastern University Press, 2006,
[38] *The Complete Works of Marx and Engels*, vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 2nd ed., 1995, p. 455.
[39] *The Complete Works of Marx and Engels*, vol. 1, People’s Publishing House, 2nd ed., 1995, p. 457.
[40] *The Complete Works of Marx and Engels*, vol. 42, People’s Publishing House, 1st ed., 1979, p. 120.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply