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CHAPTER FIVE LARRY A. HICKMAN From Critical Theory to Pragmatism Feenberg’s Progress Over the course of more than two decades, during which he has published an impressive number of books and essays, Andrew Feenberg has established himself as an important representative of a new generation of critical theorists. Consistently insightful and articulate, he has developed a trenchant critique of technological culture that has taken as its point of departure the humanistic Marxism of his mentor Herbert Marcuse. In his recent book Questioning Technology (1999), he presents what is arguably his most successful attempt to date to construct a major revision of the critique of technology advanced by Marcuse and other “first generation” critical theorists, as well as by their “second generation” heirs, such as Habermas. At one level his work can be read as ful- filling a promise the details of which Marcuse just left vague. At a deeper level, however, Questioning Technology can be viewed as a move away from some of the core ideas of the earlier critical theorists, including Marcuse. As a student of Marcuse, Feenberg might plausibly be thought to belong to the second generation of critical theory. Following Joel Anderson’s excellent essay on the history of the Frankfurt School, however, our best option is to place Feenberg’s published work squarely within critical theory’s “third” generation . If the “first” generation was interested in emancipation from instrumental rationality as ideology by means of reflective social science, and if the “second ” generation focused on the development of communicational tools to 72 Theoretical Assumptions of a Critical Theory of Technology| promote moral development and respect for constitutionality, as well as to overcome social pathologies such as extreme nationalism, xenophobia, and the colonization of the lifeworld by technoscientific rationality, then the “third” generation, whose experiences were formed by the events of 1968, has abandoned the essentialist and substantialist views of its forebears in favor of positions that are more thoroughly functionalist and constructivist. This generation has turned its attention to problems of pluralism, multiculturalism, and globalization, and has tended to view problems of technoscience not as separate from, but as a part of social life.1 To those familiar with the central ideas of American pragmatism, some of the planks in Feenberg’s platform will therefore appear remarkably familiar. More specifically, Feenberg’s revisions of Marcuse have the interesting effect of moving his critique noticeably in the direction of the instrumental version of pragmatism that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century by John Dewey. It is perhaps not surprising that this should have occurred, given attempts by second generation critical theorists Habermas and Apel to appropriate the insights of C. S. Peirce, and the influential studies of the work of G. H. Mead that have been published by Hans Joas, who might be regarded as a kind of third generation critical theorist. But this similarity between the Feenberg of Questioning Technology and Dewey’s pragmatic critique of technology, I suggest, is all the more significant given the fact that he, Feenberg, has not given his readers much evidence that he is aware of this situation. In Questioning Technology, for example, he devotes a total of about a half page to Dewey. On page 136 he discusses Dewey’s treatment of democratic deliberation and then dismisses him as having exhibited an “uncritical confidence in science and technology.”2 Ten pages later, however , he reminds us that Dewey foresaw how “the dispersion of the technological citizenry” and other factors, including a “media-dominated public process,” would account “for the passivity of a society which has not yet grasped how profoundly affected it is by technology.”3 The apparent conflict between these two assessments may in fact not be so great as it at first appears. Although Dewey did in fact have a measure of confidence in science and technology, or what is now frequently termed “technoscience ,” his attempts to present a democratized critique of technology are remarkably similar to those that Feenberg himself is now advancing. For those who are sympathetic to the programs of the American pragmatists, as I myself am, what I have termed “Feenberg’s Progress” is therefore a matter to be applauded . That is what I intend to do in this chapter. It is probably best to begin my account by taking the measure of where Feenberg thinks we have been historically with respect to the philosophical critique of technology. Presenting “before...

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