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CHAPTER THREE TRISH GLAZEBROOK An Ecofeminist Response I come to Andrew Feenberg’s work as a Heideggerian ecofeminist. Heidegger’s critique of science and technology has been useful to several ecofeminist writers , some more, some less explicitly. In my case, his work has been more than influential, in fact formative, primarily because of his analysis of the Western intellectual tradition. He argues that this tradition culminates in modernity in a logic of domination. Ecofeminists agree, and add that this logic is phallic. I have furthermore used Heidegger’s account of essence to suggest a sense in which essentialism can be thought not biologically but historically as a conceptual resource for ecofeminist alternative environmental epistemologies.1 I have borrowed ecofeminist strategies of discourse and inclusivity, in response to Michael Zimmerman’s worries,2 to develop a Heideggerian environmentalism that precludes fascism, and I have explored the account of dwelling found in Karen Warren’s work in terms of Heidegger’s analyses of Heimat and Unheimlichkeit .3 Rich and insightful though this work has been for me, I must confess that Feenberg’s writing came as a somewhat dramatic revelation to awaken me from my dogmatic slumber, as it were. My first encounter with Feenberg’s writing was in 1995. His “Subversive Rationalization : Technology, Power, and Democracy” shows that technology theorists need not dissociate themselves from praxis as a consequence of the rhetoric that totalizes technology into an ideology of domination.4 The social and political possibilities for subversive rationalization are an antidote to Luddite passivity and pessimism. Heidegger argues that technology is not just a collection of equipment, but a way of opening reality, of structuring intelligibility, of organizing a world. Feenberg argues further that technology is a source of public power. His analyses of the technology-based social infrastructures in which users are 38 Theoretical Assumptions of a Critical Theory of Technology| embedded are more helpful than Heidegger’s “Technik,” if one seeks not just diagnosis , but practical possibilities for resistance and democratization. We are on one hand cornered by technology—as Hwa Yol Jung put it recently , “Technology is somehow being forced on me, and there seems no escape .”5 It is not just that he feels ongoing pressure to use e-mail. Rather, technology seems inescapable as a system, despite the capacity to resist specific technologies. Erika, a high school student with whom I play djembe, complained during a break we took between rhythms: “I hate computers. But I finally got a laptop.” Why? “Peer pressure. All my friends did, and I want to be in classes with them.” At her school, students with laptops are in separate classes from everyone else. They take notes on their laptops, do projects, and connect to the Internet during class. Is not to have the technology to put oneself at a disadvantage? The technology segregates—apparently democratic in that all students are free to bring a laptop, it actually privileges, and reproduces race, wealth, and class lines in doing so. But Erika doesn’t seem to mind that so much. She hates computers “because they are supposed to be simple, but they make things more complicated. There’s crashes, and losses of work, and things never go like they should—a ten-minute task seems to always take half an hour—and I have to lug it around all the time.” I understand—I could easily occupy my whole day with “labor-saving” technologies. My labor is not “saved” at all, but diverted machine-ward. Furthermore, consider the bicycle. Feenberg shows how factors external to the design process influenced the technical development of the bicycle away from racing bikes toward the “safety” bike ridden today.6 A more worrisome history of the bicycle is its metamorphosis into a recreation device, and its virtual elimination from transportation in North America. Like the roads themselves , which used to serve a variety of social and practical functions, the human desire to get about has been almost entirely taken over by the car. Star Trek’s Borg may be right: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” I lived in a small town in the United States for six years without a car, and very few people seemed to understand the choice. Some would say, “But of course you can bike to class, because you live so close.” I would say, “No, I live close in order that I may bike to class.” Others kept offering me their cars, as if some...

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