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4. What’s Wrong with Being a Technological Essentialist? A Response to Feenberg
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CHAPTER FOUR IAIN THOMSON What’s Wrong with Being a Technological Essentialist? A Response to Feenberg Introduction Questioning Technology is Andrew Feenberg’s third major work on the critical theory of technology in a decade, and it confirms his place as one of the world’s leading philosophers of technology.1 In an earlier examination of this important text, I traced out some of the philosophical and political tensions in the legacy of technology critique leading from Heidegger through Marcuse to Feenberg, and concluded that the critical theory of technology Feenberg elaborates in Questioning Technology remains much more conceptually indebted to Heidegger than Feenberg’s own Marcuseanism had allowed him to admit. In response, Feenberg forthrightly acknowledged Heidegger’s great influence on his work, but then went on to stress what he took to be the most important outstanding difference between his own critical theory of technology and Heidegger’s critique of our technological understanding of Being, namely, Heidegger’s “untenable” technological essentialism.2 I would like to follow up on our previous exchange here by asking, What is at stake in Feenberg’s claim that Heidegger is a technological essentialist? I 54 Theoretical Assumptions of a Critical Theory of Technology| pursue this question not only in order to vindicate much of Heidegger’s groundbreaking ontological approach to the philosophy of technology, but also to clarify Feenberg’s conceptual cartography of technological essentialism . Doing so, I believe, will help orient the approach of future philosophers of technology to one of its central theoretical controversies. Technological Essentialism In our previous debate, the fundamental philosophical difference between Heidegger’s and Feenberg’s understandings of technology emerged in deceptively stark terms. Feenberg argued that Heidegger’s ontological understanding of technology is untenably essentialistic, while I maintained that “Feenberg’s reading is never so hermeneutically violent as when he accuses Heidegger of being a technological ‘essentialist.’” On closer inspection, however, things are not quite so simple; as we will see, technological essentialism turns out to be an extremely complex notion.3 Indeed, if we are to evaluate Feenberg’s critique of Heidegger, the first thing we need to do is establish the criteria that determine what counts as technological essentialism. To minimize potential objections, I will stick to the criteria set forth by Feenberg himself. The necessary criterion seems obvious; to be a technological essentialist, one needs to believe that technology has an essence. This criterion is not suf- ficient for our purposes, however, because it does not tell us what makes technological essentialism objectionable. A radical constructivist such as Baudrillard or Latour might maintain that there is no technology, only particular technologies, and thus that all technological essentialisms are unsound; but whether or not this is a coherent position, it is clearly not one that Feenberg shares.4 Feenberg proposes his own “theory of the essence of technology,”5 so the mere belief that technology has an essence cannot be sufficient to qualify one as the kind of technological essentialist to whom Feenberg objects. Thus, despite Feenberg’s rather incautious claim that “[t]he basic problem is essentialism ,”6 it seems that the problem is not with technological essentialism as such, but rather with particular kinds of technological essentialism. In fact, if I understand him correctly, Feenberg objects to technological essentialists such as Heidegger, Ellul, Borgmann, and Habermas because each commits himself to at least one of three particular claims about the essence of technology, claims that render their technological essentialisms unacceptable: ahistoricism, substantivism, and one-dimensionalism. Our next task will be to unpack these three essentialist claims with the goal of understanding what they are and why they are objectionable. We will then come back to each claim in turn and ask whether Heidegger holds any of the objectionable doctrines in question. [3.236.139.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:16 GMT) thomson What’s Wrong with Being a Technological Essentialist? 55|| Ahistoricism What is ahistorical technological essentialism, and what is wrong with it? According to Feenberg, an ahistorical technological essentialist is someone who interprets the “historically specific phenomenon [of technology] in terms of a transhistorical conceptual construction.”7 Thus, for example, Weber and Habermas understand the essence of technology in terms of “rational control [and] efficiency,”8 while Heidegger understands it as the reduction of “everything to functions and raw materials.”9 What does Feenberg think is illegitimate about this? The problem is that, in an attempt to “fix the historical flux [of technology...