Hacking Feenberg

Andrew Feenberg is one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of technology. Although his work is generally regarded as belonging to the tradition known as "Critical Theory of Technology" (Feenberg has been a student of Marcuse), it engages with a much wider range of thinkers and approaches, ranging from science and technology studies (STS) and Heideggerian phenomenology to Japanese philosophy.

Between Reason and Experience, a collection of formerly published essays, does not only provide a good summary of Feenberg's work during the past 20 years, but also reflects the richness of a thinking that could only emerge from such a broad ecology of theoretical concepts and case studies. More importantly, it foregrounds some extremely challenging societal and philosophical problems that deserve attention from philosophers in and outside of the critical theory community.

The book starts with introducing its central thesis: technology involves "interaction between reason and experience" (xvii). To understand what Feenberg means, we have to know his so-called "instrumentalization" thesis: technological devices have their (instrumental) rationality, but devices then enter the lifeworld, and what technology is also depends on its use—which may be different than originally intended and which may influence design.

As Feenberg explains in the first part of the book, the instrumentalization concept must be seen as a response to technological determinism, which has argued that in scientific-rational dystopia there is no room for freedom and individuality. Giving the examples of hacking information technology (chapter three and chapter five) and the environmental movement (chapter two), he is optimistic about the possibility that user initiatives can transform design and that technology can be democratized. The end to dystopia is near (xxiii-xxiv), since "those who today are subordinated to technology's rhythms and demands may be able to control it and determine its evolution" (3). In this sense, there is "indeterminism": technology does not determine society but is itself shaped by "both technical and social factors" (13). What Feenberg calls "technical code" is then "the rule under which technologies are realized in a social context with biases reflecting the unequal distribution of social power" (65).

In the second part of the book, Feenberg says more about his instrumentalization theory (72-76) and argues that the existentialist tradition (and I would add: traditional critical theory) has focussed too much on primary instrumentalization, neglecting meaning and concrete social forces. He also asks if Japan qualifies as an alternative modernity and, interestingly, compares their synthesis of Eastern values and Western technology to "the layering of technology with environmental, democratic, and other objectives excluded from the original design process" (Chapter six).

The third part of the book further reflects on rationalization and modernity. Feenberg also responds to Latour, whose work he criticises for eliminating the categories of modernity theory (135). In the final chapter, he concludes that nature and experience are complementary, and summarizes the ways in which lifeworld and science interact (211) by using Marcuse. However, in the concluding section, his thinking moves closer to Heidegger: he argues that we can only "recover the normative of technique" by letting norms emerge from "the shared experience of a community with its world," that is, from the horizon "within which actions and objects take on meaning" (217).

However, despite Feenberg's emphasis on interactions between the two kinds of instrumentalization, and despite his flirts with Heideggerian thinking, he still seems to presuppose a sharp distinction between the rational-technological "system" and the lifeworld. This can be criticized from a phenomenological point of view (see also below). Feenberg criticizes Heidegger for not being able to discriminate "between electricity and atom bombs, agricultural techniques and the Holocaust" (25). But contemporary phenomenology could criticize Feenberg for discriminating too much between primary and secondary instrumentalization, that is, for suggesting that technology is something entirely separate from the lifeworld. Feenberg criticizes Habermas for leaving no room for the social dimension of science and technology (138), and for not paying attention to the complex "real interactions between system and lifeworld" (59), but his conceptualization of the relation in terms of "interactions" suggests that he adopts Habermas' presupposition that we can treat both as separate spheres in the...