Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on the Substantive Critique of Technology from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.
We finished the last lecture with a discussion of Max Weber and his pessimistic vision of a modern world locked in a conceptual “iron cage” in which we can only see the world through the narrow perspective of instrumental rationality. The selection from Weber articulates what we might call the substantive theory of technology. In this view, technology requires on the part of its users and developers a way of thinking about the world that precludes other alternative ways of thinking. In particular, what is lost for both Weber and the thinkers we will look at in this lecture, is a way of reasoning about ends.
German Critical Theory (also called the Frankfurt School) refers to a number of related philosophers, economists, sociologists, and other thinkers initially associated with (or later influenced by) the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in the early 1930s. These thinkers were all dissident Marxists who attempted to reformulate Marx’s ideas in light of Freud’s and Weber’s ideas as well as in light of the political and economic developments of the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps the most key members of this group were Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.
In Horkheimer and Adorno’s most famous work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argued that the instrumental success of technology in managing the external world leads to the use of this way of thinking for all spheres of life. It leads to a world in which instrumental success and efficiency become the only way of judging things. Since religion and myth no longer successfully order and make predictive sense of the world, the modern age is left with only one criteria for judging actions/outcomes: instrumentality (i.e., finding the most efficient means to an end). As such, the world loses its ability to judge the ends themselves.
In our reading from Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, we can see a similar argument. Marcuse argues that the rationality required to create better and better technology pushes discussion on ends and values out of the realm of rational discourse, preventing criticism of our way of life.
Thus, technology ends up “indoctrinating and manipulating” and “promotes a false consciousness which is immune to its falsehood.”
In their critique of technology, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School adopted Max Weber’s iron cage thesis. The rationalization of the world—that is, the institutionalization of the pursuit of interests set in accord with achievable values through the regulated employment of means measurable through the criterion of efficacy—has created a cage from which the hope for an escape can only be a “hopeless hope.” This modern instrumental rationality (what Weber called Zweckrationality) is the supreme prison because it eliminates the possibility of distinguishing between truth and power, between truth and ideology, and as such, thinking loses the ability to critique the status quo, to envisage change, or to think about the “ought.” In a world dominated by instrumental reason, we cannot imagine a world outside its prison. Thus we have been colonized by technology; as such, we now identify political and personal freedom with technological use and consumption.
Other thinkers not associated with the Frankfurt School have criticized technology in a similar way. In our reading from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964), he claims that “technique has become … independent of the machine” and has a result technique “transforms everything it touches into a machine.” By using the word technique, Ellul makes it clear that he is not talking about the things but a way of thinking.
For Ellul, technique is “finding the one best means” to an end “on the basis of numeric calculation.” That is, technique is the “search for greater efficiency.”
It should not be all that surprising that this understanding of technology developed in the 1920s to 1950s. It was during these decades that the problematics associated with modernization—rapid full-scale industrialization throughout all sectors of society and its concomitant displacements of traditional ways of life, as well as the disenchantment of traditional worldviews via science—were being especially felt. This relatively rapid birth of the modern world brought forth a great deal of introspection on the part of intellectuals on the “meaning” of this change. As well, the lack of the great expected change—the Communist Revolution—also led social thinkers to reassess the modern world and its defining feature, its technology. The final focusing event was the Second World War, a war in which monstrous tools seemed to dwarf man as tool-user. The atomic mushroom cloud almost blocked, but not completely, the image of bulldozers piling emaciated corpses into mass graves.
It was during the eerie new dawn that followed this Götterdammerung that Martin Heidegger and others began to reassess the problem of technology. In his post-war essays on technology—in particular, “The Question Concerning Technology” (”Die Frage nach der Technik”) and “The Age of the World Picture” (”Die Zeit des Weltbildes”)—Heidegger emphasized that technologies are not just instruments but are a general way of perceiving the world.
In fact, to see technology merely as a neutral means to an end is to be “delivered over to it in the worst possible way.” We will “remain unfree and chained to technology” if we continue to think of technology as a neutral instrument.
To prevent such a surrender, Heidegger claims, we must endeavor to discover the essence or being of technology. What then is this essence?
“Technology,” Heidegger asserts, “is a way of revealing.” It is a way of trying to make Being present itself as truth. But technology is more than a “trying”—it is a “challenging,” a “demanding” by humans that Being present itself to humans as “standing-reserves.”
That is, technology is a way of seeing the world; it sees the world as a supply house of raw material to be used as a means of expressing power. This way of seeing the world, Heidegger called Gestell. The danger for man in this way of seeing the world is that it becomes “destiny,” in that he becomes unable to see the world in any way but in the technological way. And since humans are also part of the world, it inevitably follows that the technological way of seeing will eventually see humans as mere raw material as well. Thus the degradation of workers in factories, the genocide of gas-ovens, and the instant holocaust of nuclear war, is not the result of capitalism, totalitarianism, or the technology itself for Heidegger, but the result of how Gestell becomes destiny. That is, seeing things as raw material for power is so instrumentally successful that it prevents us from seeing the world in any other way; we thus become powerless to stop it, and technology as world view becomes our destiny.
Courses, History, Technology
