Introduction

In order to ground our discussion and locate its arguments within the appropriate philosophical landscape, I will begin with a brief taxonomy of philosophical approaches to technology as they have developed in the twentieth century. These taxonomies aim to identify theories according to answers they provide to certain questions about technology. Such questions include: Is the development of technology and the trajectory of this development under human control? Is this trajectory predetermined by the very nature of technology? Does technology have a nature (or essence)? If so, what is it? Do technologies inherently dictate values, or are they valueless means to value-laden ends? As mentioned above, it is most helpful to distinguish broadly between essentialist and constructivist approaches to technology. The former attribute to technology an essence that cannot be altered (for better or worse), while the latter emphasize the social aspects of technology and the ways in which it can be reformed toward socially determined ends.[1]

One essentialist approach to technology is the neutrality approach, in which a tool is taken to be neutral and can be used for good or bad purposes. Technology is considered to embody a universal rationality that is independent of social forces. In other words, there is no such thing as morally good or bad technology, only good or bad users. The neutrality approach is sometimes referred to as instrumentalism since it views technologies as mere instruments for human activities; as value-neutral means to value-laden human ends.[2] As will be discussed below, Habermas’s early work can be construed as endorsing this approach to technology.
Another essentialist approach is technological determinism. There are a number of variations to this view, but two are most prominent: the first views technology as the driving force of social change. It is technologies, devices and machines rather than human beings who primarily drive and explain changes in society. The second, sometimes referred to as the autonomy view of technology, asserts that there is a sense in which technology has gained autonomy vis-à-vis its human makers and users, to the extent that humans no longer control technology. Rather, technology controls human activity, imposing a “technological” or “technicized” way of life on a society. The works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger will be discussed in this context. I will also examine the work of Herbert Marcuse, and will argue that though it is unclear to what extent both Marcuse and Heidegger deny the possibility of influencing the nature and direction of technology, they see it as highly unlikely, and in any case do not provide any guidelines for a move in that direction.

In contrast to essentialist approaches, constructivist philosophers of technology advance empirical and historical views of technology, and examine it in its actual uses in social contexts. They argue that society simultaneously shapes technology as technology shapes society. Technology is not neutral, but neither is its nature predetermined. Technology is always underdetermined and always embodies specific values. From this vantage point, human activity, technology, and the natural and human environment are bound up together in a relationship of mutual constitution.[3] Indeed, one of the main efforts of the constructivist approach as a critical theory of technology is to restore the possibility of agency within the technological realm, a possibility that has been placed in serious doubt by many twentieth century thinkers. A number of American philosophers have forcefully advanced the constructivist view in recent decades, including Langdon Winner, Albert Borgmann, Don Ihde and Andrew Feenberg, among others. Feenberg in particular has called for a “democratization of technology.” His approach and its problems will be the focus of Chapter Two.

Heidegger on Technology

The three approaches to technology – neutrality, determinism, and autonomy – can all be characterized as “essentialist” positions insofar as they all ascribe a certain essence to technology, one that is inherent to it, part of its very nature. Perhaps the most influential philosopher to have taken such a position is Martin Heidegger.[4] Heidegger argued that the view of technology as a merely neutral instrument does not fully grasp the essence of technology, and misconceives technology as if it were a tool subject to human control. In contrast, he understood technology as a comprehensive framework of our human being in the world. In particular, this technological framework is at the foundation of modern society. As Borgmann points out, Heidegger came to distinguish between technology, which referred to the technology in the instrumental and anthropological senses, and the essence of technology, which referred to technology as a fundamental mode of being.[5] Heidegger’s view is “essentialist” in the sense that it denies the idea that the nature of technology is under direct human control. It rejects social constructivist views that understand technologies to be a result of social construction as well as views which assign responsibility for technological domination to particular individuals and groups. However, it should be noted that Heidegger’s essentialism does not conceive of the essence of technology in ahistorical terms. As noted above, Heidegger conceives of the essence of technology as a modern phenomenon.[6]

Emphasizing the way in which technology is not neutral, Heidegger writes: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which we today particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.”[7] Rather than merely a means or instrument, for Heidegger the essence of technology is a “way of revealing,” and, to the extent that we have hitherto failed to comprehend that the essence of technology is not its being a thing but rather a way of understanding things, to this extent it is also a way of concealing.[8] To understand the full sense on which technology reveals, we must keep in mind Heidegger’s conception of truth as a disclosure, a revealing.[9] For him, the common understanding of technology as a neutral instrument under the control of humans is not incorrect, but it is untrue insofar as it fails to reveal technology as a grounding framework.[10]

One might ask of what is technology a way of revealing and concealing. For Heidegger, as mode of revealing, technology frames human beings’ relation to themselves, to their world, and to each other. Modern technology reveals everything as “standing-reserve,” as being stored, stacked, and compiled to be used as a resource. As such, “[u]nlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing.”[11] Heidegger names this all-encompassing way of revealing, “enframing” (Gestell).[12] This concept denotes not only human activity, and not only the concrete technologies at hand, but also the gathering together of man and tool in an ordering, in a network of resources and their use which not only provides efficiency but primarily gives meaning to these relations as such.[13] The technological framework also frames man’s attitude toward nature, such that technology is not merely a tool for controlling nature, and science not merely an endeavor to understand it. It is technology as the zeitgeist, as the very mode of revealing of being that brings forth nature as an order governed by quantifiable metrics and mathematical laws, and conceals its aesthetic and moral forces.[14]

The extent to which Heidegger holds hope for changing this “technicized” mode of being is debatable. In his essay on The Question Concerning Technology (1954) he warns against the danger of technological enframing, cautioning that there may come a point when man himself “will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.”[15] Ultimately, according to Heidegger, the completely enframed man will no longer see the question of revealing as such, and will no longer be capable of envisioning other modes of being.[16] Man’s “saving power,” it seems, is precisely to think this danger. For Heidegger, if there is hope, it is in anticipating some alternative way of being-with (nature, others and self). It is perhaps in this sense that in his 1966 interview to the Der Spiegel, Heidegger famously claimed that in light of the existing technological world, “only a god can still save us.”[17]

In this interview Heidegger asserts that technology is in its essence something that human beings cannot master of their own accord.[18] He explains that “[e]verything is functioning. This is exactly what is so uncanny, that everything functions and that the functioning drives us more and more to even further functioning, and that technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them… The only thing we have left is purely technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which man lives.”[19] He asserts that philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world (for him this is true not only of philosophy but of all “merely” human meditations and endeavors).

While this position gives reason to think that there is no hope of emancipation from this technological enframing, Heidegger makes clear that he does not view “the situation of man in the world of global technology as a fate which cannot be escaped or unraveled,” and hints that a free relationship to the technological world may be possible.[20] Others have taken up this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking about technology, and have offered a slightly less pessimistic interpretation. According to the latter, we can take Heidegger to be asserting that only some new cultural pillar, which can gather together a community in a new way and give new meaning to its practices (as the Greek temple once did), can bring about this “saving power.” However, this pillar cannot simply be erected or brought about in any simple way. Even this less gloomy outlook still understands Heidegger to be saying that human agency vis-à-vis technology is not promised.[21]

Adorno and Horkheimer on Technology

From a different perspective, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was also highly suspicious of technology and its social implications. For Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, technology threatens to diminish thinking. According to their analysis, modern technology reifies human thinking. Better still, it is human thinking in the enlightenment that objectifies itself “to become an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it.”[22]

To understand this detrimental “dialectic of enlightenment,” one must consider the way in which this position is a response to two influential predecessors, namely, Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx did not focus explicitly on the nature of technology, but to some extent we can understand his analysis of the production process, and especially the “forces of production,” as referring to technology.[23] Famously, Marx asserted that these forces of production, the material technologies that facilitate the production process, determine social relations. In other words, changes in the forces of production bring about changes in social relations. Thus, for Marx, the kind of self-alienation described by Adorno and Horkheimer was a result, not of technology itself, but of the relations it had brought about, whereas for Adorno the technology and the technocracy it produces results in a society and individuals completely dominated by technological relations.[24]

Perhaps the most notable difference between Marx and the Frankfurt School theorists (excluding, as will be discussed, Walter Benjamin) is that they rejected Marx’s optimism regarding the emancipatory potential of technological development.[25] While pointing out the disastrous effects of technology when applied within a capitalist economy,[26] Marx saw the very same technology as being a key to a leisurely, creative and productive life in a future communist society. Considering the potential for lesser pressure toward human specialization (supplanted by machines) and hence less pressure toward more division of labor, Marx writes in The German Ideology that “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner…”[27] This sort of optimism is colorfully illustrated in The Right to Be Lazy, an essay published in 1883 by Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue. Lafargue ends this essay with the following words: “Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labour. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudices of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.”[28]

Weber’s influence on Adorno and Horkheimer can be seen in their pessimism. Weber analyzed the process of increasing “rationalization” and its effects on modern society and consciousness, an analysis that informed Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of technological rationality.[29] Where Marx saw the continuous development of the forces of production as a rational historical process with emancipatory potential, Adorno contended that insofar as capitalist organizations are guided by principles of efficiency and calculability, they embody technological rationality. This form of rationalization bolsters various forms of alienation rather than freedom.[30]

Adorno and Horkheimer draw upon Weber’s analysis of the enlightenment as a movement from superstition to knowledge, what he coined the “disenchantment of the world,” including the understanding and domination of nature through science and technology.[31] This, in a nutshell, is the dialectic of the enlightenment; that industrial, technologically advanced societies (along with the suffering advanced by these societies in the 20th Century) are the logical result of the enlightenment, and not some unexplained abnormality. Yes, technology does provide the conditions for emancipation through increasing economic productivity (as Marx asserted), but it also facilitates exploitation of humans and of nature.

In line with their analysis of technological domination, Adorno and Horkheimer (contra Marx) expanded their analysis of technology to include not only technology of economy and production, but also technologies of culture (such as film, radio, television, music) and their interface with the mass dissemination of culture through advertising. The “culture industry” is understood, then, as one aspect of the totally technological society, adhering to the strict form of technological rationality (which in this society has become rationality pure and simple).[32]

This analysis of the pervasiveness of technological rationality leads Adorno and Horkheimer to rather pessimistic practical conclusions. As Krakauer explains, for Adorno “the culture industry of late capitalism has become adept at disarming any significant protest movement, any large-scale dissent, by absorbing it into itself […]. As a result, Adorno mistrusts all would-be movements or parties of the oppressed.”[33] Since action is not a possibility, Horkheimer writes that “[t]he struggle against mass culture can consist only in pointing out its connection with the persistence of social injustice.”[34] Hence, the role of the theorist is not to engineer technology differently, but to expose its harms. We may ask, Should we not attempt to “engineer technology differently” because it cannot be done principle, or rather because it is unlikely to be successful under the totalizing conditions of capitalism? Adorno and Horkheimer’s answer to this question is not entirely clear, but it seems clear that such an attempt is discouraged for fear it will only reinforce the oppression it seeks to overthrow. As Krakauer explains Adorno’s position here, “[o]nly rigorous negation of false emancipation keeps open the possibility of emancipation in the positive sense, a life free from conflict, coercion, want and suffering.”[35] Put differently, modern technology as it developed under capitalism stymies the political imagination, and it is the task of critical theory to resist this tendency, holding on to the possibility of a different, emancipated society, even if this society can only be referred to in negative terms, as a place holder for what is yet to be imagined.

This concern for the political imagination is illustrated by Adorno’s debate with Walter Benjamin over the role of art in advanced technological societies. Benjamin’s most prominent work on this topic can be found in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which focuses on film.[36] In this essay Benjamin argues that the introduction of technologies that enable mechanical reproductions of works of art change how we understand what a work of art is, as well as its function in society. He explains that the value of manually produced works of art depended on the idea of authenticity – that there is value in having the original work present.[37] This significance of originality is taken away by reproduction, and the object is detached from tradition.[38] This may seem to be a loss, and Benjamin concedes this, but he emphasizes its positive implications. Instead of being based in tradition and ritual (the reason for the unique value of the authentic), the reproduced work of art draws its value from a different domain of social practice, namely, politics. Technologically reproduced art, and especially film, necessarily engages the participation of the masses. In this new age of mass (not to be conflated with class) culture, Fascism, according to Benjamin, seeks the aestheticization of politics; Communism responds with the politicization of art.[39]

Benjamin did not view technology as a tool for mastering nature, or other human beings, but rather as a medium through which relations to nature and other human beings are ordered. In his early work One Way Street Benjamin writes along these lines:
The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensible ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man.[40]
 
To understand this better, it is worth considering Benjamin’s distinction between “first” and “second” technology. According to Benjamin,[41] second technology comes about in modern society, and in the aesthetic realm in the age of mechanical reproduction. Second technology is a result of a historical process in which man distances himself from nature through the medium of play (spiel). This distance allows for the possibility of reconciliation with nature, a possibility that has matured in the medium of film. According to Benjamin, it is first technology that indeed aimed at dominating nature, not the second. Those that accuse second technology of the faults of the first, have not yet realized the emancipatory potential of second technology.[42]

Reminiscent of Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the aesthetic state,[43] Benjamin sees technology as a medium suited for experimental play.[44] What is important for him, however, is that this experience take place in public, since the social interaction is crucial for the change in the individual. It is not, then, that Benjamin envisions a unified mass subject; rather, it is a process of subjectivization that occurs in the public, playful, space.[45] We may better understand the idea that “Communism responds with the politicization of art” when considering a footnote that Benjamin included in his second draft of the essay. McBride explains that “[i]n this footnote, Benjamin claims that the collective that learns to appropriate the second technology will be as different in quality from all previous forms of collectivity as the second technology is from the first.”[46] For Benjamin, then, this new technologically enabled medium of art harbors the potential for a new society.

Adorno agreed with Benjamin’s assertion that technologies are changing the meaning of the work of art, as well as its function in society. However, as he made clear in his essay “On Jazz,” which appeared in the issue immediately following Benjamin’s essay on film in the Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung, Adorno was much more suspicious of this change.[47] According to his analysis, the loss of authenticity that was correctly pointed out by Benjamin entails a loss of autonomy, and a dependency of the work of art on heteronomous social factors for its value. The reproduced work of art must also surrender to the laws and necessities governing the production process itself, and is dependent upon the social conditions that facilitate this process.[48] Though jazz seems to be an art form that breaks with traditional rules and defies rigid restrictions, Adorno nonetheless asserts that “[t]he elements in jazz in which immediacy seems to be present, the seemingly improvisational moments – of which syncopation is designated as its elemental form – are added in their naked externality to the standardized commodity character in order to mask it, without, however, gaining power over it for a second.”[49] As McBride explains, for Adorno the very attributes that seem to position jazz as a medium of artistic liberation (such as syncopation), in fact function to reaffirm a fixed framework of tonal patterns and rhythms. What is more, “[j]azz, which appears to require the creative collaboration of composer, arranger, and improvising musicians, actually depends upon the division of labor.”[50] Whereas Benjamin sees the collective experience of art to be potentially emancipatory precisely due to the collective nature of the experience, Adorno views such experiences of art as merely affirming an existing collective state of consciousness. As McBride points out, for Adorno, all popular art, which contributes to socialization, is reactionary.[51]

This condemnation of reproduced art as poison to the imagination is clear in Horkheimer and Adorno’s assessment of sound film, the very medium celebrated by Benjamin. They write:

​"The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story. […] The stunting of the mass-media consumer's powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves. […] [S]ustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination."[52] 

The reproduced work of art relies on the social environment, and thus loses its power to negate it, pacifying the mass audience into acceptance of the status quo. With the technologies of reproduction, then, culture becomes an industry in service to domination:
A technological rationale […] has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a low of movement in technology as such but of its function in today's economy.[53]
 
The extent to which Adorno conflates mechanical reproduction with a capitalist mode of production is arguable. What is clear, however, is that Adorno attributes to the technology of reproduction the necessity of technical standardization.[54] This, in his mind, leads to administrative centralization in any kind of advanced production constellation.[55]

As mentioned earlier, Adorno and Horkheimer see art, and culture more broadly, as only one dimension of the technological totalization in modern societies. Technology is the embodiment of instrumental reason, or “subjective” reason, which understands reason only in terms of regulating means and ends. With the rise of modern science and technology, we no longer regard reason as a tool for understanding our ends, assessing them and determining them. Horkheimer and Adorno consequently warn that in understanding reason as a mere instrument for any given end, we have lost our autonomy, and our conceptions of justice, happiness and the good life have lost their intellectual roots.[56]

Technology, according to this view, as the embodiment and practice of instrumental reason, necessarily becomes a powerful means of domination, providing an ever more efficient method for the exploitation of labor. Thus, “[o]n the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning,” as calculation and utility become the prevailing and oppressive substitutes.[57]

Interestingly, the later Adorno seems to have left more room for optimism with regards to the agency of individuals vis-à-vis the culture industry. Drawing on the psychoanalytic roots of the Frankfurt School, Adorno finds reason for optimism in the unconscious. In his reconsideration of his writings on the culture industry, when attempting to explain why social protest still occurs, he suggests that “only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual makeup of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry.”[58] Adorno even goes further, and a few years later seems to be drawing even on the reasons that gave Marx reason for optimism, namely, the contradictions of capitalism itself. In reaction to a study suggesting that the German public was able to critically assess the social implications of various current events, Adorno asserted in a radio lecture that “the integration of consciousness and leisure time is not yet complete after all. The real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist total manipulation up to a point. This analysis would be in tune with the prognosis that consciousness cannot be totally integrated in a society in which the basic contradictions remain undiminished.”[59] This strand of Adorno’s later thought, which points to the extra-rational and the unconscious for hope of emancipation, finds a following in Herbert Marcuse’s views on technology and society.

Marcuse on Technology

Horkheimer and Adorno’s collaborator, Herbert Marcuse, also pointed to the dialectical nature of technical progress. He argued that as technology created conditions of rising standards of living through the concentration of private enterprises in ever more effective and productive corporations, it had made non-conformity or dissent from this system seem socially useless, if not completely irrational.[60] Indeed, thought is confined to what seems practical within the existing framework, and “the movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.”[61] According to Marcuse, this results in a “one-dimensional man” whose ideas, possibilities and actions are constantly redefined to fit within the rationality and terms of the system.

Thus, the one-dimensional technological world of advanced industrial societies is for Marcuse an almost closed system:
By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian… a non-terroristic economical-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs and vested interests… Today political power asserts itself through its power over the machine process and over the technical organization of the apparatus.[62]
 
Similar to Heidegger, his former teacher, it was hardly clear to Marcuse that opposition to this force was possible.[63] However, still influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Marcuse argued that the reason why a total domination is theoretically impossible rests in the instincts, which at their core remain impenetrable to manipulation.[64] Thus, wary of technology but holding on to some hope, Marcuse called for an alternative science and technology: “in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility – the demands of the life instincts.”[65] This would entail a radical, qualitative shift in our conceptions of progress, in which life would be an end and not a means. However, Marcuse did not specify what such a new sensibility and social organization might concretely entail, and argued that the much needed new modes of realizing a free relation to science and technology can only be indicated in negative terms.[66] What was clear to Marcuse is that “qualitative change also involves a change in the technical basis on which society rests” since this basis is what sustains society’s economic and political institutions.[67] A new science would develop new concepts (of nature, for example) and would thus produce altogether new “facts.”[68]

How would such a new science, predicated upon a transformation of the seemingly overwhelming domination of capital-driven technical rationality, come about? Marcuse asserted that art may play a role in bringing about this new science and new technology, and ultimately a new society. Though not completely confident in this possibility (“I often blame myself for perhaps being too romantic in evaluating the liberating, radical power of art”[69]), Marcuse posited that the arts, by which he referred to literature, music and the visual arts[70], “must play a decisive role in changing the human condition and the human experience, […] helping us in envisaging, perceiving, and perhaps even building a better, a free, humane society.”[71] But what role can art play in such an ambitious transformation?

To begin to answer this question, it may be helpful to recall Karl Marx’s early reference to language. For Marx, as species-beings, all human beings have similar basic needs. Therefore, a truly human language would be a language based on needs (not rights, for example). Marx then considers what would happen if a person addressed his fellow person with an expression of his needs, such as “Please, I need X.” This human language of needs, Marx asserts, stands in opposition to the material relations (and thus social relations) in society. Therefore, we would not understand such a language. In his comments on James Mill’s 1821 work “Elements of Political Economy,” Marx explains:

"Our objects in their relation to one another constitute the only intelligible language we use with one another. We would not understand a human language, and it would remain without effect. On the one hand, it would be felt and spoken as a plea, as begging, and as humiliation and hence uttered with shame and with a feeling of supplication; on the other hand, it would be heard and rejected as effrontery or madness. We are so much mutually alienated from human nature that the direct language of this nature is an injury to human dignity for us, while the alienated language of objective values appears as justified, self-confident, and self-accepted human dignity."[72]
 
For Marcuse, the overcoming of the domineering technological, one-dimensional society will inevitably entail “the emergence of qualitatively different needs and satisfactions, of new goals.”[73] This new society must be constructed in a new technical and natural environment. It is the role of art to provide new concepts, a new language, to imagine and describe this new environment, and the new relations between persons that will consequently arise. Marcuse explains:

"The traditional concepts and the traditional words used to designate a better society, that is, a free society […] are inadequate to convey what man and things are today, and inadequate to convey what man and things can be and ought to be. These traditional concepts pertain to a language which is still that of a pre-technological and pre-totalitarian era in which we no longer live. […] Since the thirties, we see the intensified and methodical search for a new language, for a poetic language as a revolutionary language, for an artistic language as a revolutionary language. This implies the concept of the imagination as a cognitive faculty, capable of transcending and breaking the spell of the Establishment."[74]
 
The role of art is not to change society through its own powers. Its role is to provide us with new tools for imagining an emancipated society. In this sense art is an expression of the untainted life instincts, as well as the potential generator of a new consciousness, “and a new unconscious,” that breaks individuals free of the established “false, distorted reality.”[75]

Though Marcuse ascribes to art the potential for facilitating social transformation, he nevertheless acknowledges the danger to art in the one-dimensional society.[76] With an awareness that social conditions may prevent art from serving the emancipatory function it may be capable of, Marcuse asserts that “In the so-called consumer society, art becomes an article of mass consumption and seems to lose its transcendent, critical, antagonistic function. In this society the consciousness of and instinct for an alternative existence atrophies or seems powerless. All the designs of creative imagination seem to transform themselves today into technological (technische) possibilities.”[77] What is more, Marcuse warns elsewhere that “much of [art’s] most popular manifestation has become part of the Establishment, — is made by and for the market, for sale — branch of the great enterprise of manipulation and social engineering: harmless and enjoyable mobilization of the instincts.”[78]

It is worth pointing out the ways in which Marcuse’s hope for the role of art in society can be misunderstood. First, art may be understood as the “beautiful” a detached medium, removed from praxis. This is not Marcuse’s intent. Warning against just such an attitude, he asserts: “In the consciousness of the avant-garde artist, art becomes in this period a more or less beautiful, pleasant decorative background in a world of terror. This luxury function of art must be destroyed.”[79] Art as a guide for constructing a new society must be in creative contact with new forms of science and technology, which together can “construct and sustain a new system of life.”[80] In other words, art must not be separate from social life. Rather, art must give social life its form.

Second, it would be a mistake to understand Marcuse as suggesting a politicized art in the usual sense, that is, art in the service of a political venture (think of some artistic expressions in the Soviet Union, in service of the Communist Party). Marcuse is not envisioning the subordination of art to politics, not even revolutionary politics. On this he writes: “art can fulfill its inner revolutionary function only if it does not itself become part of any Establishment, including the revolutionary Establishment.”[81] To the contrary, he proposes “the subordination of politics to art, to the creative imagination.”[82] But in saying this, Marcuse considers society itself to be the work of art. The painting or poem is not the end goal. They are the language through which we speak of the ultimate work of art, namely, the free society.

Third, as I have alluded to, one ought not misconstrue Marcuse as suggesting that it is the work of art (or the artist) that could change the social conditions. In fact, Marcuse warns against sublimating repressed instinctual and biological needs “in the unreal, illusory realm of art rather than in the transformation of reality,” and immediately adds “a related question: has now perhaps come the time to free art from its confinement to mere art, to an illusion?” Marcuse states clearly that “art by itself could never achieve this transformation, but it could free the perception and sensibility needed for the transformation. And, once a social change has occurred, art, Form of the imagination, could guide the construction of the new society.” In what can be taken as a response to these three ways in which he may be misunderstood, Marcuse emphasizes the proper guiding role of art: “We have to remember: the realization of art as principle of social reconstruction presupposes fundamental social change. At stake is not the beautification of that which is, but the total reorientation of life in a new society.”[83]

This total reorientation, however, does not come about through some sort of direct effect of art. For Marcuse, “The contents and forms of art are never those of direct action, they are always only the language, images, and sounds of a world not yet in existence.”[84] By liberating consciousness and the imagination from the linguistic fetters of the prevailing order, art can function as “the architecture of a free society.”[85] But art can go no further: “The realization, the real change which would free men and things, remains the task of political action; the artist participates not as artist.”[86]

Finally, it would be a mistake to understand Marcuse’s position as ascribing no positive function to technology in society. In a dialectical view that follows Marx, Marcuse maintains that while technical progress has created conditions for domination, it also creates the possible conditions for a truly free society. There are a number of reasons why for Marcuse technology cannot and ought not be dismissed. First, art itself is expressed through various forms of technique. Whether it be instruments (think of music), tools and machinery (think of sculpting), and myriad other means, developments in art are intertwined with technical development. One such glaring example is film. Thus, Marcuse astutely points out that “the internal development of art, music, responds to, and at the same time negates the society for which, and against which it is created.”[87]

Second, similar to Marx, Marcuse believed that technical progress has reached a stage where it is able to fulfill an emancipatory promise, which has heretofore been stunted by the lack of knowledge in designing a pacified relation between man and things. He writes:

"The know-how is there. The instruments and the materials are there for the construction of such an environment, social and natural, in which the unsublimated life instincts would redirect the development of human needs and faculties, would redirect technical progress. These pre-conditions are there for the creation of the beautiful not as ornaments, not as surface of the ugly, not as museum piece, but as expression and objective of a new type of man: as biological need in a new system of life."[88]
 
Marcuse’s concerns about the role of technology in society, as well as the hope he holds for art as an emancipatory medium, must no doubt be placed in dialogue with the ideas of his teachers and collaborators mentioned above, especially those of Benjamin, Adorno and Heidegger.

First, Marcuse’s idea of a “new technology” is reminiscent of Benjamin’s notion of a “second technology.” Both Marcuse and Benjamin envisioned a technology qualitatively different from the one operating in late-capitalism, which would co-emerge with a new society, in which the relations among persons, and the relations between persons, things, and nature, would be qualitatively different as well. For both, this transformation is a collective endeavor, which, only if taken in this collective context, has the power to emancipate individuals in turn. What is more, both see the role of art in this social transformation not primarily through its content, but through the effect of its form. Both held that art can transform human sensibility, thus preparing persons for the possibilities yet to be imagined.[89]

Marcuse’s ideas also intersect with Adorno’s. Adorno seems more pessimistic about the possibility of an alternative technology (which seemed to be a theme in his disagreement with Benjamin as well). However, it does seem that at times Adorno shares a Marcusean tone of optimism. As I have already discussed, in his “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno appeals to the public’s “deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses” as the explanation for the apparent persistence of a resistance to total domination by the culture industry. Though Adorno does not share Marcuse’s hope for art as providing an alternative social architecture, he does posit, as Marcuse does, that the extra-rational (the unconscious, the instincts), may hold emancipatory potential.

Finally, there is an affinity between Heidegger’s thinking and Marcuse’s, insofar as they share doubts regarding man’s ability to escape the all-encompassing nature of technological domination, doubts that to some extent find potential remedy in art. To see this, we must go back to Heidegger’s lecture, published under the title “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this 1935 lecture (repeated again in 1936) on the origin of the work of art, Heidegger seems to suggest that art could be a source for emancipation. In the lectures Heidegger turns directly to the question of how a world is disclosed in a tangible thing. In discussing material objects, the focus here shifts from the tool as described in Being and Time to the work of art, such as the Greek temple. As Borgmann explains, in this lecture Heidegger asserts that “[t]he work of art establishes the truth of an epoch, truth not in the formal sense of truth conditions but in the substantive sense of what is eminently and decisively true of a particular time.”[90] As shown above, Heidegger later viewed technology as a manifestation of the truth of our modern era. It should not surprise us, then, that Heidegger ends his discussion in “The Question Concerning Technology” with a suggestion that perhaps art could be the source of humanity’s “saving power” in a technologically enframed world. One reason for this hope is that art, as techne, is both akin to the essence of technology and “fundamentally different” from it.[91] Similar to Marcuse, Heidegger seems ambivalent about the emancipatory potential of art in modern society. While in the Epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he agreed with Hegel that it is doubtful whether art can still be the medium through which truth appears in its highest manifestation as it has in the past,[92] he nevertheless posited that it is an open question whether the fine arts can have an altogether different revelatory function.[93]

Habermas on Technology

In his essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” Habermas responds to Marcuse’s call for a new science which will produce new forms of technology. Put succinctly, Habermas argues that liberation cannot be achieved by transforming technology because technology cannot be altered. For Habermas, technology is essentially the unburdening of needs that are rooted in human nature through purposive-rational action and substituting other means for human labor. On a fundamental level, he understood technology as related to the interests of humans in general, and not to the interests of specific groups or classes. These fundamental human needs to which technology as a general form of action responds, come prior to any particular political or ideological interest, and as such are politically neutral. Therefore, to the extent that human nature itself is not fundamentally altered, technology cannot be altered as well.[94] With regards to a new science, Habermas similarly claims that “[t]he idea of a New Science will not stand up to logical scrutiny any more than that of a New Technology, if indeed science is to retain the meaning of modern science inherently oriented to possible technical control. For this function, as for scientific-technical progress in general, there is no more ‘humane’ substitute.”[95]

Furthermore, Habermas is critical of Marcuse’s assertion that the instincts can serve as a ground for critical theory, claiming that such a proposition relied too heavily on speculations about human nature that could not be verified. As an alternative, Habermas suggested that a critical foundation could be found in the very structure of everyday language, a fundamental tenet of Habermas’s thought to which I will come back in greater detail later on.[96]

For the purpose of clarifying what Habermas views as the proper function of technology in society, it is helpful to briefly outline his distinction between lifeworld and system, along with his distinction between work and interaction. According to Habermas, advanced-capitalist societies are divided between a lifeworld, which is governed by norms of communicative interaction, and a system governed by “steering imperatives” of money and power. This distinction is meant to capture the communicative practices of everyday life on the one hand, while on the other hand recognizing the systemic forces that operate in society and which, if not controlled, come to colonize or dominate the lifeworld.[97] As Ingram explains, the colonization of the lifeworld “involves substituting strategic forms of economic and legal action mediated by money and power for communicative forms of action responsible for socialization, cultural transmission, and social integration.”[98] In this distinction the lifeworld has an essential role in the possibility of communicative action (and consequently for critical thinking). A shared lifeworld is crucial for the use of language for coordinating action.[99]

In this Habermasian framework, in modern societies technology properly relates to the level of systems (work and administration) and not the lifeworld. Habermas accepts the autonomy of technical (instrumental) rationality in a limited role of facilitating systems of labor and technical administration, while emphasizing the role of communicative reason in the lifeworld. Therefore, Habermas can be taken to maintain that technology is neutral in its proper sphere, while outside that sphere it causes various social pathologies in modern societies.[100] What is more, for Habermas, one cannot conceive of a different technological interaction with nature in the sphere of work (as opposed to interaction in the lifeworld). Habermas critiques Adorno insofar as he thinks Adorno has only attended to instrumental rationality when considering the dialectic of enlightenment, and has not considered the emancipatory potential in communicative rationality.[101]

However critical Habermas was of his mentors in the Frankfurt School, it seems he reserved his sharpest and most profound critique for the work of Martin Heidegger. Habermas acknowledges Heidegger’s philosophical importance and influence, asserting that  “From today's standpoint, Heidegger's new beginning still presents probably the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel.”[102] But Habermas quickly turns to his grave concerns about Heidegger’s approach; that Heidegger unreflectively perpetuates “an elitist self-understanding of academics, a fetishizing of Geist, idolatry for the mother tongue, contempt for everything social, a complete absence of sociological approaches long developed in France and the United States, a polarization between natural science and the Geisteswissenschaften, and so forth.”[103]

Habermas’s critique of Heidegger will be better understood after Habermas’s theory of communicative action is explicated in more detail (Chapter Three). For now, suffice it to say that, in a sense similar to his critique of Adorno (and even Kant), Habermas argues that Heidegger does not pay enough attention to the significance of intersubjectivity, which is essential to Habermas’s ethical theory, as well as his conception of truth. For Habermas, since Heidegger’s social analysis remains within the limited confine of mitsein (being-with-others), he fails to recognize the importance of intersubjective argumentation processes, which include putting forth arguments for critique of others. Similar to Adorno, albeit from a different perspective, Heidegger overlooks communicative rationality as a potentially emancipatory force. Anticipating constructivist philosophers of technology, and in accord with the Frankfurt School methodology, both of whom recognized the importance of the social sciences and empirical analysis, Habermas critiques Heidegger for lacking a more nuanced approach to technology and society. Such an approach would pay more attention to the practical operations of technology in modern societies, and would rely less on ontological, essentialist claims. Habermas writes:
[A]fter 1935 Heidegger subsumed political and social practice hastily under a few stereotypical code words without even an attempt at a description, to say nothing of empirical analysis. His ontologizing talk of "technology" itself as a destiny that is at once mystery, security, and danger reaches globally, and with strongly essentialistic conceptions, through the foreground domains of the ontical.[104]
 
Conclusion

In this chapter I have surveyed theories of technology in the Twentieth Century, focusing on those philosophers that have had the greatest impact on Habermas and later on critical theorists of technology (the focus of the next chapter will be on one such critical theorist of technology, namely, Andrew Feenberg). I have discussed these theories within the framework of essentialism; that is, theories that ascribe an essence to technology that reaches far beyond (and also is prior to) its social context.

​As this chapter concludes and we look to the discussion ahead, two points are particularly worth keeping in mind. First, as the discussion moves to constructivist theories of technology in the next chapter, the differences between technological essentialists and constructivists will become clear. One theme that has run as a thread throughout the essentialist theories ought not be overlooked, namely, the epistemic theme. For all their disagreements, Adorno, Marcuse and Heidegger (but not Habermas) seemed to share a fundamental sense that not only is their culture detrimentally pervaded by technology, but that for the most part this detriment is unnoticed (or ignored) by the broader society. Consider for example Heidegger’s discussion of “Distress” in his Contributions to Philosophy (and especially Chapter Five, titled “For the Few and the Rare”), where Heidegger discusses the distress that comes upon the few and the rare who ask the ontological questions of being.[105] Borgmann points out that for Heidegger, “Distress (die Not) is one of the key words of the Contributions and more especially the distress at the general incapacity for the recognition of how distressing times really were.”[106] This concern for an oppressive force that is not recognized by the masses, that deceives them, no doubt pays homage to Marx’s notion of false consciousness, though these theorists do not focus solely on economic structures as the source of this epistemic failure (if this economic source is acknowledged at all). What is important about this epistemic stance is that it raises doubts about the viability of democracy as an emancipatory project. If the masses are deceived, how can they be trusted to make good decisions? Indeed, such an epistemic stance, as we have seen, raises questions about the status of reason, and rational deliberation as such.

As will become clear in the following chapters, both Feenberg and Habermas take on the task of restoring a sense of confidence in reason and in democracy. Habermas will attempt to present alternative forms of rationality, that are inherent to our everyday interaction; Feenberg will attempt to rehabilitate democracy in the face of danger of technological domination, a task he refers to as the democratization of technology itself.

Is there no use then for the contributions made by Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse and Heidegger? Hardly. Though this work aims to go beyond their visions of technology and its place in a (democratic) society, there is no doubt that we gain valuable insight from them, insight that will inform the analysis of later chapters. Their concerns will not only remain helpful as a warning against the potential social and personal harms of technology; this study will also draw on these thinkers for conceptual tools. For example, Adorno’s distinction between mass culture and the culture industry, or Heidegger’s categories of “curiosity” and “idol talk.”

END NOTES
​
[1] See for example, Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (especially the Introduction); also Feenberg, Questioning Technology. As will be shown in Chapter Two, constructivist theories cannot avoid attributing some essence to technology (otherwise it seems unclear what it would mean to talk about technologies at all). However, constructivists emphasize the social processes that operate beyond this (relatively thinly conceived) essence.

[2] Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, p. xvi.

[3] Kaplan, Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, pp. xvii-xviii.

[4] The nuanced sense in which Heidegger’s position is essentialist will be discussed below.

[5] Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 420.

[6] This historical dimension to the ground of being is, arguably, a departure from the effort to uncover a universal structure underlying human being as carried out in Heidegger’s Being and Time. See Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 421-2.

[7] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 311-312.

[8] Ibid., pp. 317-319.

[9] Heidegger develops this conception of truth in many writings. See for example his 1930 essay “On the Essence of Truth.”

[10] See Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 428.

[11] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 322.

[12] Borgmann has suggested that the familiar word “framework” is more apt than the neologism “enframing” (see Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 428).

[13] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 323-329.

[14] See Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 427.

[15] That danger is inherent to the technological framework is clear when considering the origin of Heidegger’s 1954 essay on technology. The essay is a revised version of a lecture Heidegger gave in Bremmen in 1949. This lecture, titled “The Framework” (“Das Ge-Stell,”) was the second in a series of four lectures, Heidegger’s first public appearances since the end of the Second World War. The lecture that immediately followed the lecture on “The Framework” was titled “The Danger” (“Die Gefahr”). See Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 428.

[16] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 332-333.

[17] Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” p. 277. The nature of Heidegger’s thinking about technology in relation to concrete historical events in general, and the Nazi regime in particular, is complex. For example, in a parenthetical remark in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953 edition), Heidegger characterizes the Nazi movement as “the encounter between global technology and modern man” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 213; also see Habermas and McCumber, “Work and Weltanschauung,” p. 451). Heidegger had claimed that this was his position as early as the 1930s, whereas Habermas and others insist that this remark is merely meant to “whitewash” (or retroactively reframe) his stance toward the Nazi movement. See more in Habermas and McCumber’s “Work and Weltanschauung.”
Heidegger also revised his writing about the role of the essence of the technological framework in the annihilation of the Jews in the holocaust. Borgmann compares Heidegger’s remarks on this in his 1949 Bremmen lecture (“The Framework”) to his 1954 essay on “The Question Concerning Technology”: In the Bremmen lecture Heidegger writes that “Agriculture is now mechanized food industry, essentially the same thing as the production of corpses in gas chambers and annihilation camps, the same thing as the blockade and intentional starvation of countries, the same thing as the production of hydrogen bombs,” whereas the same passage in the 1954 essay reads “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. Air is positioned to yield nitrogen, the ground to yield ore, the ore to yield, for example, uranium, this to yield nuclear energy that can be released for destruction or peaceful use.” See Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 430.

[18] Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” p. 276.

[19] Ibid., p. 277.

[20] Ibid., p. 280.

[21] More on this question below. See also Dreyfus’s analysis in “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology,” pp. 104-105.

[22] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 25.

[23] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 4. See also Marx’s The German Ideology.

[24] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 5.

[25] Ibid., pp. 5-6.

[26] See for example Marx’s note in Capital, Vol. I (in the section titled “The Strife Between Workman and Machinery”), where he quotes India’s English Governor General, who reported on the social effect of the introduction of mechanized cotton weaving on traditional weavers in India. The governor reported that “The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India” (see Marx, Capital, p. 406).

[27] Marx, “The German Ideology,” p. 119.

[28] Lafargue, “The Right to Be Lazy,” p. 62.

[29] Ingram provides a concise summary of Weber’s conception of rationalization: “Rationalization involves the gradual subordination of religious and metaphysical ways of understanding the world to a secular, scientific outlook. The disenchantment of nature as a domain of purposes and ends is coupled with the emergence of market and legal systems that center around contracts and private property. Accompanying this functional change in economy and law is a profound change in the way people understand themselves. People now understand themselves as individuals who must be rationally accountable to themselves and others” (Ingram, Habermas, p. 119). See also: Ingram, Habermas, pp. 307-316.

[30] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 8.

[31] For more on this see Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy, pp. 48-54.

[32] See Huyssen, “Introduction to Adorno,” p. 4.

[33] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 7. This may shed some light on Adorno’s vexed relationship with the German student movement in the 1960s.

[34] Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film,” p. 45.

[35] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 6.

[36] It is worth noting that Benjamin reworked this essay twice, giving us three versions altogether. The one translated into English to date is the third version, originally published by the Adornos in their two-volume collection of Benjamin’s works (for more on this see: McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” pp. 465-466).

[37] One is reminded here of Sherry Turkle’s account of her visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where she and her fourteen year-old daughter saw rare live giant tortoises. Seeing the tortoise inert, and unimpressed by the tortoise’s authenticity, Turkle’s daughter remarked: “They could have used a robot.” Turkle then describes the reactions of other parents and children as she asked them if the fact that they were real live tortoises made a difference to them. She recounts: “A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: ‘Its water looks dirty. Gross.’ More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: ‘For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.’ Her father looked at her, mystified: ‘But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point.’” (Turkle, Alone Together, pp. xxiii-xxv).

[38] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 218-221.

[39] See especially Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 224, 241-2; also see Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film,” p. 41-42. More on this follows.

[40] Benjamin, “One Way Street,” p. 104. This passage is also quoted, with minor error, in Denham’s “The Cunning of Unreason and Nature's Revolt,” endnote 97.

[41] This analysis appeared in Benjamin’s second draft of his essay on mechanical reproduction, but was omitted in the third draft, the one later translated into English. See: McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” pp. 478-479.

[42] McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 478.

[43] See for example Letter 22 in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

[44] The potential that technology harbors for emancipation through experimental play has also been invoked in recent decades with reference to computers and cyberspace. See especially: Sherry Turkle’s work: “Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the end of the Freudian Century,” pp. 73-74; “Whither Psychoanalysis in Computer Culture,” p. 21; “Our Split Screens.”

[45] On the face of things, one might see the debate between Benjamin and Adorno regarding the potential psychological effect of mass culture as a mirror of the debate between Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung regarding individual and collective unconscious. As McBride notes, “in a lengthy letter from 2-4 August 1935, Adorno criticized Benjamin's emphatic notion of collective consciousness for resembling too closely the ideas of C.G. Jung” (McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 470). However, as I have noted, Benjamin’s position need not be read as endorsing a notion of collective subjectivity; only a notion of collective process of subjectivization.

[46] McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 479.

[47] See this essay in Adorno’s Essays On Music.

[48] That Adorno’s position on this has hardly changed is evident in his essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” first published in 1967, more than three decades after his essay “On Jazz”: “[T]he technique of the culture industry is, from the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains external to its object. The culture industry finds ideological support precisely in so far as it carefully shields itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy” (Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” pp. 87-88).

[49] Adorno, “On Jazz,” p. 473.

[50] McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 472.

[51] McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 475.

[52] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 126-127 (in the chapter titled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”) - my italics. Adorno is criticized for not distinguishing between the film as it developed under monopoly capitalism and the potential it has for operating differently under alternative economic structures, including the distinction between the prevailing aesthetic forms of film (naturalism) and the potential for other film aesthetics. Adorno provides an important contribution in analyzing the connection between the economic structure and the development of the artistic medium, but his analysis seems to deny the possibility for an alternative form of art under alternative economic circumstances (see Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film,” pp. 49-51). For reasons of brevity it is impossible to delve deeper into this critique of Adorno’s discussion of film here, but this search for alternative (emancipatory) social practices vis-à-vis technologies motivates the constructivist theorists of technology, as will be discussed in Chapter 2.

[53] Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” p. 121, quoted in Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film,” p. 56.

[54] Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” p. 134.

[55] See for example Adorno’s unpublished remarks in Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, p. 193.

[56] Horkheimer, “Means and Ends,” pp. 38-42.

[57] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 5 (in the chapter titled “The Concept of Enlightenment”).

[58] Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” p. 91.

[59] Huyssen, “Introduction to Adorno,” pp. 9-10; see also Waldman, “Critical Theory and Film,” p. 60.

[60] Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, pp. 1-2.

[61] Ibid., p. 14.

[62] Ibid., pp. 2-3. See also p. xlvii.

[63] For more on Heidegger’s influence on Marcuse’s (especially early) thinking, see: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger, “An Exchange of Letters,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Edited by Richard Wolin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. For a more extensive analysis of Heidegger’s influence on Marcuse, see: Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History, New York: Routledge, 2005.

[64] For more on this see Chapter 5 (“Marcuse and Freud: The Instinctual Basis of Critique”) in Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy, pp. 93-105.

[65] Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 19.

[66] Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, pp. 3-4.

[67] Ibid., p. 18.

[68] Ibid., pp. 166-167.

[69] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 113. This essay was first presented as a lecture at the New York School of Visual Arts, March 8, 1967.

[70] Ibid., p. 113.

[71] Marcuse, “Commencement Speech to the New England Conservatory of Music,” pp. 130-131. Marcuse delivered this speech to the New England Conservatory of Music on June 7, 1968.

[72] Marx, “Excerpt-Notes of 1844 (Selections),” p. 52.

[73] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 116.

[74] Ibid., p. 114. Elsewhere Marcuse explains: ““a new cognitive function of art is contained in this oppositional stance; art is called upon to represent the truth. […] ‘Art is a painted or molded critique of cognition.’ […] This statement contains a demand for a new optics, a new perception, a new consciousness, a new language which would bring with it the dissolution of the existing form of perception and its objects. This is a radical break; new possibilities of representing people and things are at stake” (Marcuse, “Society as a Work of Art,” p. 124).

[75] Marcuse, “Commencement Speech,” p. 132.

[76] See Marcuse, “Society as a Work of Art,” p. 127. This essay was first presented in German at the Third Salzburg Humanismusgespräch (Conversation on Humanism) in August 1967.

[77] Ibid., p. 128.

[78] Marcuse, “Commencement Speech,” p. 138.

[79] Marcuse, “Society as a Work of Art,” p. 126.

[80] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 119.

[81] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 115.

[82] Marcuse, “Society as a Work of Art,” p. 124.

[83] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 118.

[84] Marcuse, “Society as a Work of Art,” p. 129.

[85] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 122.

[86] Ibid., p. 122.

[87] Marcuse, “Commencement Speech,” p. 135.

[88] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” p. 121.

[89] McBride, “Romantic Phantasms,” p. 480.

[90] Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 429

[91] Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 429.

[92] Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” pp. 204-205.

[93] See: Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”, pp. 337-340.

[94] Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” pp. 120-122; See also, Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 7.

[95] Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” p. 122.

[96] See Ingram, Critical Theory and Philosophy, p. 107. Habermas has suggested the turn to language as early as 1968 in “Knowledge and Human Interests.”

[97] Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 1-8; see also Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere and Democracy,” p. 272. Habermas views Marx’s most important contribution to social theory as the “account of social evolution as a separation (abstraction or uncoupling) of a self-regulating legal and economic system from a meaningful lifeworld” (Ingram, Habermas, p. 310). One can easily see this contribution in Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld. Moreover, Habermas considers this process of differentiation as an achievement of modern societies, as compared with traditional ones.

[98] Ingram, Habermas, p. 272. For an analysis and critique of Habermas’s lifeworld-system distinction, as well as Habermas’s analysis of the “colonization of the lifeworld” see: Peters, “On Reconstructive Legal and Political Theory,” pp. 120-126.

[99] Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 22.

[100] Such an interpretation can be found in Feenberg, Questioning Technology, p. 152.

[101] Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject, p. 12. In this context, Krakauer asserts that Habermas did not take seriously enough Adorno’s concerns about a positive program, concerns I have referred to above, within the same culture of domination (Ibid.).

[102] Habermas and McCumber, “Work and Weltanschauung,” p. 434.

[103] Ibid., p. 438.

[104] Habermas and McCumber, “Work and Weltanschauung,” p. 445.

[105] See: Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), pp. 9-15.

[106] Borgmann, “Technology,” p. 425.