From Critical Theory of Technology to the Rational Critique of Rationality

Abstract

This paper explores the sense in which modern societies can be said to be rational. Social rationality cannot be understood on the model of an idealized image of scientific method. Neither science nor society conforms to this image. Nevertheless, critique is routinely silenced by neo‐liberal and technocratic arguments that appeal to social simulacra of science. This paper develops a critical strategy for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique. Romantic rejection of reason has proven less effective than strategies that conceptualize modern artefacts, systems, and organizations as rationally underdetermined. This approach first appears in Marx’s analysis of capitalist economics. Although he lacks the concept of underdetermination, Marx gets around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like it in his discussion of the length of the working day. Frankfurt School Critical Theory later blended romantic elements with Marxian ones in a suggestive but ambiguous mixture. The concept of underdetermination reappears in contemporary science and technology studies, now clearly articulated and philosophically and sociologically elaborated. But somewhere along the way the critical thrust was diluted. Critical theory of technology attempts to recover that thrust. Here its approach is generalized to cover the three main forms of social rationality.

Keywords:

• Rationalization
• Technology
• Bureaucracy
• Markets
• Critical Theory

Notes

[1] Other socially rational systems of lesser importance also exist. Among them, commercialized and technologized games are of special interest as rapidly growing phenomena with increasing effects on core institutions. See Grimes and Feenberg (2007).

[2] The case offers an interesting parallel to the relationship of sex and gender in Judith Butler’s anti‐essentialist gender theory (Butler 1990). Butler argues that sex does not precede and found gender because our understanding of sex, even in its pure anatomical concreteness, is already shaped by assumptions about gender. I think she would agree that the two are distinguishable in a meaningful way—otherwise there could be no science of sex—but they are not ontologically distinct. Like Latour’s hybrids, the body, as a living actor, is ontologically fundamental rather than the two aspects of nature and culture abstracted from it in modern discourses. If there is a problem with this view, it lies in the tendency of its advocates to discount the internally coherent, rational form of the abstractions in which nature is constructed. Admitting this need not imply the realistic ontological claims anti‐essentialism rejects.

[3] For an excellent review of feminist approaches see Wajcman (2004). Critical theory of technology can situate the sort of work done in feminist technology studies in the context of a general social critique of rationality. See Glazebrook (2006) and Feenberg (1999b).

[4] This brief description of the theory gives only a hint of developments described more fully in several of my books (Feenberg 1999a, 2002).

[5] I previously called these valuative enactions “mediations”; that term, however, risks confusion with the more general mediation of experience by technology. The choice of the new terminology was dictated by the desire to avoid reducing valuative dimensions of technology to attitudes of the subject. Values are enacted, embodied, in technologies, and as such script corresponding enactive relationships, not merely attitudes, on the part of subjects.

[6] “In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so‐called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working‐out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e., the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?” (Marx 1973, 488). See also Sahlins (1976).

[7] Function is also abstracted from a wider range of causal relations, called “effects” in the instrumentalization theory, which includes unintended consequences.

[8] For the relation of the semiotic concepts of denotation and connotation to the hermeneutics of technology, see Baudrillard (1968).