TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE
 

Preface

1. Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy Andrew Feenberg

2. New Science, New Nature: The Habermas-Marcuse Debate Revisited Steven Vogel

3. On the Notion of Technology as Ideology: Prospects Robert B. Pippin

4. Citizen Virtues in a Technological Order Langdon Winner

5. The Moral Significance of the Material Culture Albert Borgmann

6. Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology Hubert L. Dreyfus

7. Heidegger and the Design of Computer Systems Terry Winograd

8. Heidegger on Technology and Democracy Tom Rockmore

9. Image Technologies and Traditional Culture Don Ihde

10. Technology and the Civil Epistemology of Democracy Yaron Ezrahi

11. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective Donna Haraway

12. Knowledge, Bodies, and Values: Reproductive Technologies and their Scientific Context Helen E. Longino

13. Sade, the Mechanization of the Libertine Body and the Crisis of Reason Marcel Hénaff

14. The Archimedean Point and Eccentricity: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Science and Technology Pieter Tijmes

15. Gilbert Simondon's Plea for a Philosophy of Technology Paul Dumouchel

16. A Door Must Either Be Open or Shut: A Little Philosophy of Techniques Bruno Latour
 

Today the philosophy of technology is at a turning point. Not long ago the very label lacked seriousness. Technology was for technologists and if philosophers had anything to say to practice their professional concern was with goals not means. Indeed the prospect of a philosophy of technology had to await the dissolution of the widely held belief that philosophy was only interested in technology to condemn it.

In recent years that has all changed. Environmentalism has undermined the old confidence in the objectivity of scientific-technical expertise. In a world of continuing war, prejudice, illness, hunger and poverty we can no longer afford to be complacent about technology, and a superior disregard of this ever-expanding sphere of human life has now given way to broad-based concern. The ready availability of computer technology has no doubt played its part in changing attitudes. Considerable progress in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of technology has made available a large body of literature on every aspect of the subject and philosophers have not been slow to appropriate it.

Where formerly the discussion of technology was discouraged amongst philosophers by the cult of value-neutrality and the programmatic subservience of philosophy to science in matters of knowledge, there are now several philosophical traditions which stress the role of values in the growth of knowledge. Thus a clearing has opened within which fundamental issues of political and social philosophy can be raised in their relevance to the rapid technological change going on around us. Indeed concern with technology has become unavoidable in the context of discussions of Habermas, Foucault, Heidegger, and feminism, where the question of its nature and consequences frequently looms large.

A not uncommon response to the facts that prompt concern with technology is despair, or else a utopian optimism. Traces of neither will be found in these pages, nor is there any common consensus. But the reader will note with what surprising regularity the authors propose that philosophical reflection and democratic discussion should play a larger role in shaping the technological environment. Another thing the reader will notice is how pervasive the theme of technology is, how diverse the areas of everyday life in which it plays a part, and not least how long the problems to which it gives rise have been waiting to be posed.

This collection represents a generous sampling of the new state of philosophy of technology. In bringing together an unexpectedly wide array of authors and subject matters, it makes evident the new maturity in the field. The six sections into which the volume is divided review the classic contributions of the Frankfurt School and Heidegger as well as new methods in the social construction of science and technology, such recent issues as the feminist critique of reproductive technologies, and the impact of technology on multiculturalism, the body and postmodern politics.

Is technology socially and ethically neutral, a product of rational problem solving, or is it, as the Frankfurt School claimed, a kind of materialized ideology, a prop of the established society? The three chapters of this section discuss different aspects of this question.

In "Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy," Andrew Feenberg updates the Frankfurt School approach in terms of the new constructivist sociology of technology. He argues that technology is not governed by economic and technical rationality, nor is it determining for society. On the contrary it is technology that is determined in its meaning and normative content by the social world in which it is embedded. But then technology, like other institutions, ought to be subject to conscious social control. An anti-foundationalist philosophy of technology can help to restore the eroded initiative of the democratic process in determining the future of technologically advanced societies.

Steven Vogel's "New Science, New Nature: The Habermas-Marcuse Debate Revisited," reviews the controversy over the relativity of scientific-technical knowledge in the Frankfurt School. At his most utopian, Marcuse called for a new non-alienated science and technology in a pacified society. Habermas rejects any such reconciliation with nature as romantic, and instead links science and technology to a generic human interest in control. Vogel teases out contradictions in Habermas's position, but Marcuse too confronts unresolvable paradoxes because he posits an independent nature as the object of a socially determined science and technology. To recognize the social construction of nature without reserve is finally to accept the human responsibility for science and the natural world.

Robert Pippin's "On the Notion of Technology as Ideology: Prospects," evaluates a wide range of arguments for the technology as ideology thesis, from Heidegger's theory of "enframing," through Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of enlightenment, to Habermas's theory of the technological "colonization of the lifeworld." He concludes that all of these theories share the questionable assumption that there is a "true interest" in a better design or application of technology lurking beneath the surface of modern social life. Pippin claims, on the contrary, that normative confusion, acquisitiveness, instrumentalism, and ceaseless self-expansion are defining for modernity and are merely reflected in technology as we know it. The problem is not with technology, with the control of machines or their place in social life, but with modernity as such.

Pippin's chapter suggests that the crisis of technology is really a crisis in the Western moral tradition. The two chapters of this section fault that tradition for failing to supply us with the concep