© Andrew Feenberg and Figure/Ground Communication.
Dr. Feenberg was interviewed by Laureano Ralon on August 18th, 2010
Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab. He has also taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at San Diego State University, and at Duke University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Universities of California, San Diego and Irvine, the Sorbonne, the University of Paris-Dauphine, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the University of Tokyo and the University of Brasilia. He is the author of Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1981; Oxford University Press, 1986), Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford University Press, 1991), Alternative Modernity (University of California Press, 1995), and Questioning Technology (Routledge, 1999). A second edition of Critical Theory of Technology appeared with Oxford in 2002 under the title Transforming Technology. Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History appeared in 2005 with Routledge. Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity appeared with MIT Press in 2010. Translations of several of these books are available. Dr. Feenberg is also co-editor of Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (Bergin and Garvey Press, 1987), Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (Indiana University Press, 1995), Modernity and Technology (MIT Press, 2003), and Community in the Digital Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). His co-authored book on the French May Events of 1968 appeared in 2001 with SUNY Press under the title When Poetry Ruled the Streets. With William Leiss, Feenberg has edited a collection entitled The Essential Marcuse published by Beacon Press. A book on Feenberg’s philosophy of technology entitled Democratizing Technology, appeared in 2006. Dr. Feenberg is currently studying online education on a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). In this exclusive interview with Figure/Ground, Professor Feenberg talks about Marcuse, Heidegger, McLuhan and the philosophy of technology.
In one of your lectures entitled Heidegger, Marcuse and the Philosophy of Technology, you said that, even though you had had the good fortune to study with Marcuse and been influenced by his thought, you did not consider yourself a “Marcusean.” I’m curious as to why you felt the need to make that clarification, and whether that makes you ipso-facto a Heideggerian, given that Heidegger was your mentor’s mentor…
It seems to me a “Marcusean” would have to buy the Freudian dimension of Marcuse’s thought. I am not convinced. There is also the matter of Marcuse’s proposal for a “new science” which I have discussed critically. I have felt the need to reinterpret these aspects of his thought in phenomenological terms, which brings me somewhat closer to Heidegger, but there’s no ipso-facto about it. I am even less a Heideggerian than a Marcusean!
I found your anecdote about Marcuse asking you to make a phenomenological reduction of a sunset quite amusing. You write: “Phenomenology seemed to collapse in the face of Marcuse’s stunning koan, but sudden enlightenment did not follow. It could not possibly have occurred to me then that the rejection of a phenomenological reduction that late afternoon confirmed yet again Marcuse’s decision to abandon Heidegger’s mentorship in 1933. He had found another way to understand beauty and its promise of happiness.” Now, isn’t the phenomenological reduction a feature of transcendental phenomenology à la Husserl? Wasn’t Marcuse’s critique the exact same critique Heidegger laid down on Husserl in order to “existentialize” the transcendental phenomenology of his mentor – namely, that one can’t possibly reduce the complexities and ambiguities of lived-through world experience? Is Heidegger “just” a phenomenologist in your view?
This is a very complicated question. Marcuse was probably criticizing me for my then-Husserlian bias against Heidegger. So perhaps he was indulging in a Heideggerian critique of his student Feenberg. I don’t actually know. He was also undoubtedly thinking about the aesthetic in the terms of his own theory. I do think Heidegger was a kind of phenomenologist, at least until the 1930s. This is clear from his courses and from Being and Time. But I don’t get the “just” a phenomenologist remark. There is a tendency to construct an idealist straw man out of Husserl in order to make Heidegger seem more original than he was. I don’t buy that.
During one of his lectures at UC Berkeley, John Searle declared: “in the subculture that I belong to, you don’t want to be caught dead with any of the ‘Hs’” – in clear reference to Hegel, Husserl, but especially Heidegger, given his well-known antagonism with Hubert Dreyfus. Do you think Heidegger’s work continues to be stigmatized and ignored because of his ties to Nazism? I personally believe that the “Death of the Author” was a premature death sentence; however, I do think it’s important to separate a man from his work in some instances, especially when it means saving the work from the man. I’m thinking of Heidegger – but also of Althusser and others. As academics, how should we deal with the fact that perhaps one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, whose masterpiece is, in my opinion, a labour of love that has inspired so many, was also a Nazi collaborator? Does your book Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History provide an insight into this sensitive issue?
I seriously doubt if Searle worries overmuch about Heidegger’s Nazism. The big problem, far bigger than mere political errors, is “Continental obscurantism.” We like our ideas “clear” in the English speaking world. So that’s a red herring. Your interesting question concerns the significance of Heidegger’s Nazism for our appreciation of his philosophy. There seems no doubt that Heidegger had serious character flaws that played into his response to Hitler. But to what extent were these reflected in a work like Being and Time? Here’s my answer, which I presented in my book. Heidegger had four very smart Jewish students, Marcuse, Arendt, Jonas, and Lowith. They were surprised when he became a Nazi. Surely that is the most important evidence of all. They must have noticed that their professor was very conservative, but that did not necessarily imply Hitler worship in the late twenties and early 30s. There were other more respectable ways of being conservative. I do think that Heidegger’s conservatism is apparent in Being and Time, and influences his thought in ways that diminish it, but that is a far cry from Nazism.
In the aforementioned lecture of yours, you went on to describe the making of your book as follows: “several years ago I decided to investigate the links between Heidegger and Marcuse more closely and discovered to my surprise that they share a common interpretation of Aristotle, an interpretation that seems to originate in Heidegger’s early courses which Marcuse attended.” How was Heidegger’s (and Marcuse’s) interpretation of Aristotle different from, say, Franz Brentano’s and other philosophers coming from a Cartesian background? What’s the importance of Aristotle in the philosophy of technology?
I am not sufficiently acquainted with all the other interpretations of Aristotle to comment on that part of your question. Certainly Marcuse might have been influenced by many different interpreters but we happen to know he studied with Heidegger for whom Aristotle’s thought was absolutely central. In fact Heidegger interpreted Aristotle as a kind of proto-phenomenologist of the everyday lifeworld. Objectivistic assumptions veiled this to Aristotle himself and to most of his interpreters. Perhaps this is what you mean by referring to “Cartesian” interpretations. As far as philosophy of technology is concerned, the importance of Aristotle lies in his notion that techne realizes potentialities rather than imposing subjectively constructed plans. This is the core argument of Heidegger’s essay on The Question of Technology and it continues in Marcuse in a modified form. They both contrast modern technology with this earlier form of technique. The main difference between them is that Heidegger sees no possibility of renewing techne while Marcuse sees a promise of renewal in socialism.
In a recent interview I did with professor Corey Anton, he pointed out that he was a little suspicious of scholars who talk about “topics” when they’re asked what they do. Do you think specialization still holds in the age of information? McLuhan predicted that it wouldn’t; but if that were true, why don’t we appear to have thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger or Husserl anymore, all of whom seem to have provided us with robust and perfectly articulated systems of thought and comprehensive tool-kits that could be applied to and used to make sense of just about anything across many disciplines and topic areas?
I am not sure that our failure to produce heroic thinkers such as the ones you mention is caused by specialization. With the exception of technical domains, this is a period of astounding cultural poverty. Specialization may be more of a reaction to the impotence of thought today than a cause. As for McLuhan, I do not think he had it right. It is true there are tendencies toward the breakdown of disciplinary barriers in many fields but I think these tendencies are due to the upsurge of real problems that won’t fit within those boundaries and not to changes in the media as McLuhan supposed. I would give the example of environmentalism as a case in point.
In a recent interview, Professor Albert Borgmann defined you as follows: “Andrew Feenberg is the premier political philosopher of technology although he is well-versed in so many other areas that bear on our understanding of technology…he knows much more about political theory and is more optimistic about ordinary people’s ability to adapt technologies to morally significant concerns.” Somewhat related to the previous questions, do you consider yourself a generalist?
Albert is very generous. He has made a great contribution to our thinking about technology. I only wish the environment in which his ideas were presented had been more favourable to the kind of wide ranging and deep reflection in which he engages. In answer to your question, I am an odd sort of generalist. I tend to take up multiple specializations and try to do good professional work in each while contributing to a larger project.
The following question was drafted by Professor Albert Borgmann himself: “is the philosophy of technology a fruitful and flourishing branch of philosophy, has it been recognized as a bona fide special area by North American mainstream philosophers, and has it made a contribution to the public conversation in North America?”
I do not think philosophy of technology has broken through. The reason is primarily the intolerance of analytic philosophers. It does not help that American philosophers who are interested in Continental philosophy have taken up figures who themselves are uninterested in technology such as Habermas and Derrida. Not to say these thinkers are uninteresting! On the contrary, but philosophy of technology has a hard time in organizations such as SPEP. Perhaps Don Ihde has succeeded better than the rest of us in attracting attention to our field but one robin does not make a spring. The other part of the question is more positive. I do think philosophy of technology has had some influence in gradually weaning people away from older positivist and instrumentalist notions of technology. The Internet and the environmental movement have given us a credibility we would never have had on purely argumentative grounds but it has been important that arguments and concepts have been available to rethink technology in the light of these experiences.
You may not remember this, but when I was an undergraduate student at SFU, I once showed up in your office asking you why you considered Marshall McLuhan a technological determinist, given that much of his work is concerned with mediation, embodiment, and the senses. I think I was unable to get my point across then, though that exchange inspired me to write my MA thesis about the points of contact between media ecology and phenomenology. Why do you think McLuhan’s work is largely ignored by philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Michael Heim and yourself?
McLuhan had the unfortunate good luck of being too popular for a moment in time and falling off the edge of the world afterwards. Something similar seems to have happened to Marcuse. I will admit that I could use a refresher course on McLuhan who I read with great sympathy in the 1960s. But there is a theoretical problem. The thesis that technologies extend the body and the senses is associated historically with the deterministic views of Gehlen and other early thinkers. For us the question is not just how technology extends the body and senses but how technologies shape and are shaped by cultural and political contexts. I don’t think this was McLuhan’s question.
How is your approach to the study of technology different from some of the philosophers of technology I have just mentioned? Are you an optimist, a pessimist or an “apocalyptic” – like McLuhan used to say – when it comes technological progress and development?
I seem to be the only philosopher of technology attempting to work with the ideas of both the Frankfurt School and constructivist sociology of technology. Combining these sources has been an interesting project for me and opens up the politics of technology in an original way. I suppose the radical indeterminism of constructivist sociology encourages me to be more optimistic than some others writing on technology, but I was raised in the midst of the scientific community and have always had an acute awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons. I would summarize my views this way. Our civilization has no assured long term prospects of survival unlike every earlier major civilizational project. On the other hand, its future is more open to decision than others as well, and this means we can hope to make good decisions that preserve us from threatening catastrophe. Is that optimistic or pessimistic? I’m not sure.
What are you currently working on?
I have just brought out a book entitled Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. It is published by MIT Press. So you do not have to wait for my next book to find out what I am thinking these days. I am working on two projects at present. I have spent a good deal of time lecturing in Latin America and writing for Chinese magazines lately. I am interested in the relation of philosophy of technology to the problems of exclusion and development. These texts and some lectures presented in Holland form a short book which I hope will be a good introduction to critical theory of technology. I am also writing on Lukács again. My thesis under Marcuse was on the early Lukács. I have been invited to contribute chapters to two forthcoming books on Lukács and this has got me interested in returning to this topic.
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I wish to challenge the notion that McLuhan was a technological determinist which Laureano suggests is the position of Prof Feenberg. I do this with an excerpt of my book Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan
2.3 Was McLuhan a Technological Determinist?
This is a difficult question to answer because the term “technological determinist” is a loaded term used by many scholars as a pejorative to dismiss the work of others as being naïve or simplistic.
I’m a little wary of using the term as I’m aware that professional sociologists often refer to theories as ‘determinist’ as a dismissive term of abuse. But, then, they would, wouldn’t they? After all, if you accept a strong form of determinism, there’s not a lot of point in sociology (www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/med…).
P. David Marshall (2004, p. 31) is just one of many communications scholars who was not wary of using the term and tried to tar McLuhan with the ‘technological determinist’ brush: “Because of the simple relationship between technology and its capacity to transform society, McLuhan is rightly labeled a technological determinist.”
In fact, Marshall is the one who is being simplistic in suggesting that McLuhan proposed that there existed a simple relationship between technology and its capacity to transform society. McLuhan as we have pointed out developed a very rich relationship between technology and media and their impact on society. Certainly McLuhan is guilty as charged if one wishes to label anyone who posits a relationship between technology and societal transformation as a technological determinist. Anyone one who would deny a relationship between technology and societal transformation would be hopelessly naïve and out of touch with social realities. Having extracted the poison of the charge of technological determinism, the question becomes to what extent was McLuhan a technological determinist and what kind of technological determinist was he.
Some scholars have made a distinction between strong and weak technological determinism. I believe it is more useful to determine if the scholar in question maintains that technology is the sole factor that transforms society or if the scholar recognizes that there are many factors contributing to societal transformation. So the question is not one of strong versus weak determinism but one of whether a view embraces a single cause or multiple causes in explaining societal transformation.
There is no question that a central tenet of McLuhan’s approach to understanding media is that they contribute in a very important if not dominant way to social transformation. McLuhan’s notions that “the medium is the message” and media are “living vortices of power” are certainly two cases in point. So is the following quote that we will encounter again in A11: “Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to penetrate that milieu until every institution is saturated (McLuhan 1964, 177).”
Having established McLuhan as a technological determinist in the sense that technology’s impact on societal processes is important we are left with the question as to whether or not he was a naïve technological determinists as some have claimed. Clearly McLuhan was not a single cause explainer of anything. He railed against the notion of the “point of view” and the “single vision of Newton”. He described his own work as “observation minus ideas”.
He described an insight as “the sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction”, which is how he regarded the relationship between media and society. “We live today in the Age of Information and Communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men participate” (McLuhan 1964, p. 248). A field approach rejects the notion of a linear cause and effect model, which characterizes naïve ‘technological determinism’. In describing Innis’s approach, which greatly influenced his own work McLuhan observed that instead of “matching one cause against another effect he went on making sense of the process released by the new structures of communication” (ibid., p. x).
Mcluhan adopted a “total-field-theory approach”. He recognized the non-linear aspect of the relationship between media and society and in a certain sense foreshadowed the notion of co-evolution and complexity or emergence theory. I would guess based on my conversations with him in the 1970s that he was probably unaware of the work in this area, and which in 1964 certainly was only being hinted at. It is certainly the case that in 1964 that complexity theory was just beginning to be explored in the physical sciences and had not yet impacted on the social sciences.
As an example of the non-linear relationship between media and society consider the question of whether the Gutenberg press gave rise to the Renaissance and the renewed interest in books or whether the renewed interest in books and the renaissance of learning gave rise to the printing press in that it created a demand and a market for more books, which motivated Gutenberg. It is impossible to disentangle these two phenomena to determine which was the cause and which the effect. More likely the two phenomena co-evolved or autocatalyzed each other. They were involved in a symbiotic relationship.
The interest in books gave rise to the printing press, which made more books available and created a greater interest in books which led to improvements in the technology of the press. The first printing press in Europe was an invention of Laurens Janszoon of the Netherlands using carved wooden blocks. Gutenberg improved on Janszoon’s invention with movable type (Logan 2004a, pp. 175-76).
When considering whether or not McLuhan was a technological determinist it is important to remember he and Innis were engaged in creating a revolution in media studies that involved a shift from ‘content analysis’, which totally dominated the field in the 1950’s and early 60’s to the analysis of media independent of their content. As a consequence McLuhan emphasized, perhaps even exaggerated, the effects of media as media per sè while down playing the role of their content. McLuhan never suggested that the content could or should be ignored. In fact in the quote we cite in Section A.32 he said that “media study considers not only the ‘content’ but the medium and the cultural matrix” in which it operates implying that ‘content’ cannot be ignored.
Given this approach of McLuhan it is ironic that he was so often criticized as a naïve technological determinist. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we will now demonstrate.
Marshall suggests that, “McLuhan places too much importance on one factor in shaping society” and hence overlooks “political and economic forces.” What is particularly ironic of Marshall’s charges is that in his analysis of “new media” he correctly observes effects of these media that McLuhan (1964) long ago identified without crediting McLuhan for these insights. What is extremely impressive about McLuhan’s body of work is that he correctly identified properties of electric media that are even more salient with the “new media” (4.4)
Let us begin with Marshall’s charge that McLuhan overlooks political and economic forces despite the fact that McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt co-authored Take Today: Executive as Dropout, a book devoted to analyzing economic and political issues. We can begin with McLuhan’s observation cited above that electric technology ends the dichotomy between work and leisure, a point Marshall (2004, p. 27) reiterates without crediting McLuhan: “There is less distinct separation of tasks, for example, between work and leisure.” Other examples of McLuhan’s analysis of political and economic issues include the connection he made with nationalism and the printing press and his demonstration that electricity:
1. decentralizes and democratizes economic and political activities;
2. integrates economic and political activities that were once fragmented;
3. spells the end of jobs; and
4. makes the “abstract manipulation of information a means of creating wealth.”
Marshall makes a point similar to McLuhan’s point 1. re the decentralization and democratization of media production: “New media forms increasingly naturalize both the sensation of control and the sensation of producing….What has changed is a kind of media literacy that not only leads us to interpret media, but advances us towards producing (ibid., p. 27).”
Marshall also reiterates McLuhan’s point 3. re the end of jobs when he observes, “One of the central changes (due to the new media) has been the rapid decline in long-term employment for the information classes (ibid., p. 38).”
Marshall implicitly makes a point similar to McLuhan’s point 4. that information processing creates wealth:
There is a migration of information-related positions out of the most affluent countries to places such as Bangalore….The major beneficiaries… are those countries that have built a higher-education infrastructure that can rival that of Europe or North America (ibid., p. 38).
Marshall even recapitulates McLuan’s idea that the user is the content: “It is more accurate to say that users of new media are becoming the content of the form (ibid., p . 23).” While we are on this point how can McLuhan be accused of the position that the medium technologically determines its content if he maintains that the user is the content. Why take the “medium is the message” literally but not “the user is the content”. McLuhan obviously cannot be taken literally. He uses language poetically not logically, which is why he has caused so much consternation among academics who are not used to a literary style of scholarship. As I have already argued McLuhan’s view of the relationship between media and its users is not a simple one and certainly not one of naïve technological determinism.
What makes Marshall’s critique of McLuhan so ironic is that he never acknowledges his debt to McLuhan for many of his own insights. It makes one wonder how closely he read McLuhan.
Given the many times that McLuhan has dealt with economic and political issues I have concluded that perhaps Marshall’s assertion that McLuhan “overlooks political and economic forces” might stem from the fact that McLuhan does not make moral judgments (A26) about the way in which media are deployed as is the case with Marshall who champions the anti-globalization movement and expresses concern for the “digital divide.” McLuhan, on the other hand, was quite explicit about the fact that he did not indulge in moral judgments and he certainly had no desire to be politically correct as is the case with so many of today’s scholars. Melvin Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” sums up McLuhan’s position (and mine) very succinctly.
Another technological determinist attack on McLuhan was mounted by Richard Barbrook when he was interviewed by E. Henroux (1997):
The reasons why certain paths of innovation are followed and others ignored do not lie in some inherent logic within technology. McLuhan was wrong! On the contrary, states, companies and communities devote time and effort to researching and developing technologies, which are useful for their own purposes. For instance, the Net was created by the state for military communications, was improved by amateurs as a form of horizontal communications and is now being further advanced by corporations who want to make money from “interactive TV”.
Barbrook in his desire to criticize business fails to recognize that the Net did more to close the gap between consumer and the producer that it did to exploit the consumers through unfair business practices. It created many new competitors to mainstream media from the ranks of the users of the Net. The Net caused a number of corporations a lot of grief through the illegal file sharing of music and movies. Barbrooks observation that the medium of the Net has been exploited for commercial reasons is nothing new. This has been the case with each medium that preceded the Internet. The Net’s greatest commercial impact has not been on existing corporate interests but rather in the way it has given rise to new enterprises to a host of new corporate interests ranging from AOL and Yahoo to Google and MySpace and hundreds of small to medium sized companies. In addition to the new enterprises it gave rise to it also liberated the public from corporate monopolies and decreased their dependence on them for news and entertainment. Think of all the information one can access for free from blogs, news sites, podcasters, Web publishers, etc. What annoys Barbrook, like many other academics, is that some people have used the Internet to make money as though there was something inherently wrong with that. I guess it is hard for many academics to shake of the monasterial roots of the university.
Up to this point I have been acting as an apologists for McLuhan’s technological determinism, but perhaps it was not necessary. The charge of technological determinism cuts in two directions. We have already talked about how it is used to dismiss another’s work. But consider the fact that determinism is at the heart of much explanatory science. Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein and Darwin were all determinists. Any formulator of a law is a determinist. Many of the principles we reviewed in Chapter 2 and the Appendix were formulated as laws. Certainly the Laws of the Media (A38) is another example of formal laws. McLuhan’s laws emerged from his observations of patterns in the same way that natural scientists formulated their laws from the patterns they observed.
Let us examine how we may justify the claim that McLuhan’s generalizations based on his observations may be regarded as scientific laws. For a proposition to be considered a scientific hypothesis it must be falsifiable, i.e. it must make a claim that can be empirically tested. Given that McLuhan never had the opportunity to observe the “new media” if the principles that he formulated for the “old media” hold true for the “new media” we may regard this as an empirical verification of his theories.
Let us begin with his notion that at first the content of any new medium is some older medium. This we shall see is well borne out in that the content of the “new media” at first was always some older traditional medium. In Chapter 4 when we come to describe the generic effects of the “new media” we will see that the predictions that McLuhan made about electric mass media hold for the “new media” as well and in fact these effects are even more pronounced. The claims that I will make for the verification of McLuhan’s laws will not have the rigor of the mathematical laws of physics but they are just as solid as any of the laws of the social sciences and even if I may dare say it, biology.
Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology is I think attractive both because of its social and political scope and because of its optimism. The idea that technologies are designed and regulated according to a ‘code’ that presupposes value commitments and power relations is both illuminating and also opens the door to critique and reform. Usually this code favors efficiency and productivity above all else, but as Feenberg shows in Questioning Technology, in areas such as medicine, industry, and communications technology, different societies have succeeded in modifying the code to favor other values.
Unlike a more phenomenologically oriented philosopher of technology, like Don Ihde, who tries to get at the structures of human-technology-world relations from a first-person perspective, Feenberg manages to articulate the relationships between technology and social and political contexts. For this, his work is a great contribution to the philosophy of technology.
Thanks for these comments. An interesting review of my latest book has just appeared at:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21029
It gives a good brief description of my central idea.