Towards reconciliation or mediated non-identity? Feenbergs aesthetic critique of technology

Graeme Kirkpatrick

Abstract

This article interrogates Andrew Feenbergs thesis that modern technology is in need of re-aestheticization. The notion that modern technology requires aesthetic critique

connects his political analysis of micro-contexts of social shaping to his wider concern with civilization change. The former involves a modified constructionism, in which the motives, values and beliefs of proximal agents are understood in terms of their wider sociological significance. This remedies a widely acknowledged blind-spot of conventional constructionism, enabling Feenberg to identify democratic potential in progressive agency at the scene of technology design. Feenberg argues that the aesthetics of naturalistic modernism may serve as a bridge between such interventions and cultural transformation. Referring to developments in design culture, especially as this relates to the human-machine interface on digital

artefacts, the article suggests that this part of Feenbergs argument has been falsified.

This kind of aesthetic modernism is hegemonic in contemporary design and it has not

brought about significant progressive advance. In conclusion, the article suggests a

different approach to aesthetic critique that is based on difference rather than

wholeness, and on the principle that there is no inherent correspondence of aesthetic

standards and ethics in technology design.

Introduction: technology in context

This paper focuses on one part of Andrew Feenbergs critical conception of the politics of technology design: his notion of aesthetic critique. Feenberg draws on the insights of social constructionism to argue that the design of technologies is always a more contentious, disputed process than we tend to think. Constructionism succeeded in showing that technologies do not impact upon society from outside, forcing changes and adaptations to accommodate them and the improvements they bring. Rather, artifacts are socially shaped all the way down and they come heavily inscribed with symbolic meanings. Feenberg has advanced our understanding of this by showing how these social inscriptions not only construct technology in line with the conceptions of specific social groups but also, at the same time, tie artifacts into wider social networks. Enlarging the picture in this way enables us to see that as well as being profoundly relational process technology design is also socially transformative. In other words, technology creation is not bracketed off from other social practices but intimately related to them.

In this way, Feenberg has drawn attention to the politics of technology design not by reducing the process to more profound layers of the social formation (which was, perhaps, the old Marxist way of achieving the same thing) but by demonstrating the connection between technology and social power as this is manifest in what he calls the technical code. In other words, we recognize the presence of an object in our environment as technology precisely because it bears certain significations that speak of (and to) wider social relations: it is efficient; it is an enhancement to what we did previously; it represents the future, and so on. These things are inscribed in the artifact along with more specific instructions, concerning which tasks it performs, on its user interface. These inscriptions enable us to recognize it as technology and in so doing they position it in a wider web of social meanings and values. None of these (efficiency, the future) are specific to technology, but in they are integral to the modern notion of what technology is. One way that technology bears the imprint of these wider webs of meaning is through aspects of artifact design that are commonly thought of as aesthetic.

There is no aspect of technology that is outside the scope of Feenbergs critical theory social construction runs all the way down and no network in which technology might not play a role. One of the defining features of modern technologies is precisely that they are located in ever longer and more interconnected networks: Modern societies emphasise systematization and build long networks through tightly coupling links over huge distances between very different types of thing and people (2010: 76). Feenbergs approach allows us to follow artifacts wherever they may go and to discover what meanings they acquire in the process of use. However, Feenbergs theory is critical, which means that it focuses particularly on how ideas from the wider social web are manifest inside the micro-political situations encountered by social actors involved in technology design. He argues that among the standards we routinely apply to technology design the idea of efficiency continues to dominate and this reflects an enduring legacy of technocracy, criticized in the 1960s by Herbert Marcuse (1964), and others. Feenberg also identifies new sources of resistance from computer hacktivists to patients rights groups and his theory articulates their struggles to the experiences of earlier generations of activists and to a progressive conception of history derived from Karl Marx. His critical theory casts contemporary activists as exploiting margins of maneouvre that have opened up within contemporary technology design and it aligns their activity with a model of action for social change he calls progressive rationalisation.

The idea of aesthetic critique connects Feenbergs politicized constructionism with the larger, transformational aims of the critical theory of technology. Aesthetic aspects of design are an important issue at stake between different constituencies who seek to make artefacts comport with their definition of the technology and what it is for. Perhaps less obviously, aesthetic critique addresses the sedimentation of values associated with past technologies (and their codifications) in the foundations of contemporary cultural life. If democratizing the scene of technology design allows user groups and workers a voice in shaping machines that are more pleasant to work with, their actions also re-position technology in the wider webs of meaning just discussed. When he discusses this aspect of aesthetic critique Feenberg often refers to substantivist critics of technology (Heidegger, Marcuse), for whom the question of civilization change, predicated on development of a radically different kind of technical infrastructure, was a key concern. The notion of aesthetic critique is central to Feenbergs strategy for bridging the gulf that separates constructionism, with its emphasis on contingency and contemporary struggles, from the long-term historical concerns of such substantivist philosophies of technology. Feenberg has stated that the normative or critical imperatives of his theory are in fact grounded here, writing that, aesthetics provides the normative basis for the reconstruction of technological rationality (Feenberg 2005: xv).

Section 1 presents an account of Feenbergs idea of technical politics, showing that he presents a modified constructionism in which the codification of technology as neutral is a decisive outcome of social processes. This relates to the question of aesthetics in design as the locus of a kind of locally initiated reform that might herald wider changes with implications for the character of civilization. Section 2 positions aesthetic critique at the intersection of constructionism and traditional critical theory. For Feenberg, aesthetic critique of technology design carries the values of a wider critique essential to civilization change and makes it possible to bring them to bear upon contemporary technology designs while evading the charge of utopianism or flouting the rationality conditions that must preside over technical thinking.

Section 3 describes the thesis of re-aestheticisation of capitalist technology with reference to Feenbergs argument that all technology includes what he calls primary and secondary instrumentalisation. The first of these involves an originary violence, without which there can be no technology, while the second is restorative and compensates nature by mediating the result through meaning. In capitalist societies the second of these moments is stymied, resulting in a cold, one-dimensional technology and a correspondingly shallow way of life. Here Feenbergs notion of an aesthetic dimension re-presents Marcuses thesis of an enlarged or transformed mode of technical reasoning, compatible with a new kind of civilization. I suggest that the idea of an aesthetic transformation cannot bear the weight of these essentially utopian ideas or their substantivist premises. In the concluding section I recommend an alternative understanding of the place of the aesthetic in contemporary technical politics, drawing on ideas from elsewhere in the critical theoretic tradition.

1. Social constructionism and technical politics

In presenting technology as a phenomenon of social connection, Feenberg stresses that he is making an anti-essentialist move. Throughout his work, he emphasizes technology is socially constructed:

technology is a dependent variable in the social system, shaped to a purpose by the dominant class and subject to reshaping to new purposes under a new hegemony (Feenberg 1991: 35)

The importance of such a definition is multiple. It is historically accurate because people have not always talked about technology in the same ways that they do today. It is important to register differences like the foregrounding of the word technology, which happens in English in the 18th century, for example, and heralds a relatively recent framing of devices and machines, which were previously described as mechanical arts (Jennings 1985; Ad