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This is the first monograph devoted to the work of one of the foremost contemporary advocates of critical theory, Andrew Feenberg. It focuses on Feenberg’s central concept, technical politics, and explores his suggestion that democratising technology design is key to a strategic understanding of the process of civilisational change. In this way, it presents Feenberg’s intervention as the necessary bridge between various species of critical constructivism and wider visions of the kind of change that are urgently needed to move human society onto a more sustainable footing. The book describes the development of Feenberg’s thought out of the tradition of Marx and Marcuse, and presents critical analyses of his main ideas: the theory of formal bias, technology’s ambivalence, progressive rationalisation, and the theory of primary and secondary instrumentalisation. Technical politics identifies a limitation of Feenberg’s work associated with his attachment to critique, as the opposite pole to a negative kind of rationality (instrumentalism). It concludes by offering a utopian corrective to the theory that can provide a fuller account of the process of willed technological transformation and of the author’s own idea of a technologically authorised socialism.
This book aims to bring into sharper relief what Harold Bloom, across a prolific publishing career over more than forty years, has helped us to see about the business of reading and writing. It is also interested in those other aspects of Bloom - the pedantry, conservatism, hysteria and silliness - that so many readers have found in his work. Perceptions of Bloom have been constantly shifting over the last four decades as a series of revolutions have swept through literary studies. In a moment of relative calm within the discipline, the author wants to reassess Bloom's consistently sustained agenda in the light of these revolutions, as well as taking a fresh look at Bloom's work from within a critical climate that, in some ways, might be increasingly congenial to him. Bloom is probably the most famous living literary critic in the world. The book focuses on what Bloom's understanding of historical continuity tells us about the fate of Wordsworth's tragic tale of revolutionary France, 'Vaudracour and Julia'. Feminist readings are not the only ones marginalised by Bloom's patriarchal directives - bibliographic readings, for example, are also overlooked. Andrew Stauffer illuminates this particular 'blind spot' in Bloom's theory in his discussion of the 'material existence' of one of Bloom's favourite poems - Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came". Julian Wolfreys takes The Anxiety of Influence as his text and attempts to unravel the thread of spectres woven into Bloom's fabric.
. Technology does not only exist as described but must be understood as involving objects that also act at the scene of design and elsewhere. A properly materialist philosophy of technology should be focused on opening up space in which objects may be heard. Retrieving the category of substantive bias, which Feenberg clarifies but then rejects, turns out to be a way to identify missing potential as well as identifying real evil in technologies of the past. Secondly, the linkage from technical politics to civilisation change is fragile and requires some further support
earlier generations of critical theorists, who associated it with instrumental reason and the disenchantment of the world. Strangely enough, Feenberg also retains some of these negative ideas but incorporates them into an understanding of technology that grasps it in terms of its fundamental ambivalence. He presents a definition of technology that is both conceptually nuanced and at the same time sensitive to historical variation in a way that distinguishes his work and sets it above even the most sophisticated positions in contemporary philosophy of technology. 1
the origins of modern signalling systems, to a time in which the question of which colour should stand for which command was still undecided. As Ernst Kapp notes in his Elements of a Philosophy of Technology , ‘the semaphore telegraph is now in service to the railway’ ( [1877] 2018 , 237). At around the time when the different versions of this early telecommunication medium were replaced by electrical systems, railway companies adopted the semaphore principle of optical telegraphy in order to facilitate the communication between the engine
-human essence, stands. Here it is useful to supplement Feenberg’s argument with ideas from post-phenomenological philosophies of technology, which emphasise the role of technical artefacts as agents or quasi-subjects rather than more or less inert objects. Feenberg’s attempts to comprehend this are impeded by his framing of technology in terms of its association with a distinctive kind of societal rationality. Detached from a rationalisation-based historical perspective, technical politics becomes more messy and requires more diverse tactics than a battle between two
the long-term historical concerns of such essentialist 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 places Feenberg’s ideas about aesthetics in the context of his technical politics, positioning them within his critical version of constructivism as part of the codification of technology – a process that includes technology’s ‘neutral
(Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2006). 63 See Zvi Griliches, ‘Hybrid corn: an exploration in the economics of technological change’, Econometrica, 25 (1957), 501–22; ‘Hybrid corn and the economics of innovation’, Science, 132 (1960), 275–80. Many thanks to Francesco Lissoni for this idea. 64 Low bridges acted as a means of racial exclusion aimed at mostly black bus users – the bridges were deliberately built so that buses could not fit under them, L. Winner, ‘Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: social constructivism and the philosophy of technology
McLuhan and the Essence of Virtual Reality’, in R. C. Scharff and V. Dusek (eds), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology , Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 539–55. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin
–12. Rosière, S. and R. Jones, 2012. ‘Teichopolitics: Re-considering Globalisation Through the Role of Walls and Fences’, Geopolitics 17(1): 217–34. Rouvroy, A., 2013. ‘The End(s) of Critique: Data-behaviourism vs. Due-process’, in M. Hildebrandt and K. de Vries, eds, Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn. The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology , Milton Park/New York: Routledge