Science and technology pose different problems for Marcuse’s theory which he did not clearly distinguish. We can make sense of his approach to technology in a relatively straightforward way. But to do so persuasively we need to show how Marcuse’s philosophical categories play out in the new field of technology studies. Marcuse’s own discourse has powerful philosophical and political resonances which cannot be duplicated at the sociological level, but neither can contemporary research into technology be pursued exclusively at Marcuse’s level of abstraction.
The environmental movement and the computerization of society have brought us into contact with technology in new ways Marcuse did not anticipate. They have made us far more aware of the contingency of design on social and political choices than we were a generation ago. At the same time, sociologists and historians of technology have shown that applications are not designed in function of abstract technical principles alone but emerge from concrete technical disciplines applied in social contexts. Naturally, those disciplines incorporate technical principles, but they include much besides. As social institutions, they operate under the influence of “actors,” social groups with the power to define problems and select solutions. Designs that flow from these sources accord with the interests, ideology, and way of life of those groups. Of all the various ways in which a device can be designed to accomplish a certain purpose, that one will be chosen that satisfies both technical and social criteria.
Unfortunately, Marcuse never developed concepts at this concrete sociological level, but he did give a more abstract interpretation of technological rationality that can be applied in a social context. Social constructivism, actor network theory, and the study of large-scale technical systems have developed useful concepts that are anticipated by Marcuse or easily applied to the explanation of his thought. We can thus translate Marcuse’s insights into the basis for a radical sociology of technology. Here are some examples of anticipations and convergences that give a hint of this potential.
• The notion that technological design is not governed by efficiency or scientific principles but is decided by socially situated actors resembles Marcuse’s critique of the neutrality of technology and his notion of socially determined technological projects (Bijker, et al., 1987). Marcuse goes beyond current technology studies in facing the political implications of the non-neutrality of technology. If actors impose designs accommodated to their way of life, then surely we should judge the results in terms of some sort of normative criteria (Marcuse 1964, 220ff).
• This approach to the social bias of technical decisions presupposes two further constructivist principles, the technical under-determination of design and the interpretative flexibility of artifacts. It makes sense to analyze technology in social terms only if the meaning of artifacts is socially determined and contested, and workable alternatives are available (Bijker, et al., 1987). Marcuse presupposed something similar as the basis for his own notion of reconstruction of the technical base. In my own work I have tried to show how this presupposition can be made explicit and defended.
• Actor network theory proposes a concept of “delegation” according to which a value may be embodied either in discourse as a moral imperative, or in design through technical choices that enforce appropriate behavior. For example, the value of safety may be supported by a sign reminding users of a device to handle it carefully, or by a design which makes it impossible to use the device without taking the necessary precautions (Latour 1992). Marcuse might be said to offer the “macro” version of this “micro” thesis according to which norms are embodied in devices and constrain (“script”) behavior (Marcuse 1964, 9ff).
• Finally, the theory of large-scale technical systems explains how technologies such as electric power and the airline industry bind huge populations and things together in both causal and symbolic relations. This approach has parallels in the Heideggerian enframing [Gestell] and in Marcuse’s version of it. Some historians and sociologists of technology have in fact made the connection between Heidegger and their empirical research (Hughes 1989; Gras 1993). Marcuse adds a much needed perspective on the political implications of the systematization of society.
As these examples show, Marcuse allows us to draw rather more radical conclusions from technology studies than is customary. I realize that many students of technology dismiss both Heidegger and Marcuse and insist that we are wasting our time on useless abstractions when we could be doing useful empirical research. I do not think philosophers need to take lessons in empiricism from social scientists. These are old debates too tedious to repeat once again. Marcuse operates at a high level of abstraction, to be sure, but our task is to relate levels of abstraction—all we have to work with in the end—not to claim a false concreteness for empirical facts that owe their meaning to such non-facts as traditions, the imaginary, and the global social context.
This is what I have attempted to do in my own writings, borrowing freely from Marcuse and technology studies. I have introduced the concept of the “technical code” to explain Marcuse’s concept of technological rationality in a more concrete sociological context. The technical code consists in fundamental social imperatives in the form in which they are internalized by a technical culture. These imperatives—Marcuse would call them “a prioris”—appear in technical disciplines as standards and specifications that have an apparently neutral aspect. Husserl once said that “Tradition is forgetfulness of the origin.” This is certainly true of technical disciplines which live in blissful ignorance of their own past, proclaiming their autonomy for all to hear while historians uncover the many acts of power that shaped them. The history takes us back to the actors who struggled to impose their interests and vision through encoding emerging technologies (Marcuse 1968, 215–16; Feenberg 1999, 87–89). The process continues today and we need the concepts to understand it.
This theory of technical codes has implications for the relation of technology and values. We can no longer accept the Weberian conception of technology as a value-free enterprise. Sociology of technology routinely tracks the influence of values on design. But this also calls into question the usual understanding of values. Are values, as is commonly supposed, subjective feelings rather than solid facts? Marcuse relativizes this distinction. He argues that values appear as values rather than as (technical) facts to the extent that they have been excluded from reality in the interests of a repressive organization of society. Technology itself could accommodate them were it “liberated” from the constraints of the existing society (Marcuse 2001, 54).
We might reformulate this insight to say that design embodies only a subset of the values circulating in society at any given time. Those not so embodied appear discursively rather than technically, but the two forms of value are not irrevocably cut off from each other. The “ideological” values can enter the technical realm through different design choices (“delegations”) imposed by a different relation of political and social forces. This is an argument of particular importance for environmentalism. Conservative opponents of environmental reform routinely contrast “rational” technology with supposedly “irrational,” “emotional,” or “ideological” values. This contrast is spurious as a general rule if not in all particular cases.
Such fundamental social imperatives as environmental protection are beginning to shape an alternative technological rationality in Marcuse’s sense. These imperatives are the “technological a priori” embodied in the devices and systems that emerge from the culture and reinforce its basic values. As we have seen, Marcuse argues that life affirming values are actually internal to technology and are not an arbitrary imposition. While this claim is excessively general, it can be given a concrete content in terms of technical codes. Each such code affirms life within the limits of the technical knowledge and the repressive structure of the dominant regime. Ethical and aesthetic mediations play an essential role in this process, integrating technical principles to a design that coheres with social and natural values. What makes capitalism special is the progressive reduction and neutralization of such mediations, the inherited logos, wherever they conflict with a narrow pecuniary interest.
This reductive process is the source of the apparent purification of technological rationality in modern times, and not, as Weber and Habermas claim, the emergence of an original essence of technology from out of the undifferentiated social magma of premodern society. If capitalism is unique, that is not because it has freed technology from “nontechnical” concerns. Rather, capitalism is the first social system to repress the underlying population primarily through technology rather than through religion, ritual, and violence, and the first to treat it as essentially neutral rather than governed by an inherent logos. In this sense “neutral” capitalist technology can be said to be “political” without mystification or risk of confusion.