Abstract
In this chapter I will compare Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology with that of the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han to show that their diagnoses about the contemporary social and political status of technological development, as well as their prognoses about how to deal with it, differ radically. I argue that this radical difference is based on: (i) two different evaluations of modernity and, in particular, two different appraisals of both Martin Heidegger’s and Michel Foucault’s thought; (ii) an anti-essentialist stance about technology on Feenberg’s part, and an essentialist/reductive appraisal of technology on Han’s part; (iii) two different accounts of the Internet and of information technology. My aim is to show that Feenberg’s reflection represents a more solid and detailed analysis of the phenomenon of technology, from the point of view of its limitations and its potentials, as well as a critical corrective to Han’s radicalism, as far as outlining the realistic possibility for future political interventions.
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Notes
- 1.
Han voiced similar views in an interview with Vera Tollmann, in 2011, just after the publication of Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (see Tollmann, 2011, last retrieved November 18, 2020).
- 2.
In its assumptions, Feenberg’s approach offers plenty of phenomenological insights, although these are rarely explicitly formulated. The idea that in order to appreciate the horizon of meaning of technological phenomena in their material objectiveness, these must be traced back to the sphere of the lifeworld—which is to say, the moment of the direct experiencing of these phenomena in their social and cultural stratifications—represents a key principle within a phenomenology of technology of Husserlian inspiration. Moreover, in a passage from Technosystem discussing Ian Angus’s work, Feenberg appears to be drawing upon the notion of formalisation by applying it to the concept of reification theorised by Lukács: formalisation is understood in a Husserlian sense here, as a process that is separate from generalisation and which, unlike the latter, “breaks that connection to the individual and substitutes variables that can refer to any object whatsoever. (…) Formalization and instrumental practice share an alienation from the lifeworld that results in Husserl’s ‘crisis’” (Feenberg, 2017, p. 128).
- 3.
Part III of Questioning Technology is entirely devoted to the topic of “Technology and Modernity.” In particular, Chap. 8 focuses on “Technology and Meaning,” providing a detailed critique of Heidegger’s views in The Question Concerning Technology.
- 4.
Feenberg does not fail to emphasise a certain shift of perspective in Heidegger’s later works, such as his Discourse on Thinking, where the German philosopher presents a mode of “free relation” with technology: “We can affirm—Heidegger writes—the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 54). It is crucial to establish this free relation insofar as technology is the cultural form that makes every element of modernity subjectable to control: this “culture of control” implies “an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller, a narcissistic degeneration of humanity” (Feenberg, 1999, p. 185). However, Heidegger’s reflection is still compromised by a number of ambiguities—for example: “He warns us that the essence of technology is nothing technological, that is to say, technology cannot be understood through its usefulness, but only through our specifically technological engagement with the world. But is that engagement merely an attitude or is it embedded in the actual design of modern technological devices?” (ibid., p. 186).
- 5.
All translations of passages from Han’s works are my own. In brackets I am providing a reference to the German original and—when a text is quoted for the first time—to the title and year of the English edition.
- 6.
If we assume that the very beginning of body and mind control, as a biopolitical practice, dates back to Descartes’ dualism of substances, then we should consider dualism itself as an early form of that practice. However, rather than analyzing Cartesian dualism in terms of its biopolitical consequences, Han overturns it in order to show the increasing priority of sum over cogito, and over all other activities performed by the subject in capitalist societies. Han’s thesis of the “hypertrophic Ego” is grounded in the reversal of Cartesian dualism and represents a direct consequence of people’s life turning into a mere domain of demand and consumption.
- 7.
In Marcuse’s own words: “(…) in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility—the demands of the life instincts. Then one could speak of a technology of liberation, product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil” (Marcuse, 1969, p. 19).
- 8.
“I have proposed the term ‘democratic rationalization’ to signify user interventions that challenge undemocratic power structures rooted in modern technology. With this concept I intend to emphasize the public implications of user agency” (Feenberg, 1999, p. 108).
- 9.
This thesis is a recurrent one in Han’s writing, from Müdigkeitsgesellschaft onwards. Consider the following passages, for example: “Self-exploitation is far more effective than external exploitation, as it is accompanied by a sense of freedom” (Han, 2013, p. 93). “Self-enlightenment is more efficient than the enlightenment that comes from someone else, because it is combined with a sense of freedom” (Han, 2012, p. 80). “Psychopower is more effective than biopower insofar as it disciplines, controls, and influences human beings not from the outside, but from within” (Han, 2013, p. 101). “Neoliberalism is a highly effective system for exploiting freedom (…). It is not effective to exploit someone against his will (…). Only the exploitation of freedom produces the highest yield” (Han, 2014, p. 11). “Smart power with a free and benevolent appearance that stimulates and seduces is more effective than that power which orders, threatens and prescribes” (Ibid., p. 27).
- 10.
Han expounds his theory about digital technology in Im Schwarm (2013). However, in this work the term “digital” is used in a rather generic sense to describe both applications downloaded from the Internet and intended for personal use (e.g. for biometric measurements) and devices such as Google Watch and other self-tracking and Quantified Self tools, as well as the Internet and online communication via social networking. According to Han, the logic of optimisation and performance applies to all these cases. In other words, Han does not provide a theory which distinguishes between the various aspects of digital technology and considers their specific and distinctive traits, which depend on the different technologies used to implement them and their different designs. By contrast, particularly in Technosystem, Feenberg specifically focuses on the Internet as a case study. In the following section, therefore, in discussing the digital sphere, I will essentially be referring to the case of the Internet and online digital communication.
- 11.
Similarly, Brian Haman (2018) has noted in his recent review of Psychopolitik that, “Han overlooks the link between social media, mobile phones, and activism. After all, the myriad ways in which the digitally dependent masses across the world have harnessed these new technologies precisely in order to subvert existing power structures suggest the extent to which digital spaces have become contact zones.”
- 12.
Feenberg has identified the following levels: (1) Nonhierarchical structure; (2) Anonymity; (3) Broadcasting; (4) Data storage; (5) Many-to-many communication. All these levels reflect the systemic ambivalence of the Internet, which is to say the struggle between the consumption model and the community model: the two models coexist and the predominance of one over the other in certain contexts does not amount to a permanent achievement, but only to a particular stage in a process of development whose outcomes are still largely unpredictable.
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Buongiorno, F. (2022). Beyond Efficiency: Comparing Andrew Feenberg’s and Byung-Chul Han’s Philosophy of Technology. In: Cressman, D. (eds) The Necessity of Critique. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07877-4_10
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