Three perspectives on technology and politics

Synesis, 4, 2013

It goes without saying that the change we experience today, which is fuelled by a series of new technologies, differs from other profound changes that have defined our culture in the past. The current change affects our everyday lives, but the new tools it offers us can be seen as an extension of our senses, of our various modes of communication and, to a certain extent, of our brains (since the question about whether one regards machines as extensions of living organisms or living organisms as complex machines seems to be a topic of exploration as well). Nowadays, the proliferation of the fields of knowledge, the often vague distinction between art, technology and science, and the "immaterial" form of the new tech-nologies compel us to widen the field of our traditional research disciplines, and most crucially the field of ethics. The debate around the morality of technology has given rise to special moral categories -regarding for example the issues of responsibility, safety and risk -which had not been as important in premodern moral philosophy.

Foundations of Science, 2015

Pieter Lemmens’ neo-Marxist approach to technology urges us to rethink how to do political philosophy of technology. First, Lemmens’ high level of abstraction raises the question of how empirically informed a political theory of technology needs to be. Second, his dialectical focus on a “struggle” between humans and technologies reveals the limits of neo-Marxism. Political philosophy of technology needs to return “to the things themselves”. The political significance of technologies cannot be reduced to its origins in systems of production or social organization, but requires study at the micro-level, where technologies help to shape engagement, interaction, power, and social awareness.

The Late Foucault. Ethical and Political Questions, Marta Faustino, Gianfranco Ferraro (eds), Bloomsbury Academic, London – New Delhi - New York – Sidney, ISBN 9781350134379 , 2020

The aim of this chapter is to highlight how the relationship between the subject and time both represents the basis of the practice of the self and constitutes the foundation of another substantive relationship between the subject and truth: one which intersects the relationship between time and truth. It is through the subject’s representing time in a certain way, a way which is produced through certain practices of the self, that it is possible to become aware of the value and meaning of one’s own existence. This chapter also sets out to emphasize how time and exercises related to the perception of time actually lie at the very core of Foucault’s reflection on what he calls “the technologies of the self ” in the ancient world, even though—as I will try to show— he does not overtly stress or make explicit their crucial importance to his discourse.

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2004

Philosophy & Technology, 2012

This article focuses on tracing and extending Michel Foucault's contributions to the philosophy of technology. At first sight his work on power seems the most relevant. In his later work on subjectivation and ethics technology is absent. However, notably by recombining Foucault's work on power with his work on subjectivation, does his work contribute to solving pertinent problems in current approaches to the ethics of technology. First, Foucault's position is compared to critical theory and Heidegger, and associated with the approach of "technical mediation"

History and Technology, 2013

Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International …, 2002

The argument presented in this article is that the premises governing human-technology interaction partly derive from the distinctive ways by which each technology defines a domain of reference, and organizes and codifies knowledge and experience within it. While social in ...

Lubar, Steven und W. David Kingery: History from things: Essays on Material Culture. Washington, 1993

Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory, 2014

There is a rich history in early critical theory of attempting to harness the power of aesthetic imagination for the purposes of political liberation. Both Adorno and Marcuse pursue this project in different ways. But it has not yet been linked concretely enough to the philosophy of technology. In advanced technological societies, technologies often aid in and embody certain political structures of domination. This has led some theorists to equate technology itself with domination, by way of a technical rationality that is supposedly devoid of any moral, political, or aesthetic content. In his recent work in the philosophy and politics of technology, Andrew Feenberg challenges this thesis, pointing out that the reduction of technologies to their function is a theoretical abstraction rather than a historical fact. As such, it can be understood as a technological fetishism (analogous to commodity fetishism) which conceals rather than clarifies the political character of concrete technologies. 1 Once technologies are seen as socially constructed and mediated, the design and social organization of technology becomes a normative issue. That is, one can then ask, as Feenberg does, how technologies ought to be constructed in order to best serve the interests of a democratic society. It is not my intention to challenge this program of democratizing technology. Rather I would like to draw out and examine a particular aspect or "initiative" within it. Technologies, as concrete objects infused with political content, are especially appropriate for bringing aesthetic elements into the everyday lives of their users. In the first place this is merely the discouraging insight that aesthetically pleasing design is an important feature of commodities in consumption-driven societies. But aesthetic aspects of technologies can resist as well as support the status quo, and further, I will argue, aesthetic initiatives are a vital component of resistance to technocratic (i.e. undemocratic) organizations of technology, since the power of these technological regimes is partly symbolic. The phenomenon of customization and personalization of technologies, although already coopted in a variety of ways, is a testament to such resistance. I begin then, by specifying the conventional method of understanding technological domination: the differentiation thesis. I then show how this understanding of technological development fails to grasp the reality of technologies as they are embodied in social contexts. From the concept of an embodied technology, I demonstrate, through an analysis of customization, that aesthetic imagination plays an important role in politicizing technologies, and enrolling these technologies themselves in the project of resisting the general phenomenon of technological domination. This helps to understand what it might mean to translate the insights of early critical theory into a contemporary critical praxis.

2006

As philosophy goes, philosophy of technology is a relatively young field. Courses called "History of Modern Philosophy" cover philosophers of the Renaissance and the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Philosophy of the early twentieth century is covered in "Contemporary Philosophy." The main branches of philosophy go back over 2200 years. Philosophy of science was pursued, in fact if not in name, by most of the early modern philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the midnineteenth century several physicists and philosophers were producing works that focused solely on the philosophy of science. Only sporadically were there major philosophers who had much to say about technology, such as Bacon around 1600 and Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the "great philosophers" of this period, although they had a great deal to say about science, said little about technology. On the assumption that technology is the simple application of science, and that technology is all for the good, most philosophers thought that there was little of interest. The "action" in early modern philosophy was around the issue of scientific knowledge, not technology. The romantic tradition from the late eighteenth century was pessimistic about science and technology. Romantics emphasized their problematic and harmful aspects, and only a handful of academic philosophers concerned themselves with evaluation and critique of technology itself. Particularly in Germany, there was a pessimistic literature on the evils of modern society in general and technological society in particular. We shall examine at length several of the twentieth-century inheritors of this tradition. In the English-speaking countries, with the exception of romantic poets such as Wordsworth and mid-nineteenth-century culture critics such as Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin, or the socialist artist William rationality, and dialectical rationality, among others. Risk/benefit analysis, a form of formal rationality, closely related to mathematical economics, and often used to evaluate technological projects, is presented and evaluated. Next, approaches to philosophy of technology very different from the logical, formal economic, and analytical approaches are examined. Phenomenology, involving qualitative description of concrete experience, and hermeneutics, involving interpretation of texts in general, are presented in chapter 5. Several philosophers of technology who have applied phenomenology and hermeneutics to fields such as technical instrumentation and computers are discussed. A complex of issues involving the influence of technology on society and culture are treated in chapters 6 and 7. Technological determinism, the view that technological changes cause changes in the rest of society and culture, and autonomous technology, the view that technology grows with a logic of its own out of human control, are discussed and evaluated. Chapter 8 describes the debates concerning whether technology is what distinguishes humans from other animals, and whether language or technology is most characteristic of humans. Chapters 9 and 10 discuss groups of people who have often been excluded from mainstream accounts of the nature and development of technology. Women, despite their use of household technology and their widespread employment in factories and in the telecommunications industry, were often omitted from general accounts of technology. These accounts often focus on the male inventors and builders of large technological projects. This is true even of some of the best and most dramatic contemporary accounts (Thompson, 2004). Women inventors, women in manufacturing, and the burden of household work are often downplayed. Similarly, non-Western technology is often shunted aside in mainstream Western surveys of technology. The contributions of the Arabs, Chinese, South Asians, and Native Americans to the development of Western technology are often ignored. The power and value of the local knowledge of non-literate, indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and the South Pacific is also often ignored. However, ethno-science and technology raise issues about the role of rationality in technology and the nature of technology itself. There is also a powerful traditional critical of technology, at least since the romantic era of the late 1700s. In contrast to the dominant beliefs about progress and the unalloyed benefits of technology, the Romantic Movement celebrated wild nature and criticized the ugliness and pollution of the industrial cities. With the growth of scientific ecology in the late nineteenth and is shown by the stimulating but often hopelessly muddled prose of the Canadian theorist of the media, Marshall McLuhan. Lewis Mumford, the American freelance architecture and city planning critic and theorist of technology, is readable, but at times long-winded. Not only are major European figures (such as Heidegger, Arendt, and Ellul), whom Don Ihde has called the "grandfathers" of the field, difficult to read, there is a further complication in that many other schools of twentiethcentury philosophy have contributed to the philosophy of technology. Anglo-American linguistic and analytic philosophy of science has contributed. Besides the various European schools of philosophy (neo-Marxism,