Critical theory emerges in the early 1920s in response not just to the so-called ‘objective crisis’ of capitalist society but also to its ‘subjective crisis’ (Gandesha, 2014). Running parallel to other influential intellectual currents in the early twentieth century, most notably phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty) and existentialism (Schmitt, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir), Critical Theory understands such a subjective crisis in capitalism as a crisis of reason and experience. Like the former, Critical Theory, at its inception, was particularly concerned with the increasing pervasiveness of scientism and technology; like the latter it was concerned with ascertaining the conditions for the possibility of genuine ‘action’ or praxis as distinguished from naturalistic, unreflexive conceptions of ‘behaviour’.
In this, Critical Theory sought to clearly differentiate itself from the dogmatic, economistic and quietist ‘scientific socialism’ of fin de siècle social democracy and to those aspects of Marx’s own thought that it considered to be characterized by a certain technological determinism. For example, in the Poverty of Philosophy (1976: 166) Marx argues infamously that ‘the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the individual capitalist’. Critical Theory differentiated itself from this dogmatic tradition in at least two ways. The first was by reclaiming genuinely ‘dialectical thinking’, which is to say a form of thinking that centred on the reciprocal and mutually determining relations between subject and object rather than on an understanding of their supposed opposition and the positing of mechanistic, causal relations between them. Indeed, it emphasized the central role played by negativity, which is to say the non-coincidence between subjectivity and objectivity, identity and non-identity (see Adorno, 1981; Marcuse, 1986). The second, as alluded to above, was by entering into a productive dialogue with currents that were to some extent exterior to the Marxian tradition, for example the thought of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as the schools of phenomenology and hermeneutics, ideas and approaches that presented significant challenges to certain guiding assumptions of historical materialism, at least in its more orthodox incarnations.
At its inception, Critical Theory understood itself in Kantian terms as engaging in a ‘rational critique of reason’ as well as of reductionist, economistic and dogmatic forms of Marxism (Horkheimer, 1975). It was a theory that was critical, but also a critique of existing theory. Both dimensions coalesce as in the form of criticism of what Horkheimer (1974) called ‘instrumental’ or ‘subjective’ reason or a form of reason confined to the determination or calculation of the most efficient means to the achievement of goods or ends that, themselves, could never appear before the bar of reason but, rather, were simply a matter of an irreducible subjective preference or decision. In the realm of moral theory this was referred to as emotivism. A major challenge of Critical Theory, especially in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1991), was to identify a form of communicative as opposed to strategic and instrumental rationality that would be able to serve to adjudicate between certain ends and outcomes in the form of an ethics of discourse (Habermas, 1992). The subjective form of reason becomes dominant with the eclipse of a form of ‘objective reason’ that embodies a claim to conceptualize the totality of mediations, historically understood – on the basis of a dynamic account of ‘becoming’ rather than a static naturalistic account of ‘being’.
Crises of reason and experience were diagnosed in the early work of Erich Fromm (1994) and Max Horkheimer (1975, 47–128), through the lenses of psychoanalysis and sociology, respectively, and attributed to the profound transformations in existing forms of authority, familial structures and processes of socialization. Parallel to this was the critique of reason that had become reduced to pure means or the relation of technological form to the social totality. Walter Benjamin (2002b, 144) makes clear this connection between technological form and the crisis of experience in an arresting passage from his essay on Nikolai Leskov: ‘For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’. It is this second stream – the crisis of experience – that will be the focus of this chapter.
The roots of such a critique of the crisis of experience, as previously alluded to, can be located in a wider critique of the positivistic and mechanistic reading of Marx in the Second Socialist International (1890–1914) that was geared to understanding with nothing short of scientific precision the so-called ‘objective laws’ of capitalist society (Joll, 2015). This reading of Marx – what Russell Jacoby (1971, 1975) called ‘automatic Marxism’ – held that the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society was that between the ‘productive forces’, on the one hand, which were relentlessly innovative, future-oriented and, ultimately, therefore promised human emancipation, and the relations of production based on private property which, after the transformation of the feudal order, were increasingly static, on the other. The locus classicus for this is the Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels suggest that the contradiction comes about through the necessarily antagonistic relation between capital and concrete labour within the space of the industrial factory, where the productive forces bring workers together in ever larger numbers in increasing opposition to the bourgeoisie in the context of the increasing immiseration of the population and what Marx would later diagnose in Capital as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Written on the eve of the cataclysmic, if ultimately unsuccessful, revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels spend rather more time praising the historical accomplishments of the bourgeoisie than anticipating the transformative praxis of the proletariat. In particular, Marx and Engels emphasize the great advances in transportation and communications technologies that would enable the proletariat to shed its allegiance to particular local or even national identities and that would be, instead, like the First Working Man’s International – consisting mainly of German and Polish émigrés – for which they wrote the Manifesto, truly internationalist if not explicitly cosmopolitan in outlook. Indeed, at the end of the Manifesto, the authors, with some prescience, note the advent of ‘world literature’. It came as little surprise, then, in the sesquicentennial of the publication of this epochal text in 1998, that the house organs of global capital such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times praised the text as foreseeing the advent of neo-liberal globalization while, of course, ignoring Marx and Engel’s prediction that the bourgeois order would be transitory, giving rise to its communist successor. Marx and Engels held that the dynamic, even explosive, nature of technological forces would create the conditions in which the proletariat – having become the majority of society – would be able to ‘expropriate the expropriators’.
Revolutionary transformation in Europe, alas, did not to come to pass. In fact, not only did the proletariat fail, during the supposedly ‘objectively revolutionary conjuncture’ of the 1930s after the Stock Market crash, to seriously vie for social power, it was, to the contrary, largely won over to the side of fascism only to see its autonomous institutions – for example political parties, trades unions and cultural institutions – decimated and incorporated by the party/state apparatus. An important prelude to the incorporation of the working class could already be seen, in retrospect, with the German Social Democratic Party’s ignominious vote for ‘war credits’ in the Reichstag in 1914 and the subsequent implosion of the Second Socialist International due to a resurgence of nationalism that was only apparently superseded by proletarian internationalism. Indeed, fascism, in some analyses (Postone, 1986, Bonefeld, 2016), was itself a corrupted and displaced form of anti-capitalism, a ‘socialism of fools’, in words often attributed to August Bebel but most likely to have issued from Ferdinand Kronawetter, insofar as it identified and separated the abstract form of capital, financial capitalism, for capitalism as a whole. In other words, the narrower dynamics of an abstract logic of finance capital were mistaken metonymically for the totality of capital as a whole for which the Jews were taken as personifying in concrete form.
In any case, the rise of fascism became cause for a fundamental rethinking of Marx and Engels’ conception of the socially innovative nature of technological forms insofar as it draws attention to the way in which dominant strains of Marxism tended to emphasize concrete over the problem of abstract labour and articulate a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the former. In other words, the rise of fascism occasioned a rethinking of Marxian categories which continues today in the so-called ‘new reading’ of Marx (see Heinrich, 2012). According to one such reading, based on a reconstruction of the argument of the Grundrisse (1993), Marx’s Critical Theory must not be simply understood as a critique from the standpoint of labour, entailing a more equitable or just distribution of wealth in the form of value, but rather as the critique of abstract labour as the predominant form of social mediation (Postone, 1993). In the first, there is simply a more just distribution of wealth in the form of value, while in the second, the aim is the abolition of the law of value tout court. In other words, it wasn’t simply the objective reality of capitalist society that constituted the conditions of unfreedom but the very reified categories that capitalism itself produced qua ‘real abstractions’.
The historical rise of National Socialism that showed the extent to which what was regarded by the Marxist tradition as the emancipatory implications of technology – emancipatory insofar as it enabled humanity to increasingly master and control a once overwhelming, threatening but now tamed and domesticated power of external nature – could be turned in the direction of deepening the hold of existing forms of social domination. In contrast to traditional, Romantic or Burkean forms of conservatism, which ultimately drew upon an Aristotelian understanding of a hierarchy of goods established within a traditional organic political community within which reason was to be understood, German National Socialism represented a form of ‘reactionary modernism’ (Herf, 1986) that sought expressly to employ the most advanced technological forms in economy and, most importantly, the state, to annul the universalistic ideals that had been actualized, from the standpoint of the Marxian tradition, in a one-sided and incomplete way, during the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Nazism wasn’t simply anti-Enlightenment but precisely embodied the dialectic or self-undermining of Enlightenment – the ‘self-devaluation’ of the Enlightenment’s highest, which is to say, universalist, values. While such an actualization was one-sided and incomplete insofar as it liberated, as Marx showed in his early writings, man only as citoyen but emphatically not as homo economicus, it nonetheless laid the groundwork for the basis of a determinate negation via the proletarian revolution that would represent the genuine ‘realization of philosophy’. And, indeed, as previously suggested, the productive forces would play a key role in such a determinate negation of the bourgeois order. In other words, the abstract, formal achievement of ‘free and equal exchange’, concealing a hidden form of domination of the owner of labour power by the owner of money, nevertheless made possible the concrete actualization of genuinely ‘free and equal’ relations (Adorno, 1981: 147) that it had promised. In contrast, using the most advanced technological means, the Nazis sought to obliterate the radical political legacy of the historical Enlightenment.1 An important sphere of the deployment of such technology was mass communications such as radio, on which the Füehrer’s masterfully manipulative oratory was broadcast to the masses, but also film, in particular that of Leni Riefenstahl, in the form of an ‘aestheticized politics’. The Communist left sought to confront such an aestheticized politics – the spectacle of war and violence – by politicizing art (Benjamin, 2002a) through a deployment of the anti-auratic media of cinema and photography in ways that pushed, through an alienation effect [Verfremdungseffekt] beyond passive spectatorship under conditions of aesthetic illusion, or ‘Schein’, directly into political action. We shall return to this problem of an aestheticized politics below.
The starting point of any account of the relation between totality and technological form is Marx’s (1992) seminal discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital Volume I. It will then turn to Max Weber’s influential account of rationalization and disenchantment, before showing how Georg Lukács’ systematic account of “reification” (1972a) in History and Class Consciousness represents a synthesis of both accounts.
Lukács’ account of reification helps us to understand the manner in which technological form fundamentally occludes the social totality of which it is a ‘moment’, or what has been understood as the problem of what Fredric Jameson (1988) calls ‘cognitive mapping’ – the difficulty, if not impossibility, of representing or imagining the totality of social relations and therefore the lines of social and political conflict in late capitalism whose relations of production are increasingly globally dispersed through many discrete yet closely inter-connected nodes and sites. Technological forms become ever more prominent with the deepening of generalized commodity production and the application of advanced scientific techniques to the labour process, which. This deepens reification insofar as the social field becomes increasingly understood not as comprised of social relationships but as anonymous ‘objective’ processes and is therefore converted into merely technical problems to be mastered or solved. This opposition could be said to lie at the heart of the current discussion of global climate change and the prospective solutions to it. Are these solutions to be understood in terms of more advanced forms of, for example, carbon capture techniques that leave in place social relations geared to an infinite, unfettered accumulation, or do they entail a fundamental transformation of human social relations, the species’ relation with external nature and to our relation to own libidinal impulses or desires? Would such transformed, that is to say democratized, relations, at the same time, lead to changes in the actual technical design of objects and their relation to the natural world? In other words, are purely technical solutions to ecological crises possible without directly addressing what Marx calls the ‘metabolic rift’ between humanity and nature? (Marx, 1981: 949; Bellamy-Foster et al., 2011)?
Critical Theory, broadly understood, can be said to manifest at least three distinct responses to Lukács’ diagnosis of this contradictory relation of technological form, on the one side, and social totality, on the other: (1) Walter Benjamin’s influential account, already alluded to above, of post-auratic art, which suggests the manner in which technology can successfully confront the crisis of experience by engendering new artistic forms that can articulate a critical perspective on social relations, revealing what he calls an ‘optical unconscious’; (2) Theodor W. Adorno’s antithetical defense of aesthetic autonomy, specifically in terms of the accelerated development of the ‘aesthetic forces of production’, for example in the work of figures such as Beckett and Schönberg, that enable them to register the ‘truth content’ of natural history and point beyond the pure immanence of late capitalism in which virtually all other forces of opposition have been transformed into the means by which the system, or what he calls the ‘total context of delusion’, is reproduced; finally, (3) the debate between Herbert Marcuse’s phenomenological account of technology as a form of ‘world disclosure’, subsequently elaborated by Andrew Feenberg into the theory of democratizing technical design (2002), and Habermas’ critique of ‘functionalist reason’. In what follows, we will focus on the third account of the relation between totality and technological form.
Marx shows the manner in which generalized commodity production under capitalism (M-C-M,’ as opposed to the C-M-C of pre-capitalist formations) already hints at a cognitive crisis. The starting point, namely, Marx’s account of ‘commodity fetishism’, cannot be overestimated in terms of its importance for understanding the relation between technological form and social totality. The logic of the commodity, an object that is at one concrete and abstract, that embodies both use value and exchange value, functions in such a way that the commodity qua fetish becomes both separated from and also obscures the totality of mediations – social relations of production – that constitutes it. The phenomenon of commodity fetishism presents the social world in such a way that relations between human agents appear as the relations between things, and relations between things appear as the relation between agents. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism returns to and develops his early critique of alienation that takes the criticism of religion as its primary model. It should be said that, in Hegel, this critique of alienation anticipates, in its treatment of the Kantian Understanding or Verstand and the underlying culture of diremption that it expresses (see Hegel, 1978; Pinkard, 2011), the deep tension between technological reason and an account of reason [Vernunft] that is up to the task of grasping the whole.
The alienation of the human essence in religion, as per Feuerbach’s ‘transformative critique’, has its origins, fundamentally, not simply in the human suffering which gives rise to it, as Marx suggests in his early critique of Hegel, but in the mystified realm of alienated production relations constitutive of capitalist society. Such alienation results from the fundamental separation of the worker from the productivity of his labour power. In the same way that the idea of God represents the alienated projection of fundamental human spiritual powers, so, too, do the products of human labour power take on a life of their own independent of it. The worker therefore creates a world that confronts her in the form of an ‘alien power’ and that possesses a lawfulness that is inherently heteronomous or determined outside of her and beyond her control. Such a heteronomous condition constitutes a particularly vicious circle: the more wealth the worker produces the poorer he becomes; the more powerful capital becomes, the more powerless the worker.
Capitalist society as a totality of social relations and productive forces is occluded by the commodity form, or what Sohn-Rethel (1977) describes as a ‘real abstraction’. That is to say, it is not an abstraction qua ‘idea’ posited by a philosophical concept or a sociological theory but an actual phenomenon induced by social relations themselves. The commodity as the embodiment of abstract, measurable labour time, and is ‘alienated’ from the direct producers, that is, goes its own way independent of their will. So, it conceals from view the fact that it is itself a product of social relations and is, in effect, therefore a form of ‘socially necessary illusion’ under capitalist production relations. Such an illusion lies at the heart of the self-presentation of capitalist social relations as a ‘natural’ order. The commodity form precludes, therefore, an immediate grasp of capitalism as a set of determinate social relations but rather presents the latter in the form of the simple appearance of what Marx calls ‘an immense collection of commodities’. Exactly one hundred years after the publication of Capital in 1967, Guy Debord (1992) elaborated this into a theory of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’. The spectacle transforms the active, laboring subject into a passive spectator who beholds the products of his own sensuous activity from a distance.
Commodity fetishism is the point of departure for Georg Lukács’ (1972a) theory of reification. Marx held that the inverted relation of humans and things could be demystified, dialectically, within a larger account of the unfolding of the mediations or relations constitutive of the social whole, that is, the realms of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, which is precisely what he sought to provide in the three volumes of Capital. It is for this reason that, as Lenin argued (Lenin, 1976), it was first necessary to grasp the mediations of Hegel’s Logic in order to properly understand Marx’s argument in Capital. In his essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, Lukács takes up the problem of inversion of the relation between human beings and things that Marx understands as the immediate self-presentation of capitalist social relations and elaborates the theory of ‘Reification’ (literally ‘thingification’) with the help of Max Weber’s account of disenchantment and rationalization.
Weber’s account of rationalization shows the way in which the conception of nature undergoes a fundamental transformation through the process by which it is reduced to mechanical causal relations and could, therefore, no longer be understood as inherently meaningful. Modern thought can be understood in terms of a break with a teleological Aristotelian ontology that saw nature as embodying purposes. A decisive step was of course the Copernican-Galilean revolution in the conception of the universe via the invention of the telescope, which also marked the emergence of the modern empirical-scientific world-view (Husserl, 1970). Rationalization can be understood as the reduction of the complex, manifold understanding of causality in ancient philosophy to a single form of causality – efficient causality – mechanically understood.
Disenchantment means that there are neither inherent meanings nor indeed any mysterious forces embodied in nature. Nature in its totality can, in principle, be explained by way of science and manipulated and controlled by purposive reason. In other words, we can no longer understand nature as embodying final causes or purposes. As Weber (1958: 155) puts it, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ entails that ‘[p]recisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations’. What results from this is a decentring of a single and hierarchical account of the good life and a re-emergence of conflicts between what Weber calls ‘warring gods and demons’ within increasingly differentiated, complex, pluralistic capitalist societies, which culminates in the Westphalian system of nation-states. In the ‘dark writers of the bourgeoisie’, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, de Sade and Nietzsche (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 92), final causes or ends are shown to be no longer determinable by a reason reduced to pure instrumentality.
With the decentring of a totalizing account of the good, there is a corresponding transformation of authority. The charismatic authority upon which many religious world-views, particularly those of the Abrahamic religions, was based, as well as the traditional authority of agrarian societies, is increasingly replaced by what Weber calls ‘legal-rational authority’. While charismatic authority is grounded in insight into the divine, and the traditional form is ‘the authority of the eternal yesterday’, legal-rational authority derives from the adequacy of the procedure by which a given social norm is generated or determined. In other words, the binding character of the norm has to do with the degree to which a legitimate procedure is followed. Crucially, here rationality [Zweckrationalität] is by definition restricted from judging the outcome of content of the procedure and concerns itself with only the adequacy of the form of the procedure itself.
The bureaucracy of the modern state is founded precisely on this form of rationality, centring exclusively on calculability and technical efficiency in attaining its ends, but this also makes it constitutively unable to reflect on the validity of those ends themselves. The apparent inability of rationality to attend to outcomes is what gives rise to the possibility of the genocidal events of the twentieth century, in particular the Nazi Holocaust, which constitutes the uniquely ‘banal’ form of modern evil (Arendt, 2006). This procedural conception of rationality, which also governs science, suggests the neutrality of technology insofar as it can serve either good or evil ends. As we shall see, however, in Marcuse’s phenomenologically inspired critique of technology, technology cannot be thought of exclusively as technological but is constitutive of practices of ‘world disclosure’.
It is important to bear in mind Weber’s account of purposive rationality as articulated in the context of his account of the role of religious ideas or spirit of capitalism in the emergence and consolidation of capitalist social relations in Western Europe. Challenging the orthodox Marxian view (Anderson, 2013) that the rise of capitalism could be understood to result from objective contradictions intrinsic to the previous, feudal order, for example, in the growing antagonism between the town-dwelling burghers (the incipient bourgeoisie), on the one hand, and the aristocracy and Absolutist state, on the other, Weber argued that the subjective transformation of the world-view of the Puritan created a subjective disposition uniquely suited to capital accumulation. Following Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1989), Weber (2001) called this unique disposition ‘inner-worldly asceticism’. By this, Weber meant that the bourgeois Puritan’s asceticism entailed activity outside of the monastic order (in the world) but, like the monastic order, it entailed self-abnegation and the deferral of gratification in the service of what were initially higher, spiritual ends. Rather than immediately consuming the surplus that his enterprise had generated (by exploiting the labour of others), according to his methodical ‘rational life practice’, he reinvested it back into the enterprise itself. While, given the doctrine of predestination, no amount of worldly success could guarantee ‘election’, inner-worldly success could be, nevertheless, read or interpreted as a sign of divine grace.
As processes of rationalization and disenchantment deepened, however, and produced an increasingly secular world, religious world-views began to lose their hold. The accumulation of capital, which was initially a means, once detached from any reference to a higher purpose or end, becomes an end in itself. In other words, Weber puts his finger on the manner in which technical means becomes an end-in-itself. In a logic of what Nietzsche (1968: 9) called ‘nihilism’, that the ‘highest values devalue themselves’, Christian faith proves itself unable to withstand the very transformations inaugurated by the Reformation itself. Rationality, which had previously been understood in terms of the realization of purposes, including, of course, the highest good, understood in either Aristotelian or Christian terms, now becomes reduced to a pure means, instrument or tool (Taylor, 1992) stripped of any possible relation to transcendence. In other words, rationality becomes a mere technique by which capital accumulation is pursued or bureaucratic state power administered without being indexed to a conception of the ‘good life’ lying beyond it. The processes of rationalization and disenchantment culminate, therefore, in a seemingly inescapable fate, an ‘iron cage’.
In the key chapter of History and Class Consciousness, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ (Lukács, 1972), written in the wake of the failures of the central European Revolutions, Lukács presents a synthesis of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism and Weber’s theory of rationalization in his concept of ‘reification’, or the process by which what is living, vital and dynamic becomes hollowed out and static, seemingly governed by law-like regularities that mirror laws governing nature. In other words, reification is a form of ‘second nature’ that resembles first nature. Marx had sought to show the manner in which the commodity was a moment in the unfolding of the mediations of the capitalist mode of production as a whole. Indeed, as already suggested, the contradiction between the relations and forces of production would make possible the transformation of the class-in-itself to the class in-and-for-itself and enable the proletariat to challenge the power of the bourgeoisie.
In contrast, Lukács indicates the manner in which the increasing specialization within the division of labour and rationalization of the labour process through the integration of technical knowledge (for example Taylor’s principles of ‘scientific management’ that came to play such a key role within the post-War Fordism) further alienated and isolated individual workers from one another, themselves and the labour process as a whole. In other words, the fact that abstract labour was the given form of social mediation constituted the social world as a kind of ‘second nature’ (Lukács, 1974) that seemed, as a result, impervious to human will and action; quality was replaced by quantity. Reification gave rise to a pervasive passivity, or what he called a ‘contemplative attitude’ (1972b: 83–222), which was a regression insofar as it inverted the modern hierarchy in the relation between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa in which the former prevailed over the latter. Again, it was only a short step for Guy Debord (2002) to elaborate Lukács’ insights into a theory of the spectacle in post-war Europe (Gandesha and Hartle, 2017). To emphasize the difference with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, once more, it was precisely because of the pervasiveness of reification in all of its manifold forms that it became clear that it was now no longer possible for workers in the space of industrial production to directly grasp the totality of capital that confronted them collectively and to mount a challenge to this, what amounted to their own ‘alien powers’.
The phenomenon of reification was not confined to the sphere of production relations but came to penetrate even the most intimate or refined cultural sphere, including the assumptions of philosophy itself. It culminates in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, in particular in his conception of the Understanding [Verstand], in which various oppositions are established, between ought and is, freedom and necessity, etc. within differentiated spheres of value: science, morality and art. Indeed, for Lukács, Kant’s opposition of the world as appearance and as the ‘thing-in-itself’ crystallized the contemplative attitude and represented the very apotheosis, at the level of thought, of the process of reification that derived from and ‘expressed’ (Althusser, 2006) the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalist social relations. It is in the subsequent history of German idealism, in Hegel’s Absolute Idealism in particular, that we find the best strictly philosophical solution to this problem.
As previously suggested, Critical Theory strives to come to terms with the fact that, rather than playing an unequivocally emancipatory role, technology is at best ambivalent. Marcuse addresses such ambivalence through a critique of Max Weber, whose concept of rationalization, as we have seen, plays such a key role in Lukács’ influential account of reification. Far from being value-neutral, as Weber maintained, Marcuse argues that the very abstractness of technology conceals a substantive complicity with domination, much in the same way the abstract ‘equal’ exchange between the ‘owner of money’ and the ‘owner of labour power’ conceals what is, at bottom, a structurally unequal, exploitative relationship. Such a critique of Weber is significant because it highlights Marcuse’s own ambivalent relationship to technology, it contrasts with Habermas’ own critique of the one-sided nature of Weber’s account of rationalization, and it enables us to identify the stakes in the respective accounts of technology in Marcuse and Habermas.
Marcuse challenges Weber’s claim to value-neutrality by situating him within the context of Wilhelmine Germany and suggests that, in its very insistence of value-neutrality, Weber’s concept of rationality reveals its inherent political disposition. Genuine value-neutrality is premised upon self-reflection, on the ‘power of resisting interference’ (Marcuse, 1965). Marcuse’s point here is that value-neutrality can only be thought of as a regulative ideal, a moment of which must be a reflection on the way in which technology embodies value. In the absence of such self-reflection, putatively value-neutral rationality becomes vulnerable to heteronomous determinations or determinations from the outside. Given the nature of formal rationality, such determinations cannot, by definition, be adjudicated in the court of reason. Moreover, Marcuse identifies three salient elements of Weber’s account of reason: the progressive mathematization of experience, here the natural sciences, in particular physics, become the model for the social sciences as in Hobbes’ political theory (2008) as suggested above; the insistence on the necessity of rational experiment and proofs in the organization of both science and the conduct of life; and the genesis and solidification of a technocracy. It is indeed in the transition from theoretical to practical reason that the apparently neutral conception of formal rationality reveals itself to be circumscribed by the conditions of its own historical emergence. The parallels with classical political economy are clear. Weber’s account of rationality, in Marcuse’s view, is unequivocally marked by its own historicity, which is to say, the conception presupposes a form of abstract labour ‘freed’ from the means of production and its increased control by private firms. Weber’s supposedly ‘neutral’ conception of rationality, in other words, presupposes liberal capitalism. With the eclipse of this social order, what becomes increasingly clear is the inescapably irrational nature of technical reason. The ‘inner-worldly asceticism’ which, as we have already seen, drove the rational life-conduct of the emergent bourgeoisie, now becomes objectively irrational in a transformed capitalism ever more dependent upon solving its inherent contradictions by the mass production and consumption of commodities.
Here Marcuse seeks to provide an answer to the question that we posed earlier: how do the productive forces, whose ‘liberation’ played such a decisive role in the undermining of the old order, now contribute to the freezing of social relations in an eternalized present? Marcuse argues that, in his understanding of industrialization as a logic of the ‘iron cage’, Weber inadvertently demonstrates the manner in which formal rationality is substantively determined. Weber, according to Marcuse, ‘generalizes the blindness of society that reproduces itself behind the back [sic] of the individuals, of a society in which the law of domination appears as an objective, technological law’ (1965). Weber’s concept of rationalization shows how, in contrast to previous modes of production in which political and economic domination were fused, the nature of domination under capitalism seems increasingly impersonal, abstract and necessary, taking on, therefore, a fateful character. Recognition, however, that this fate has in fact become a fate, that is to say, a historical rather than a natural phenomenon, implies the possibility of its transcendence or determinate negation. Any scientific analysis that fails to commit itself to such a negation places itself in service of ‘actually existing’ domination.
If Marcuse’s two-fold critique of Weber is to hit home, if the identification of the limits of Weber’s account of rationality is, as Hegel had shown in his critique of Kant, a transcendence of those limits, then it was incumbent on Marcuse to provide an alternative to the culmination of the unfolding of rationalization in a stultifying and nihilistic ‘iron cage’. Only through such an alternative would the triumph and domination of formal rationality not appear as the singular fate of modern societies. Marcuse locates such a possibility, anticipating his later account of the possibility of a new reality principle in the idea of non-alienated labour. Lukács’ response to Weber entails an understanding of the proletariat as the collective subject that grasps its own objective reality in the self-consciousness of the historical process, which nonetheless makes the error of conflating ‘objectification’ and ‘alienation’. Marcuse, in contrast, with the benefit of having read Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, offers an existential and ontological interpretation of labour as the foundation of historical materialism.
We can now see the clear outlines of Marcuse’s critique of the reified nature of technological reason. Marcuse provides an account of how the insights of Husserl’s diagnosis of the crisis of the European sciences can be fleshed out by historical materialism. What the Epoché reveals isn’t the pure structure of intentionality – the consciousness always already directed towards an object – but rather the objectivity of the object is, in the final instance, the objectification of an embodied form of sensuous subjectivity. Through practical reason, the reified structures of the lifeworld are dynamized into actuality and cease standing over and against human beings as a heteronomous order.
What becomes clear in Marcuse’s encounter with Weber is an apparent ambivalence in Marcuse’s approach to technology that stems from the two sources of his critique: historical materialism and phenomenology. In other words, Marcuse wants both to appropriate the concept of the lifeworld understood as the symbolic or meaningful structures into which individuals are always already ‘thrown’ and offer the possibility of their fundamental transformation via ‘historical and social labour’. Marcuse argues that the ideological nature of technology does not just come from the outside – that is, in the specific ends to which it is put – but rather constitutes its innermost essence. The ambivalence is thus one between technology as a project, on the one hand, that discloses human beings and things within the ‘world’ in such a way as to make them available for the apparatus of industrial capitalism and technology understood as technics, or neutral instrumentality fettered only by society’s production relations, on the other. Such an ambivalence can be said to run throughout Marcuse’s post-war writings, in particular Eros and Civilization (1974) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). It is evident also in his important essay from 1941 ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ (1990).
Technology and technics converge in Marcuse’s account of the way in which the automobile embodies the new ‘matter-of-factness’ of technological reason. While in the past such ‘matter-of-factness’ played a progressive role in countering metaphysical world-views, as in the modern physics and the rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, today it contributes to reproducing the existing order (see also Horkheimer, 1975: 232). This gets to the heart of Marcuse’s answer as to why, after a period of rationalization that contributes to the overthrow of the ancien régime, technological reason plays a crucial role not in pushing beyond the capitalist order – as some contemporary ‘Accelerationists’ (see Mackay and Avanessian, 2014) think it still possesses the capacity to do – but rather in buttressing and justifying this order. This is the dialectic, in other words, whereby the normative ideals of the bourgeois society, in particular the idea of reason as the actualization of human autonomy in opposition to external authorities, are reversed. Technological reason forms the basis of one-dimensional society insofar as it supplants critical, which is to say, negative reason, which seeks to liberate the untapped potential that lies dormant in human beings and in external nature alike.
In contrast to his later position, however, Marcuse retains the orthodox Marxian view of the productive forces as inherently dynamic and emancipatory. If the proletariat, and with it the possibility of an immanent critique of political economy, is at the point of being fully incorporated within the dominant form of technology of the late capitalist order, technics or the productive forces can still be understood as embodying contradictory tendencies that result from its inherently innovative logic. As such, technics retains the ability, for example, to ‘democratize’ functions and, in the process, reveal the existing production relations as arbitrary and obsolete. How this is actually to come about is not clearly specified. Nonetheless, what is crucial is Marcuse’s attempt to keep open the relation between technology and technics. Let us now turn to Habermas, who makes such ambivalence central to his response to Marcuse, and his important alternative reading of Weber, which plays such a crucial role in his attempt to work out his account of communicative reason.
Taking as his point of departure Hannah Arendt’s (1958) differentiation within the vita activa of labour, work and action, Habermas distinguishes in his reading of Marx between labour and interaction: action oriented towards mastery and control and action oriented to mutual understanding. Such a differentiation enables Habermas to provide, like Lukács and Marcuse before him, a critique of Weber’s account of rationalization. While showing that the ‘inner-worldly asceticism’ of the Puritan was central to the spread of what he calls ‘cognitive-instrumental’ rationality (‘formal’ as opposed to ‘substantive’ rationality), Weber under-plays the transposition of the rationalization of world-views into ‘societal’ rationalization. With the process of secularization that comes in the wake of the process of rationalization, Habermas comes to rethink this process in his notion of ‘post-secularity’ (2005), fundamental questions of the ‘true’, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’ become differentiated and supplant, as distinct and irreconcilable spheres of value, the metaphysical systems in which they were bound together. While Weber, in his Nietzschean diagnosis of nihilism as the unending war between contending ‘gods and demons’, drew the pessimistic conclusion that reason had forever lost its unity, universality and capacity to grasp the whole, Habermas elaborates on the vague conception of formal rationality inherent in Weber. The fragmented dynamic of cultural rationalization, according to Habermas, is unified by a communicative form of rationality, guided by the regulative ideal of undistorted communication or mutual understanding. The latter takes the form of the argumentative redemption of claims to validity: ‘The unity of rationality in the multiplicity of value spheres rationalized according to their inner logics is secured precisely at the formal level of the argumentative redemption of validity claims’ (Habermas, 1991: 249). Habermas therefore attempts to show that communicative reason mediates the universal structure of action oriented towards understanding and the particular claims made within each quasi-autonomous sphere of value.
In contrast with Marcuse’s critique the shortcomings of Weber’s account of modernity lie in the refusal to recognize that the process of rationalization is, itself, accompanied by a simultaneous differentiation of value spheres no longer rooted in either traditional or charismatic forms of authority, and the corresponding possibility of a ‘rationalization’ of the lifeworld grounded in the argumentative procedure of the giving and taking of reasons. Marcuse’s and Habermas’ critiques of Weber’s account of rationalization are inverse images of each other. While Marcuse argues for an extension of the concept of labour as the cultural mediation of subject and object, Habermas argues for its foreshortening in an account of the rationalization of the symbolically mediated interaction of the lifeworld that is attendant upon the spread of formal rationality.
Habermas therefore argues that Marcuse’s ambivalence towards technology, discussed above, results from the collapse of ‘work and ‘interaction’. Work is defined as ‘purposive-rational action’, which is, itself, further differentiated into instrumental action, rational choice (strategic action) or some combination thereof. Purposive action is action geared to realizing goals defined under given conditions guided by criteria for the effective control of reality (instrumental action) or the correct evaluation of possible alternative choices (strategic action). Interaction, as distinguished from work, is defined as communicative or symbolic action and ‘is governed by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations about behavior and which must be understood and recognized by at least two acting subjects’ (1970: 92).
According to Habermas, the central problem with Marcuse’s critique of technology lies in its misguided attempt to cash out a philosophical critique of technological reason in sociological terms. As we have already seen, Marcuse’s critique of Weber lies in what he takes to be the latter’s suspect conflation of reason and rationalization which, for the former, is inextricable from domination. It is necessary, in Habermas’ view, to keep the philosophical and sociological dimensions of his critique separate and distinct. The former derives, as it does for the first generation of Critical Theorists as a whole, from what Habermas regards as the problematic horizon of what he calls the ‘secret hope of the redemption of a fallen nature, of restoring ‘nature’s voice’. This would entail, then, ‘a different scientific methodology in general … The viewpoint of possible technical control would be replaced by one of preserving, fostering, and releasing the potentialities of nature’ (1970: 86). Because Marcuse articulates his philosophical critique from within the antiquated confines of the metaphysics of the philosophy of consciousness, his critique of technology becomes obsolete. If technology could be viewed phenomenologically as a ‘project’ at all, it could only be as a ‘generic’ one, which has the human species as a whole as its subject, ‘not one that could be historically surpassed’ (1970: 87). Habermas accuses Marcuse of the category error of attempting to apply concepts that are applicable only to inter-subjective relations to relations between subject and object.
Habermas is, nonetheless, more sympathetic to Marcuse’s sociological critique of technology as the dominant ideology within late capitalism. He agrees with Marcuse’s view that rather than exploding capitalist social relations from within, technology legitimizes this order. Technological reason, in Habermas’ view, becomes the means by which the ‘productive forces … continually threaten the institutional framework and at the same time set the standard of legitimation for the production relations that restrict the potential’ (1970: 89, emphasis in original). This is an early version of Habermas’ ‘colonization’ thesis articulated in the second volume of the Theory of Communicative Action, according to which the fundamental pathology of late capitalist societies lies in the tendency of the steering mechanisms of the social subsystems of economy and state, namely money and power, to ‘colonize’ the symbolically mediated sphere of the lifeworld. So, rather than rejecting Marcuse’s critique of technology tout court, Habermas seeks to set it on firmer, post-metaphysical footing. This is accomplished by arguing that the ideological nature of technology (and science) inheres not in its orientation towards controlling nature, but rather in the transgression of the boundary of its own sphere of value. Because its legitimate orientation consists of controlling nature, technological or cognitive-instrumental rationality becomes ideological when it overflows or exceeds the sphere of subject–object relations or the sphere of work and spills into that of inter-subjective relations or that of ‘interaction’. This argument rests upon a theoretical edifice that becomes clearer in Habermas’ subsequent work, central to which is an understanding of language that privileges validity over meaning.
Indeed, as alluded to above, Habermas’ account of language enables him to reconstruct the relationship between technological form and totality. This account of language is based on an appropriation of speech act theory, and rationality itself is understood in terms of a formal conception of argumentation. By shifting the perspective from the relation between subject and object to that between subject and subject or inter-subjectivity, Habermas grounds rationality in the ‘argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness and aesthetic harmony’ (1987: 314). The dirempted spheres of validity (science, morality, art) are unified not in an emphatic, metaphysical way as in Hegel’s conception of Absolute Spirit, or in Lukács’ conception of the identical subject-object of history, or in Marcuse’s early ontological understanding of labour but, rather, in terms of communicative action.
Habermas’ critique of Marcuse’s understanding of technology and, indeed, his re-construction of Critical Theory as a whole is based on the marginalization of a ‘world disclosive’ conception of language (Lafont, 2000; Kompridis, 2006). Such a marginalization becomes especially clear in Habermas’ engagement with Derrida, in which he draws a strong line between pragmatic or ‘problem-solving’ and disclosive conceptions of language (Habermas, 1987; Gandesha, 2006). In other words, with his emphasis on the argumentative redemption of claims to validity within the ‘objective’, ‘social’ and ‘subjective’ worlds, Habermas could be said to suspend the question of the meaningfulness of these worlds themselves. But what precisely is meant by ‘world disclosure’? The world disclosive conception of language (in a lineage stretching back to Wilhelm von Humboldt and Herder) emphasizes, as Gadamer puts it, that ‘Language is not simply one human possession among others in the world, rather, on it depends the fact that human beings have a world at all’ (cited in Bohman, 1996: 200). The concept of ‘world refers to the always already articulated, shared orientations and interpretations, independent of individuals who are socialized in it’ (Bohman, 1996: 200).
As Bernstein (1994: 210) has suggested, while Habermas claims that interpretation has a key role to play within his theory, he nonetheless privileges discourses of justification. Such a privileging has a tendency to rehabilitate the positivist position that tends to denigrate the rationality of logic of discovery by holding that only justificatory discourses are rational. Validity claims within the three spheres are modelled on that of scientific truth which itself, at least for Habermas, presupposes ‘nature as it is’. The marginalization of the disclosive conception of language places the emancipatory aspiration of modernity – its unique consciousness of time, its relentless impulsion to generate its own normativity out of itself, its need for a new beginning unencumbered by the past, etc. – in jeopardy. In his assessment of poststructural critiques of the discourse of modernity, Habermas juxtaposes in sharp outline his pragmatic conception of language with the disclosive conception that figures so prominently in the work of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida but whose provenance is clearly Heideggerian. Central to Habermas’ critique of the poststructural appropriation of Heidegger is that it is based upon the idea of the ‘ontological difference’: the happening of truth that discloses the world is a mysterious extra-mundane dispensation of Being, rather than the result of intra-mundane action and learning processes.
As previously suggested, Marcuse’s conception of technology (as opposed to technics), albeit without its fullest linguistic implications, is based on a notion of disclosure. If this aspect is emphasized, then it is possible to defend his account of technology from Habermas’ critique. By so doing it may also be possible to expose some of the weaknesses of the communicative paradigm.
It might be argued that the very strength of Habermas’ critique of the pre-eminence of the paradigm of production in Marcuse is at the same time its weakness. While Habermas might be correct to take issue with Marcuse’s attempt to ground his critique of technological reason in the paradigm of production, such a critique can perhaps be undertaken without necessarily accepting the premises of the paradigm of communication. As suggested above, the elements of the production paradigm, namely its emphasis on the centrality of labour as an ontological category, sit rather uncomfortably with the phenomenological dimension of Marcuse’s critique. The productivity of meaning and the productivity of labour power cannot be assimilated. Meanings accumulated and embedded in cultural traditions are not to be re-appropriated in an analogous way to the appropriation of accumulated, ‘dead labour’ by ‘living labour’. Habermas must privilege validity over meaning in order to complete the transition from the philosophy of consciousness to communicative reason.
In contrast, Marcuse can be defended if we read his critique of technology as anticipating the following insight: that in each of the three realms – science, morality and art – it is possible to discern the operations of a disclosive conception of language. This is what Adorno calls ‘constellation’ and what Wittgenstein calls ‘aspect seeing’. Far from subverting rationality (‘the acquisition and use of fallible language’), linguistic world disclosure, in fact, makes such rationality possible. Any theory that fails to elucidate the manner in which the world, itself, becomes possible ends up reifying the symbolic resources of the lifeworld and, therefore, short-circuits the possibility of its transformation. In contrast to Habermas, the merit of Marcuse’s critique of technology is to show the way in which validity and meaning exist in a relation of genuine tension.
While Habermas is correct to note the ambivalence in Marcuse’s approach to technology as both value-neutral and a specific historical ‘project’, such an approach isn’t so contradictory as it may prima facie appear. The key concept that undergirds Marcuse’s critique of technological reason is what he calls the ‘technological a priori which organizes modern science and technology. It is the culmination of the processes of rationalization and disenchantment that Marcuse outlines in his critique of Weber and appropriation of Husserl. As rationality comes to be defined in terms of objective laws of motion, values become purely subjective as opposed to indexed to a conception of objective reason. The effect of this is that, theoretically, the transformation of humanity and external nature is free from all limitations except, of course, from the ‘brute factuality of matter’, and become a ‘(hypothetical) system of instrumentalities’. The elaboration of such a system becomes more than simply the development of all forms of particular technical organization; rather, it is their precondition. ‘Proved in its effectiveness’, Marcuse (1965b: 152) argues, ‘this conception works as a priori – it predetermines experience, it projects the direction of the transformation of nature, it organizes the whole’.
Marcuse’s example is that of the automobile which, of course, gives its name to an entire ‘regime of accumulation’, namely: Fordism:
A man who travels by automobile to a distant place chooses his route from highway maps. Towns, lakes and mountains appear as obstacles to be bypassed. The countryside is shaped and organized by the highway. Numerous signs and posters tell the traveller what to do and think; they even request his attention to the beauties of nature and the hallmarks of history. Giant advertisements tell him to stop for the pause that refreshes. And all this is indeed for his benefit, safety and comfort; he receives what he wants. Business, technics, human needs and nature are welded together into one rational and expedient mechanism. He will fare best who follows its directions subordinating his spontaneity to the anonymous wisdom that ordered everything for him. (Marcuse, 1990: 143)
The automobile, the ‘rational and expedient mechanism into which is synthesized ‘business, technics, human needs and nature’, functions as the ‘technological a priori’. The very judgement that it is the most effective means of travelling from point A to point B structures in advance the visible and the invisible (what Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’). The automobile as technology materialized participates therefore in disclosing the world. Albert Borgman views the modern highway system, as well as symbolic logic and modern architecture, as exemplifying the essential features of technology. Like the other two forms of technological practice, the highway system qua ‘embodied calculus, is not just instrumental but paradigmatic’ (Borgman, 1978: 20). As a paradigm it shapes our vision of objectivity. Thus, like the vicious circle that Marcuse discerns in Husserl,
in technological practice formal features are discovered in the concrete phenomena of our world. Such discoveries lead to the construction of formal models that cover a certain domain of the concrete world. These models form a hierarchy from concrete and limited realizations at the bottom to more abstract and encompassing models in the higher reaches of the hierarchy. (Borgman, 1978: 20)
In the process, technological practice ‘delimit[s] in rigorous form the space of all possibilities of the domain that they cover’, the result of which is that the ‘world in its historical coherence and its actual and singular presence recedes’ (20). Or, as Marcuse (1990: 143) puts it, ‘The countryside is shaped and organized by the highway’.
Viewed now in light of the concept of ‘technological a priori’, the apparent contradiction between technics as neutral, and technology as value-laden, dissolves. The form functions at the level of what Marcuse calls technology, while technics constitute the productive forces that can promote either domination or liberation. Marcuse takes up the phenomenological understanding of technology as ‘nothing technological’ (Heidegger), that is, as a mode of ‘revealing beings’ without at the same time understanding world disclosure as existing beyond the pale of history. The technological disclosure of being happens through historically situated human decisions and practices. In fact, it is precisely the very productivity of technics that makes it possible to imagine the objective possibility of a radically different set of social arrangements. This does not mean that the appearance of such an imaginary is its realization. Rather, Marcuse provides us with the possibility of understanding the relation between technology and technics as the relationship between meaning and validity respectively. While technics can and must be understood in terms of the criterion of ‘success’ in achieving a given end, the sense or meaning of success itself would have to be understood in terms that lay beyond the narrow provenance of pure instrumental means or efficiency. Such a criterion would have to make reference to a wider set of assumptions, orientations and commitments that cannot ultimately be understood independently of the languages within which they are expressed. Success can be defined in terms of the furtherance of domination of human beings and external nature alike or it could be understood in terms of the thriving and flourishing of human and non-human life within a ‘pacified existence’.
What we have tried to show is that, from its origins in the mid 1920s, Critical Theory applied itself to the question of why, in the midst of a profound crisis of capitalism in the inter-war period, the outcome was counter-revolution rather than proletarian revolution. Committed to the idea that any compelling grasp of the physiognomy of this crisis must be premised on totality, Critical Theory disavowed a purely philosophical conception of it. Rather, it constituted an interdisciplinary research project geared, in part, to empirical analysis of the social-psychological and institutional nature of the crisis that questioned some of the key assumptions of traditional or ‘world-view’ (Heinrich, 2012) Marxism. In particular, it challenged the role such a form of Marxism assigned to the productive forces. Drawing upon Marx’s critique of the value form, Lukács’ important elaboration of this critique in the concept of ‘reification’ and Weber’s account of the rationalization of disenchantment, Critical Theorists, in particular Herbert Marcuse, sought to show the manner in which, far from constituting a neutral, abstract form of rationality that would burst asunder capitalist production relations from within, technology actually helped to consolidate rather than transform these relations. Technology, Marcuse argued, wasn’t simply an abstract instrumentality but rather constituted the principle perceptive structure – the ‘technological a priori’ – through which the world takes shape. It is for this reason that the aesthetic dimension comes to play a key role in the politics of Critical Theory.
1. This was perhaps most dramatically represented by Thomas Mann in his novel Dr. Faustus, in which the troubled yet brilliant composer, and representative of the most advanced artistic form, Leverkühn, threatens to ‘revoke’ Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its pièce de résistance ‘Ode to Joy’, a beautiful paean to the solidarity of a universal humanity proclaimed in Schiller’s song.
2. Much of what follows draws upon Gandesha (2004).
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