Between Instrumentalism and Determinism: Western Marxism and Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology

Abstract

This paper relates Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology to contemporary work in Western Marxism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, perhaps the most conspicuous Marxian text of the twenty-first century, represents digitally networked communication within a positive, aggregative schema. Human and technology form hybrid units, which multiply within the many-to-many fabric of digital communication, forming singular yet connected political units. Against the aggregative form, critiques of technology and technological rationality by Jodi Dean and Christian Fuchs, drawn from Frankfurt School critical theory, intend to show that new media is a politically inoperative space, through which radical desires are co-opted and the socialist horizon foreclosed. The critical theory of technology moves in between aggregation and foreclosure. With its roots in a politically active Marxian dialectic, class struggle regains its ability to redirect technological change, foreclosed in critical theory from Dean and Fuchs.