Technology and the Politics of Knowledge ed. by Andrew Feenberg, Alastair Hannay

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 809 Ortega is taken as representative ofwhat has been called humanities philosophy of technology, then these “new” meditations are not so much new in the sense ofbuilding on and continuing Ortega’s proj­ ect as they are new in seeking to break with it in order to establish a new beginning. Certainly it is the case that the style of these essays departs significantly from that of Ortega. The more immediate stimulus for these new meditations is, how­ ever, the work of Quintanilla, a philosopher of science whose Tecno­ logía: Un enfoquefilosófico (1990) was a major effort to build a bridge between humanities and engineering reflections on technology. It is also worth noting that Quintanilla and his colleagues are well ac­ quainted with Anglo-American analytic philosophical work, certainly much more so than English-language philosophers are of Spanishlanguage contributions to their fields. Were North American philos­ ophers of science and technology to wish to make an effort to over­ come this limitation, Broncano’s edited volume would be an espe­ cially good place to begin. Carl Mitcham Andoni Alonso Dr. Mitcham holds ajoint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of Philosophy ofTechnology in Spanish Speaking Countries (Boston: Kluwer, 1993). dr. alonso is a postdoctoral research fellow from the University of the Basque Country. Technology and the Politics of Knowledge. Edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. x+288; notes, index. $15.95 (paper). A central theme running through this volume in the Indiana se­ ries in the Philosophy ofTechnology is the recognition that technol­ ogy, like science, is not an autonomous world segregated from the larger society. As the editors declare in the preface, “The philosophy oftechnology is at a turning point. Not long ago the very label lacked seriousness. ... In recent years that has all changed. Environmen­ talism has undermined the old confidence in the objectivity ofscien­ tific-technical expertise. In a world of continuing war, prejudice, ill­ ness, hunger, and poverty we can no longer afford to be complacent about technology, and a superior disregard of this ever-expanding sphere of human life has now given way to broad-based concern” (p. ix). This, for the editors, is evidence of “the maturity that the field has attained” (p. ix). The first three essays (by Andrew Feenberg, Steven Vogel, and Robert Pippin) discuss the Frankfurt School, whose members in the Germany of the 1930s and, later, in exile in the United States, ques­ 810 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tioned the Enlightenment dichotomy of the rational and the irratio­ nal. They questioned the possibility of an exodus from an old world of particular traditions to a new world of universal law. Feenberg, Vogel, and Pippin see this focus on inevitable progress leading to a sense of irresponsibility about the society in which we live. If, for these essayists, we live in a world that we construct rather than dis­ cover, we should take responsibility for our current social patterns. For example, this means for Feenberg that democracy must be ex­ tended from politics to the realm of work. This concern runs through many of the essays: that political democracy is collapsing because it is not based on a democratic economy and technology in which workers participate in making fundamental decisions. Lang­ don Winner writes, for instance, “the political vacuum evident in the lack of citizen roles, citizen awareness, and citizen speech within liberal democratic society is greatly magnified within today’s tech­ nology-centered workplace” (p. 73). A number of the essays try to explain how the metaphor of two worlds, political and technological, came to dominate the modern imagination. Some of these involve discussions of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Jurgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse. Al­ though most of the essayists are trying to place technology within a social context, many of them continue to depend on a history of ideas which focuses on a canon of great male thinkers. In their es­ says, Donna Haraway and Helen Longino remind us of this implicit masculine prejudice. To a large...