Towards reconciliation or mediated non-identity? Feenberg’s aesthetic critique of technology

Introduction: Technology in context

This article focuses on one part of Andrew Feenberg’s critical conception of the politics of technology design: his notion of aesthetic critique. Feenberg draws on the insights of social constructionism to argue that the design of technologies is always a more contentious, disputed process than we tend to think. Constructionism succeeded in showing that technologies do not impact upon society from outside, forcing changes and adaptations to accommodate them and the improvements they bring. Rather, artifacts are socially shaped ‘all the way down’ and they come heavily inscribed with symbolic meanings. Feenberg has advanced our understanding of this by showing how these social inscriptions not only construct technology in line with the conceptions of specific social groups but also, at the same time, tie artifacts into wider social networks. Enlarging the picture in this way enables us to see that as well as being a profoundly relational process, technology design is also socially transformative. In other words, technology creation is not bracketed off from other social practices but intimately related to them.

In this way, Feenberg has drawn attention to the politics of technology design not by reducing the process to more profound layers of the social formation (which was, perhaps, the old Marxist way of achieving the same thing) but by demonstrating the connection between technology and social power as this is manifest in what he calls the ‘technical code’. In other words, we recognize the presence of an object in our environment as technology precisely because it bears certain significations that speak of (and to) wider social relations: it is efficient; it is an enhancement to what we did previously; it represents the future, and so on. These things are inscribed in the artifact along with more specific instructions, concerning which tasks it performs, on its user interface. These inscriptions enable us to recognize it as technology and in so doing they position it in a wider web of social meanings and values. None of these (efficiency, the future) are specific to technology, but they are integral to the modern notion of what technology ‘is’. One way that technology bears the imprint of these wider webs of meaning is through aspects of artifact design that are commonly thought of as aesthetic.

There is no aspect of technology that is outside the scope of Feenberg’s critical theory – social construction runs all the way down – and no network in which technology might not play a role. One of the defining features of modern technologies is precisely that they are located in ever longer and more interconnected networks: ‘Modern societies emphasise systematization and build long networks through tightly coupling links over huge distances between very different types of thing and people’ (2010: 76). Feenberg’s approach allows us to follow artifacts wherever they may go and to discover what meanings they acquire in the process of use. However, Feenberg’s theory is critical, which means that it focuses particularly on how ideas from the wider social web are manifest inside the micro-political situations encountered by social actors involved in technology design. He argues that among the standards we routinely apply to technology design the idea of efficiency continues to dominate, and this reflects an enduring legacy of technocracy, criticized in the 1960s by Herbert Marcuse (1964) and others. Feenberg also identifies new sources of resistance – from computer hacktivists to patients’ rights groups – and his theory articulates their struggles to the experiences of earlier generations of activists and to a progressive conception of history derived from Karl Marx. His critical theory casts contemporary activists as exploiting margins of manoeuvre that have opened up within contemporary technology design, and it aligns their activity with a model of action for social change he calls ‘progressive rationalization’.

The idea of aesthetic critique connects Feenberg’s politicized constructionism with the larger, transformational aims of the critical theory of technology. Aesthetic aspects of design are an important issue at stake between different constituencies who seek to make artefacts comport with their definition of the technology and what it is for. Perhaps less obviously, aesthetic critique addresses the sedimentation of values associated with past technologies (and their codifications) in the foundations of contemporary cultural life. If democratizing the scene of technology design allows user groups and workers a voice in shaping machines that are more pleasant to work with, their actions also re-position technology in the wider webs of meaning just discussed. When he discusses this aspect of aesthetic critique Feenberg often refers to substantivist critics of technology (Heidegger, Marcuse), for whom the question of civilization change, predicated on development of a radically different kind of technical infrastructure, was a key concern. The notion of aesthetic critique is central to Feenberg’s strategy for bridging the gulf that separates constructionism, with its emphasis on contingency and contemporary struggles, from the long-term historical concerns of such substantivist philosophies of technology. Feenberg has stated that the normative or critical imperatives of his theory are in fact grounded here, writing that, ‘aesthetics provides the normative basis for the reconstruction of technological rationality’ (Feenberg, 2005: xv).

Section 1 (‘Social Constructionism and Technical Politics’) presents an account of Feenberg’s idea of ‘technical politics’, showing that he presents a modified constructionism in which the codification of technology as ‘neutral’ is a decisive outcome of social processes. This relates to the question of aesthetics in design as the locus of a kind of locally initiated reform that might herald wider changes with implications for the character of civilization. Section 2 (‘Marcuse, Aesthetics and Critique’) positions aesthetic critique at the intersection of constructionism and traditional critical theory. For Feenberg, aesthetic critique of technology design carries the values of a wider critique essential to civilization change and makes it possible to bring them to bear upon contemporary technology designs while evading the charge of utopianism or flouting the rationality conditions that must preside over technical thinking.

Section 3 (‘Instrumentalization Theory’) describes the thesis of re-aestheticization of capitalist technology with reference to Feenberg’s argument that all technology includes what he calls primary and secondary ‘instrumentalization’. The first of these involves an originary violence, without which there can be no technology, while the second is restorative and compensates nature by mediating the result through meaning. In capitalist societies the second of these moments is stymied, resulting in a cold, one-dimensional technology and a correspondingly shallow way of life. Here Feenberg’s notion of an aesthetic dimension re-presents Marcuse’s thesis of an enlarged or transformed mode of technical reasoning, compatible with a new kind of civilization. I suggest that the idea of an aesthetic transformation cannot bear the weight of these essentially utopian ideas or their substantivist premises. In the concluding section I recommend an alternative understanding of the place of the aesthetic in contemporary technical politics, drawing on ideas from elsewhere in the critical theoretic tradition.

Social constructionism and technical politics

In presenting technology as a phenomenon of social connection, Feenberg stresses that he is making an anti-essentialist move. Throughout his work, he emphasizes technology is socially constructed: ‘technology is a dependent variable in the social system, shaped to a purpose by the dominant class and subject to reshaping to new purposes under a new hegemony’ (Feenberg, 1991: 35).

The importance of such a definition is multiple. It is historically accurate because people have not always talked about technology in the same ways that they do today. It is important to register differences, like the foregrounding of the word ‘technology’, which happens in English in the 18th century, for example, and heralds a relatively recent framing of devices and machines which were previously described as ‘mechanical arts’ (Jennings, 1985; Adas, 1989). In contrast, the essentialist view illegitimately projects back contemporary meanings to establish a connection between proto-tools used by monkeys, medieval sewing implements and nuclear power stations as if they were all manifestations of the same, continuous phenomenon (e.g. Kirkpatrick, 2008). It underestimates the contingency that really attaches to technology and other social practices, supporting narratives (from socio-biology to optimistic visions of progress) that obscure the real, underdetermined1 nature of technology design.

It is important to notice that this relational definition dilutes ideas long accepted by critical theorists concerning technology’s role in the human story. For example, while Marx states that capitalist technology is shaped to facilitate domination of workers (Marx, 1990: 562), he also argues that human history is the growth of productive power – the expansion of the productive forces, which includes technology – and strongly implies some kind of technological progress from inferior tools of previous modes of production to the advanced machines of capitalism that will ultimately set us free (Marx, 1981: 701). Technology is the outcome of local projects rooted in specific social conflicts, but its development is one of the cornerstones of human social, economic and cultural advancement.

Feenberg’s embrace of constructionism places the second of these positions under strain because if technology is reducible to its local coordinates the path from each design decision to the meaning of technology as a whole in the historical process is likely to be methodologically tortuous. However, as indicated above, he doesn’t want to abandon the connection with Marx entirely, nor with the idea that history may progress and that technology plays some part in this. This is crucial because it is part of what puts the ‘critical’ into critical theory and, as such, makes Feenberg more than just another constructionist. ² Disputes over technology mean something to the agents involved in them but they can also connect with wider struggles and have significance for social actors elsewhere in space and historical time.

Marx provided detailed accounts of social struggle and more than one statement of his theory of history, but he had less to say about questions of culture and the mediations of meaning that occur in an increasingly technological society. Following in the footsteps of earlier critical theorists, Feenberg uses Max Weber’s work on societal rationalization, but also Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and Marcuse’s vision of ‘civilizational transformation’, to expand Marx’s theory. Part of Feenberg’s project is to try and maintain a connection between these conceptions of the meaning of technology in modern culture with fine-grained accounts of struggles over technology design in an account of historical change. He maintains that the issue of what technology means is at stake in the local struggles described by constructionists and how those struggles play out has a bearing on the kind of society we will live in in the future.

Constructionist scholars have provided detailed descriptive histories of struggles over the meanings of individual technologies but they have been accused of abstracting them from wider social relationships. Langdon Winner (1993) in particular has pointed out that constructionism seems to be blind both to the contexts that condition actors’ interests in a given technology and to the wider consequences of their struggles. Feenberg’s theory brings relationality and connectedness. He shows that the scene of technology design is always already pre-coded as technical, meaning that some actors will be empowered as ‘experts’ and (normally) that dominant social interests will be represented. Moreover, the imprint that products bear as technologies ensures they are perceived as ‘neutral’ at the end of these social processes. The ‘technical code’ in modern societies emphasizes that technology is value-free and only there, in our workplace, because it enhances efficiency. This appearance of neutrality – of technology as the objective solution to a problem – is key to understanding how technology comports with social power.

Feenberg maintains that technology, like other formal systems associated with modernity (bureaucracy, public law), presents as free of substantive entanglements or biases (see Kirkpatrick, 2013). Technology does not seem to favour any particular social group and it does not make arguments for this or that point of view. The modern perception of technology is that it is not subject to moral questioning: if someone chooses to set it to a ‘bad’ purpose then it is the person and not the machine that is at fault. Constructionism confirms this perception in the sense that it shows how each individual artefact is shaped so that it represents the solution to a particular problem – the one that was preferred by the dominant social group. On Feenberg’s use of constructionism, however, it also shows the opposite, namely, that as a class of objects codified as ‘technical’, artefacts are made to appear as somehow above the political fray of further contestation and dispute. The production of this appearance masks disputed design decisions while ensuring that all parties, including the people who have to live with the consequences, accept that the result is the best design because it is the most efficient. As such, the codification of technology as ‘neutral’ is a supplement to the constructionist idea of ‘closure’. ³

Feenberg’s politicization of constructionism involves using its methods to re-open the historical questions that are placed out of view by the neutral codification in order to make social actors aware that they can challenge individual technical designs and bring their own interests and values to bear upon them. ⁴ Feenberg deconstructs technology’s codification of technology as ‘neutral’ by reading it as a variety of discourse in Foucault’s (1994, 1997) sense of the term. Viewed in this way, technology resembles stretches of language that represent and constitute the world for agents, who must find margins of maneouvre within the interstices of authoritative sense-making and associated institutionalized forms of domination. Foucault’s rhetorics to one side, ⁵ it is clear that real material technologies often dovetail with strategems of power – one thinks of the physical design of prisons or psycho-pharmacology – and reference to this enables Feenberg to suggest that technology itself functions like a discourse, as well as operating adjacent to it.

Feenberg’s technical politics distinguishes between strategic implementations of technology that both serve dominant interests and re-enforce the dominant codification of it as a neutral structure, and tactical operations on the part of resisting subjects. The latter grapple with Foucault’s metaphoric technics of domination but also with real machinery and technologies that establish procedurally correct behavioural templates and, in so doing, leave behind spaces for subversion. In the case of technology designs, these spaces are occupied where social groups come together and demand something better from established technical means. The patients’ groups who obliged medical authorities to speed up AIDS drug-testing, for example, were engaged in a kind of Foucauldian counter-practice that re-shaped spaces previously sculpted exclusively by and for experts (Feenberg, 1995: ch. 5). Technical politics, then, accounts for the appearance of technology’s neutrality as the outcome of social processes, including a determinate codification of technical artefacts, and it specifies a way in which this might be challenged. Each time a technology design is subjected to democratic challenge it both improves that technology and, potentially at least, changes the global meaning of technology as well.

Feenberg’s theory suggests that local struggles to re-open technology designs and challenge their objectivity are at the same time steps towards a larger, wider kind of change involving the meaning of technology itself and associated with civilization change. This marks an opening to the critical theory tradition and its raising of larger questions. If modern technology’s appearance of neutral efficiency is contingent on social processes, what are the implications for social change? Might we envisage a situation in which the term ‘technology’ no longer serves as a connector linking all of its instances and associating them with other sources of neutral authority? Can we envisage a design culture in which the particular and the sensuous are foregrounded in our experience of artefacts? This brings us to the aesthetic dimension of the theory.

Marcuse, aesthetics and critique

Positive advocates of technocracy, of which there have been few, recommend finding technical solutions to human problems and implementing them in systems that are as efficient as possible. Expertise ought to be authoritative. Technocracy was the implicit, dystopic situation for the first generation of critical theorists because it represented the clearest example of a society that was so irrational no one would choose to live in it precisely because it made a narrowly construed rationality its sole organizing principle. Herbert Marcuse was the Frankfurt School theorist most preoccupied with technocracy – the erosion of democracy by the rule of technical imperatives, usually implemented by experts.

Marcuse’s critique of technocracy was aesthetically grounded. He objected to the monotone, ‘one-dimensional’ character of modern machines – their narrow emphasis on function over other concerns – and associated this with a lack of meaning in modern life. He envisaged a new technology that would reflect an influx of imagination into its design and reveal a new world in which beauty and form, not only efficiency, were part of what people expected from technics. This transformation would dissociate technology from humanity’s artificially prolonged struggle for survival and connect it with the fulfilment of human desires. For Marcuse, a redesigned technology could be the basis for a constellation in which humanity, nature and artefacts would be reconciled in a softer, more humanized world (Marcuse, 1978).

This part of Marcuse’s theory was famously criticized by Jürgen Habermas (1975), who accused him of seeking to establish a society based on dialogue with nature. The suggestion was that Marcuse was something of ‘a dreamer’ (Feenberg, 2005: 100). In contrast, Habermas (1985) argues that modern technology is a gain of societal evolution, reflecting the progressive differentiation of a systems sphere that handles our relations with a nature that is not susceptible to persuasion. Feenberg counters that Habermas idealizes technology as an agent of progress, overlooking its implication in environmental degradation and dehumanizing labour practices. Feenberg praises Marcuse’s vision because it ‘calls for change in the very nature of technological rationality’ (2005: 98). He rejects any retreat from Marcuse’s wider objective of total transformation in the ‘meaning’ of technology as a regression behind basic insights from Heidegger. For Feenberg, if we can’t have a dialogue with nature we are not necessarily committed to being at war with it either. He acknowledges, however, that Marcuse lacked any account of how this principle might be implemented in practice and claims his own engagement with constructionism enables him to fill this gap. What Heidegger (2013) described as modern technology’s enframing of nature as a mere standing reserve of raw material need not be overturned ‘all at once’. In place of ontological critique based on the possibility of a new ‘world-revealing’, aesthetics can serve as a better standpoint for comprehending the changes in our most fundamental categorial orderings that are necessary to precipitate what Feenberg, following Marcuse, envisages as civilization change.

At important moments in his elaboration of the aesthetic as a ground for the technical politics that mediate this change, Feenberg invokes an idea of resonance or harmony between the way that humans apprehend the world and structures that are out there, so to speak, to be experienced. For example, in his account of Marcuse’s theory, Feenberg refers to ‘consensual notions of beauty’ (2005: 109) and to ‘natural harmonies’ between humanity and nature that exceed scientific explanation, even though they are present in things like scientists’ preference for elegant mathematical demonstrations (2005: 107). Feenberg contends that Adorno, whose work he compares unfavourably to Marcuse’s on this point, regresses behind Kant when he offers an aesthetics based on mediated non-identity – a position Feenberg casts as evasion on Adorno’s part (2005: 118–19). ⁶ I will return to this point in what follows. The aesthetic demand for a technology that comports with inner and outer nature and seeks harmony between them is, Feenberg maintains, central to the critical theory of technology. It promises to enlarge our understanding of what technology is and, above all, to re-position it in the new constellation.

At the same time, Feenberg acknowledges that the starting point for this aesthetic critique cannot consist in a fixed idea of human nature. Critique must be grounded historically and relationally. To this end, he retrieves from the young Marx the notion that our sensory apparatus may itself be subject to historically (that is, not biologically) driven variations over the course of the historical process: there is a ‘historical biology’ of sense perception (2005: 120–1). Feenberg proposes to develop his aesthetic critique through a phenomenological account of the resonances humans can find in the world at any given point. On this basis, he says, we can have access to the gains associated with ontological critique, namely, a perspective in which technology mediates our world relations in very different ways under various historical circumstances, without the essentialist connotations of full-blown Heideggerianism (according to which technology in the modern sense would be contrasted with a more authentic yet long-lost revealing).

In the aesthetic critique, then, the variability to be uncovered and used to highlight the contingent character of current ‘truths’ about technology (its ‘correct’ form as the one that is ‘most efficient’, etc.) remains thoroughly historical, although it has to be elaborated phenomenologically, ⁷ and it can be articulated to technical-political projects where it might even serve as a kind of critical index on the ambition of specific reform proposals. Here Feenberg re-casts Marcuse’s notion that we can reform ‘technological rationality’ as a matter of introducing variation into the technical code, which he hopes will give the idea ‘a more concrete sociological element’ (2005: 104). He retains from Marcuse, however, commitment to a particular conception of progressive change as involving the restoration of natural harmonies, or reintegration of societal elements thought of as part of an organic whole. ⁸

At this stage in his argument Feenberg commits to some rather specific aesthetic affiliations, which seem to me to foreclose on the actual course of contemporary aesthetics and the role of technology in them. His attachment to specifically modernist design principles is clear when he invokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, for example, as a model of the integration of nature and artifice in designs that are conducive to pleasurable human experience (2001: 155): ⁹

Like the early twentieth-century avant-garde, especially the surrealists, Marcuse believed that the separation of art from daily life could be transcended through fusing reason and imagination. Marcuse thus proposes the Aufhebung of the split between science and art in a new technical base…

Although this program sounds wildly implausible, it makes a kind of intuitive sense. For example, we easily recognize the difference between the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mies shows us technology as a manifestation of untrammeled power, the technological sublime, while Wright’s structures harmonise with nature and seek to integrate human beings with their environment. We will see that it is possible to save Marcuse’s essential insight by developing this contrast. (2001: 155)

Feenberg’s confidence concerning the kinds of change aesthetic critique will demand is partly informed by the environmental movement’s success in broadening the dominant conception of technology. The technology-ness of a thing now includes the issue of its ‘sustainability’; it is part of what we think about when we encounter a technology for the first time. There is no technology use that does not feel the pull of this question. The argument that a relatively new connotation of technology has been established here is not something that I want to take issue with ¹⁰ but I do want to query the grounds Feenberg presents for endorsing it, because it is here that we can detect both the centrality of aesthetic critique to his theory and its fundamental ambivalence between positions that are consistent with his emphasis on contingency, relationality and difference and others that are somewhat more focused on wholeness and reconciliation. This discrepancy becomes clearer when we look more closely at Feenberg’s account of what distinguishes capitalist technology.

Instrumentalization theory

What is wrong with modern, capitalist technology is not that it is uniquely violent or indeed that it is the source of a specifically horrible enframing, but rather that it fails to compensate nature for an original violence that is present in all technologies. Feenberg develops this idea through what he calls ‘instrumentalization theory’, according to which technology always has two moments. These are not temporally discrete but co-exist as dimensions of any present technology. Primary instrumentalization involves forcing nature into new shapes that comport with our wishes and involves ‘a series of moments through which the object is isolated and exposed to external manipulation’ (2001: 176). ¹¹

At this point we can see the influence of substantivist or essentialist notions of violence against nature as constitutive of modern technology. ¹² However, primary instrumentalization is not specifically modern or capitalist. The difference with earlier cultures is that they made up for primary instrumentalization, which is generic, with culturally specific secondary instrumentalizations ¹³ that restored harmony to the world. According to Feenberg, ‘all earlier cultures are based on substantive worldviews rather than formal rational principles, which, where they exist at all, are confined to very narrow functions’ (2002: 167). In those cultures technology ‘is contextualized by practices that define its place in an encompassing nontechnical action system’ (2002: 177). What makes capitalist tools both neutral (as a formal system to be complied with) and yet more brutal is the fact that, rather than being developed to serve wider social goals that comport with cultural values, modern technology is narrowly assessed for its efficiency. Feenberg writes:

Technology is not value neutral but rather, under capitalism, the neutralization of the traditional values that governed it in earlier times adapts it to the pursuit of profit and power. These narrow capitalist values no longer respect the object, human beings or limits of any kind. (2005: 100)

It is this conception of the specificity of capitalist or modern technology that underscores Feenberg’s belief in the necessity of an aesthetic critique, which would take the form of a demand for ‘re-aestheticization’ of the technical relation. Here there is an affinity between worker and user demands for technology that is more pleasant to use and the wider goals of social change. Civilizational transformation will result when such demands succeed in re-writing the technical code so that the horizon on technology development is broadened, altering the meaning of ‘efficiency’ itself. The terms of such a broadening would reflect the infusion of aesthetic values associated with a recharged secondary instrumentalization. ‘An alternative modernity’, Feenberg writes, ‘would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics’ (2010: 77). It would involve a new technical code, ‘oriented toward the reintegration of the contexts and secondary qualities of both the subjects and objects of capitalist technique’ (2002: 184).

In addition to his strategically construed ‘technical politics’ of design, then, Feenberg envisages a ‘deep democratization’ (2002: 159) of technology in which it is finally ‘subordinated to humanistic objectives’ (2002: 165). Aesthetic critique is a crux of Feenberg’s theory because it provides the bridge between the two aspects of his project. On one side, workers and others contest technology designs. On the other, each instance of success in democratizing technology corresponds to a re-aestheticization, through which progressive change touches the very meaning of technology and its articulations in the web of social relations. The difficulty with the latter idea, however, is that it rests upon a largely unthematized presumption in favour of a harmonious relationship with nature, in which our very senses are disposed to an enriched perception of the world as meaningful, while the world is humanized and made more habitable as a result of our reconfigured technology. This reflects an organicist bias in Feenberg’s thinking, which he inherits fairly directly from Marcuse.

Since technology is a potential source of disruption to the society-nature whole, the theory of secondary instrumentalization is a normative pivot on which critical theory of technology turns from description to prescription. The demand for a re-aestheticization informed by naturalistic modernism is part of this and that aesthetic style is preferred because its logic is integrative and restorative.

An alternative role for aesthetics in technical politics

The difficulty I have identified with preferring a particular aesthetic and its values in this way becomes more apparent when constructionism moves on to become Actor Network Theory (ANT). ANT theorists have pointed out that the idea of critique has long deployed, and to an extent been predicated on, a loaded definition of the act of making, in which the human agent is implicitly cast as coming at the world in a domineering fashion. In fact, writing in very different contexts (the sociology of religion and of art respectively), both Bruno Latour and Antoine Hennion have suggested that making need carry no such connotation; it happens even without humans being present – a making can be a letting be. As Latour puts it, ‘to the humble and honest work of making, they’ve [critical theorists] surreptitiously added a crazy hypothesis about the craftsman’s domination of his oeuvre’ (Latour, 2013: 142; Gomart and Hennion, 1999: 222).

The importance of this point lies in the discrepancy it opens up between a strictly relational definition of technology on one side, which emphasizes its constitution through entwinement in a variety of social networks, and a more substantivist one on the other, which stresses its place in a dialectic of human potential and social domination. If we deny that technology has any founding moment of violence that requires compensation through a second, restorative moment, then we seem, as Latour points out, to lose any connection with critique. There is no deep violence to be compensated and no inherent human potential bound up with further development of the technological mission. Latour’s argument is an attempt to cut Feenberg’s theory off at the root. Sharpening the relational turn in social theory, ANT prohibits postulating connections that cannot be traced through actual webs that social actors themselves recognize as connecting them and their actions to others and which tie them into other networks (Latour, 2005). As Hennion writes in connection with the sociology of art, ‘adding a superior, more coherent principle, whether aesthetic or social, adds nothing…it must be strictly forbidden to create links when this is not done by an identifiable intermediary’ (Hennion, 1995).

The effect of such an injunction on Feenberg’s theory would be to sever the relational definition of technology operative in technical politics from the larger project of cultural transformation. The challenge it sets for critical theory of technology is to identify a ground or source for critique that is strictly immanent to technical practices. This might involve detaching the question of the aesthetic from residual substantivist notions implicit in instrumentalization theory and re-positioning it more securely in a strategic conception of the politics of technology design. In a way it is easy to see how to implement the call for more democracy in technology design (there is an established literature on the legitimacy of such arrangements to draw upon), but the question of the aesthetic dimension to technical politics is much less clear.

The ‘aesthetic objection’ to capitalist technology was never simply a matter of what it looked like or felt like to use. As Feenberg makes clear, it concerns the position occupied by technology in wider webs of meaning and the global meaning of ‘technology’ that results from that positioning. Notwithstanding the example of environmentalism, the re-aestheticization of technology has been proceeding apace in the post-industrial era. Nearly all the digital technology that we use from day to day has a customizable interface, for example, enabling people to incorporate devices seamlessly into their lives, often transforming their own identities in the process. The emphasis has been on creating ‘environments’ that support both work and play, within which the human user does not have to think about their activity in a technical way (Kirkpatrick, 2004).

Despite my provocations (Kirkpatrick, 2004, 2008), Feenberg has not commented on this directly, but he seems to approve these design principles, arguing that computers were ‘transformed’ in the 1980s into a ‘communications medium’. This reflects the unfolding of a dialectic, in which two opposed forces came together in terms that are underpinned by aesthetic critique:

Systems designed for hierarchical control are congruent with rationalistic assumptions that treat the computer as an automaton intended to command or replace workers…Democratically designed systems must instead respond to the communicative dimension of the computer through which it facilitates the self-organisation of human communities. (Feenberg, 2002: 108)

Feenberg’s enthusiasm for friendly computers reflects his theoretical vision, in which technology’s instrumental aspect and its aesthetics are divided and awaiting dialectical reconciliation, in the Marcusean scenario described above. However, it is not obviously the case that naturalistic modernist principles applied to technology design necessarily result in better outcomes for workers or for society. As I have argued (Kirkpatrick, 2004), seductive interfaces can be manipulative and exclusionary. Since the late 1980s interfaces on digital artefacts have been shaped by a design culture whose naturalist biases are largely consonant with Feenberg’s approved aesthetic, leading Hal Foster to suggest that modernists should have been careful what they wished for (2002: 19). ¹⁵ Moreover, it is also not clear that the only ‘good’ use of computers is communicative while more technical employments are always more implicated in strategies of domination. Technical knowledge can involve difficulty but still be empowering, while ‘easy’ operating in sumptuous online environments makes people prey to corporate marketing and leaves them vulnerable to government and corporate spying activities. I submit that progressive ‘re-aestheticization’ may not be the best way to understand the place of design in these developments.

The underlying problem here is Feenberg’s organicist conception of society. He favours naturalistic modernism because his critique of capitalism emphasizes its fragmented, disjointed character – it needs repair and reintegration to become a healthy totality. Reform proposals are assessed in light of this model of progressive change. Viewed in this way, reconciliation (of subject and object in the historical process) becomes a matter of finding new forms of social life in which antagonism and domination can be minimized by establishing higher levels of consistency between agents’ purposes and the social whole. This approach is basically Marcusian and, as we have seen, it contrasts with Adorno’s aesthetic critique.

The goal of harmonious integration is potentially tyrannical because society is against the individual. Adorno’s dialectic was ‘negative’ because it asserted both the necessity of reconciliation and its radical impossibility. It is this moment of contradiction that means critical theory can issue no utopian vision of the future. This is not an evasion but is based on recognition of the situation in which the subject finds no reflection of him or herself in the prevailing reality, apart from the fact that it seems to have been constructed to ensnare them. Attractive, user-friendly interfaces can be read precisely as traps in this sense. Adorno’s attention to the aesthetic as an experiential domain is based on the realization that it is only in connection with difficult artworks that human beings can find a reflection of the suffering associated caused by their presence-as-absence ¹⁶ in an inhuman social system. While it was conceived through reflection on so-called high arts, this conception of the aesthetic need not be alien to technical politics.

Following a suggestion from Darrow Schecter (2012), I think we can use Adorno’s theory to clarify the aesthetic dimension in technical politics. In contemporary experience the technical and the aesthetic are increasingly superimposed on one another and the effect is that rather than producing a single, hegemonic truth to be overcome, truths multiply at the scene of contemporary technology; the game is often on to establish what it’s for and the prevailing attitude is playful. ¹⁷ This is where aesthetics is political, in the fine grain and the folds of technical politics, rather than as a transcendental humanist balm. We encounter the aesthetic as a moment in our technical dabbling and, as such, it is immanent to the ongoing politics of technical design. In Schecter’s terms, in such moments ‘the truth of a truth regime is doubled and susceptible to further and more intense multiplication rather than divided, and awaiting re-articulation as mediated unity’ (2012: 176).

If we understand the aesthetic as a superimposition that may be part of the dominant codification of technology – as when we find, on reflection, that we were ‘steered’ towards buying an ‘app’ we didn’t know we wanted, or that we were only able to proceed in one of two ways because a (charming) interface presented no third option – then the problem we have is not a lack of technical-aesthetic reconciliation. Rather, it is that the two aspects work together very well so that authoritative demands seem all the more reasonable because they cohere with our expectations and tastes to re-enforce behaviour that comes to us ‘naturally’.

Schecter’s development of this involves using Foucault’s writing on art to elaborate the latter’s idea of an aesthetics of self. Foucault describes how ‘facts’ emanating from authoritative discourses are articulated to specific deployments of our senses, especially the visual. On this basis, we experience reality in a way that has been pre-structured by power. Moreover, this structuring proceeds from notional centres, like ‘medicine’ or ‘technology’. Their construction, Foucault tells us, corresponds to what we see: medicines are packaged a certain way, presented to us by people in white coats in special buildings, and so on. Foucault’s (1982) analysis of Magritte’s (1928–9) painting, La Trahison des Images, shows that it is not discrepancies between the way the world is described and the way it appears that present openings for critique, but rather the fact that these things reinforce each other in striking ways. Such points are nodes in the network that constitutes technology and they refer to a definitional centre (‘technology’) to be deconstructed, much as Magritte’s painting pulls at the meaning of artistic representation. The problem the painting presents us with ‘is not the disparity but rather the similarity between the linguistic sign and the visual image’ (Schecter 2012: 177). ¹⁸

Divided truth rests on a metaphysical, higher standpoint where it ‘awaits reunification’ (reconciliation). But in Magritte’s image truth is doubled by being superimposed and subject to multiplication, mirroring the production of what Jacques Rancière (2007) calls a ‘regime of sensible experience’ in social life. In these circumstances Adorno’s normativized aesthetic theory, with its insistence on mediated non-identity, is more relevant than ever because we are not confronted with a system of shocks ¹⁹ and jolts, reflecting the contradiction between hegemonic power and dispersed resistance, but rather a diffuse regime whose demands we feel only in so far as we suffer the effects of false identification, or empty performance; when we feel a sense of our homelessness in this fabricated, choreographed world. ²⁰ In his reflections on political legitimacy, Schecter envisages a new kind of law that can reflect and respect non-identity (2012: 230), and this has its analogue here in a conception of the aesthetics of technology design that is pluralistic, perhaps working against the idea of technology as such and insisting on machines that accommodate the maximum degree of choice for their human operators, consistent with efficient performance of their intended purpose.

If Feenberg’s theory consistently eschewed any connection to substantivism it would lack clear norms applicable to technology design. But perhaps this would not be such a bad thing. The shaping of artefacts increasingly falls within the scope of a Foucauldian aesthetics of self-fashioning in contemporary society and this territory is being shaped by connections that people are making for themselves in ways that are dissolving, perhaps have already dissolved, the codification of technology as ‘efficient’, for example. Reflecting on the dominant meaning of technology today, I’m not sure that there is one: do people choose their mobile phones on grounds of efficiency? This is progress, in the sense clarified by Feenberg’s theory: it means that people are participating in contesting and shaping technology; that its representation is in question. Under these circumstances the code that inscribes gender norms, proprietary claims over software, the right and wrong way to use a computer network, is susceptible to challenge and counter-articulation. When the meaning of technology is in question in this way the rewriting of categorial orderings alluded to previously can be brought into the open and discussed, as a part of the micro-sociological detail of democratic technical politics.

At the same time, refocusing aesthetic critique in this way is problematic because, as others have described in detail, contemporary governmentality works precisely to dispose people to adapt themselves to the demands of an increasingly pervasive system. As Dardot and Laval (2014) point out, in neoliberalism we are all made responsible for everything that happens to us. Technology is one of the means at our disposal through which we are encouraged to respond to this situation. Given this, it will likely dovetail with developments that fold real devices into the apparatus that Foucault figuratively described as ‘technologies of the self’. This can represent an extension of domination, in which aesthetic strategies of power involve making technology seem ‘natural’ and harmonious, while resistance often runs in the opposite direction, disrupting this appearance. Under these conditions critique should eschew identification with any specific set of aesthetic values and focus instead on those occasions when the meaning of technology is placed in question – any kind of question – by social actors.

In the revised version of aesthetic critique suggested here, aesthetics remains central to technical politics. However, it is not as a bridge between the proximal concerns of groups competing for control over the meanings of new technology designs and wider questions of civilization change. The aesthetic provides no privileged point of connection with such wider shifts and we cannot pre-judge what kind of aesthetic might be ‘progressive’ with reference to whether a design fits more or less well in a utopia of restored wholeness. Rather, the aesthetic emerges at signal points in the constellation of human, society and nature and at times it disrupts the seamless operations of power. When we think about the aesthetics of a technology, how it fits with our experience, this creates an opening to questions about its design, the desirability of our activity, its necessity, and so on. Aesthetic experiences often lead into technical politics and, once this happens, aesthetic considerations may inform the demands of oppositional movements as they set out and implement alternative uses.

There is no firm basis for identifying such demands with any particular aesthetic project or movement. Rather, the kind of technology that is preferred (including its aesthetics) will be more or less ‘authentic’, in Adorno’s sense, in so far as they respect the non-identity of the subject with the technical environment, and maintain the openness of work-spaces to intelligent determination by the person who has to operate there. This might be accomplished by creating sumptuous environments that are comfortable to occupy, but that is not straightforwardly true for all cases. The aesthetic values that inform a design may be austere, deliberately challenging and kept thoroughly instrumental in their design for perfectly good reasons other than those of domination. Ugliness and even brutalism may be preferable aesthetic strategies in contemporary technical politics.