karl bühler digital

Home > Edited Book > Contribution

Publication details

Publisher: Springer

Place: Berlin

Year: 2017

Pages: 163-189

ISBN (Hardback): 9783319578965

Full citation:

Matthew Greaves, "Between instrumentalism and determinism", in: Critical theory and the thought of Andrew Feenberg, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Between instrumentalism and determinism

Western Marxism and Feenberg's critical theory of technology

Matthew Greaves

pp. 163-189

in: Andreas Michel (ed), Critical theory and the thought of Andrew Feenberg, Berlin, Springer, 2017

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.

Cited authors

Publication details

Publisher: Springer

Place: Berlin

Year: 2017

Pages: 163-189

ISBN (Hardback): 9783319578965

Full citation:

Matthew Greaves, "Between instrumentalism and determinism", in: Critical theory and the thought of Andrew Feenberg, Berlin, Springer, 2017