From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg


Symposium: Andrew Feenberg’s Questioning Technology*

From the Question Concerning
Technology to the Quest for a Democratic
Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse,
Feenberg

Iain Thomson
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Andrew Feenberg’ s most recent contribution to the critical theory of technology,
Questioning Technology , is best understood as a synthesis and extension of the
critiques of technology developed by Heidegger and Marcuse. By thus situating
Feenberg’ s endeavor to articulate and preserve a meaningful sense of agency in our
increasingly technologized lifeworld, I show that some of the deepest tensions in
Heidegger and Marcuse’ s relation re-emerge within Feenberg’ s own critical theory.
Most signi� cant here is the fact that Feenberg, following Marcuse, exaggerates
Heidegger’ s ‘fatalism’ about technology. I contend that this mistake stems from
Feenberg’ s false ascription of a technological ‘essentialism’ to Heidegger. Correcting
this and several related problems, I reconstruct Feenberg’ s ‘radical democratic’ call
for a counter-hegemonic democratization of technological design, arguing that
although this timely and important project takes its inspiration from Marcuse, in the
end Feenberg remains closer to Heidegger than his Marcuseanism allows him to
acknowledge.

I. Introduction

Richard Wolin has remarked that ‘[t]he full story of Marcuse’s relation to
Heidegger has yet to be written’.1 Indeed, there are at least two stories to be
told about the Marcuse–Heidegger relationship: the story of its historical past
and the story of its philosophical future. Let us hope that intellectual
historians like Wolin will continue to bring the past of this important relation
to light; in the meantime, Andrew Feenberg has already begun writing the
philosophical story of its future. The goal of his Questioning Technology is to

# 2000 Taylor & Francis

Inquiry, 43, 203–16

* Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999),
xvii + 243 pp., pb. $24.95. Unprefixed page references are to this work. Earlier versions of this
paper were presented at the Society for Philosophy of Technology conference in San Jose, CA,
on July 16, 1999 and at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical
Association in Boston, 28 December 1999. I thank Bert Dreyfus, Jerry Doppelt, Andy
Feenberg, Wayne Martin, David Stump, and Richard Wolin for helpful comments and
criticisms.



articulate a critical theory capable of responding to ‘[t]he fundamental
problem of democracy today’, namely, the question of how to ‘ensure the
survival of agency in this increasingly technological universe’ (p. 101). To
meet this challenge, Feenberg synthesizes and extends the critiques of
technology developed by Heidegger and post-Heideggerian thinkers like
Marcuse and Foucault. My approach will seek to situate Feenberg’s project
within this historical perspective.

II. The History Behind Feenberg’s Heidegger–Marcuse Dialectic

Marcuse studied with Heidegger from 1928 to 1932, and Feenberg was a
Marcuse student during the late 1960s. 2 This, of course, makes Feenberg one
of Heidegger’s intellectual grandchildren. But this is a genealogy fraught with
political and philosophical tensions, tensions which occasionally make
themselves felt in Feenberg’s interpretations and which point back to the fact
that Marcuse himself broke with Heidegger bitterly – and permanently – in
1948. To Marcuse, Heidegger’s strong early support of National Socialism
represented a fundamental betrayal of Heidegger’s own ‘existential’
philosophy, and thus an abandonment of ‘the greatest intellectual heritage
of German history’, and he said so at the time.3 In 1933 and 1934, while
Heidegger was making political speeches on Hitler’s behalf, Marcuse was
� eeing Hitler’s rise to power, � rst from Frankfurt to Geneva in 1933, then
emigrating to New York in 1934, where he served as the philosophical
specialist for the now exiled Frankfurt School. During this period, Marcuse
wrote Reason and Revolution, defending Hegel’s notion of the state – as ‘a
social order built on the rational autonomy of the individual’ – against the
‘pseudo-democratic ideology’ characteristic of Fascism, which pays lip
service to the direct rule of the ‘people’ [Volk], while in fact ‘the ruling groups
control the rest of the population directly, without the mediation of . . . the
state’. Hitler had abolished all such democratic mediation, so Marcuse
concludes Reason and Revolution by quoting Carl Schmitt’s proclamation
that on January 30th, 1933, ‘the day of Hitler’s ascent to power, “Hegel, so to
speak, died”.’4

Marcuse’s post-Heideggerian return to Hegel was of course also a return to
Marx; he was elaborating the major philosophical sources of Frankfurt School
critical theory. But around this time Max Horkheimer, who directed the
Institute for Social Research and controlled its � nances, began working
closely with another philosopher, Theodore Adorno. Adorno, whose hatred
for Heidegger apparently spilled over onto Marcuse, wrote to Horkheimer in
1935 to remind him of the ‘illusions’ Marcuse had so recently had ‘of Herr
Heidegger, whom he thanked all-too-heartily in the foreword to his (1932)
Hegel book’. Adorno went so far as to accuse Marcuse of being ‘hindered

204 Iain Thomson



[only] by Judaism from being a fascist’!5 Whether or not Adorno’s vicious
intrigue succeeded, Marcuse soon found Institute funds in too short a supply
to continue supporting him and his family. Thus it was that Marcuse, the
philosopher now best remembered as the intellectual guru of the New Left
(and thus the mentor of New Left philosophers like Feenberg, Angela Davis,
and Douglas Kellner), found himself working for various American
Intelligence agencies from 1942 to 1951.6

This is less strange than it sounds. Marcuse actually spent the � nal years of
the Second World War doing ‘de-Nazi� cation studies’ for the Of� ce of
Strategic Services. Here, with two other prominent members of the Frankfurt
School (the legal scholar and economist Franz Neumann and the political
theorist Otto Kirchheimer), Marcuse engaged in an intensive interdisciplinary
effort to uncover and ‘eliminate the root causes that had produced fascism’.
Looking back in 1954, however, Marcuse would conclude that: ‘The defeat of
Fascism and National Socialism has not arrested the trend toward
totalitarianism.’ 7 The fundamental political threat to democracy had not
been rooted out; it had merely changed forms and continued to spread after
the war. Marcuse called this new, post-Fascist form of totalitarianism
‘technocracy’. A technocracy is a political state in which ‘technical
considerations of imperialistic ef� ciency and rationality supersede the
traditional standards of pro� tability and general welfare’.8 For the rest of
Marcuse’s long and fruitful career, his overriding question became: How can
the increasingly global technocracy be subverted, that is, democratized? This
is precisely the quest behind Questioning Technology, the project that
Feenberg takes up – with Heidegger’s help.

Of course, Marcuse himself would not have looked to Heidegger for help.
Marcuse was deeply dissatis� ed by Heidegger’s private admission of a
‘political error’; he expected Heidegger to publicly announce his political
change of ‘allegiance’ (as Nazi opportunists like Schmitt and Alfred Bäumler
had done right after the war, a disingenuous act that Heidegger, the thinker of
authenticity, found simply ‘loathsome’).9 Marcuse warned Heidegger that his
refusal to make such an apology would be interpreted as a continuing
‘complicity’ with Nazism, but Heidegger obstinately refused.10 Thus a
controversial stalemate was reached, and Marcuse and Heidegger would
remain personally and professionally estranged for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately, as Feenberg shows, this mutual estrangement led them to
neglect the important insights contained in each other’s work on technology.
Feenberg brings out remarkable similarities between Marcuse’s critique of
technocracy , the technologically mediated production and maintenance of a
one-dimensional society, and Heidegger’s ontological critique of enframing,
the technological understanding of being which turns everything it touches
into a mere resource.11 Indeed, Feenberg stages a forceful post-Marcusean

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 205



return to Heidegger, and thus presents in absentia much of Marcuse and
Heidegger’s missing interlocution on the essence of modern technology.

True to the philosophical spirit of Marcuse, Feenberg’s critique of
Heidegger is thoroughly dialectical. Its negative or critical moment seeks to
isolate Heidegger’s deepest insights into technology, preserving these
insights from distortions Feenberg blames on Heidegger’s ‘techno-phobic’
(p. 151) and ‘essentialist’ (p. 3) understanding of technology. In the positive
moment of his critique, Feenberg appropriates several of Heidegger’s
insights, incorporating these in a powerful new way into his own critical
theory of technology. In so doing, he demonstrates the continuing importance
of the Heideggerian critique of technology while going beyond Heidegger –
and Marcuse – in signi� cant respects.

III. Feenberg’s Marcusean Critique of Heidegger

Feenberg argues that the four major types of theories of technology
(determinism, instrumentalism, substantivism, and critical theory) can be
differentiated by the answers they each give to two basic questions (p. 9). For
Feenberg, Heidegger’s � rst answer represents an unsurpassable historical
advance beyond determinism and instrumentalism, but Heidegger’s second
response pinpoints where his ‘substantivist’ view goes wrong and needs to be
superseded by Feenberg’s own critical theory. The � rst question is: Is
technology neutral or is it value-laden? As Feenberg argues, Heidegger
undermines once and for all the belief that technology is neutral by showing
that the technological doer comes to be historically ‘transformed by its acts’
(p. 206). Heidegger’s understanding of technology thus overturns both
traditional Marxist determinism (according to which technological advance
will inevitably usher in the golden age of communism), and liberal
instrumentalism (which understands technology merely as an instrument of
progress, a set of tools which can be used transparently to achieve
independently chosen ends). As Feenberg puts it, Heidegger shows that
‘technology is not merely the servant of some prede� ned social purpose; it is
an environment within which a way of life is elaborated’ (p. 127). And thus,
‘for good or ill, the human manner of inhabiting the environment can only be
[an] ethical’ question. 12

Heidegger’s answer to this ethical question concerning technology argues
that technology has an ontological impact which is far from neutral. As
technology colonizes the lifeworld, everything ‘sucked up’ into its purview,
including the modern subject, is reduced to the ontological status of a
resource to be optimized. Within our current technological ‘constellation’ of
intelligibility, ‘[o]nly what is calculable in advance counts as being’.13 This
technological understanding of being produces a ‘calculative thinking’ which

206 Iain Thomson



quanti� es all qualitative relations, reducing all entities to bivalent,
programmable ‘information’, digitized data, which increasingly enters into
what Baudrillard calls ‘a state of pure circulation’.14 As this historical
transformation of beings into resources becomes more pervasive, it
increasingly eludes our critical gaze; indeed, we come to treat even ourselves
in the terms underlying our technological refashioning of the world: no longer
as conscious subjects in an objective world but merely as resources to be
optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal ef� ciency (whether
cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or cybernetically).15

For Heidegger, the ‘greatest danger’ of our spreading technological under-
standing of being is the possibility that we will lose the capacity to understand
ourselves in any other way.

Feenberg seems to agree with Heidegger’s basic diagnosis of technology’ s
ontological impact, but thinks that Heidegger overstates the danger because
he ignores resources internal to technological society capable of combating
this ontological devastation. This brings us to the second question Feenberg
uses to categorize the � eld of technological theories, the question which
differentiates Feenberg from Heidegger: Can the historical impact of
technology be humanly controlled, or does it operate according to its own
autonomous logic? Is humanity capable of guiding the historical direction in
which technology is taking us? No, Heidegger answers; what is most essential
about technology – namely, the way in which it alters how reality shows up
for us – cannot be controlled.16 As Heidegger writes: ‘No single man, no
group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and
technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or
direct the progress of history in the atomic age.’17 This answer reveals what
Feenberg most fundamentally objects to in Heidegger’s approach: Heidegger
attributes an autonomous logic to technology. This fatalistic ‘substantivism’
stems ultimately from Heidegger’s essentialism, Feenberg contends (p. 17),
and it leads Heidegger to advocate ‘liberation from [the technological order]
rather than [its] reform’ (p. 198).

But Feenberg’s reading is never so hermeneutically violent as when he
accuses Heidegger of being a technological ‘essentialist’. Heidegger’s
paradoxical-sounding claim that ‘the essence of technology is nothing
technological’ does not mean that technology leaves no room for ‘re� exivity’
(p. 207). Heidegger is really expressing the paradox of the measure; height is
not high, treeness is not itself a tree, and the essence of technology is nothing
technological. To understand the ‘essence of technology’ , Heidegger says, we
cannot think of ‘essence’ the way we have been doing since Plato (as what
‘permanently endures’), for that makes it seem as if ‘by the [essence of]
technology we mean some mythological abstraction’. We need, rather, to
think of ‘essence’ as a verb, as the way in which things ‘essence’ [west] or
‘remain in play’ [im Spiel bleibt].18 ‘The essence of technology’ thus means

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 207



the way in which intelligibility happens for us these days, that is, as
‘enframing’ (the historical ‘mode of revealing’ in which things show up only
as resources to be optimized). Heidegger’s historical understanding of the
‘essence’ of technology may actually put his position closer to the
‘constructivist’ than the ‘essentialist’ camp, and it becomes clear that
Feenberg shares a similar view when he advocates ‘a historical concept of
essence’ in the book’s concluding chapter (p. 201).

What Feenberg really objects to, it seems, is Heidegger’s claim that the
appropriate response to technology is best characterized by the comportment
toward phenomena Heidegger calls Gelassenheit , that is, releasement,
equanimity, composure, or ‘letting-be’ (p. 198) – not ‘resignation and
passivity’, as Feenberg rather polemically translates the term at one point
(p. 184). But Feenberg gives a more sympathetic treatment of the notion of
Gelassenheit later, when he writes: ‘Heidegger’s undeniable insight is that
every making must also include a letting-be, an active connection to the
meanings that emerge with the thing and which we cannot “make” but only
release through our productive activity’ (p. 198, my emphasis). If the ‘criteria
for constructive reform’ (p. 189) Feenberg seeks are to be found anywhere in
Heidegger’s view, it is here. In fact, Gelassenheit is one of the main criteria
that the Amish use when deciding for or against the integration of a new
technological device into their community. To some this example may seem
its own refutation, but the critical theorist of technology can learn much from
the Amish, who are not ‘knee-jerk technophobes’ , but rather ‘very adaptive
techno-selectives who devise remarkable technologies that � t within their
self-imposed limits’. The Amish may actually have achieved Heidegger’s
ideal of a ‘free relation to technology’ , according to which we should ‘af� rm
the unavoidable use of technical devices, and yet also deny them the right to
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste to our nature’. Heidegger
is not a Luddite, but rather advocates a non-addicted ‘proper use’ of technical
devices in which we keep ourselves ‘so free of them that we may let go of
them at any time’.19 He says we should ‘let technical devices enter our daily
life, and at the same time leave them outside’; the Amish take this advice
quite literally when they leave their cellular phones in the outhouse overnight
so that phone calls will not interrupt the face-to-face communal relations they
cherish. The Amish do not reject new devices like the cell phone out of hand,
but live re� exively with them, sometimes for years, before deciding ‘what
will build solidarity and what will pull them apart’, what can be adapted to � t
the needs and values of their community (like high-tech electric barbecues)
and what cannot (like cars), and in such adaptation they can be quite
creative.20

But for Feenberg, Heidegger’s faith in Gelassenheit is too ‘nostalgic’
(p. 199) and passive; Heidegger’s ‘fatalism’ gives over too much human
autonomy to the technological order. In fact, Feenberg’s fundamental

208 Iain Thomson



objection appropriates Marcuse’s most powerful political criticism of
Heidegger. As Marcuse put it, Heidegger succumbed to a ‘hopeless
heteronomism’, that is, he lost faith in the Enlightenment’s understanding
of freedom as the capacity for substantive rational self-determination, the
ability to direct the ends as well as the means of human life. Feenberg
expresses this Marcusean criticism in a Marxist register: Heidegger is a
‘technological fetishist’ (p. viii). In the Marxist vocabulary, fetishism occurs
when a ‘social relation between men’ assumes ‘the fantastic form of a relation
between things’.21 For a Marxist (and let us not forget that critical theory is
post-Marxian Marxism), to fetishize something is to detach it from the human
labor that produced it but to continue nevertheless to project human meanings
upon it, mistaking these projections for an independent reality. The fetishist’s
anthropomorphic projection endows a humanly created thing with the
magical appearance of possessing a telos independent of human ends.
Heidegger’s technological fetishism is visible in the fact that, in his view (as
Feenberg reconstructs it), ‘technology rigidi� es into destiny’ (p. 14). But just
as Feenberg downplays the active element in Gelassenheit , so here he
overlooks the fact that for Heidegger enframing is our ‘destiny’, but it is not
necessarily our ‘fate’. As Dreyfus puts it, ‘although our understanding of
things and ourselves as resources to be ordered, enhanced, and used
ef� ciently has been building up since Plato and dominates our practices, we
are not stuck with it. It is not the way things have to be, but nothing more or
less than our current cultural clearing’. In fact, the critical force of
Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ comes from his hope for a new historical
beginning in which we would no longer treat everything as resources to be
optimized.22

Feenberg argues, however, that Heidegger succumbs to the ‘deterministic
illusion’ because he fails to notice the ‘speci� c technical choices’ which are
in fact always involved in processes like ‘the deskilling of work, the
debasement of mass culture, and the bureaucratization of society’ (p. 11). If
Heidegger ‘allows no room for a different technological future’ (p. 16), a
future which would avoid ‘the gloomy Heideggerian prediction of
technocultural disaster’ (p. 17), it is because he overlooks the speci� c
choices that always go into the process of ‘technological design’, and thus
cannot envision the possibility that technologization could come to serve
democratization. Again, I do not think Feenberg is right about Heidegger’s
supposed fatalism. This objection ignores Heidegger’s hope for an ‘other
beginning’ to Western history (this is not surprising, since for Feenberg the
political direction in which this hope led Heidegger disquali� es the hope
itself). Second, it rests on Feenberg’s polemical characterization of
Gelassenheit as ‘Heidegger’s outright rejection of agency’ (p. 105). But, as
Feenberg recognizes subsequently, Heidegger’s more balanced insistence on
ontological receptivity is in fact better understood as Heidegger’s later

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 209



‘corrective to his overemphasis on the role of Dasein in disclosure’ in his
early work (p. 195). For Heidegger it is crucial that we recognize our
ontological receptivity if we are to get beyond our ‘willful’ technological
ontology and envision an alternative future.23 Still, Feenberg’s conclusion –
that Heidegger’s own suggestions about this alternative future leave no room
for a democratization of technology – is probably right for another reason,
namely, Heidegger’s excessively dim view of democracy.

At any rate, Feenberg’s critique of Heidegger becomes the springboard for
his own alternative, which seeks to expand democratic control over the
technological design process. Here Feenberg again draws his inspiration from
Marcuse. Unlike Heidegger, Marcuse learned from Hitler’s rise to power
about the importance of maintaining strong democratic institutions capable of
mediating the will of the people and ensuring that the national voice is as
inclusive as possible. Still, Marcuse was deeply concerned that the
technological colonization of these democratic institutions discouraged
rational autonomy. As Marcuse looked around himself in 1941, he saw that
‘[i]ndividualistic rationality has developed into ef� cient compliance with the
pre-given continuum of means and ends’. Indeed, one revealing difference
between Heidegger and Marcuse can be seen in Heidegger’s interpretation of
a massive highway interchange on the autobahn as a ‘thing’ capable of putting
us in touch with the meanings of the world it embodies.24 Pace Feenberg, here
Heidegger recognizes that: ‘Devices are things too’ (p. 196), that is, he
acknowledges that it is possible to attain a ‘re� exive relation’ to technological
devices (p. 207). Heidegger thus helps raise the question concerning the world
of meanings opened and transformed by technological phenomena such as the
‘information superhighway’, the internet.25 Unlike Heidegger, however,
Marcuse thought that: ‘In manipulating the machine, man learns that
obedience to the directions is the only way to get the desired results. . . .
There is no room for autonomy.’ I think this shows that in fact Heidegger
thought further in the direction of Feenberg’s project than did Marcuse, even
though this project is inspired by Marcuse’s notion of a technological
‘democratization of functions’ (the only development Marcuse could point to
within Western democracies that seemed capable of reversing our slide
toward a ‘totally-administered society’).26

IV. Feenberg’s Alternative

Feenberg uses the work of Bruno Latour to uncover the way in which
substantive political choices are embedded into technology during the design
process. Think for example of the moral content locked into the ‘technical
code’ of the ‘speed-bump’: rather than appealing to our rational autonomy
through the imposition of speed-limits, the technical device simply decides

210 Iain Thomson



for us and forces us to comply.27 As Feenberg writes: ‘Design comes to re� ect
a heritage of . . . choices. . . . [I]n a very real sense there is a technical
historicity; technology is the bearer of a tradition that favors speci� c interests
and speci� c ideas about the good life’ (p. 139). In short, technological ‘design
mirrors back the social order’ (p. 87). Thus, against Heidegger’s supposed
technological essentialism, Feenberg argues that we need to recognize the
historical ‘malleability of technology’ (p. 193), the possibility that technology
could come to embody more democratic values. As an example of such
technical historicity, Feenberg describes the struggle between IBM and
Macintosh over text versus graphics user interfaces. Early on, the text-based
interface nicely represented the values of computer users, who were mostly
programmers. But as the democratization of computers spread computer use
beyond programmers, the graphics interface came to better represent the
values of the broader community of users.28

Why is it then that when we look at today’s computers we see no sign of
this struggle, which only recently ended? Feenberg’s answer to this question
explains why he thinks Heidegger missed what he missed. When the design
process is complete, the value-laden choices that went into it are ‘black-
boxed’, sealed into ‘the technical code’ (p. 88). This hard-wiring of speci� c
cultural values into our technical devices obscures the fact that these values
were chosen, and this reinforces a fatalistic attitude toward technology. Such
an analysis leads Feenberg to suggest that Heidegger falls victim to the
‘deterministic illusion’ technological ‘closure’ produces (p. 87) because he
‘doesn’t view modern technology from within’ (p. 197). It is certainly true
that Heidegger did not have much internal experience with technology (he did
not own a television and wrote his more than one hundred book-length
manuscripts all by hand; he would not even type, let alone ‘word-process’,
and it is not hard to imagine what he would have thought of the voice-
recognition software Feenberg himself uses).29 This becomes a decisive point
for Feenberg, who concludes that Heidegger has unknowingly adopted the
top-down ‘strategic standpoint of the systems manager’ rather than the
bottom-up ‘tactical standpoint of the human beings’ enrolled within the
technological network (p. 197).

Thus Feenberg responds to Heidegger with Foucault, supplementing the
view from above with the ‘view from below’, adding the perspective of the
many ‘subjugated knowledges that arise in opposition to a dominating
rationality’ (p. 8). Every program has its ‘anti-program’ (p. 119), Feenberg
shows, because the dominating rational order only comes into existence in
opposition to a subjugated group.30 The hope for a democratization of
technology is thus placed with such subjugated groups who, Feenberg
convincingly argues, could increasingly come to intervene in the design
process. Of course, to do so they must overcome the technocratic inertia
produced by the vested interests embodied in the technical code (which, like

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 211



Bentham’s Panopticon, eliminates the need for someone actually to occupy
the dominant subject position). Can Feenberg tell us how we are to do this?
He should be able to, since he is so critical of the fact that Heidegger ‘offers
no criteria for constructive reform’ (p. 189). In fact, there is a tension in
Feenberg’s positive view which re� ects the difference between the
Marcusean and Heideggerian positions he has synthesized. He vacillates
between an optimistic, Marcusean, May ‘68, ‘Progress will be what we want
it to be’ view which exalts the human capacity to control our future through
strategic interventions in the design process (p. 22), and a more pessimistic
Heideggerian view which suggests that while we cannot directly control the
historical direction in which technology is taking us, we can nevertheless
impact the future in small ways by learning to recognize, encourage, and
support technological democratizations when they occur.

But in the end, Feenberg’s optimism wins out, and takes him beyond the
alternatives envisioned by Marcuse and Heidegger. For Feenberg holds that
‘[w]hile the technocratic tendency of modern societies is no illusion, it is
nowhere near as total as its adversaries once feared’ (p. 104). The
Birmingham School has taught him that the ‘power structure of advanced
societies’ is ‘a contestable “hegemony” rather than a “total administration” ’
(p. 106). In so far as the technocracy is not totalizing (as both Marcuse and
Heidegger thought it would be), resistance to it need not take the Utopian
form of trying to transform the entire system at once. So Feenberg replaces
Heidegger’s epochal view of revolutionary historical change with a
progressivist, evolutionary model. Clearly, Feenberg does not like Heideg-
ger’s idea that we must wait for ‘another God’, that is, a radically
transformative cultural event which would successfully realign our values
in one fell swoop.31 Yet here I can’t help wondering, isn’t ‘May ’68’ the name
for an event in which such a god seemed for a time to arrive? Feenberg’s own
project is certainly deeply motivated by the experiences of this event and the
historical possibilities it revealed.

Feenberg nevertheless claims to be content to advocate an activism which
is ‘far more modest in its ambitions’ (p. 104). He does not follow Marcuse’s
emphasis on possible resistances to technocracy which come from ‘“without”
(art, philosophical critique, the instincts, the Third World)’ (p. 107); rather, he
advocates a progressive reform which taps into the ‘radical political resources
immanent to technologically advanced societies’ (p. 108). Feenberg’s goal is
what he calls ‘deep democratization’, that is, a short-circuiting of the
administrative ‘suppression’ of resistances which would ‘permanently open
the strategic interiority to the � ow of subordinates’ initiatives’ (p. 114). But
Feenberg does not rid himself of all revolutionary ambitions; as he calls for
the establishment of this permanent democratic voice in the design process,
he situates his project within the broader movement known as radical
democracy.32 Feenberg’s hope is that the proliferation of situated micro-

212 Iain Thomson



struggles will eventually lead to a ‘convergence’ in which AIDS patients join
together with environmentalists, Minitel hackers, progressive medical
researchers, and the like, in order to form a ‘counter-hegemony’ capable of
permanently democratizing technological design and so gaining some control
over the historical impact of technology. 33 But if the goal is not simply
democratic control for the sake of control, if, rather, this endeavor is
‘pre� gurative’, that is, if its goal is ‘to open up a possible future’ other than
enframing or technocracy (p. 108), then in the end Feenberg’s powerful and
important project may remain closer to Heidegger than his Marcuseanism
allows him to acknowledge. 34

N O T E S

1 Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy (New York: Colombia University Press,
1991), p. 152.

2 See Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London: Macmillan,
1984), pp. 480–97; and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and
Political Signi� cance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 95–
104.

3 Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’
(1934), Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. J. Shapiro (London: Free Association
Books, 1988), p. 41.

4 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (New York:
Humanities Press, 1954), p. 170; ibid., p. 180; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure
and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942
and 1944), p. 470 (Marcuse clearly shared Neumann’ s view; see Kellner, ‘Technology,
War, and Fascism: Marcuse in the 1940s’, in Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, Fascism,
Kellner [ed.], [London: Routledge, 1998], p. 8); Marcuse, Reason and Revolution , p. 419
(Schmitt, of course, was celebrating rather than bemoaning this fact; see Marcuse, ‘The
Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’, p. 275, note 79).

5 Adorno’s May 13, 1935 letter to Horkheimer is quoted by Kellner in ‘Technology, War,
and Fascism’, p. 16 note 22.

6 Kellner, ‘Technology, War, and Fascism’, op. cit., pp. 15–38; see also Wiggershaus, The
Frankfurt School, op. cit., pp. 292–302.

7 Kellner, ‘Technology, War, and Fascism’, ibid., p. 21; Marcuse, Reason and Revolution ,
op. cit., p. 433.

8 Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ (1941), in Marcuse, Tech-
nology, War, Fascism, op. cit., p. 41. Cf. Feenberg (p. 4).

9 Heidegger, January 20, 1948 letter to Marcuse (in Wolin [ed. and trans.], The Heidegger
Controversy, p. 162); ibid., p. 163. Marcuse indiscriminately associated Heidegger with
Schmitt and Bäumler in 1934’s ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View
of the State’, op. cit. (see pp. 31–42).

10 Marcuse, May 12, 1948 letter to Heidegger (in Wolin [ed.], The Heidegger Controversy ,
ibid., p. 164; I am reading Marcuse’ s self-reference as a displaced warning to his old
mentor).

11 The irony of their estrangement is compounded by the fact that Heidegger understood his
critique of technology as his philosophical repudiation of Nazism; see Hubert L. Dreyfus,
‘Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics’ , in C.
Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).

12 Augustin Berque, E^ tre Humains sur la Terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 81; translated and
quoted by Feenberg (p. 165).

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 213



13 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977), p. 33; Martin Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’ ,
trans. W. Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research XXIII (1998), p. 136.

14 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. Anderson and E. Freund (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), p. 46; Heidegger, ‘Traditional Language and Technological Language’ , ibid.,
p. 139; Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. J. Benedict (London: Verso,
1993), p. 4. But cf. Feenberg (p. 204); and Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 218–21.

15 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , op. cit., p. 17.
16 ‘Humanity does not have control over unconcealment itself’ (Heidegger, The Question

Concerning Technology , ibid., p. 18). Indeed, the very attempt to control technology – ‘the
will to mastery which becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip
from human control’ (ibid., p. 5) – is for Heidegger part of the problem; willful ontic
attempts to control or manage technology risk reinforcing the Nietzschean ontotheology of
eternally recurring will-to-power ultimately responsible for our technological epoch of ‘the
atomic age’.

17 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, op. cit., p. 52.
18 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , p. 4; ibid., pp. 30–31; ibid., p. 30.
19 Howard Rheingold, ‘Look Who’s Talking’, Wired (Jan. 1999), p. 161; ibid., p. 131;

Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 54; ibid. (my emphasis). Here we have at least one of
the Heideggerian ‘criteria’ Feenberg seeks: to relate comportmentally to technological
things with Gelassenheit means, minimally, to be able to let them go, to be able to live
without the television, cell phone, pager, fax machine, internet hook-up, etc. Of course,
counter-examples like the pace-maker and hearing-aid suggest that Heidegger’ s criterion
needs further re� nement.

20 Donald Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (quoted by Rheingold, ‘Look Who’s
Talking’ , op. cit., p. 161).

21 Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’,
op. cit., p. 39; Karl Marx, Capital (Volume One), in The Marx-Engels Reader , 2nd, R.
Tucker (ed.) (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 321.

22 Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology’ , in Andrew
Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (eds), Technology and the Politics of Knowledge
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 102. For a philosophical defense
of Heidegger’ s hope for a ‘new beginning’ , see my ‘Ontotheology? Understanding
Heidegger’ s Destruktion of Metaphysics’ , forthcoming in the International Journal of
Philosophical Studies .

23 On Heidegger’ s understanding of this alternative, see ibid., pp. 102–4.
24 Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implication of Modern Technology’ , op. cit., pp. 46–48; see

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), pp. 152–3.

25 If television has been the best ‘opiate of the people’ since religion, the Internet has the
potential to function more like a psychedelic, opening minds and increasing rather than
diminishing the interaction between self and world. Feenberg himself steadfastly defends
the democratic potentials emerging within recent forms of cyber-optimized political
networking, paying less attention to the political dangers ‘lurking’ here as well.

26 Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implication of Modern Technology’ , p. 46; ibid., p. 55.
27 Thanks for this example go to John Senion.
28 Cf. Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds:

Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997), pp. 52–54.

29 Feenberg pokes fun at Heidegger’ s critique of typewriting (see Heidegger, Parmenides ,
trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992], pp.
80–87). I � nd it remarkable, however, that in 1942 Heidegger already recognizes (in the
replacement of handwriting by typewriting) a symptom of our ontological transformation
toward enframing, a transformation which only becomes obvious once typewriting itself is
replaced by word-processing. For a convincing argument to this effect, see Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, ‘Highway L. Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann

214 Iain Thomson



on How to Af� rm Technology’ , Man and World 30 (1997), no. 2. When Heidegger looked
out at the highway interchange and the powerplant on the Ister and found words which now
seem to describe those developments we associate with the Internet, genetic research, and
cloning, his was not what Auden called ‘The dazed uncomprehending stare / Of the
Danubian despair’ .

30 Here Feenberg follows the Foucaultian thinker Michel de Certeau rather than ‘the � nal
Foucault’, who abandoned his own earlier focus on the power-resistance isomorphism in
favor of an ‘aesthetics of the self’ after his concrete genealogies taught him that such
resistances are too often re-inscribed into the system so as to expand and reinforce its rule.
(For a particularly ironic example, we might think of the way in which the New Left student
movement inadvertently catapulted Reagan to power.)

31 For Heidegger, history does not � ow in a smooth, uniform succession; the wheel of history
turns in starts and stops, revolutions catalyzed by climactic events which set the tone for the
epoch which follows; cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti� c Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962). On Heidegger’ s understanding of a new ‘god’, see my
‘The Silence of the Limbs: Critiquing Culture from a Heideggerian Understanding of the
Work of Art’, Enculturation 2 (1998), no. 1.

32 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a
Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

33 One problem with staking the future of the New Left on the hope that local, situated micro-
struggles will converge into a democratizing counter-hegemony is the fact that our recent
political history seems to demonstrate that egalitarian groups have great dif� culty building
and maintaining large-scale alliances. Leftist anti-authoritarianism and distaste for coercion
often generate an insistence on communal unanimity which (especially when combined
with the tendency toward radical self-critique) tends to splinter and divide egalitarian
alliances. See Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 86–93.

34 For Heidegger, such democratization for the sake of control would be, at best, an attempt to
roll back the wheel of history, reconstituting modern subjects out of post-modern resources .

Received 6 August 1999

Iain Thomson, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, 513 Humanities
Building, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg 215