The innocence of science?

Even if the technological option correctly interprets Marcuse’s intent and overcomes the usual objections, there are still problems with the critique of quantification. These problems concern what science and technology share, namely, precise rational methods of calculation and control. Like Heidegger, Lukács, and his Frankfurt School colleagues, Marcuse wants to extract grounds for critique from these features. But he admits that they cannot be eliminated from technology even in a socialist society. If that is so, then the objectionable aspect of capitalist technology must lie elsewhere, but where?

In a Habermasian framework one might argue that the term “domination” is inappropriate as a description of the scientific-technical quantification of being; the neutral term “control” would be a better description with “domination” reserved for specific uses of scientific-technical powers.⁶³ But as I explained in Chapter 7 the solution to the conundrum is not to revert to this outdated notion of the neutrality of science and technology, but to understand their social implications in a more complex framework.

All these theories confuse the shared a priori precondition of science and technology with a unity of purpose and consequence they need not share. The “command of nature” Bacon prophesized is common to both but this is not sufficient grounds for identifying them without distinction. Without going as far as Habermas in restricting the use of the concept of domination, it is still important to note that the link between capitalism and natural science is fundamentally methodological, not substantive. The economic system and science share a reliance on quantification, as exemplified by commodity fetishism and measurement, but they do not share the same relation to society or serve the same goals.

The concept of domination does seem inappropriate when applied to natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and geology rather than to their contingent social uses. Of course social needs often inspire research; some scientific objects and research programs clearly reflect specific power relations or ideologies. But the most profound link between capitalism and natural science is its construction of nature as an object. At this level science is relatively neutral with respect to the ideologies and values circulating in modern society. A technological attitude toward nature will be shared to some extent by any modern society, including a socialist society.

Yet, even here, where its connection to social forces is remote, the very neutrality of science cancels the consideration due to the potentialities of human beings and things.⁶⁴ But it is only conservative in its social implications to the extent that its prevailing technological applications ignore those potentialities as well. The important link between technology and capitalism is not pure method but a particular application of the method. In this context neutrality is an ideological choice.

Crudely put, science treats potassium cyanide and magnesium hydroxide indifferently as natural substances, but administering one or the other to a living human being transforms them into poison or medicine. The choice has nothing to do with scientific-technical rationality, but the technological a priori contains an inherent potential for domination, insofar as it allows one to conceive the conditions of life and death indifferently as “natural.” That potential need not be actualized. Indeed, society has structured the institution of medicine specifically to exclude neutrality as between life and death. Unfortunately, no similar exclusion protects workers and nature from the harms of industrialism.

Thus even though scientific-technical rationality is not exactly “innocent,” there is a difference between the theoretical representation of nature and the practical response to social forces in the construction of useful artifacts. To get from research to social facts an essential mediation is required; that mediation is the design process, itself based on technical codes that embody social demands in technical specifications.

The scientific-technical conception of nature enters the social world through formally biased technical realizations. These realizations depend not just on rational principles but also reflect the understanding and intentions of social actors. Technology relies on scientific knowledge at the level of causal effectiveness, while also participating in the meaningful contexture of ordinary experience. Technology thus lies “between reason and experience” and cannot be identified completely with the abstract understanding of nature of natural science.⁶⁵ Because it functions in and responds to far more substantive aspects of the lifeworld than science, technology has distinctive characteristics. The theory of formal bias explained in Chapter 7 shows how the apparently contradictory world relations of the scientific-technical disciplines and everyday experience are combined in design.

Counteracting the potential for domination implicit in science and technology requires incorporating values protective of life in design. Designs answering to such values are routinely found in precapitalist societies. This is the work of craft. But craft belongs to societies of scarcity in which class rule is based not on technology but on myth and force.

Under capitalism craft traditions are abandoned and the underlying population excluded from the design process. Capitalism revolutionizes production and subordinates the whole society to technical power that becomes the new source of legitimacy. Thus capitalist technology fully unfolds its potential for domination not only at the level of its particular objects but generally, socially. This situation can be reversed where design takes into account the potentialities projected by a democratic process informed by a humane imagination.

Marcuse thus argues that technology must again incorporate an objective “final cause.” Teleology returns as an attribute of artifacts responding to human and natural potentialities. He writes, “the technical mastery of final causes is the construction, development, and utilization of resources (material and intellectual) freed from all particular interests which impede the satisfaction of human needs and the evolution of human faculties. In other words, it is the rational enterprise of man as man, of mankind.”⁶⁶ And again:

The critique of technology aims neither at a romantic regression nor at a spiritual restoration of “values.” The oppressive features of technological society are not due to excessive materialism and technicism. On the contrary, it seems that the causes of the trouble are rather in the arrest of materialism and technological rationality, that is to say, in the restraints imposed on the materialization of values.⁶⁷

Here the original telos of rationality is restored.