4.1.1. Philosophy and Sociology of Technology
During my time as a PhD student at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, I started teaching philosophy and sociology of technology to informatics students in 2000. I had read Marx and made his analysis of technology in capitalism a centrepiece of my lectures. I however wanted to complement Marx by a critical analysis of the role of technology in the twentieth century. Like most students interested in Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the Germanspeaking world, I had read Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. But I found their approaches did not suficiently engage with the relationship of technology and society. I had at this time only read a couple of Herbert Marcuse’s essays. In the German-speaking world, students interested in critical theory are not so much encouraged to engage with Marcuse and many scholars have the (false) idea that Marcuse only copied Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industrychapter and did not write much more than One-Dimensional Man. Facing the task of teaching Frankfurt School Critical Theory of technology, I discovered the importance of Marcuse’s works.
I used parts of One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964b) and Marcuse’s (1941b) essay Some Social Implications of Modern Technology for teaching. Fascinated by Marcuse’s insights, I read more and more of his books and articles and thereby obtained a fuller picture of the breadth and depth of his critical theory. I was especially impressed by Reason and Revolution (Marcuse 1941a) because it opened up an interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical logic that was grounded in a dialectic of subjectivity/objectivity and chance/necessity and helped me to understand the importance of avoiding the twin traps of idealist subjectivism that neglects structural conditions of action and vulgar materialism that sees the world as being determined by natural laws.
I wrote three books about the contemporaneity of Marcuse’s works:
• Krise und Kritik in der Informationsgesellschaft. Arbeiten über Herbert Marcuse, kapitalistische Entwicklung und Selbstorganisation (Crisis and Criticism of the Information Society. Works on Herbert Marcuse, Capitalist Development and Self-Organisation, Fuchs 2002).
• Emanzipation! Technik und Politik bei Herbert Marcuse (Emancipaton! Technology and Politics in the Works of Herbert Marcuse, Fuchs 2005a).
• Herbert Marcuse interkulturell gelesen (Herbert Marcuse: An Intercultural Interpretation, Fuchs 2005b).
These three works have not been much read because they have not been translated into English and there is much more interest in Adorno, Horkheimer and
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Critical Theory of Communication