The Black Notebooks are a work, in which Heidegger provided an answer to the question of the structural contexts of modernity and modern technology. He says that the logic of calculability is Jewish. Heidegger identifies instrumental reason with Jews. So for him the cause and context of modernity and modern technology’s problems – the rise of world-lessness and alienation – is seen in Jews.
There is a logical link between the Black Notebooks, Being and Time, and The Question Concerning Technology. The first provide the missing link and grounding for the second and the third. The Black Notebooks help explaining a theoretical void in the other two books. Das Man (the they) and das Ge-stell (the enframing) have in the Black Notebooks a grounding for Heidegger, namely what he and others term ‘world Jewry’, i.e. the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy.
1.5.4. Heidegger and the Critical Theory of Society, the Media and Technology
The Frankfurt School’s works form a critique of instrumental reason, a critique of capitalism’s reduction of humans to instruments whose labour serves capital accumulation, a critique of domination questioning the instrumentalisation of humans for fostering the rule and power of the few, and a critique of ideology questioning the instrumentalisation of human thinking. The Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason is however fundamentally diferent from Heidegger’s analysis. Whereas Critical Theory’s context is political economy, Heidegger’s phenomenology is short-circuited and therefore prone to turn into an instrumental ideology itself. If one wants to ground a critique of modern technology and media, then approaches that are much better grounded in the analysis of society and political economy than Heidegger’s phenomenology are available.
Heidegger and the critical theory of society, the media and technology are irreconcilable. Such a theory can in contrast in a feasible manner be grounded in Karl Marx’s dialectic of technology, Georg Lukács’ notion of reification, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of instrumental reason, and Herbert Marcuse’s category of technological rationality.
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Critical Theory of Communication