Response to Andrew Feenberg

Abstract

I would like to thank Andrew Feenberg for his detailed and scrupulous reading of my book – Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World. It is furthermore a pleasure to have pointed out a convergence of my work with his own, one major aspect of which is his critique of technosystems and theorization of their reform by social movements. In this we have a common interest. Understanding this relationship is one of the most important tasks for a contemporary critical theory. The theoretical connection that he correctly makes is to understand technosystems – such as urban transit systems, medical systems and so on – in relation to the conception of formalization, which I take from Edmund Husserl and develop somewhat further in Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism. Formalization of a system of signs depends, in the first place, on considering each sign not as an individual perception or action but as an ‘anything–whatever’ (Husserl) that can then be placed into relation with other similar signs to constitute sign-systems that are most developed in mathematical manifolds. The development of extensive formal systems independent of their experiential origin or consequences is arguably the central feature of post-Renaissance modernity. My critique of formalization shows that the elements of such sign-systems cannot be related back to individual objects of perception or action directly but can only occur by the application of the sign-system as a whole to a formalized domain of experience – what Feenberg calls a technosystem. Classical Critical Theory recognized that there is a difference between two forms of abstraction – generalization and formalization – but did not consider the difference to be of relevance to their arguments. They simply assumed that the application of scientific abstraction led to technical applications. In my reconsideration of Marcuse’s work, I showed why formal abstraction leads to technical applications due to the stripping of an ‘anything–whatever’ of its relation to a perceived background and a limiting horizon