Policy Futures in Education, Volume 4, Number 1, 2006 doi:10.2304/pfie.2006.4.1.

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Groundwork for the Concept of Technique in
Education: Herbert Marcuse and technological society
CLAYTON PIERCE
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
ABSTRACT This article articulates the groundwork for a new understanding of the concept
of technique through a critical engagement with Herbert Marcuses critical theory of
technology. To this end, it identifies and engages three expressions of technique in Marcuses
work: mimesis, reified labor, and the happy consciousness. It is argued that this mapping of
the concept of technique provides the philosophy of education with a new perspective in
which to understand the relationship between technology and the educational experience in
the contemporary moment. The exposition of technique, moreover, when applied to the
educational context, applies not only to technological artifacts per se but also extends to
educational policies that share the mutual logic embedded within existing expressions of
technique. Finally, it is suggested that Marcuses project to theorize a qualitatively new
form of technology must be taken up within the educative process. The article contends
that this will require rethinking interactions between students and science and technology
within the educational context that can promote and produce democratic and liberatory
expressions of technique.
The culture depends, for its continued functioning (even for its growth) on sustaining the
limits which it imposes upon technology. Moreover, these limits also determine the
direction in which technical progress develops within this culture. The idea of qualitatively
different forms of technological rationality belongs to a new historical project. (Herbert
Marcuse)
Introduction: technique and education
Historically, technology within the sphere of education has always been a means by which to shape
and enhance the transmission of knowledge and information. From the first educational
technologies, such as the printed text, to correspondence educations dependence on the postal
system, to contemporary multimedia and information technologies that have accompanied the rise
of the information society, educational institutions have always had to respond to evolving
technologies that have altered the ways humans work, understand, and interact within society and
culture. Yet, this relationship between education and technology has in official policies also been
one of passivity and adaptation. New technologies enter the sphere of education as modes of
information transfer and as cultural artifacts and as such they co-construct the experience of
education as well as its outcomes. This dominant model is embodied in the National Education
Technology Plan of 2004, released in January 2005 by the US Department of Education:
With one notable exception, No Child Left Behind, these changes are being driven by forces
in the field. They are being driven by the new realities of the digital market place, the rapid
development of virtual schools, and the enthusiasm of an amazing generation of students
weaned on the marvels of technology who are literally forcing our schools to adapt and
change in ways never before imagined.[1]
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Indeed, information and communication technologies constitute the most dramatic relationship
between technology and education today. And while these seductive and powerful technologies
may offer progressive potentials in the way education engages technology, possibly providing a
space of resistance where information technologies can be appropriated and retooled for
democratic ends, there is little discussion of how education has also been complicit in denying a
demand for qualitatively new forms of technology. In this article I will begin to examine the
reasons for this complicity. In so doing, I ask what role education should play in generating a
demand for qualitatively new forms of technology that promote democratization, freedom, and
human well-being. I work toward an answer to this question through the manifold of Herbert
Marcuses critical theory of technology.[2] More precisely, in an effort to make clear what an
educational project for qualitatively new forms of technology will require, I will concentrate on the
concept of technique in Marcuses philosophy. The reason I focus on the concept of technique is
because, as I argue below, the concept best illuminates the multidimensional life of technology
which not only shapes the content of education but also its material expression.
It is the less visible aspects of technology, therefore, that constitute the form and content of
technique, reflecting the cloaked social and political life of science and technology.[3] Technique is
defined, therefore, in this study as epistemological modes of interaction and relations with technology. Yet
technique is also more than ways of knowing in relation to technological artifacts; it is also an ontological
concept as it produces distinct modes of being in technological society. Technique, as I am employing it,
differs from other studies of technique, such as Jacques Elluls The Technological Society, in that
technique is treated here as a dialectic concept as opposed to a totalizing one.[4] Technique
understood dialectically resists a solely negative characterization of the concept. Instead I
emphasize techniques multidimensionality as it can be reconstructed as a toehold for extending
democratic and socially transformative practices in education. Thus, as technique is most
frequently expressed in education oppressively, at the same time it presents the possibility to
cultivate alternative expressions of technology through reconstructed techniques.
But first, it will be useful to elucidate how technique is related to technology more clearly with
a brief sketch of this relationship. Technique as a concept reflects the objective organization of
technology as a process of production and modes of social life set within the context of
technocapitalist [5] society. Particular technologies, such as a bar of soap or a nuclear reactor for
example, are both linked to technique in that they produce sets of practices, relations, and ways of
being at the level of the individual and society. Techniques role in technocapitalist society,
therefore, is a constitutive one because it is the conjuncture where technology, society and culture,
and the political coalesce. As such, it is in the concept of technique where not only the ontological
expression of soap and nuclear energy are determined and legitimized, but also it is where the
negative consequences of these technologies (that range from the minimal displeasure of bad odor
to the destruction of life at the cellular level) escape the democratic process.[6] Technique,
moreover, is where the multidimensionality of technology is revealed its positive and utopian
potential as well as its negative and destructive quality are mediated by technique. This is why
technique must be interrogated if we are serious about remaking society through education.
Producing counter-techniques in education that aim at the social reconstruction of technology and
education can extend democracy into the realm of technique.
Thus, in order to flesh out technique as a muted organizational structure and its expression in
the sphere of education, I focus on three expressions of technique in Marcuses One-Dimensional
Man and other essays on technology and society. The first expression of technique in Marcuses
critical theory of technology is the concept of mimesis. I will concentrate on how mimesis acts as
an accelerator and strengthening force of technique within technological society, or, in other
words, how technique becomes subjective. The second expression of technique I examine in
Marcuses work illuminates how, through technology, labor is qualitatively effected within
technological society. And lastly, I articulate how, for Marcuse, technological society shrinks
alternative spaces of resistance by extending technique into the deepest recesses of human
subjectivity and culture.
From my analysis of technique in Marcuses critical theory of technology, I argue that a
rigorous critique of technique within education is necessary in order to expand the project for
robust democratic practices within education. This theory entails the linking of technology and
Marcuse and Technological Society
63
science to a broader project of democracy while also imbuing in such subjects a critical
consciousness that can begin to generate the demand for a new relationship with technology that
originates both within and outside the classroom. To put it another way, by questioning the role of
technique within the sphere of education, and by using Marcuses concept of technique as the
groundwork for this project, it will become apparent how technology and science are central to the
project for a democratic society through education. Thus, the groundwork for the examination of
technique provides the philosophy of education with a tool that can better articulate the
relationship between technology and its life in the classroom.
One example of what the groundwork for a critique of technique in education can yield, and
which will be touched upon in my conclusion, are expressions of technique that extend beyond
technological artifacts such as computers, white boards, digital projectors, or drinking fountains.
That is, technique equally shapes not only educational content in technocapitalist society through
technological artifacts and educational policies such as those embodied in the assessment and
standardization movement encapsulated in the No Child Left Behind Act (hereafter NCLB), but
also in educational space. Indeed, the concept of technique offers powerful insights while also
raising some important questions that point to the need for new approaches in educational
philosophy. But first I will examine Marcuses seminal study on technological society which will
serve as the point of departure for the further development of the concept of technique in the
contemporary moment of education.
Marcuse and Three Expressions of the Concept of Technique
Of the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists it was Herbert Marcuse who relentlessly studied
the role of technology and its impact on civilization. For him, the historical moment of advanced
society was uniquely marked by the harnessing and shaping of human technology through the
capitalist apparatus of production that extended an imprisoning and debilitating set of social and
cultural relations through negative techniques of administration and containment. Under the
constraints of capitalism, technology, for Marcuse, came to be the vehicle for the advancement of
instrumental reason, contributing to and accelerating the decline of the individuals ability to
achieve critical consciousness concerning existing social conditions. Dissent against the status quo
in this context fades into the background through the strengthening presence of technological
societys novel attributes. For Marcuse, one of the emerging qualities of technological society that
signaled a dramatic change in the relationship between individuals and technology is expressed in
the concept of mimesis, the first articulation of technique in his work.
Mimesis for Marcuse plays an enormously significant role for the expression of technique at the
level of subjectivity. The process of mimesis begins where [m]ass production and mass distribution
claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the
factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical relations.
The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his
society and, through it, with the society as a whole.[7] The process of mimesis, internalized in the
individual within technological society, is alienation in its advanced form. That is, mimesis for
Marcuse is alienation that has become objective through technological societys unique capability
to achieve total administration of the labor process that couples work to the normative ethic of
consumer society all within the subject. Indeed, the effects of mimesis on the individual in
advanced society for Marcuse are tremendous and of great political consequence:
reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become entirely
objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence. There is
only one dimension, and it is everywhere and in all forms. The achievements of progress
defy ideological indictment as well as justification; before their tribunal the false
consciousness of their rationality becomes the true consciousness.[8]
Alienation in technological society has indeed achieved a new level of strength for Marcuse. This
more robust form of alienation is marked by a greater liquidation of dissent and critical thought to
the objective historical conditions that further obscures the processes of alienation embedded in
advanced capitalist society. But most important for this analysis is that mimesis evaporates the
former historical relationship between individuals, their tools, and relations of production in
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industrial society. It is this effect of mimesis set within technological society that I want to
accentuate here.
The relationship that is established through mimesis between the individual and technology is
one that emanates an unreflective and pacified nature a way of life that accepts technologies as
they are on their own terms. The individuals capacity to attain critical consciousness of the
objective contradictions of capitalist labor conditions, aggressive militarism, and rampant
destruction of the natural world, for instance, is subsumed through an apparatus that produces
both the needs and goods that consumer society demands. This destructive and oppressive quality
of technology under capitalisms control and the process of mimesis move from sight. Here we can
begin to see that Marcuses problem is not only a material but a metaphysical one as well:
technological society, through the subjectification of objective reality (mimesis), dispenses with
metaphysics, the realm of contemplative thought where the way things are can be held in
judgment against the way things ought to be, or at least potentially could be. This space collapses
through advanced societys ability to deliver the goods, which now comes to define the good life.
In this sense we can think of Hegels night where all cows are black. However, in the context of
technological society, the implosion of the material and metaphysical worlds has brought forth
darkness through a distorted brand of enlightenment. As such, Marcuses concept of mimesis offers
a way of understanding human interaction with technology as not simply a utilitarian moment, but
instead what becomes clear is how technology is complicit in producing modes of life and ways of
thinking through the subjective internalization of technique.
For Marcuse the mode of life produced through mimesis in advanced society is an unreflective,
pacified one. Subjectivity, defined under these terms, lacks the capacity to establish autonomous
and critical relations with human technology that is, creating and implementing technologies for
democratic and responsible ends. Mimesis thus gives technique a material expression in advanced
society that is historically unique, conquering dissent and critical consciousness in the individual
while retaining and reproducing the necessary forms of labor relations, social needs, and political
attitudes. In the context of contemporary education, mimesis as an expression of technique
manifests in the NCLB era as an immediate relation between the student and society. Increasingly,
a reflective distance from society and culture is denied in education and instead an immediate
relationship to technocapitalist society is imposed. Yet, for Marcuse, mimesis does not signal the
complete foreclosure of political alternatives to technological societys historical expression. In fact,
alternative modes of life reside in the very same technologies that contribute to civilizations
decline in advanced industrial society.
The grand paradox of advanced society never left Marcuses sight: capitalisms advanced
technologies of production presented the material potential to simultaneously alleviate human toil
and increase leisure. This paradox was never completely solved by modernity. Thus, building off
Marxs dialectic insight on industrial technology in the Grundrisse, Marcuse similarly saw the
undelivered promise of Enlightenment progress lying in the accelerated means of production that
the machines of industry had ushered into history.[9] Marcuses critical theory of technology,
however, also recognized that in fascist and advanced society technology had taken on a unique
totalizing quality. It was these organizational forms of the state that generated the cultural and
social conditions for technology to reach its oppressive apex. Technology in both contexts was
bound to the imperatives of the systems irrational demands: one that harnessed technology for a
state-controlled production process and one that aimed to prevent crisis in the capitalist mode of
production. Thus for Marcuse technical progress evolves its own apparatus, and evolves it in
accordance with the work to be done, and this work is not determined technologically: it is rather
given from the outside, by the social needs to be fulfilled.[10]
With this in view, techniques second expression within advanced society is characterized by its
ability to achieve a containment of social change. This takes place for Marcuse in the new labor
relationship between the worker and his or her technology of production in a highly technological
landscape. The transformation of labor within technological society is characterized for Marcuse by
its automation, that, on the one hand, increasingly reduc[es] the quantity and intensity of physical
energy expended in labor [11], while on the other, assimilating the innermost recesses of the
workers consciousness to the objective reality of technological society. Labors new mode
produces significant effects for Marcuse. Through automation, the technologically streamlined
Marcuse and Technological Society
65
production process itself becomes a subject a reified process that conditions the workers
consciousness and being through a meshing of the instinctual drives and aspiration of individuals to
the rhythms of mechanized labor. Through technologies of work, a new transfer has emerged on
the scene that further blurs the line between subject and capitalist expressions of technology.
What is important for us to reflect on here is the shift in the relationship between the subject
(the worker) and technology (the object or artifact). That is, we see in Marcuses study of
technological society that technology has taken on a reified and totalizing quality. In other words,
technology and technique merge into an indistinguishable unity. The worker is thus no longer able
to distinguish technology from its organizational framework, or the role of technology in the
capitalist production process. Even more pernicious, the organizational goals of technology in
advanced society have become the very same goals and aspirations of the worker. This seamless
coupling of technique and technologies of production dissolves the potential for alternative forms
of life by imbuing in the individual a political consciousness of passive cooperation with the
imperatives of global capital that Marcuse characterizes as a vicious circle ... which is self-
expanding and self-perpetuating in its own pre-established direction driven by the growing needs
which it generates and, at the same time, contains.[12]
Technology in advanced society, therefore, produces a new historical expression of technique
where [t]he mechanics of conformity spread from the technological to the social order; they
govern performance not only in the factories and shops, but also in the offices, schools, assemblies
and, finally, in the realm of relaxation and entertainment.[13] Standardization, conformity to
consumer attitudes and culture, the workers anesthetization to class contradiction, and most
importantly, the loss of dissenting critical thought against this system, are expressed through the
technique of technological society. To put it another way, the expression of technique illuminated
here as a new form of labor carries with it the epistemological seed for its continued development
through its increasingly determinative effect on human work and learning. Learning in an
automated context where the banking method [14] is the dominant mode of pedagogy (reinforced
by a hegemonic policy of reward and punishment), the classroom itself becomes a place where
technique and technology become one. The distinction between what we learn and how we learn
is lost and the totality remains invisible. This epistemological transfer does not only take place
through labor, however, but also in the realm of leisure and art. Technique, in Marcuses critical
theory of technology, thus not only extends into the sphere of work, but also to the cultural.
The flattening out of society into an efficiently productive whole entails for Marcuse the striking
out of all realms of potential critical reflection. This is the striking feature of the third expression of
technique: the colonization of the spaces of art and leisure where the worker was previously
afforded a place to escape the miseries of alienated life. One-dimensional thought, in other words,
is now able through technological societys totalizing quality to penetrate the transcendent
rationality of the aesthetic realm. To be sure, technological society, for Marcuse, has developed the
capacity to surround the individual even outside of the factory, defining the very space where
individuals may have had a chance to acquire a critical position to the oppressive features of his or
her experience. The emergence of an apparatus of cultural production [15]that harnesses mass
communication and information technologies thus generates its own aesthetic of oppression that
extends techniques influence from beyond the factory or office:
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics,
religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their
common denominator the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of
salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the
status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.[16]
In Marcuses framework, technique, through technologies of communication and cultural
production, provides the means for the colonization of a dimension of social refusal. This is the
distinguishing mark of this mode of one-dimensional technique.
For Marcuse, the concept of repressive desublimation explains technological societys
colonization of the realm of Refusal retained in art, where the protest against that which is is
reduced to the caprice of the captains of the culture industry.[17] This concept expresses
technique in technological society in a wholly unique manner. This is because, for Marcuse,
repressive desublimation replaces mediated with immediate gratification at the instinctual level of
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the individual. That is, technological society, through its unprecedented material strength, is able
to liberate instinctual drives that were formerly suppressed through toil of physical labor, and
project this surplus libidinal energy into illusory form. In other words, repressive desublimation
plays out in subjectivity by:
diminishing erotic and intensifying sexual energy, the technological reality limits the scope
of sublimation. It also reduces the need for sublimation. In the mental apparatus, the tension
between that which is desired and that which is permitted seems considerably lowered, and
the Reality Principle no longer seems to require a sweeping and painful transformation of
instinctual needs. The individual must adapt himself to a world which does not seem to
demand the denial of his innermost needs a world which is not essentially hostile.[18]
Technological society, in this sense, shapes the libidinal, innermost drives of human subjectivity,
reducing them to a position that accepts an immediate form of eroticism that is dispensed through
any number of mass-produced cultural artifacts and manufactured pleasure experiences. Alleviating
the contradiction that arises from the socially established Reality Principle allows technique to
affect primordial drives that resist the instrumental constraints that are embodied in the social
institutions and cultural norms of advanced society. The redirection of the inner drives of
subjectivity, for Marcuse, marks the depths to which technique in technological society has come
to define human existence. The shrinking of opposition to these forces of technological society
affects the ontological determination of the individual. His or her subjectivity springs forth into
contemplative thought only to return to the individual in a self-affirming form. The negative realm
of art replaced with an administered aesthetic ameliorates existence into a blissful complacence.
The result of this third expression of technique is the emergence of the happy consciousness of
technological society.
For Marcuse, the production of the happy consciousness and its operationalization through
repressive desublimation is a distinct and widespread feature of technological society. The previous
forms of technique examined thus far labor in a highly technological context and the process of
mimesis culminate in a historical form of this complacent consciousness. This dominant mode of
thought found in technological society:
reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of
everything, delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the
effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and
must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral
agent. Conscience is absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things.[19]
This totalizing picture for Marcuse is the product of advanced capitalist societys highly
technological form and its technique. Existence in this context is one that is constantly mediated by
the immediate of a highly technological reality. Whereas industrial society created the conditions
for alienation to grow objectively, technological societys objectivity completely engulfs the
individual and gains subjective form through the happy consciousness. For Marcuse, the alternative
to one-dimensional society and the happy consciousness requires a radical transformation of
science and technology. This must take place through a transvaluation of science and technology,
uprooting their intimate relationship to technocapitalism and replacing it with a rational one.
New Technologies, New Techniques and Education
For Marcuse, to escape the destructive and oppressive science and technology of advanced society
new techniques of liberation must be brought into being. Indeed, Marcuse envisages a science of
liberation which would combine reflections on liberation with thought about how to reconstruct
our technology, environment and human relations to increase dramatically human freedom and
well being.[20] Yet, this project never reached fruition in Marcuses lifetime and he left it up to a
new generation of critical theorists to break the iron grip that advanced society retains over the
material expression of human technology. I want to suggest here that this project needs to be
centered in education. As I have argued above, and attempted to demonstrate through an
engagement with Marcuses critical theory of technology, technique and technology have ceased to
Marcuse and Technological Society
67
be distinct concepts. Instead, the implosion between the reflective realm and application creates a
state of affairs that mirrors this very union. The effects of this union help shape education today.
In the sphere of education we can see how technique guides the way we interact with our
technologies, binding our relationship that oftentimes encourages passivity and adaptation. We can
also view how educational spaces across the country are infused by this very same technique. Here
the mark of the second expression of technique, labor in a technologically reified form, is set into
plain view where basic technologies of schooling such as books, paper, classroom facilities, and
basic infrastructure are absent. This is common in the United States, one of the wealthiest nations
in the world, where portable classrooms have become quite common across primary and
secondary school campuses throughout the nation. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the
largest school district in the nation, this phenomenon is commonplace, especially in disadvantaged
districts such as those in South Central and East Los Angeles.
Educational technologies of space have multiple effects on the educational experience of the
student. The symbolic effect alone of a mobile classroom is troubling enough as it communicates
to the student a sense of compulsory internment instead of an experience of empowerment and
care. As such, students would have to actively resist the instrumental design of the classrooms in
order not to feel as though they were being held captive in a prison-like facility.[21] The students
experience with an environment of development is denied and instead the standardization of
repressive techniques prevails. Indeed, spatial technologies such as portable classrooms are not
addressed in policy such as the NCLB yet they have as much of an effect on the outcome of
education as does the inherently flawed policy that is embodied in this document. In this example
technique in education stares one directly in the face: the most cost-effective use of space and
resources that house a pedagogy of acceptance and passivity. The technique of automation wins
out over education. The subjectivity formed through this relationship to technology is one of
repression and pessimism in this unacceptable learning environment. Thus, by extending the
concept of technique beyond its relationship to technologies per se within education, technique
becomes visible and points to its value as a heuristic tool.
By accentuating technique we can see how it similarly shapes the form and content of
education, mirroring the homogenizing and disempowering quality of Marcuses articulations of
technique. A clear example of this phenomenon can be located in the NCLB Act, which represents
technique as a broadened concept of shared logic. Through this analysis we can see that embedded
within the educational policy of NCLB are techniques that administer the potential for a student to
develop into an autonomous subject and responsible citizen in a global world. Many students are
affected dramatically and are subject to significant damage from this expression of technique,
especially those who attend schools in underprivileged districts across the country. For example,
hidden in the recesses of NCLB is subsection 9528 that requires both secondary and post-secondary
schools to release students personal information for the purpose of military recruitment. The
systemic demands of the state that require amiable bodies, receptive to codes of hegemonic
conduct, also produce a desired effect: students entering the military apparatus instead of
developing into autonomous and socially responsible subjects.
This congruent technique within the sphere of education is not only limited to one subsection
of NCLB. Its logic colors the entirety of the NCLB policy.[22] By analyzing the NCLBs dominant
trend of standardization and schooling as assessment from the perspective of technique, something
unique is revealed to us. That is, not only does educational standardization and assessment
enfeeble and limit the potential for empowering and socially transformative content in
pedagogy, it also unabashedly produces and employs a technique of passivity and
adaptation that shapes the development of subjectivity through schooling. The answer to
the educational crisis in the United States is thus met with more of the same. We are told that
students are not performing well enough within the existing educational structure due to lack of
regimentation and proper educational techniques. The solution implemented from the macro
level thus treats schools as defunct institutions and treats students as objects of
manipulation. Empowerment in the NCLB model comes in the shape of routinized educational
content that aims to streamline the educational system into a well-tuned machine. Under these
circumstances teaching the happy consciousness is normalized as this technique of education
demands conformity to the irrational reality.
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The historical moment requires techniques that imbue an understanding that education is
something that prepares students for the demands of society, instead of the reverse. We must move
away from the dominant trend where the sphere of education is subjugated to the role of
conditioning the subject for what lies in wait beyond the walls of the classroom toward teaching to
live the examined life and educating for social change. From our current situation students learn
that democracy means a choice between a bad or worse option while the polling station has,
unfortunately, come to symbolize the climax of most individuals democratic participation. Instead
of education as a mere appendage to this system, it must reclaim the center of society. Education
must refocus on the production of new relations that begin with critical and empowered
subjectivities through a new relationship between individuals and technology.
Given the increasingly intimate relationship between technology and schooling, education is
crucial to what Marcuse calls a new historical project for a qualitatively different form of
technological rationality, and this is why educational philosophers must continue to articulate ways
in which to resist and reverse the dominant trends that techniques within education require. One
example of contemporary movements that could be seen as developing new techniques within
education is the multiple literacies project.[23] This project within educational theory offers
critical reflection and practical frameworks that rethink education within a highly technological
terrain. In so doing, the multiple literacies movement aims to empower students with a pedagogy
that provides critical literacy skills for media and information and communication technologies,
facilitating a learning environment that generates counter-hegemonic uses and productions of the
Internet and multimedia. Their work represents the cultivation of new techniques within
education, and the expansion of educational philosophy into the pressing pedagogical challenge of
replacing oppressive techniques with liberatory ones.
Empowering students with multiple literacy skills, enabling students with the skills to produce
alternative forms of media, or teaching critical navigational skills is perhaps a place we can begin to
look for plateaus of resistance, but we must also ask at the same time if these strategies are asking
enough from technology and denying techniques of oppression. Perhaps multiple literacies
methods deliver a space for the development of a more robust set of demands. By shifting and
developing to techniques that refuse the dysfunctional relationship of response and adaptation
from existing techniques is the point of departure for a new historical project that requires more
from our technology and the subjectivity that education presently reproduces through one-
dimensional techniques. Yet, we also need to examine how technique extends beyond information
and communication technologies. As I have argued above, technique involves more than the
instrumental qualities of technological artifacts. Without a critique of the expressions of technique
treated in this article, mimesis, reified learning and work relations, and happy consciousness
through repressive desublimation, educational philosophy risks reproducing one-dimensional
relations with technology.
In light of Marcuses critique of the depth of technique in social and cultural life, we must
consider how education can play a more active role in reversing effects of technique. I contend that
this will require centering science and technology within the educational context, illuminating its
democratic role in society. This project requires education to take on a more active role with
technology and science, reversing the trend of passivity and adaptation to one that facilitates an
epistemological shift in regard to our relationship to technology. A project such as this, set
within the educational context, can produce different ontological expressions of being with
technology. For example, technologies of space such as mobile classrooms could become a
technology that is refused and recategorized as an undemocratic technology. Teachers, students,
community groups, activists and progressive scholars could lead a movement to reject mobile
classrooms as a repressive technology. The invisible political quality of this technology, its
repressive technique, would cease to be neutral and acceptable. Having educational content that
makes the links between technologies and their broader social and political life must be part of a
comprehensive democratic education.
Similarly, with the rush to wire the classroom it should also be taken into account how
techniques are strengthened and their presence augmented. Given the provision in the NCLB Act
that requires every student to be technologically literate by eighth grade, the major push to get
technologies into schools is now led by a group called Partnership for 21st Century Skills Forum.
Marcuse and Technological Society
69
This forum was created to support this requirement [NCLB], the Department [of Education]
provided assistance to the 21st Century Skills Forum, a public-private partnership among
government, business and education.[24] Not surprisingly, this group consists almost entirely of
the following corporate interests: Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell, ETS (Educational Testing Centers,
the company that administers and profits from tests such as the GRE, LSAT, and SAT), Ford, Intel,
Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Time Warner and Verizon. This exchange represents the blurred
lines between political economy and education where again the distinction between the whole
(society) and education is null critical space to mount resistance is filled with this mimetic
relationship that collapses private and public domains. Thus the technique accompanied with the
NCLB policy to make all students technologically literate brings with it an advanced form of
alienation that subjectifies the objective corporate reality through use of the classroom. This is
precisely why techniques of liberation must be generated in education to resist this mode of
technology and instead demand technologies that enable democracy instead of defining it in a
damaged form. A technique that would resist the condition that accepts one-dimensional
manifestations of technology must begin with the recognition that technology in the contemporary
context is linked to forms of life and ways of being. The challenge for educational philosophy is to
provide the means to alternative forms of life and ways of being that are deeply involved with
techniques of oppression. The project for techniques of liberation must continue to develop if we
are serious in our commitment for social transformation.
Notes
[1] National Education Technology Plan 2004 Toward a New Golden Age in American Education, available
from Department of Education website
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/plan.pdf. Even as this study is
being written Microsoft has just struck a deal with a public school district in Philadelphia to create
the high school of the future. The goal is to not only create the most technologically advanced school
in the United States, but it is also an attempt to implement a new bureaucratic form into schooling
that mimics the model used by the Microsoft Corporation. This is only the latest example of many in
the movement to privatize public schools in this country using corporate organizational models as
the streamlined response to educational needs. See Christine Smallwood, Microsofts new project:
Building a Better High School from Salon online at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/13/public_school_privatization/index_np.html
(accessed: 13 March, 2005).
[2] Different from other major studies on technological society and technique, such as Martin
Heideggers essay The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger, 1977), Jacques Elluls The
Technological Society (Ellul, 1964), and Lewis Mumfords Technics and Human Development (Mumford,
1962), Marcuse does not articulate a deterministic or autonomous framework for the logic of
technology. The former two theorists of technology ultimately advance this position, while
Mumford, in contrast, envisions the potential for different forms of technique and technology under
alternative organizations of the state. See his essay Authoritarian and Democratic Technics (1964,
pp. 1-8). However, Mumford inadequately explains, as Marcuse does much better, the historical
context of advanced capitalist society and its relationship to technique and technology. That is,
Marcuses critical theory of technology is a systematic treatment of technology and technique within
the framework of capitalism. For him, capitalist society shapes not only technology but also
individual needs, cultural expressions and ways of relating to technology. As such, Marcuses dialectic
of technology avoids technological or economic determinism by recognizing the potential for
alternative expressions of technology and human relations that are set within the capitalist context.
The dialectic analysis is unique to Marcuses study of technology and technique in capitalist society
that none of the aforementioned theorists adequately or even superficially demonstrate.
[3] See Judy Wajcman & Donald MacKenzies essay The Social Shaping of Technology (2002) for an
excellent exposition of the social life of technology and how technology is not only those that we
encounter as a technological object, but also the knowledge that accompanies their creation and
implementation.
[4] Elluls study of technique, written in 1954, is perhaps the best-known study of technique in the
twentieth century. He characterizes technique in technological society as a closed world. It utilizes
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what the mass of men do not understand. It is even based on human ignorance ... The individual, in
order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization. And no
single technician dominates the whole complex any longer. The bond that unites the fragmentary
actions and disjointedness of individuals, co-ordinating and systematizing their work, is no longer a
human one, but the internal laws of technique ... Technique reigns alone, a blind force and more
clear-sighted than the best human intelligence. The concept of technique I am using in this study
does not give such a large degree of agency to technique rather, technique as I am employing it
accentuates the dialectic relationship between human activity, their tools, and society; one that is not
immutable in the face of technique. Instead I view technique as a potentially emancipatory concept
that can through a reconstructed education, lead to new ways of using and being with technology.
See Ellul, [1954] 1964, p. 93.
[5] The concept of technocapitalism was first introduced by Douglas Kellner in Critical Theory, Marxism,
and Modernity (1989) and developed with Steven Best in their important study on contemporary
society and culture, The Postmodern Adventure: science, technology, and cultural studies at the third
millennium (Best & Kellner, 2001). Here they define the concept of technocapitalism as a
constellation in which technology and scientific knowledge, computerization and automation of
labor, and interactive technology play a role in the process of production analogous to the function of
human labor power and machines in an earlier era of capitalism. Technocapitalism also encompasses
novel modes of societal organization, unique forms of culture and everyday life, and innovative types
of contestation (p. 213). Best & Kellners concept of technocapitalism reflects the dialectic of
technology that was at the heart of Marcuses theory of technology and capital that illuminates
possibility in the present historical moment.
[6] Ulrich Beck in his now famous study on Risk Society (1992) offers a very persuasive argument and
analysis of how the modern project of industrialization, which is still the dominant production model
in contemporary society, continues to advance a non-reflective form of techno-science that directs
and shapes social progress. Beck adds to this thesis, however, which can be found earlier in the work
of Frankfurt School theorists such as Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer, that in the course of the
exponentially growing productive forces in the modernization process, hazards and potential threats
have been unleashed to an extent previously unknown (p. 19). The dual production of risks and the
responses to risk from the same scientific framework is a very powerful insight that Beck provides in
his study: the legitimization of risks and hazards through the process of contemporary forms of
techno-science that are a continuation of the modern project. Beck thus reveals the politically
invisible qualities of techno-science that have real life and death effects such as chemically triggered
cancer and global environmental destruction for example (Beck, 1992, p. 19).This is an incredibly
powerful insight that Beck provides in his study: the legitimization of risks and hazards through the
process of contemporary forms of techno-science that are a continuation of the modern project. Beck
thus reveals the politically invisible qualities of techno-science that have real life-and-death effects
such as cancer, and global environmental destruction, for example..
[7] Herbert Marcuse, 1991, One-Dimensional Man, p. 10.
[8] Ibid., p. 11.
[9] Marx remarks in the Grundrisse that What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of
the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation
of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself,
instrumental in creating the means of social disposal time, in order to reduce labour time for the
whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyones time for their own
development (Marx, 1993, p 708). This passage reflects Marxs dialectical position on technology
where at once technology is subsumed within the production forces of capitalist social relations while
simultaneously presenting the opportunity for the emancipation of labor from the strictures of the
capitalist paradigm.
[10] Herbert Marcuse, 2001, The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society, p. 47.
[11] Herbert Marcuse, 1991, One Dimensional-Man, p. 24.
[12] Ibid., p. 34.
[13] Herbert Marcuse, 1998, Some Social Implications of Modern Technology, p. 48.
[14] I am of course referencing Paulo Freires famous formulation of the banking concept in the Pedagogy
of the Oppressed ([1970] 2000). Here this method of pedagogical instruction is characterized by its
Marcuse and Technological Society
71
unidirectional teaching style. The students are recognized as mere receptacles for information to be
deposited, while the teacher remains as the only source of knowledge in the classroom. The banking
concept of education is in contrast to a dialogical learning environment where both the teacher and
students generate the content of the learning dynamic.
[15] Marcuse here is clearly building off Adorno & Horkheimers famous essay on the culture industry in
the Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1947] 2002).
[16] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 1991, p. 57.
[17] Repressive desublimation is an advancement of Marcuses concept of repressive sublimation that he
previously articulated in Eros and Civilization. There, repressive sublimation operates on a
preconditioned instinctual structure, which includes the functional and temporal restraints of
sexuality, its channeling into monogamic reproduction, and desexualization of most of the body.
Sublimation works with the thus preconditioned libido and its possessive, exploitative, aggressive
force. The repressive modification of the pleasure principle precedes the actual sublimation, and the
latter carries the repressive elements over into the socially useful activities (Marcuse, [1955] 1974,
p. 206).
[18] Marcuse, 1991, One-Dimensional Man, p. 73.
[19] Ibid., p. 79.
[20] Douglas Kellner, 1984, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, p. 333.
[21] See Tyson Lewis (2003, pp. 335-355) for an excellent analysis of the ways in which schools have
become increasingly prison-like institutions.
[22] One could argue that NCLB does not have such a totalizing logic as it clearly allows and promotes
state and local autonomy for the development of policy that is community sensitive. However, this
argument falls apart once one looks at the stipulations that are attached and thus required from
schools if they are to receive federal financial assistance. All of these stipulations require schools to fit
the mold of the overall plan for standardization and assessment if they are to receive funds. See
section 1111 for federal requirements for the State and section 1112 for local criteria. Also see
Chapter C, part D for the NCLB policy for the integration of educational technologies into the
curricula. This approach continues the relationship of imposition and adaptation that has been
discussed throughout this study.
[23] Douglas Kellner, Nicholas Burbules & Thomas Callister, and Carmen Luke are some of the strongest
representatives of this movement within educational philosophy. For an example of their work see
Douglas Kellners Technological Transformation, Multiple Literacies, and the Re-visioning of
Education. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu.faculty/kellner/papers/revisioned.htm; Nicholas Burbules &
Thomas Callisters (2000) Watch IT: the risks and promises of information technologies for education; and
Carmen Lukes (2000) Cyber-Schooling and Technological Change: Mutltiliteracies for new Times.
[24] The Department of Education website
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/facts.html
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Correspondence: Clayton Pierce, GSE&IS, University of California, Los Angeles, Moore Hall, Box
951521, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521, USA (geist@ucla.edu).