Thoughts on money's neglect in Andrew Feenburg's Technosystem

Andrew Feenberg in Technosystem quickly obliviates discursive differences between the classical tripartite separation of society: market, administration and technology, as put forward by critical theorists such as Habermas, by stating:

Neither markets nor administrations are conceivable outside a technical framework of some sort. Similarly, no technology is an island; all technology is mediated by markets and administrations. What is more, economic and administrative activity are themselves structured by technical disciplines¹

I'd like to put forward in the following text that Feenberg's critical theory of the technosystem---as a synthesis between ideas of critical theory and STS---has within itself dispelled potentiality for progressive change once applied essentially to the higher order of political economy, production, currency and its corresponding system: finance, etc. To do this, I will immanently critique Feenberg's critical constructivism's theoretical reliance on concretization as it is already dangerously manifested in the age-old technological innovation that was and is exchangeable currency and its eventual culmination in the financial system of late stage capitalism. In Feenberg's technical rationality's telling application to currency itself, such democratic intervention into technological systems is revealed as a much less viable route for political change, as the driving technical function of currency is itself increasingly concretized into, paradoxically, higher levels of abstraction from its objects of representation and actor interests as it is systemized into national financial markets. But two things need to be established prior to this conclusion: Money is an interpretable object that Feenberg's theory should extend to and that concretization operates in an analysis of money but forfeits democratic access for progressive praxis.

Generally, Feenberg's work is essentially one of phronetic interpretation i.e. objects are rarely seen as either ahistorical or essentially substantive, but instead interpreted via their historically situated place as almost a nexus of actor interests, interests laden with values that shape what Feenberg calls the "design code". This technical code "is a technical specification that corresponds to a social meaning."² This is the thematic that Feenberg lays out in the beginning of the chapter focused on Marx, describing that, for Marx, a "concrete" object is still an intermingling of separate determinations; he calls this a "genealogy" of technosystem design. To use 'interpretation' in reference to Feenberg is not an overdetermination philosophically, as Feenberg states that in developing his critical theory of technology, "the key advance is the hermeneutic perspective on the full range of meanings of technical devices"³. This then situates Feenberg's technology objects has having roughly a "social ontology" of a Heideggarian influence, albeit hermeneutic in the sense that it is meant to apply to specific technologies as they relate to lived experience. Dereifying analysis is thus essentially interpretation of a hermeneutic object, phenomenologically experienced, to situate onself in relation to its historical, or worldly, horizon.

On the one hand, hermeneutics is erected on the basis of phenomenology and thus preserves something of a philosophy from which it nevertheless differs: phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. On the other hand, phenomenology cannot constitute itself without a hermeneutical presupposition.⁴ What this presupposition that links the two is explication [Auslegung] or as hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricouer states, "The choice in favor of meaning [as opposed to a "naturalistic-objectivistic attitude] is thus the most general presupposition of any hermeneutics."⁵ I state this not as a meaningless excursion, but to solidify my claim that Feenberg's theory of a technosystem inextricably connects to a general ontology of meaning, and thus should be applicable to any hermeneutic object such as currency.

Feenberg in the aforementioned section "Marx after Foucault" references the fact that Marx rejects the "Aristotelian concept of substance" and puts forward that Marx himself subjected money to something like 'dereifying analysis' wherein "'things' such as artifacts, institutions, and laws" are rendered as "assemblages of components held together by their functional roles"⁶. Explicitly, Feenberg states that money "...is not composed of the same "stuff" nor does it have the same role, and yet it is still 'money'. Dereifying analysis must identify the ontological differences in the construction and meaning of objects at each stage in their development." ⁷ But this, I argue, tentatively is a reductionist explanation of the type of demystifying analysis Marx repeatedly undertook in his monetary theory, one that does not position Marx rightly as a philosopher of material relations, totalities of production. In one of Feenberg's essays on reification, he states:

Reification is in the first instance practical rather than theoretical. That is to say, the reification of social reality arises from the way individuals act when they understand their relation to social reality to be reified. The circularity of reification is a familiar social ontological principle currently referred to by the fashionable term 'performativity'. For example, money is money only insofar as we act as though it were money and it is the success of this sort of action that determines our conviction that money is in fact money... Social 'things' are not merely things but are implicated in practices.

However, from Marx, money is something more than an individual technical "thing" that one can dereify in reference to individual valuation, or actor interest. This subjectification of money's potentiality dismisses the way in which money as a phenomenon is a constitutive, yet paradoxical, surface result of a material totality.

The Grundrisse is Marx's first comprehensive treatment of money. What is vital to understand is the universal character of money that Marx puts forth here. In response to utopic socialists such as Proudhon, Marx, in answering the question 'Why is money necessary?' describes money as the "universal commodity", "the equivalent", or "general commodity". As we know, a commodity is anything that is bought, sold, or exchanged in a market sense. Further, the commodity has both an exchange value and a use value. But money is that which links by way of abstraction and contradiction these two values so that the market, or transactional institution, can operate at all. As Marx states, there is even a further contradiction between an object's exchange value and its transformation into monetary exchange value,

The simple fact that the commodity has a dual existence, as a specific product which contains its exchange value in its natural form of existence as idea (in latent form) and then as revealed exchange value (money) which has discarded all connection with the product's natural form of existence; this dual existence in two distinct forms must lead to differentiation and the differentiation to opposition and contradiction.

Essentially, contrary to Hegel who viewed money as a universal but not as a particular, Marx's theory of abstracted labor hinges on a dialectical understanding of money as that which operates as both a particular and a universal commodity, an existence inherently that of a contradiction that attends to the irrationality of capitalist system. For Marx, money is not simply an illusory thought category, but instead represents the system that produces it in its entirety: commodity exchange within political economy. Money is the universal "palpable manifestation" of contradictions within production. This idea of money as that which superficially represents objectified labor as general commodity extends forward through Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and Capital. In the former, in Chapter 2, Marx ponders over the further abstractive level of currency:

Since labour-time is the intrinsic measure of value, why use another extraneous standard as well? Why is exchange-value transformed into price? Why is the value of all commodities computed in terms of an exclusive commodity, which thus becomes the adequate expression of exchange-value, i.e., money

A possible answer to this question is developed in Capital I wherein Marx develops the idea of commodity fetishism. In short, commodities are obscured into monetary value forms so that commodity producers, by indirectly exchanging their labor as commodities, may render social relations between labor as instead relationships between objects i.e., labor is further abstracted in monetary exchange which serves Capitalist logic in many ways. Commodity fetishism involves "an alienated and independent form of labor which is hostile to labor itself". Marx's theory of money is obviously more complex but. principally, what I've hoped to establish is that a Marxist analysis of money reveals a relationship to a totality of economic relationships and, further, that its inherent function is multifaceted abstraction. As my argument now develops, utilizing Simondon's theory of concretization as it functions in technological analysis seems to merely insularize many of Feenberg's conclusions for an optimistic inclusion of technical rationality into the wider system of economic relation.

In introducing Simondon's theory of concretization, Feenberg states, "For Simondon, technologies are characterized as more or less abstract or concrete depending on their degree of structural integration. Concretizing innovations adapt technologies to a variety of demands that may at first unrelated or even incompatible."⁸ This ability for technological innovations to transform into seamless structure is called a technological system's elegance. Further, in Simondon's writing this carries a normative, teleological impulse in technological development, as Feenberg observes, "They [technologies] thus achieve higher and higher levels of concretization. In so doing they resolve tensions arising from the initial relations between their components and their environment."⁹ What is also essential, and integral to this theory of technological development is individuation, which Feenberg dedicates a section to, stating that "According to Simondon, the individual is not independent of the world but arises from a process of differentiation in a 'pre-individual' medium that splits into individual and mileu." Continuing, Feenberg widely applies this to developmental tensions between a thing and its environmental niche; this tension "testifies to the system's sustained potential, which provides the basis for its evolution towards higher levels of integration."¹⁰

Feenberg himself admits that Simondon "does not develop the political implications of concretization"¹¹ He attempts to do so in the section "The Politics of Concretization" and in my reading this is the main theoretical result of the book. As Feenberg states, "This calls for a (metaphorical) concretization of apparently incompatible theoretical functions...My aim is to 'concretize' in a single conceptual framework the functionally distinct notions of concretization in Simondon and actors in STS."¹² This new metaphorical concretization is supposed to represent how different actor interests culminate into an interpretive, value-laden, effect upon design structure. The telos, then, of technosystemic development would not be determinist and intrinsic to the technology itself but include within it the interests of both experts and lay-people. Feenberg optimistically suggests that,

Concretizations construct alliances among the actors whose various demands are materialized in a single object. That object operates across the boundaries of different social groups, each interpreting it in accordance with its own conception of its needs, each incorporating it into its own world.¹³

As he concludes the section on Concretization, this interpretation is supposed to include a type of development that "technically and normatively progressive"¹⁴

However, I will conclude by challenging this optimistic interpretation of concretization on two fronts. The first is shorter and I think quite evident: nothing of the supposed synthesis between actor interests and technological design is normative. What Feenberg fails to address is, despite the attention given to the dynamics of Power and Knowledge earlier in the book, the over domineering hegemonic power differential that exists in Capitalist society means that Actor interests are not, at least easily or without tension, equivalently incorporated into design. The aforementioned negligence towards the realities of political economy are readily present when, for example, Feenberg states that, "Ownership is of course an important resource...but it is not the only resource and at times is overshadowed by social and political factors in domains where the market is less central."¹⁵ However, in the face of growing wealth inequality, surely ownership, hegemonically imbalanced, will importantly shape future design choices in the favor of Capital interests. Simply put, Feenberg really needs to address the counterargument that lay actors are not at all capable of challenging capitalist hegemony and technocratic rationality before incorporating Actor Network Theory to explain the social influence over technological concretization. In the section on the Internet, the only application of the theory present in the book to a large extent, Feenberg states that, "The future of the Internet depends on which actors determine its technical code". But I fail to see any legwork done on enabling anti-capitalist influence over the Internet. Suggestions towards "subactivism" or dissenting political groups as existing on social media are overshadowed in my mind by the sheer capitalist bent of internet communities. Ads are spliced between the content, social spaces are increasingly monopolized into mainstream localities, etc.

This runs into my second, more theoretical point: that combining what I have shortly exposited to be the Marxist interpretation of money with Feenberg's optimistically interpreted theory of concretization reveals a discursive hole. To state bluntly, money as commodity is already, as shown, the most concretized technological "thing" existent in the total system that is political economy, but its surface appearance as the universal commodity dissimulates ways in which labor and man's species-being is increasingly abstracted. Money as thing has for itself abstraction as its function. It's transformation into elegant structure is global economy. Further, the two-fold nature of money that Marx's exposited shows how readily capitalist logic can distance real social relation into a market of thing relations. Are not the multifaceted interests of actors lost when currency equivocates economic spheres of production, as Marx stated? How might one influence the "design" code of an abstractive function, one which is instead the connective mediator between differing commodities and their system of production? I failed to see, in Feenberg's Technosystem a real engagement with these questions. This ultimately renders Feenburg's theory here a lot more reformist than I think he would envision.