The Impossibility of Non-Repressive Technical Codes: Re-framing Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology with Jacques Lacan

Following Herbert Marcuse’s suggestions to get out of one dimensionality, Andrew Feenberg outlines suggestions for the possibility of democratic technologies: technologies that are not fixed to the dominant ‘technical code.’ However, One-Dimensional Man (1964) follows Eros and Civilization (1955), wherein Marcuse puts Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx into dialogue to assess the function of repression in maintaining a docile populace. Marcuse’s reading of Freud opens the possibility of ‘unrepressed eros,’ a ‘way out.’ A Lacanian reading of repression rather than a Freudian one challenges Marcuse’s expectation for liberation. Jaques Lacan believes that repression is the cost of entering the symbolic order: there is no society without repression. The implication is that any ‘new’ social order which supplants one form of domination installs another form of repression. Thus, Feenberg’s ‘democratic technologies,’ which are meant to release individuals from hegemonic technical codes, create new repressive technical codes in their place