With the Marshall McLuhan Lecture, the transmediale invites a figure in the Canadian cultural landscape, whose work expands on McLuhan’s media theories in the context of contemporary culture and society, to present their insights.

Lecture topic: Ten Paradoxes of Technology

This lecture presents a philosophy of technology. It draws on what we have learnt in the last 30 years as we abandoned old Heideggerian and positivist notions and faced the real world of technology. It turns out that most of our common sense ideas about technology are wrong. This is why I have put my ten propositions in the form of paradoxes, although I use the word loosely here to refer to the counter-intuitive nature of much of what we know about technology. The story is one of reconciling the incompatibilities between whole and part, lay and expert, means and ends, authority and democracy, reason and experience.

Andrew Feenberg is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, BC). He received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse. Among his research interests are philosophy of technology, Critical Theory, the Internet, and Japanese intellectual history. His work combines an approach based on Critical Theory with concepts and methods drawn from the field of Science and Technology Studies. He is the author of Transforming Technology, Questioning Technology, Alternative Modernity, Heidegger and Marcuse, and Between Reason and Experience, co-author of When Poetry Ruled the Streets, and co-editor of Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Modernity and Technology, and The Essential Marcuse. He has taught at Duke University, San Diego State University, the University of Paris, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Tokyo. > sfu.ca/~andrewf

 
Moderator

Kristoffer Gansing (se/de)

transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture is a cooperation between transmediale and the Embassy of Canada.