Complexity, Masculinity, and Critical Theory: Revisiting Marcuse on Technology, Eros, and Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article takes as its starting point Christian Fuchs’s Internet and Society (2008), which deploys selected aspects of Herbert Marcuse’s work in the construction of a critical theory of techno-social systems and informational capitalism. Going beyond Fuchs’s emphasis on dialectics, I argue for a deeper engagement with Marcuse’s distinctive combination of Marxian, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological theory in order to formulate a theoretical framework that includes embodied aspects of techno-social experiences. By reinterpreting the concepts of nature and Eros in Marcuse’s critical theory in terms of complexity and self-organization, I suggest that his work can inform a renewal of critical theories of technology at a time when boundaries between the natural and social worlds are increasingly contested. At the same time, I argue that Marcuse’s critique of technological rationality has a significant gendered dimension that is relevant to understanding how the complexity of nature gets taken up within contemporary techno-social systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".