techno society
The Technological Society (1954) by jacques ellul via 318 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jacques-ellul-the-technological-society]
towards end started reading his propaganda as well
notes/quotes:
5
Statement from the Publisher
I would never have heard of this book ..Sometime in 1961, Robert M. Hutchins and Scott Buchanan told Aldous Huxley of the Center’s interest in technology and asked his opinion about contemporary European works on the subject. Huxley recommended above all Ellul’s La Technique, which had been published in Paris by Armand Colin in 1954 without having attracted much attention.
I couldn’t possibly read Ellul’s French, which apart from the matters with which he deals is very difficult, but since Scott Buchanan and Columbia’s distinguished sociologist Robert K. Merton both said the book deserved publication in English, and since Mr. Buchanan had a translator at hand in John Wilkinson of the Center staff, who was willing to tackle this difficult and almost sure to be thankless job, I committed our firm to an undertaking that I soon began to call “Knopf’s folly.”
6
Foreword
..and it is more analytical than Lewis Mumford’s trilogy—although Ellul handles the historical evidence much more sparingly and with less assurance than Mumford.
Despite Ellul’s forceful emphasis upon the erosion of moral values brought about by technicism, he has written neither a latter-day Luddite tract nor a sociological apocalypse. He shows that he is thoroughly familiar with the cant perpetuated by technophobes and for the most part manages to avoid their cliches. Indeed, he takes these apart with masterly skill to show them for the empty assertions they typically are. Neither does he merely substitute a high moral tone or noisy complaints for tough-minded analysis. His contribution is far more substantial. He examines the role of technique in modern society and offers a system of thought that, with some critical modification, can help us understand the forces behind the development of the technical civilization that is distinctively ours.
Enough of Ellul’s idiosyncratic vocabulary has survived the hazards of transoceanic migration to require us to note the special meanings he assigns to basic terms. By technique, for example, he means far more than machine technology. Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized. The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion. He cannot help admiring the spectacular effectiveness of nuclear weapons of war. Above all, he is committed to the never-ending search for “the one best way” to achieve any designated objective.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Ours is a progressively technical civilization: by this Ellul means that the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means. What was once prized in its own right now becomes worthwhile only if it helps achieve something else. And, conversely, technique turns means into ends. “Know how” takes on an ultimate value.
mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
The vital influence of technique is of course most evident in the economy. It produces a growing concentration of capital (as was presciently observed by Marx). Vast concentrations of capital require increasing control by the state. Once largely confined within the business firm, planning now becomes the order of the day for the economy as a whole. The dominance of technique imposes centralism upon the economy (despite comparatively inconsequential efforts to decentralize individual industrial firms), for once technique develops beyond a given degree, there is no effective alternative to planning. But this inevitable process is impersonal. Only the naïve can really believe that the world-wide movement toward centralism results from the machinations of evil statesmen.
7
The intellectual discipline of economics itself becomes technicized. Technical economic analysis is substituted for the older political economy included in which was a major concern with the moral structure of economic activity. Thus doctrine is converted into procedure. In this sphere as in others, the technicians form a closed fraternity with their own esoteric vocabulary. Moreover, they are concerned only with what is, as distinct from what ought to be.
Politics in turn becomes an arena for contention among rival techniques. The technician sees the nation quite differently from the political man: to the technician, the nation is nothing more than another sphere in which to apply the instruments he has developed. To him, the state is not the expression of the will of the people nor a divine creation nor a creature of class conflict. It is an enterprise providing services that must be made to function efficiently. He judges states in terms of their capacity to utilize techniques effectively, not in terms of their relative justice. Political doctrine revolves around what is useful rather than what is good. Purposes drop out of sight and efficiency becomes the central concern. As the political form best suited to the massive and unprincipled use of technique, dictatorship gains in power. And this in turn narrows the range of choice for the democracies: either they too use some version of effective technique—centralized control and propaganda—or they will fall behind.
so let’s try that tech ness .. for good.. ie: tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
Restraints on the rule of technique become increasingly tenuous. Public opinion provides no control because it too is largely oriented toward “performance” and technique is regarded as the prime instrument of performance, whether in the economy or in politics, in art or in sports.
Not understanding what the rule of technique is doing to him and to his world, modern man is beset by anxiety and a feeling of insecurity. He tries to adapt to changes he cannot comprehend. The conflict of propaganda takes the place of the debate of ideas. Technique smothers the ideas that put its rule in question and filters out for public discussion Only those ideas that are in substantial accord with the values created by a technical civilization. Social criticism is negated because there is only slight access to the technical means required to reach large numbers of people.
In Ellul’s conception, then, life is not happy in a civilization dominated by technique. Even the outward show of happiness is bought at the price of total acquiescence. *The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions—escape..t into absorption with technically dominated media of popular culture and communication. **And the process is a natural one: every part of a technical civilization responds to the social needs generated by technique itself. Progress then consists in progressive dehumanization—a busy, pointless, and, in the end, suicidal submission to technique..t
**need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
The essential point, according to Ellul, is that technique produces all this without plan; no one wills it or arranges that it be so. Our technical civilization does not result from a Machiavellian scheme..t It is a response to the “laws of development” of technique. In proposing and expanding this thesis, Ellul reopens the great debate over the social, political, economic, and philosophical meaning of technique in the modern age. We need not agree with Ellul to learn from him. He has given us a provocative book, in the sense that he has provoked us to re-examine our assumptions and to search out the flaws in his own gloomy forecasts. By doing so, he helps us to see beyond the banal assertion that ours has become a mass society, and he leads us to a greater understanding of that society..t
Robert K. Merton
Columbia University
January 19649
Translator’s Introduction: Jacques Ellul as the Philosopher of the Technological Society
Professor Ellul, unlike most of the other surviving leaders of the French Resistance, still functions as a voice of conscience for a France which seems to feel itself in danger of being overwhelmed from literally every point of the compass by the materialistic values of the cold war—consumer society. .. “I sometimes wonder,” says Ellul in a related connection, “about the revolutionary value of acts accompanied by such a merry jingle of the cash register.”
Ellul’s principal work, this book, appeared under the title La Technique and the subtitle L’enjeu du siècle. The subtitle, which means literally “the stake of the century,” is a characteristically dark and difficult Ellulian phrase which may or may not refer to a kind of “Pascal wager” put on technology by twentieth-century man. The Technique of the title, however, lends itself more easily to interpretation, although, characteristically, it too is used in a sense it does not usually enjoy. Technique, the reader discovers more or less quickly, must be distinguished from the several techniques which are its elements. It is more even than a generalized mechanical technique; it is, in fact, nothing less than the organized ensemble of all individual techniques which have been used to secure any end whatsoever. Harold Lasswell’s definition comes closest to Ellul’s conception: “The ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources to achieve values.” This definition has the merit of emphasizing the scope of technique; but Ellul’s further account makes it clear that it does not go far enough, since technique has become indifferent to all the traditional human ends and values by becoming an end-in-itself. Our erstwhile means have all become an end, an end, furthermore, which has nothing human in it and to which we must accommodate ourselves as best we may. We cannot even any longer pretend to act as though the ends justified the means, which would still be recognizably human, if not particularly virtuous..
One of the great merits of Ellul’s book arises from the fact that he alone has pushed such analysis to the limit in all spheres of human activity and in the totality of their interrelatedness. It may be added that what some authors feel to be the book’s demerits arise from the same source; they maintain that society more often than not refuses to be pushed to that reductio ad absurdum which is the inevitable end point of every thoroughgoing analysis. The books of such authors generally end on a note of optimism. A final chapter always asks: “What is to be done?” Unfortunately, their answers to the question are either inefficacious myths which confront reality with slogans, or only too efficacious technical solutions to technical problems which end only in subjecting man the more thoroughly to technology. The former are exemplified by most modern religions, philosophical systems, and political doctrines; the latter by schemes for mass education or mass cultivation of leisure, which, in Ellul’s analysis, are themselves highly impersonal and technicized structures Having much more in common with the assembly line than with what mankind has traditionally designated by these names.
10
The technological malaise seems to Have been much less acutely felt in the United States. Individuals such as Aldous Huxley, Paul Tillich, and Erich Fromm, who have raised their voices in protest, are of European origin and received their education in Europe. Technolaters such as Professors B. F. Skinner of Harvard and most other American professors represent the familiar type of *the American intellectual caught in an ecstatic technical vertigo and seldom proceeding beyond certain vague meditations on isolated problem areas such as the “population explosion,” if indeed he considers the real problems posed by technology at all..t Ellul holds the Americans to be the most conformist people in the world, but in fairness it must be objected that, in his own analysis, the Soviets seem better to deserve this dubious honor since they have made even politics into a technique. The Americans, apart from technicizing the electoral process, have left at least the sphere of politics to the operations of amateurish bunglers and have thereby preserved a modicum of humanity. It may be added that France, too, has been taken into the technological orbit with a speed which must have astonished Ellul. De Gaulle’s plans for his new France contemplate the complete technicization of French society in nine years instead of the quarter century of grace which Ellul predicts in his book.
*intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
In composition and style, Ellul’s book is certain to be an enigma, and even a scandal, to many. It is not sociology, political economy, history, or any other academic discipline, at least as these terms are usually understood. It will not even appear to be philosophy to a generation whose philosophic preoccupations are almost exclusively analytic. Ellul himself is in doubt about the value of the designation philosopher. But, if we think back to the dialectical philosophies of the whole of thinkers such as Plato and Hegel, Ellul’s book is philosophy. If an American specialist, say, in economics, with his “terribly linear” logic and his apparently unshakable conviction that his arbitrarily delimited systems can and should be studied in isolation from all others, were to flip open Ellul’s book to those sections which treat of matters economic, it is conceivable that he would be repelled by what he found. But if this same specialist could somehow or other implausibly be persuaded to persevere in the attempt to see with Ellul economics in the light of the whole of modern technical culture, it is likewise conceivable that he would gain important insights, not perhaps into the fine- structure of academic economic problems, but in the border region where his subject abuts on other disciplines, in that area where basic discoveries in economics (and everything else) are always made by gifted amateurs, who faute de mieux must be called philosophers.
11
Ellul’s admittedly difficult style is not to be referred to that style heurté affected by so many postwar French existentialists. An element of this is doubtless present, but it would be much more accurate to say that, in an essentially dramatic work such as the present book must be deemed to be, the transitions and turns of thought must have a character entirely different from those to be encountered in the ultra-respectable academic texts which have taken over from mathematics certain linear and deductive modes of presentation; modes, which, whatever their pedagogic value may be, serve, even in mathematics, only to obscure the way in which truth comes into being..t To its dramatic presentation of what are, after all, *well-known facts, Ellul’s book owes its high persuasive quality.
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
*oi
This dramatic character would have been clearly evident if the book had been written as a dialogue. Indeed, a reader could easily cast it into this form by representing to himself the various thinkers who are introduced by name as the dramatis personae, and by treating the nameless “On the one hands” and “On the other hands” in the same way. In this way the “successive recantations” of some positions and the development of others in the light of a guiding concept of the whole become clear, and the book’s essential affinity to a Platonic dialogue like the Republic is evident. (Nowhere is this successive recantation more evident than in the first chapter’s search for definitions.) Even clearer is the similarity of the book to Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, the last work of Western philosophy with which, in the translator’s opinion, the present work bears comparison. The Technological Society is not a “phenomenology of mind” but rather a “phenomenology of the technical state of mind.” Like Hegel’s book, it is intensely histrionic; and like it, it shows, without offering causal mechanisms, how its subject in its lowest stage (technique as machine technique) develops dialectically through the various higher stages to become at last the fully evolved phenomenon (the technical phenomenon identical with the technical society). Again, as with Hegel, what the philosopher J. Loewenberg has called the “histrionic irony” of statement must drive the literal-minded reader mad.
sea world and history ness resonations
12
In Ellul’s case, however, disinclination to discuss methodology specifically is almost certainly due in large part to his pervasive distrust of anything at all resembling a fixed doctrine. Nevertheless, throughout the book are scattered a large number of references to method, and it is possible and necessary to reconstruct from them a satisfactory account of the author’s methodology.
Ellul first “situates” the “facts” of experience in a general context, and then proceeds to “focus” them. This figure of speech, drawn from, or at least appropriate to, descriptive astronomy, appears over and over again in connection with each supervening stage of complexity of the subject matter. The final result of the procedure is to bring to a common focal point rays proceeding from very different spheres. The reader should be warned that it is only possible to approximate in English the mixed metaphors and the studied imprecisions of each new beginning of the process, which are gradually refined to yield at the focus a precise terminology. The translator was always uncomfortably aware of too little precision, or too much, in his choice of English words. The reader seriously interested in these nuances has no recourse but to consult the original. The translator can do little more for him than to call his attention to the problem. Anyone familiar with similar “dialectic moments” in the works of Hegel or of Max Weber will understand at once what is meant.
Ellul repeats again and again that he is concerned not to make value judgments but to report things as they are. One might be tempted to smile at such statements in view of the intensely personal and even impassioned quality of a work in which one is never for a moment unaware where the authors own sympathies lie. Nonetheless, on balance, it seems clear that he has not allowed his own value judgments to intrude in any illegitimate way on questions of fact. “Fact” is very important to Ellul, but only as experienced in the context of the whole. Facts as they figure in uninterpreted statistical analyses of a given domain, or as they may be revealed by opinion polls and in newspapers, are anathema to him; and he permits himself many diatribes against this kind of “abstract,” disembodied fact which is so dear to the hearts of Americans, at least as Ellul imagines them to be. With this proviso, Ellul can echo the dictum of Hegel’s Phenomenology that the only imaginable point of departure of philosophy is experience.
whalespeak and gibran talking law et al
The insistence on rendering a purely phenomenological account of fact, without causal explanation of the interrelation of the subordinate facts, may seem distasteful to some readers. Since Aristotle it has been a common conception of science that we have knowledge only when we know the Why. Admittedly, whenever causal knowledge is available, it is indeed valuable. But it ought not to be forgotten that such knowledge is increasingly hard to come by, and, in fact, hardly makes its appearance at all in modern physics, say, where one must, for the most part, be content with purely functional (that is, phenomenological) equations, which dispense with any appeal to mechanism but which are nonetheless adequate for prediction and explanation, and which have the enormous additional advantage of containing no hidden concepts unconfrontable by experience. The important questions concerning the technological society rarely turn for Ellul on how or why things came to be so, but rather on whether his description of them is a true one.
Ellul’s methodology is fundamentally dominated by the principle which has come to be called Engel’s law, that is, the law asserting the passage of quantity into quality. To give a commonplace example, the city, after it reaches a certain threshold of population, is supposed to pass over into a qualitatively different type of urban organization. Unfortunately, both the popular and the usual philosophical accounts of Engel’s law are incomplete, to use no worse word.
13
First, it is incorrect to speak at all of a “threshold” of quantity which, having been transcended, gives rise to a change of quality and to a new set of laws and explanatory principles. In dialectical logic, every change of quantity is simultaneously a change of quality; and the discernment of a “threshold” quantity is partly a psychological fact of awareness, and partly an illicit attempt to try to import back into a dialectical logic some of the unequivocalness of the ordinary either/or logic. Now, Ellul’s explanation of the technical takeover is based fundamentally on the fact that the material (that is, technical) substratum of human existence, which was traditionally not allowed to be a legitimate end of human action, has become so “enormous,” so “immense,” that men are no longer able to cope with it as means, so that it has become an end-in-itself, to which men must adapt themselves. But, with a better understanding of the illusory nature of the “threshold quantity,” we are able to turn aside the objections which are always raised by those who rightly but extraneously urge that historical societies have always had to struggle with the possibility of a material takeover and that the present state of affairs is therefore not something new. The answer, of course, is that the objection is irrelevant. Ellul could not mean to assert that men in the past have not had to contend with material means which threatened to exceed their capacity to make good use of them, but that men in the past were not confronted with technical means of production and organization which in their sheer numerical proliferation and velocity unavoidably surpassed man’s relatively unchanging biological and spiritual capacities to exploit them as means to human ends.
need to use that surpassing ness differently.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
Second, Engel’s law must never be taken to imply a one-way transition of quantity into quality. In dialectical logic the transformation of quality into quantity is a necessary concomitant of the reversible transformation of quantity into quality. *It is in fact, the essence of technique to compel the qualitative to become quantitative, and in this way to force every stage of human activity and man himself to submit to its mathematical calculations..t Ellul gives examples of this at every level. Thus, technique forces all sociological phenomena to submit to the clock, for Ellul the most characteristic of all modern technical instruments. The substitution of the tempus mortuum of the mechanical clock for the biological and psychological time “natural” to man is in itself sufficient to suppress all the traditional rhythms of human life in favor of the mechanical. Again, genuine human communities are suppressed by the technological society to form collectivities of “mass men” incapable of obeying any other law than the statistical “law of large numbers.” All the technical devices of education, propaganda, amusement, sport, and religion are mobilized to persuade the human being to be satisfied with his condition of mechanical, mindless “mass man,” and ruthlessly to exterminate the deviant and the idiosyncratic..t
*graeber violence/quantification law et al
need means to get back/to freedom of ie: idiosyncratic jargon
The reduction of everything to quantity is partly a cause, and partly an effect, of the modern omnipresence of computing machines and cybernated factories.
It should not be imagined, however, that the universal concentration camp which Ellul thinks is coming into being in all technical societies without exception will be felt as harsh or restrictive by its inmates. Hitler’s concentration camps of hobnailed boots were symptoms of a deficient political technique. *The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom..t Admittedly, modern man, forced by technique to become in reality and without residue the imaginary producer-consumer of the classical economists, shows disconcertingly little regard for his lost freedom; but, **according to Ellul, there are ominous signs that human spontaneity, which in the rational and ordered technical society has no expression except madness, is only too capable of outbreaks of irrational suicidal destructiveness..t
*hari present in society law.. hari rat park law
**crazywise (doc).. fromm spontaneous law.. et al
14
The escape valves of modern literature and art, which technique has contrived, may or may not turn out to be adequate to the harmless release of the pent-up “ecstatic” energies of the human bang. Technique, which can in principle only oppose technical and quantitative solutions to technical problems, must, in such a case, seek out other technical safety valves. It could, for example, convince men that they were happy and contented by means of drugs, even though they were visibly suffering from the worst kind of spiritual and material privation..t It is obvious that all such ultimate technical measures must cause the last meager “idealistic” motifs of the whole technical enterprise to disappear. Ellul does not specifically say so, but it seems that he must hold that the technological society, like everything else, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
It must not be imagined that the autonomous technique envisioned by Ellul is a kind of “technological determinism,” to use a phrase of Veblen. It may sometimes seem so, but only because all human institutions, like the motions of all physical bodies, have a certain permanence, or vis inertiae, which makes it highly probable that the near future of statistical aggregations will see them continue more or less in the path of the immediate past. Things could have eventuated in the technological society otherwise than as they have..t
graeber make it diff law.. dawn of everything (book) ness
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Technique, to Ellul, is a “blind” force, but one which unfortunately seems to be more perspicacious than the best discernible human intelligences. There are other ways out, Ellul maintains, but nobody wants any part of them.
Ellul’s insistence that the technical phenomenon is not a determinism is not weakened by the enumeration (in the second chapter) of five conditions which are said to be “necessary and sufficient” for its outburst in the recent past, since the sufficient conditions for the conditions (for example, the causes of the population explosion) are not ascertainable.
The inertia of the technical phenomenon guarantees not only the continued refinement and production of relatively beneficial articles such as flush toilets and wonder drugs, but also the emergence of those unpredictable secondary effects which are always the result of ecological meddling and which today are of such magnitude and acceleration that they can scarcely be reconciled with even semistable equilibrium conditions of society. Nuclear explosions and population explosions capture the public’s imagination; but I have argued that Ellul’s analysis demands that all indices of modern technological culture are exploding, too, and are potentially just as dangerous to the continued well-being of society, if by well-being we understand social equilibrium.
Reference to the vis inertiae of technique should not obscure the fact that technique has become the only fully spontaneous activity of the modern world. Art and science are mentioned as other human activities by Ellul. But art, though it is concrete, is subjective; and science, though objective in its description of reality, is abstract. Only technique is at once both concrete and objective in that it creates the reality it describes. Ellul must conclude that from among the data of science technique legislates those which it deems most efficient and rejects the rest Economic and social “model builders,” those assiduous technocratic apes, may seek to soften the violence of this description by pointing out that all sciences “specify a universe of discourse.” It remains unfortunately true, however, that such “specification” proceeds by way of elimination of the human;
15
Ellul is no machinoclast like the partisans of the weak-minded Ludd seeking to wreck the stocking frames. He has no doctrinal delusions at all, a fortiori none like those of Rousseau and certain of his disciples, who imagined that man would be happy in a state of nature.
In view of the fact that Ellul continually apostrophizes technique as “unnatural” (except when he calls it the “new nature”), it might be thought surprising that he has no fixed conception of nature or of the natural. The best answer seems to be that he considers “natural” (in the good sense) any environment able to satisfy man’s material needs, if it leaves him free to use it as means to achieve his individual, internally generated ends. The necessary and sufficient condition for this state of affairs is that man’s means should be (qualitatively and quantitatively) “at the level” of man’s capacities. Under these dubiously realizable circumstances, Ellul apparently thinks of techniques as so many blessings.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
Since men are unwilling to acknowledge their demotion to the status of joyous robots, and since they demand justification for their individual and collective acts as never before in history, it is easy to understand why the modern intellectuals (and their forcing-house, the university) have become veritable machines for the invention of new myths and the propagation of old ones..t It would be easy to compile a list of all the things which Ellul must deem “myth.” Such a list would quite simply contain all philosophical, historical, religious, and political doctrines known to man, except insofar as such doctrines have technological components. The Western democracies, for example, are out after money and the Eastern Communists are out after power; otherwise they share an identical view of life, and the epiphenomenal variant ideologies which accompany identical acts can only be described as a cruel hoax.
need diff data (for all our tech inputs) ie: self-talk as data.. all other data to date non legit
It is disconcerting in the extreme to contemplate the possibility that cherished democratic institutions have become empty forms which have no visible connection with the acts of democratic nations, except perhaps to render these acts technically less efficient than they otherwise need have been. But the fact that they have no connection is, paradoxically, a powerful reason for their survival. Ellul evidently contemplates a long future in which sclerotic rival ideologies will carry on their sham polemics.
Ellul, in agreement with much of Greek philosophy, seems to think that the distinction usually drawn between thought and action is a pernicious one. To him, to bear witness to the fact of the technological society is the most revolutionary of all possible acts. His personal reason for doing so is that he is a Christian, a fact which is spelled out in his book La Présence. His concept of the duty of a Christian, who stands uniquely (is “present”) at the point of intersection of this material world and the eternal world to come, is not to concoct ambiguous ethical schemes or programs of social action, but to testify to the truth of both worlds and thereby to affirm his freedom through the revolutionary nature of his religion.
It is clear that many people who will accept Ellul’s diagnosis of the technical disease will not accept his Christian therapy. The issue is nevertheless joined: if massive technological intervention is the only imaginable means to turn aside technology from its headlong career, how may we be sure that this intervention will be something other than just some new technical scheme, which, more likely than not, will be catastrophic?
John Wilkinson
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
Santa Barbara, California
January 196416
Note to the Reader
I think the task of the reader will be lightened if at the outset I attempt a definition of technique. The whole first chapter is devoted to making clear what constitutes technique in the present-day world, but as a preliminary there must be a simple idea, a definition.
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
This definition is not a theoretical construct. It is arrived at by examining each activity and observing the facts of what modern man calls technique in general, as well as by investigating the different areas in which specialists declare they have a technique.
In the course of this work, the word technique will be used with varying emphasis on one or another aspect of this definition. At one point, the emphasis may be on rationality, at another on efficiency or procedure, but the over-all definition will remain the same.
Finally, we shall be looking at technique in its sociological aspect; that is, we shall consider the effect of technique on social relationships, political structures, economic phenomena. Technique is not an isolated fact in society (as the term technology would lead us to believe) but is related to every factor in the life of modern man; it affects social facts as well as all others. Thus technique itself is a sociological phenomenon, and it is in this light that we shall study it.
Jacques Ellul
June 195317
Author’s Foreword to the Revised American Edition
At the beginning I must try to make clear the direction and aim of this book. Although descriptive, it is not without purpose. I do not limit myself to describing my findings with cold objectivity in the manner of a research worker reporting what he sees under a microscope. I am keenly aware that I am myself involved in technological civilization, and that its history is also my own. I may be compared rather with a physician or physicist who is describing a group situation in which he is himself involved. The physician in an epidemic, the physicist exposed to radioactivity: in such situations the mind may remain cold and lucid, and the method objective, but there is inevitably a profound tension of the whole being.
Although I have deliberately not gone beyond description, the reader may perhaps receive an impression of pessimism. I am neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. I am concerned only with knowing whether things are so or not. The reader tempted to brand me a pessimist should begin to examine his own conscience, and ask himself what causes him to make such a judgment. For behind this judgment, I believe, will always be found previous metaphysical value judgments, such as: “Man is free”; “Man is lord of creation”; “Man has always overcome challenges” (so why not this one too?); “Man is good.” Or again: “Progress is always positive”; “Man has an eternal soul, and so cannot be put in jeopardy.” Those who hold such convictions will say that my description of technological civilization is incorrect and pessimistic. I ask only that the reader place himself on the factual level and address himself to these questions: “Are the facts analyzed here false?” “Is the analysis inaccurate?” “Are the conclusions unwarranted?” “Are there substantial gaps and omissions?” It will not do for him to challenge factual analysis on the basis of his own ethical or metaphysical presuppositions.
The reader deserves and has my assurance that I have not set out to prove anything. I do not seek to show, say, that man is determined, or that technique is bad, or anything else of the kind.
Two other factors may lead the reader to the feeling of pessimism. It may be that he feels a rigorous determinism is here described that leaves no room for effective individual action, or that he cannot find any solution for the problems raised in the book. These two factors must now engage our attention.
As to the rigorous determinism, I should explain that I have tried to perform a work of sociological reflection, involving analysis of large groups of people and of major trends, but not of individual actions. I do not deny the existence of individual action or of some inner sphere of freedom. I merely hold that these are not discernible at the most general level of analysis, and that the individual’s acts or ideas do not here and now exert any influence on social, political, or economic mechanisms. By making this statement, I explicitly take a partisan position in a dispute between schools of sociology. To me the sociological does not consist of the addition and combination of individual actions. *I believe that there is a collective sociological reality, which is independent of the individual. As I see it, individual **decisions are always made within the framework of this sociological reality, itself pre-existent and more or less determinative. I have simply endeavored to describe technique as a sociological reality. We are dealing with collective mechanisms, with relationships among collective movements, and with modifications of political or economic structures. It should not be surprising, therefore, that no reference is made to the separate, independent initiative of individuals. It is not possible for me to treat the individual sphere. But I do not deny that it exists. I do not maintain that the individual is more determined today than he has been in the past; rather, that he is differently determined. Primitive man, hemmed in by prohibitions, taboos, and rites, was, of course, socially determined. But it is an illusion—unfortunately very widespread—to think that because we have broken through the prohibitions, taboos, and rites that bound primitive man, we have become free. We are conditioned by something new: technological civilization. I make no reference to a past period of history in which men were allegedly free, happy, and independent. The determinisms of the past no longer concern us; they are finished and done with. If I do refer to the past, it is only to emphasize that present determinants did not exist in the past, and men did not have to grapple with them then. ***The men of classical antiquity could not have found a solution to our present determinisms, and it is useless to look into the works of Plato or Aristotle for an answer to the problem of freedom.
*perhaps.. only in sea world.. however.. for the dance.. declaring any of that is an irrelevant cancerous distraction
ie: what if lefit free life has to do more with **curiosity over decision making
***actually.. to me.. anybody could.. because has nothing to do with sea world paraphernalia.. but too.. no one that still can’t hear what’s already in their heart
18
Keeping in mind that sociological mechanisms are always significant determinants—of more or less significance—for the individual, I would maintain that we have moved from one set of determinants to another. The pressure of these mechanisms is today very great; they operate in increasingly wide areas and penetrate more and more deeply into human existence. Therein lies the specifically modern problem.
aka: same song ness
This determinism has, however, another aspect. There will be a temptation to use the word fatalism in connection with the phenomena described in this book. The reader may be inclined to say that, if everything happens as stated in the book, man is entirely helpless—helpless either to preserve his personal freedom or to change the course of events. Once again, I think the question is badly put. I would reverse the terms and say: if man—if each one of us—abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; *if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinants will be transformed into inevitabilities. But, in describing sociological currents, I obviously cannot take into account the contingent decisions of this or that individual, even if these decisions could modify the course of social development. For these decisions are not visible, and if they are truly personal, they cannot be foreseen. I have tried to describe the technical phenomenon as it exists at present and to indicate its probable evolution. Fatalism is not involved; it is rather a question of probability, and I have indicated what I think to be its most likely development.
*or perhaps making a stand against is also part of the cancer.. that re ness.. what we need is to let go of all of it.. ie: hari rat park law et al
What is the basis for this most likely eventuality? I would say that it lies in social, economic, and political phenomena, and in certain chains of events and sequences. If we may not speak of laws, we may, at any rate, speak of repetitions. If we may not speak of mechanisms in the strict sense of the word, we may speak of interdependencies. There is a certain logic (though not a formal logic) in economic phenomena which makes certain forecasts possible. This is true of sociology and, to a lesser degree, of politics. There is a certain logic in the evolution of institutions which is easily discernible. It is possible, without resorting to imagination or science fiction, to describe the path that a social body or institutional complex will follow. An extrapolation is perfectly proper and scientific when it is made with care. Such an extrapolation is what we have attempted. But it never represents more than a probability, and may be proved false by events.
19
External factors could change the course of history. The probable development I describe might be forestalled by the emergence of new phenomena. I give three examples—widely different, and deliberately so—of possible disturbing phenomena:
1) If a general war breaks out, and if there are any survivors, the destruction will be so enormous, and the conditions of survival so different, that a technological society will no longer exist.
2) If an increasing number of people become fully aware of the threat the technological world poses to man’s personal and spiritual life, and if they determine to assert their freedom by upsetting the course of this evolution, my forecast will be invalidated.
3) If God decides to intervene, man’s freedom may be saved by a change in the direction of history or in the nature of man.
But in sociological analysis these possibilities cannot be considered. *The last two lie outside the field of sociology, and confront us with an upheaval so vast that its consequences cannot be assessed. But sociological analysis does not permit consideration of these possibilities. In addition, the first two possibilities offer no analyzable fact on which to base any attempt at projection. They have no place in an inquiry into facts; I cannot deny that they may occur, but I cannot take them rationally into account. I am in the position of a physician who must diagnose a disease and guess its probable course, but who recognizes that God may work a miracle, that the patient may have an unexpected constitutional reaction, or that the patient—suffering from tuberculosis—may die unexpectedly of a heart attack. The reader must always keep in mind the implicit presupposition that if man does not pull himself together and assert himself (or if some other unpredictable but decisive phenomenon does not intervene), then things will go the way I describe.
*perhaps why they might just work
The reader may be pessimistic on yet another score. In this study no solution is put forward to the problems raised. Questions are asked, but not answered. I have indeed deliberately refrained from providing solutions. One reason is that the solutions would necessarily be theoretical and abstract, since they are nowhere apparent in existing facts. I do not say that no solutions will be found; I merely aver that in the present social situation there is not even a beginning of a solution, no breach in the system of technical necessity. Any solutions I might propose would be idealistic and fanciful. In a sense, it would even be dishonest to suggest solutions: the reader might think them real rather than merely literary. I am acquainted with the “solutions” offered by Emmanuel Mournier, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ragnor Frisch, Jean Fourastié, Georges Friedmann, and others. Unfortunately, all these belong to the realm of fancy and have no bearing on reality. I cannot rationally consider them in analyzing the present situation.
However, I will not make a final judgment on tomorrow before it arrives. I do not presume to put chains around man. *But I do insist that a distinction be made between diagnosis and treatment. Before a remedy can be found, it is first necessary to make a detailed study of the disease and the patient, to do laboratory research, and to isolate the virus. It is necessary to establish criteria that will make it possible to recognize the disease when it occurs, and to describe the patient’s symptoms at each stage of his illness. **This preliminary work is indispensable for eventual discovery and application of a remedy.
*costello screen\service law et al.. healing (roots of).. and again..
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
**findings:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
By this comparison I do not mean to suggest that technique is a disease of the body social, but rather to indicate a working procedure. Technique presents man with multiple problems. As long as the first stage of analysis is incomplete, as long as the problems are not correctly stated, it is useless to proffer solutions. And, before we can pose the problems correctly, we must have an exact description of the phenomena involved. As far as I know, there is no over-all and exact description of the facts which would make it possible to formulate the problems correctly.. t
taleb center of problem law et al.. hari rat park law
and again.. we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
20
The existing works on the subject either are limited to a single aspect of the problem—the effect of motion pictures on the nervous system, for example—or else propose solutions without the requisite preliminary study. I offer these pages as a first effort in laying the necessary ground; much more work will have to follow before we can see what man’s true response is to the challenge before him.
But this must not lead the reader to say to himself: “All right, here is some information on the problem, and other sociologists, economists, philosophers, and theologians will carry on the work, so I have simply got to wait.” This will not do, for the challenge is not to scholars and university professors, but to all of us. At stake is our very life, and we shall need all the energy, inventiveness, imagination, goodness, and strength we can muster to triumph in our predicament While waiting for the specialists to get on with their work on behalf of society, each of us, in his own life, must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants. Each man must make this effort in every area of life, in his profession and in his social, religious, and family relationships.
for (blank)’s sake
In my conception, freedom is not an immutable fact graven in nature and on the heart of man. It is not inherent in man or in society, and it is meaningless to write it into law. *The mathematical, physical, biological, sociological, and psychological sciences reveal nothing but necessities and determinisms on all sides. As a matter of fact, reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms. Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity. To say that freedom is graven in the nature of man, is To say that man is free because he obeys his nature, or, to put it another way, because he is conditioned by his nature. This is nonsense. **We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.
*but non legit necessities.. so if want legit freedom.. need to be quiet enough to see/hear legit needs..
**again.. wrong necessity if need to overcome it.. and so then.. wrong/non-legit freedom.. rather.. same song.. need uncovering ness of almaas holes law to get to legit freedom
In the modern world, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it How is this to be done? I do not yet know. That is why this book is an appeal to the individual’s sense of responsibility. The first step in the quest, the first act of freedom, is to become aware of the necessity. *The very fact that man can see, measure, and analyze the determinisms that press on him means that he can face them and, by so doing, act as a free man. If man were to say “These are not necessities; I am free because of technique, or despite technique,” this would prove that he is totally determined. However, by grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being.
*if understanding this right.. oi.. cancerous distraction.. whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
At the beginning of this foreword I stated that this book has a purpose. That purpose is to arouse the reader to an awareness of technological necessity and what it means. It is a call to the sleeper to awake.
i think rather.. we need tech to help us listen to what’s already in each heart.. rather than finding meaning ness et al
Jacques Ellul
La Marierre, Pessac, Gironde, France
January 196422
Author’s Preface to the French Edition
Let us, first of all, clear up certain misunderstandings that inevitably arise in any discussion of technique.
It is not the business of this book to describe the various techniques which, taken together, make up the technological society. It would take a whole library to describe the countless technical means invented by man; and such an undertaking would be of little value. Moreover, quite enough elementary works describing the various techniques are already available. I shall frequently allude to some of these techniques on the assumption that their applications or their mechanics are familiar to the reader.
I do not intend to draw up a balance sheet, positive or negative, of what has been so far accomplished by means of these techniques, or to compare their advantages and disadvantages. I shall not repeat what has so often been stated, that through technology the work week has been materially shortened, that living standards have risen, and so forth; or, on the other side of the ledger, that the worker has encountered many difficulties in adapting to the machine. Indeed, no one is capable of making a true and itemized account of the total effect of existing techniques. Only fragmentary and superficial surveys are possible.
would make no diff anyway.. cancerous distraction.. mufleh humanity law et al
Finally, it is not my intention to make ethical or aesthetic judgments on technique. A human being is, of course, human and not a mere photographic plate, so that his own point of view inevitably appears. But this does not preclude a deeper objectivity. The sign of it will be that worshippers of technique will no doubt find this work pessimistic and haters of technique will find it optimistic.
I have attempted simply to present, by means of a comprehensive analysis, a concrete and fundamental interpretation of technique.
That is the sole object of this book.
J. E.
195423-24
CHAPTER 1: TECHNIQUES
No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world. And yet no subject is so little understood. Let us try to set up some guideposts to situate the technical phenomenon.
25
Situating the Technical Phenomenon
Machines and Technique
Whenever we see the word technology or technique, we automatically think of machines. Indeed, we commonly think of our world as a world of machines. This notion—which is in fact an error—is found, for example, in the works of Oldham and Pierre Ducassé. It arises from the fact that the machine is the most obvious, massive, and impressive example of technique, and historically the first What is called the history of technique usually amounts to no more than a history of the machine; this very formulation is an example of the habit of intellectuals of regarding forms of the present as identical with those of the past.
Technique certainly began with the machine. It is quite true that all the rest developed out of mechanics; it is quite true also that without the machine the world of technique would not exist But to explain the situation in this way does not at all legitimatize it. It is a mistake to continue with this confusion of terms, the more so because it leads to the idea that, because the machine is at the origin and center of the technical problem, one is dealing with the whole problem when one deals with the machine. And that is a greater mistake still. Technique has now become almost completely independent of the machine, which has lagged far behind its offspring.
It must be emphasized that, at present, technique is applied outside industrial life. The growth of its power today has no relation to the growing use of the machine. The balance seems rather to have shifted to the other side. It is the machine which is now entirely dependent upon technique, and the machine represents only a small part of technique. If we were to characterize the relations between technique and the machine today, we could say not only that the machine is the result of a certain technique, but also that its social and economic applications are made possible by other technical advances. The machine is now not even the most important aspect of technique (though it is perhaps the most spectacular); technique has taken over all of man’s activities, not just his productive activity.
From another point of view, however, the machine is deeply symptomatic: it represents the ideal toward which technique strives. The machine is solely, exclusively, technique; it is pure technique, one might say. For, wherever a technical factor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.
Another relationship exists between technique and the machine, and this relationship penetrates to the very core of the problem of our civilization. It is said (and everyone agrees) that the machine has created an inhuman atmosphere. The machine, so characteristic of the nineteenth century, made an abrupt entrance into a society which, from the political, institutional, and human points of view, was not made to receive it; and man has had to put up with it as best he can. Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, of air, of time, the gloomy streets and the sallow lights that confuse night and day. Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature. Life in such an environment has no meaning. Consider our public transportation, in which man is less important than a parcel; our hospitals, in which he is only a number. Yet we call this progress… And the noise, that monster boring into us at every hour of the night without respite.
add page on technique? – probably not.. as it’s no diff really (as he seems to be declaring).. just an overall umbrella of sea world tech ness
26
It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath tons of print. And, if we do not wish to play the demagogue, we must point out the guilty party. “The machine is antisocial,” says Lewis Mumford. “It tends, by reason of its progressive character, to the most acute forms of human exploitation.” The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the inhuman society in which we live. Capitalism was therefore only one aspect of the deep disorder of the nineteenth century. To restore order, it was necessary to question all the bases of that society—its social and political structures, its art and its way of life, its commercial system.
machine isn’t even deep enough to show healing (roots of).. rather.. missing pieces is cause
But let the machine have its head, and it topples everything that cannot support its enormous weight. Thus *everything had to be reconsidered in terms of the machine. And that is precisely the role technique plays..t In all fields it made an inventory of what it could use, of everything that could be brought into line with the machine. The machine could not integrate itself into nineteenth-century society; technique integrated it. Old houses that were not suited to the workers were torn down; and the new world technique required was built in their place. **Technique has enough of the mechanical in its nature to enable it to cope with the machine, but it surpasses and transcends the machine because it remains in close touch with the human order. The metal monster could not go on forever torturing mankind. It found in technique a rule as hard and inflexible as itself.
*aka: cancerous distraction.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
**so.. again.. this technique.. not any diff from sea world techs.. aka: not close with human .. because legit free human not close with order ness..
*Technique integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order where the incoherent banging of machinery heaped up ruins. It clarifies, arranges, and rationalizes; it does in the domain of the abstract what the machine did in the domain of labor. It is efficient and brings efficiency to everything. Moreover, technique is sparing in the use of the machine, which has traditionally been exploited to conceal defects of organization. **“Machines sanctioned social inefficiency,” says Mumford. Technique, on the other hand, leads to a more rational and less indiscriminate use of machines. It places machines exactly where they ought to be and requires of them just what they ought to do.
*so yeah .. see.. foundational to sea world..
**sounds a bit resonating (ie: over arching ness.. deep ness).. but also sounds like still only referring to sea world.. and again.. what we need tech (machine.. whatever you want to call it) to do is facil non hierarchical listening via its ability to org us via nonjudgmental expo labeling
This brings us to two contrasting forms of social growth. Henri Guitton says: “Social growth was formerly reflexive or instinctive, that is to say, unconscious. But new circumstances (the machine) now compel us to recognize a kind of social development that is rational, intelligent, and conscious. We may ask ourselves whether this is the beginning not only of the era of a spatially finite world but also of the era of a conscious world.” All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world.
intellectness as cancerous distraction.. graeber can’t know law.. et al
*Technique integrates everything. It avoids shock and sensational events. Man is not adapted to a world of steel; technique adapts him to it. It changes the arrangement of **this blind world so that man can be a part of it without colliding with its rough edges, without the anguish of being delivered up to the inhuman. Technique thus provides a model; it specifies attitudes that are valid once and for all. The anxiety aroused in man by the turbulence of the machine is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified society.
*in sea world
**this sea world
As long as technique was represented exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of “man and the machine.” The machine remained an external object, and man (though significantly influenced by it in his professional, private, and psychic life) remained none the less independent. He was in a position to assert himself apart from the machine; he was able to adopt a position with respect to it.
30
I have in mind the vast amount of organization in every field, the recognition of which led James Burnham to write The Managerial Revolution.
But I cannot agree with Toynbee in his choice of terms or in the line he draws between the technical period and the period of organization. In his sketchy conception of technique, for which he has been severely criticized, the confusion between machine and technique remains. He has limited the realm of technique to what it was in the past, without considering what it is now.
In reality, what Toynbee calls organization, and Burnham calls managerial action, is technique applied to social, economic, or administrative life. What but technique is the “organization” defined in the following? “Organization is the process which consists in assigning appropriate tasks to individuals or to groups so as to attain, in an efficient and economic way, and by the coordination and combination of all their activities, the objectives agreed upon” (Sheldon). This leads to the standardization and the rationalization of economic and administrative life, as Antoine Mas has well shown. “Standardization means resolving in advance all the problems that might possibly impede the functioning of an organization. It is not a matter of leaving it to inspiration, ingenuity, nor even intelligence to find a solution at the moment some difficulty arises; it is rather in some way to anticipate both the difficulty and its resolution. From then on, standardization creates impersonality, in the sense that organization relies more on methods and instructions than on individuals.”..t We thus have all the marks of a technique. Organization is a technique—and André L. A. Vincent had good reason to write: “To approach the optimum combination of factors, or the optimum dimension is… to accomplish technical progress in the form of a better organization.”
It will no doubt be asked: What is the point of discussing these terms, since, at bottom, you are in agreement with Toynbee? But these discussions are important: Toynbee separates centuries and phenomena which ought to remain united. He would have us believe that organization is something other than technique, that man has in a way discovered a new field of action and new methods, and that we must study organization as a new phenomenon, when it is nothing of the sort. I, on the other hand, insist on the continuity of the technical process. It is this process which is taking on a new aspect (I would say, its true aspect) and is developing on a world-wide scale.
What are the consequences? The first is that the problems created by mechanical technique will be heightened to a degree as yet incalculable, as a result of the application of technique to administration and to all spheres of life. Toynbee believes that this organization which is succeeding technique is in some way a counterbalance to it, and a remedy (and that is a comforting view of history). But it seems to me that the exact opposite is true, that this development adds to the technical problems by offering a partial solution to old problems, itself based on the very methods that created the problems in the first place..t This is the age-old procedure of digging a new hole to fill up an old one.
part\ial ness is killing us.. keeping us from us.. for (blank)’s sake
A second consequence: If what we are witnessing is only an extension of the domain of technique, what was said above about mechanization is understandable. Toynbee writes of organization as a phenomenon whose effects cannot yet be seen. However, we can be confident that the final result will be that technique will assimilate everything to the machine; the ideal for which technique strives is the mechanization of everything it encounters. It is clear, therefore, that my opposition to Toynbee, even if it appears to be merely verbal, is significant. The technical age continues to advance and we cannot even say that we are at the peak of its expansion. In fact, some decisive conquests remain to be made—man, among others—and it is hard to see what is to prevent technique from making them. Thus, even if this is not a question of a new factor, it is at least clear now what the phenomenon involves and what it signifies.
rowson mechanical law et al
31
This may be so, but the most important feature of techniques today is that they do not depend on manual labor but on organization and on the arrangement of machines.
32
It is less and less exact to maintain that the user remains for very long in possession of a technique the results of which he can predict; constant invention ceaselessly upsets his habits..t
desperately need this habit detox.. ie: imagine if we re-invented everyday.. who’s together in a space
33
A second criticism of Fourastié’s definition is that he assigns an exclusively productive character to technique. The growth of the volume of production is an even narrower concept than yield. The techniques which have shown the greatest development are not techniques of production at all. For example, techniques in the care of human beings (surgery, psychology, and so on) have nothing to do with productivity. The most modern techniques of destruction have even less to do with productivity; the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the Germans’ V1 and V2 weapons are all examples of the most powerful technical creations of man’s mind. Human ingenuity and mechanical skill are today being exploited along lines which have little reference to productivity.
oh but they do.. in sea world.. all about that.. hence.. graeber violence in care law et al
Nothing equals the perfection of our war machines. Warships and warplanes are vastly more perfect than their counterparts in civilian life. The organization of the army—its transport, supplies, administration—is much more precise than any civilian organization. The smallest error in the realm of war would cost countless lives and would be measured in terms of victory or defeat
What is the yield there? Very poor, on the whole. Where is the productivity? There is none.
? but yielding/using/producing tons of paraphernalia and whales et al for sea world
This tendency to reduce the technical problem to the dimensions of the technique of production is also present in the works of so enlightened a scholar as Georges Friedmann. In his introduction to the UNESCO Colloquium on technique, he appears to start out with a very broad definition. But in the second paragraph, without warning, he begins to reduce everything to the level of economic production.
who hasn’t done that? since forever.. (just change words and think we’re not)
What gives rise to this limitation of the problem? One factor might be a tacit optimism, a need to hold that technical progress is unconditionally valid—which leads to the selection of the most positive aspect of technical progress, as though it were its only one. This may have guided Fourastié, but it does not seem to hold true in Friedmann’s case. I believe that the reasoning behind Friedmann’s way of thinking is to be found in the turn of the scientific mind. *All aspects—mechanical, economic, psychological, sociological—of the techniques of production have been subjected to innumerable specialized studies; as a result, we are beginning to learn in a more precise and scientific way about the relationships between man and the industrial machine. Since the scientist must use the materials he has at hand; and since almost nothing is known about the relationship of man to the automobile, the telephone, or the radio, and absolutely nothing about the relationship of man to the Apparat or about the sociological effects of other aspects of technique, the **scientist moves unconsciously toward the sphere of what is known scientifically, and tries to limit the whole question to that.
*of math and men.. but rather again.. relationships between paraphernalia and whales et al for sea world
**science scientifically et al
34
*There is another element in this scientific attitude: only that is knowable which is expressed (or, at least, can be expressed) in numbers. To get away from the so-called “arbitrary and subjective,” to escape ethical or literary judgments (which, as everyone knows, are trivial and unfounded), the scientist must get back to numbers. What, after all, **can one hope to deduce from the purely qualitative statement that the worker is fatigued? But when biochemistry makes it possible to measure fatigability numerically, it is at last possible to take account of the worker’s fatigue. ***Then there is hope of finding a solution. However, ****an entire realm of effects of technique—indeed, the largest—is not reducible to numbers; and it is precisely that realm which we are investigating in this work. Yet, since what can be said about it is apparently not to be taken seriously, it is better for the scientist to shut his eyes and regard it as a realm of pseudo-problems, or simply as nonexistent. *****The “scientific” position frequently consists of denying the existence of whatever does not belong to current scientific method. The problem of the industrial machine, however, is a numerical one in nearly all its aspects. Hence, all of technique is unintentionally reduced to a numerical question. In the case of ******Vincent, this is intentional, as his definition shows; “We embrace in technical progress all kinds of progress… provided that they are treatable numerically in a reliable way.”..t
*graeber violence/quantification law et al.. but we do need a means to detox us from that.. ie: tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
**qualitative?.. work?.. all we need to see (or let go of).. ie: takes a lot of work ness et al is qualitative.. that we have to qualitatize anything really.. all (any form of m\a\p) .. as red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
***rather.. a band aid
****if still investigating.. already reduced/ing to numbers..
*****again.. science scientifically.. but not just ‘science’ ness.. any form of m\a\p
******so.. then too.. treatable (bandaid able) only in a violent way.. mufleh humanity law:we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh.. et al..
again..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
H. D. Lasswell’s definition of technique as “the ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources in order to achieve certain valued ends” also seems to follow the conventions cited above, and to embrace only industrial technique. Here it might be contested whether technique does indeed permit the realization of values. However, to judge from Lasswell’s examples, he conceives the terms of his definition in an extremely broad manner. He gives a list of values and the corresponding techniques. *As values, for example, he lists riches, power, well-being, affection; and as techniques, the techniques of government, production, medicine, the family, and so on. Lasswell’s conception of value may seem somewhat strange; the term is obviously not apt. But what he has to say indicates that he gives techniques their full scope. Moreover, he makes it quite clear that it is necessary to show the effects of technique not only on inanimate objects but also on people. I am, therefore, in substantial agreement with this conception.
*all cancerous distractions
Technical Operation and Technical Phenomenon
With the use of these few guideposts, we can now try to formulate, if not a full definition, at least an approximate definition of technique. But we must keep this in mind: we are not concerned with the different individual techniques. Everyone practices a particular technique, and it is difficult to come to know them all. *Yet in this great diversity we can find certain points in common, certain tendencies and principles shared by them all. It is clumsy to call these common features Technique with a capital T; no one would recognize his particular technique behind this terminology. Nevertheless, it takes account of a reality—**the technical phenomenon—which is worldwide today.
*makes no diff if still in sea world.. so.. hari rat park law et al
**sea world wide
If we recognize that the method each person employs to attain a result is in fact, his particular technique, the problem of means is raised. In fact, technique is nothing more than means and the ensemble of means. This, of course, does not lessen the importance of the problem. Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.
35
Techniques considered as methods of operation present certain common characteristics and certain general tendencies, but we cannot devote ourselves exclusively to them. To do this would lead to a more specialized study than I have in mind. The technical phenomenon is much more complex than any synthesis of characteristics common to individual techniques. If we desire to come closer to a definition of technique, we must in fact differentiate between the technical operation and the technical phenomenon.
The technical operation includes every operation carried out in accordance with a certain method in order to attain a particular end. It can be as rudimentary as splintering a flint or as complicated as programming an electronic brain. In every case, it is the method which characterizes the operation. It may be more or less effective or more or less complex, but its nature is always the same. It is this which leads us to think that there is a continuity in technical operations and that only the great refinement resulting from scientific progress differentiates the modern technical operation from the primitive one.
Every operation obviously entails a certain technique, even the gathering of fruit among primitive peoples—climbing the tree, picking the fruit as quickly and with as little effort as possible, distinguishing between the ripe and the unripe fruit, and so on. However, *what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency. Completely **natural and spontaneous effort is replaced by a complex of acts designed to improve,..t say, the yield. It is this which prompts the creation of technical forms, starting from simple forms of activity. These ***technical forms are not necessarily more complicated than the spontaneous ones, but they are more efficient and better adapted.
*kelly efficiency law et al
**graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. fromm spontaneous law.. et al.. humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
***efficiency and adapted ness as cancerous distractions
Thus, technique creates means, but the technical operation still occurs on the same level as that of the worker who does the work. The skilled worker, like the primitive huntsman, remains a technical operator; their attitudes differ only to a small degree.
But two factors enter into the extensive field of technical operation: consciousness and judgment. This double intervention produces what I call the technical phenomenon. What characterizes this double intervention? Essentially, it takes what was previously tentative, unconscious, and spontaneous and brings it into the realm of clear, voluntary, and reasoned concepts.
of math and men.. oi.. this is ridiculous ness et al
When André Leroi-Gourhan tabulates the *efficiency of Zulu swords and arrows in terms of the most up-to-date knowledge of weaponry, he is doing work that is obviously different from that of the swordsmith of Bechuanaland who created the form of the sword. The swordsmith’s choice of form was unconscious and spontaneous; although it can now be justified by numerical calculations, such calculations had no place whatever in the technical operation he performed. But reason did, inevitably, enter into the process because **man spontaneously imitates nature in his activities. Accomplishments that merely copy nature, however, have no future (for instance, the imitation of birds’ wings from Icarus to Ader). Reason makes it possible to produce objects in terms of certain features, certain abstract requirements; and this in turn leads, not to the imitation of nature, but to the ways of technique.
*ie as weapon efficiency
**so.. ways of whales and whalespeak.. all cancerous distractions
The *intervention of rational judgment in the technical operation has important consequences. Man becomes aware that it is possible to find new and different means..t Reason upsets pragmatic traditions and creates new operational methods and new tools; it examines rationally the possibilities of more extensive and less rigid experimentation. Reason in these ways multiplies technical operations to a high degree of diversity. But it also operates in the opposite direction: it considers results and takes account of the fixed end of technique—efficiency. It notes what every means devised is capable of accomplishing and selects from the various means at its disposal with a view to securing the ones that are the most efficient, the best adapted to the desired end. Thus the **multiplicity of means is reduced to one: the most efficient And here reason appears clearly in the guise of technique.
*ah.. so off.. nothing new/diff if any form of m\a\p.. same song
**even if didn’t reduce to one.. or didn’t reduce.. wasn’t/isn’t from all.. original ‘multiplicity of means’ was from finite set of choices.. we need to trust/try curiosity over decision making
36
In addition, there is the intervention of consciousness. Consciousness shows clearly, and to everybody, the advantages of technique and what it can accomplish. The technician takes stock of alternative possibilities. The immediate result is that he seeks to apply the new methods in fields which traditionally had been left to chance, pragmatism, and instinct. The intervention of consciousness causes a rapid and far-flung extension of technique.
perhaps far flung of technique.. but again.. not new/diff
The twofold intervention of reason and consciousness in the technical world, which produces the technical phenomenon, can be described as the *quest of the one best means in every field..t And this “one best means” is, in fact, the technical means. It is the aggregate of these means that produces technical civilization.
*except our humanity.. oi.. mufleh humanity law et al
The technical phenomenon is the main preoccupation of our time; in every field men seek to find the most efficient method. But our investigations have reached a limit. It is no longer the best relative means which counts, as compared to other means also in use. The choice is less and less a subjective one among several means which are potentially applicable. *It is really a question of finding the best means in the absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation.
absolute ness is myth as long as any form of m\a\p.. can only be absolute ness of sea world.. oi
It is, then, the specialist who chooses the means; he is able to carry out the calculations that demonstrate the superiority of the means chosen over all others. Thus a science of means comes into being—a science of techniques, progressively elaborated.
This science extends to greatly diverse areas; it ranges from the *act of shaving to the act of organizing the landing in Normandy, or to cremating thousands of deportees. **Today no human activity escapes this technical imperative. There is a technique of organization (the great fact of organization described by Toynbee fits very well into this conception of the technical phenomenon), just as there is a ***technique of friendship and a technique of swimming. Under the circumstances, it is easy to see how far we are from confusing technique and machine. And, if we examine the broader areas where this search for means is taking place, we find three principal subdivisions of modern technique,..t in addition to the mechanical (which is the most conspicuous but which I shall not discuss because it is so well known) and to the forms of intellectual technique (card indices, libraries, and so on).
*all irrelevant s if legit free.. so now.. all cancerous distractions
**rather all whale activity.. there are no legit free humans
***yeah.. all cancerous distractions.. structural violence.. spiritual violence
1) Economic technique..t is almost entirely subordinated to production, and ranges from the organization of labor to economic planning. This technique differs from the others in its object and goal But its problems are the same as those of all other technical activities.
econ we need: bachelard oikos law
2) The technique of organization ..t concerns the great masses and applies not only to commercial or industrial affairs of magnitude (coming, consequently, under the jurisdiction of the economic) but also to states and to administration and police power. This organizational technique is also applied to warfare and insures the power of an army at least as much as its weapons. Everything in the legal field also depends on organizational technique.
org we need: org around legit needs
3) Human technique..t takes various forms, ranging all the way from medicine and genetics to propaganda (pedagogical techniques, vocational guidance, publicity, etc.). Here man himself becomes the object of technique.
human ness we need: unconditional ness of itch-in-the-soul.. what’s already on each heart.. as data to org
imagine if we ness
37
We observe, in the case of each of these subdivisions, that the subordinate techniques may be very different in kind and not necessarily similar one to another as techniques. They have the same goal and preoccupation, however, and are thus related. *The three subdivisions show the wide extent of the technical phenomenon. In fact, nothing at all escapes technique today. There is no field where technique is not dominant—this is easy to say and is scarcely surprising. We are so habituated to machines that there seems to be nothing left to discover.
*in sea world.. but there is the opp for hari rat park law et al.. ie: there is a nother way
Has the fact of technique no intrinsic importance? Does it spring merely from the march of time? Or does it represent a problem peculiar to our times? Our discussion of the biology of technique will bring us face to face with this question. But first we must survey in detail the *vast field which the technical phenomenon covers, in order to become **fully cognizant of what it signifies.
*not so vast really.. sea world quite small in scope of things
**aka: fully dead.. ie: intellectness as cancerous distraction et al
38
Historical Development
Primitive Technique
It has not been sufficiently emphasized that technique has evolved along two distinct paths. There is the concrete technique of homo faber—man the maker—to which we are accustomed, and which poses the problems we have normally studied. There is also the technique, of a more or less spiritual order, which we call magic.
39
In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and “the higher powers,” just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.
40
Then, too, whereas material techniques are relatively distinct and independent of one another, magical techniques are rapidly elaborated into a rigid system. Everything is of a piece, everything is dependent upon everything else; consequently, nothing can be meddled with, nothing modified without threat to the whole structure of beliefs and activities. Hence, their weak expansive power and their strong power of defense against alien magical techniques.
The two great streams of technique which we have traced from their beginnings evolved in completely different ways. In manual technique we observe an increase and later a multiplication of discoveries, each based on the other. In magic we see only endless new beginnings, as the fortunes of history and its own inefficiency call its procedures into question.
seems contradictory to sentence in para preceding it
41
Greece
Technique is essentially Oriental: it was principally in the Near East that technique first developed, and it had very little in the way of scientific foundation. ..an error which is found throughout Western thought: that the Oriental mind is turned toward the mystical and has no interest in concrete action, whereas the Western mind is oriented toward “know-how” and action, and hence toward technique. In fact, the East was the cradle of all action, of all past and primitive technique in the present sense of the word, and later of spiritual and magical technique as well.
oi.. us and our history ness.. our intellectness as cancerous distraction ness..
The Greeks, however, were the first to have a coherent scientific activity and to liberate scientific thought. ..But it is certain that material needs were treated with contempt, that technical research was considered unworthy of the intellect, and that the goal of science was not application but contemplation.
oi
42
Rome
Social technique was still in its infancy. Doubtless, there had been some attempts at social organization—those of certain Pharaohs, and those of the Persian empire, were not negligible. But such organizations could be maintained only by police power. whereas the exact opposite is true of genuine social organization. By the very fact of its existence, coercion demonstrates the absence of political, administrative, and juridical technique; for this reason the great empires of the past are of little importance to our study.
but coercion is admin/juridical.. ?
50
The Industrial Revolution
The term industrial revolution is applied exclusively to the development of machinery, but that is to see only one side of it. In actual fact, the industrial revolution was merely one aspect of the technical revolution. It is preposterous that a specialist such as Lewis Mumford can write that he has found in the various modes of exploiting energy the key to the evolution of technique and the moving force behind its transformations. In his view, a first period, which lasted until about 1750, knew only hydraulic energy; a second period, from 1750 to 1880, is the age of coal; and a third, that of electricity. (The use of nuclear energy has only recently appeared; it is perhaps to be reckoned as part of the age of electricity.)
mumford non-specialized law..?
Mumford’s thesis is incomprehensible unless technique is restricted to the machine; Mumford actually makes this identification. His distinction is then valid as a plan for the historical study of machines, but it is totally invalid for the study of technical civilization. When technical civilization is considered as a whole, this classification and explanation are shockingly summary and superficial. Norbert *Wiener likewise rejects the classification founded on the different sources of energy. For him there has been only one industrial revolution, and that consisted in the replacement of human muscle as a source of energy. And, he adds, there is a second revolution in the making whose object is the replacement of the human brain. Of this last we have as yet only preparations and indications. We are not yet there. What we are witnessing at the moment is a rearrangement of the world in an intermediate stage; the change is not in the use of a natural force but in the application of technique to all spheres of life.
*norbert wiener.. oi.. what computers can’t do et al
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
The technical revolution meant the emergence of a state that was truly conscious of itself and was autonomous in relation to anything that did not serve its interests—a product of the French Revolution. It entailed the creation of a precise military technique (Frederick the Great and Napoleon) in the field of strategy and in the fields of organization, logistics, and recruitment; the beginning of economic technique with the physiocrats, and later the liberals. In administration and police power, it was the period of rationalized systems, unified hierarchies, card indices, and regular reports. With Napoleon particularly, there was a tendency toward mechanization which resulted from the application of technique to more or less human spheres of action.
The revolution also entailed the exertion and the regrouping of all the national energies. There were to be no more loafers (under the French Revolution, they were imprisoned), no more privileged persons, no special interests. Everyone must serve in accordance with the strictures of technique.
52
The close link between scientific research and technical invention appears to be a new factor in the nineteenth century. According to Mumford, “the principal initiatives came, not from the inventor-engineer, but from the scientist who established the general law.” The scientist took cognizance both of the new raw materials which were available and of the new human needs which had to be met. Then he deliberately oriented his research toward a scientific discovery that could be applied technically. And he did this either out of simple curiosity or because of definite commercial and industrial demands. Pasteur, for instance, was encouraged in his bacteriological research by wine producers and silkworm growers.
biggest problem.. keep focusing on non legit needs..
In the twentieth century, this relationship between scientific research and technical invention resulted in the enslavement of science to technique. In the nineteenth century, however, science was still the determining cause of technical progress. The society of the eighteenth century was not yet mature enough to allow the systematic development of inventions. As Siegfried Giedion says, the France of that period was a testing ground. Ideas proliferated but could take no final form until society had undergone a transformation.
What distinguishes the eighteenth century is that applications were made for reasons of utility; soon the only justification of science was applicability. Most historians of technique content themselves with invoking philosophy to explain this.
The philosophy of the eighteenth century did indeed favor technical applications. It was naturalistic and sought not only to know but also to exploit nature. It was utilitarian and pragmatic. It concerned itself with easing human life, with bringing more pleasure into it and simplifying its labor. For the eighteenth century, man’s life was narrowly confined to the material; it seemed evident that the problem of life would be resolved when men were able to work less while consuming more. The goal of science thus appeared to be fixed by philosophy.
This philosophy was concrete; it was bound up with material results. What cannot be seen cannot be judged, and this explains this century’s judgment of history: that the foundation of civilizations is technique, not philosophy or religion.
53
The optimistic atmosphere of the eighteenth century, more than this philosophy, created a climate favorable to the rise of technical applications. The fear of evil diminished. There was an improvement in manners; a softening of the conditions of war; an increasing sense of man’s responsibility for his fellows; a certain delight in life, which was greatly increased by the improvement of living conditions in nearly all classes except the artisan; the building of fine houses in great numbers. All these helped persuade Europeans that progress could only be achieved by the exploitation of natural resources and the application of scientific discoveries.
This state of mind created, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a land of good conscience on the part of scientists who devoted their research to practical objectives. They believed that happiness and justice would result from their investigations; and it is here that the myth of progress had its beginning..t
It is clear that this atmosphere was favorable to technical development. But, in itself, it was not enough. How, then, are we to explain the sudden blossoming of technique in the nineteenth century? (The eighteenth century was only the preliminary phase of technical application; the nineteenth century is the really interesting period.) I feel that this transformation of civilization can be explained by the conjunction in time of five phenomena: the fruition of a long technical experience; population expansion; the suitability of the economic environment; the plasticity of the social milieu; and the appearance of a clear technical intention.
54
A second factor was equally necessary: the population expansion. Here again we find ourselves face to face with a familiar problem. For two decades population studies in relation to the development of civilization have demonstrated that there is a close link between technique and population: the growth of population entails a growth of needs which cannot be satisfied except by technical development. From another viewpoint, a population expansion offers favorable grounds for research and technical growth by furnishing not only the necessary market but also the requisite human material.
The third condition has been analyzed by Vincent. If technical progress is to take place, the economic milieu must combine two apparently contradictory traits: it must be at once stable and in flux. The foundations of economic life must be stable so that primary technical research can be devoted to well-defined objects and situations. But at the same time this milieu must be capable of great change, so that technical inventions can be absorbed into the economy, and research stimulated. A rigid economy brings with it fixed customs which stifle the inventive faculty. Studies of the economic situation in the second half of the eighteenth century show that it had precisely these two opposed characteristics. But this is well known. I shall do no more than point it out and shall devote greater space to the last two conditions, which are usually neglected.
The fourth condition is possibly the most decisive. It is the plasticity of the social milieu, which involves two factors: the disappearance of social taboos and the disappearance of natural social groups.
natural?
The first of these appears in various forms, depending on the society involved. In the Western civilization of the eighteenth century there are two large categories: the taboos resulting from Christianity, and sociological taboos. The first category takes in all religious and moral ideas, judgments concerning action, the prevailing conception of man, and the ends proposed for human life. These were, theoretically and factually, opposed to technical development. When faith had been translated into prejudice and ideology, and personal religious experience incorporated into a social institution, a hardening of moral positions took place which corresponded to the creation of genuine taboos. The natural order must not be tampered with and anything new must be submitted to a moral judgment—which meant an unfavorable prejudgment. This was the popular mentality created by Christianity, particularly during the seventeenth century. Closely related to these were sociological taboos, in particular the conviction that a natural hierarchy exists which nothing can modify. The position of the nobility and the clergy, and above all of the king, could not be questioned. When in the middle of the eighteenth century these began to be questioned, the reaction of the people was that sacrilege was being committed; the stupor that accompanied the execution of Louis XVI was a religious stupor. In fact, regicide was seen as deicide. This constitution of society, which everyone relied on and recognized as the only one possible, was an obstacle to technique within it; technique was held to be fundamentally sacrilegious. The natural hierarchy operated against the practice of the mechanical arts, which would only bring conveniences to the lower classes. And since the lower classes too believed in the natural hierarchy, they could only be submissive and passive; they did not try to better their lot. The important point here was not the reality of the facts or the existence of the hierarchy; it was belief in its natural and sacred character which stood in the way of technique.
55
The very structure of society—based on natural groups—was also an obstacle. Families were closely organized. The guilds and the groups formed by collective interests (for example, the University, the Parliament, the Confraternities and Hospitals) were distinct and independent. The individual found livelihood, patronage, security, and intellectual and moral satisfactions in collectives that were strong enough to answer all his needs but limited enough not to make him feel submerged or lost. They sufficed to satisfy the average man who does not try to gratify imaginary needs if his position is fairly stable, who opposes innovation if he lives in a balanced milieu, even though he is poor. This fact, which is so salient in the three millennia of history we know, is misunderstood by modern man, who does not know what a balanced social environment is and the good he could derive from it.
natural?
*rather.. since forever.. black science of people/whales law et al
At the same time (and this is the second factor which made for the plasticity of the social milieu) a systematic campaign was waged against all natural groups, under the guise of a defense of the rights of the individual; for example, the guilds, the communes, and federalism were attacked, this last by the Girondists. There were movements against the religious orders and against the privileges of Parliament, the Universities, and the Hospitalers. There was to be no liberty of groups, only that of the individual. There was likewise a struggle to undermine the family. Revolutionary legislation promoted its disintegration; it had already been shaken by the philosophy and the fervors of the eighteenth century. Revolutionary laws governing divorce, inheritance, and paternal authority were disastrous for the family unit, to the benefit of the individual. And these effects were permanent, in spite of temporary setbacks. Society was already atomized and would be atomized more and more. The individual remained the sole sociological unit, but, far from assuring him freedom, this fact provoked the worst kind of slavery.
The atomization we have been discussing conferred on society the greatest possible plasticity—a decisive condition for technique. The breakup of social groups engendered the enormous displacement of people at the beginning of the nineteenth century and resulted in the concentration of population demanded by modern technique. To uproot men from their surroundings, from the rural districts and from family and friends, in order to crowd them into cities still too small for them; to squeeze thousands into unfit lodgings and unhealthy places of work; to create a whole new environment within the framework of a new human condition (it is too often overlooked that the proletariat is the creation of the industrial machine)—all this was possible only when the individual was completely isolated. It was conceivable only when he literally had no environment, no family, and was not part of a group able to resist economic pressure; when he had almost no way of life left.
56
Giedion says of the period from 1750 to 1850: “Invention was a part of the normal course of life. Everyone invented. Every entrepreneur dreamed of more rapid and economical means of fabrication. The work was done unconsciously and anonymously. Nowhere else and never before was the number of inventions per capita as great as in America in the 60’s of that century.”
57
In the middle of the nineteenth century the situation changed. Karl Marx rehabilitated technique in the eyes of the workers. He preached that technique can be liberating. Those who exploited it enslaved the workers, but that was the fault of the masters and not of technique itself.
Marx was perhaps not the first to have said this, but he was the first to convince the masses of it. The working class would not be liberated by a struggle against technique but, on the contrary, by technical progress itself, which would automatically bring about the collapse of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism. This reconciliation of the masses to techniques was decisive. But it would not have been sufficient to result in a clear consciousness of the technical objective, the new consensus omnium, had it not appeared simultaneously with a second historical fact, namely, the diffusion of the so-called benefits of techniques among the masses. These benefits included, for example, the conveniences of daily life, the progressive shortening of the work day, facilities for public transportation and medicine, new possibilities of making one’s fortune (in the United States and in the colonies), housing improvements, and so forth. A prodigious upheaval took place between 1850 and 1914 which convinced everyone of the excellence of a technical movement that could produce such marvels and alter human life. All this, Marx explained, presaged even better things and pointed to the road to follow. Fact and theory were for once in agreement. How could public opinion resist?
58
In the middle of the nineteenth century, when technique had hardly begun to develop, another voice was raised in prophetic warning against it. The voice was Kierkegaard’s. but his warnings, solidly thought out though they were, and in the strongest sense of the word prophetic, were not heeded—for very different reasons. They were too close to the truth.
59
The English technical movement was marked by the fact that all the different financial systems (banks, stock exchanges, insurance companies) were perfected. The clear consciousness of the value of technique expressed itself primarily in terms of money, and was located at the center of the systems of distribution..t
need bachelard oikos law
60
Great inventions may have been made in Germany and Russia during this period. Everyone is familiar with the claims of Hitler, and later of Stalin, that all important discoveries were made in their respective countries. Allowing for exaggeration, there is perhaps some truth in these claims. But the discoveries were not applied, and only application counts in the rise of technique. Application did not take place because the felicitous combination of factors we have discussed was lacking..t The social milieu of these countries, their spiritual tendencies, group psychology, sociological structures, and past history were all unfavorable to the rise of technique. The state in some countries, principally Prussia, was favorable to it; but a clear technical consciousness on the part of the state alone was obviously insufficient to open the door to the great mobilization of men and things necessary for this multiform progress.
The joint occurrence of the five factors we have briefly analyzed explains the exceptional growth of technique. Never before had these factors coincided. They are, to summarize: (1) a very long technical maturation or incubation without decisive checks before the final flowering; (2) population growth; (3) a suitable economic milieu; (4) the almost complete plasticity of a society malleable and open to the propagation of technique; (5) a clear technical intention,..t which combines the other factors and directs them toward the pursuit of the technical objective. Some of these conditions had existed in other societies; for example, the necessary technical preparation and the destruction of taboos in the Roman Empire in the third century. But the unique phenomenon was the simultaneous existence of all five—all of them necessary to bring about individual technical invention, the mainspring of everything eke.
1\ a quiet revolution – story board [2008 to present].. 2\ just hs 3\ sabbatical ish transition 4\ virus noticings et al 5\ there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.
62
CHAPTER 2: THE CHARACTEROLOGY OF TECHNIQUE
66
In our day, we are unable to envisage comfort except as part of the technical order of things. Comfort for us means bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing machines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and promote rest and physical euphoria. For us, comfort is closely associated with the material life; it manifests itself in the perfection of personal goods and machines. According to Giedion, the men of the Middle Ages also were concerned with comfort, but for them comfort had an entirely different form and content. It represented a feeling of moral and aesthetic order. Space was the primary element in comfort. Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possibility of moving about, of seeing beyond his nose, of not constantly colliding with other people. These preoccupations are altogether foreign to us.
black science of people/whales law – even in mid ages
Moreover, comfort consisted of a certain arrangement of space. In the Middle Ages, a room could be completely “finished,” even though it might contain no furniture. Everything depended on proportions, material, form. The goal was not convenience, but rather a certain atmosphere. Comfort was the mark of the man’s personality on the place where he lived. This, at least in part, explains the extreme diversity of architectural interiors in the houses of the period. Nor was this the result of mere whim; it represented an adaptation to character; and when it had been realized, the man of the Middle Ages did not care if his rooms were not well heated or his chairs hard.
need house/room via bachelard oikos law et al
67
The deficiency of the tool was to be compensated for by the skill of the worker. Professional know-how, the expert eye were what counted: man’s talents could make his crude tools yield the maximum efficiency. This was a kind of technique, but it had none of the characteristics of instrumental technique. Everything varied from man to man according to his gifts, whereas technique in the modern sense seeks to eliminate such variability. It is understandable that technique in itself played a very feeble role. Everything was done by men who employed the most rudimentary means. The search for the “finished,” for perfection in use, for ingenuity of application, took the place of a search for new tools which would have permitted men to simplify their work, but also would have involved giving up the pursuit of real skill.
need a tool that helps make skill ness and pursuit ness et al.. irrelevant
68
The consequence was an extreme local diversity of techniques for attaining the same result. No comparison or competition existed yet between these different systems; the formulation: “The one best way in the world” had not yet been made. It was a question of the “best way” in a given locality. Because of this, arms and tools took very different forms, and social organizations were extremely diverse.
It is impossible to speak of slavery as all of a piece. Roman slavery, for example, had nothing to do with Teutonic slavery, or Teutonic slavery with Chaldean. We habitually use one term to cover very different realities. This extreme diversity divested technique of its most crucial characteristic. There was no single means which was judged best and able to eliminate all others by virtue of its efficiency. This diversity has made us believe that there was an epoch of experimentation, when man was groping to find his way. This is a false notion; it springs from our modern prejudice that the stage we find ourselves in today represents the highest level of humanity. In reality, diversity resulted not from various experimental attempts on the part of various peoples, but from the fact that technique was always embedded in a particular culture.
69
Alongside this spatial limitation of technique, we find a time limitation. Until the eighteenth century, techniques evolved very slowly. Technical work was purely pragmatic, inquiry was empirical, and transmission slow and feeble…The initial problem was to construct the machine, to make the invented technique actually work. The second consisted in the diffusion of the machine throughout the society; and this second step proceeded very slowly..t
until now..
This divergence between invention and technique, which is the cause of the time lag.. t we have spoken of, is correctly interpreted by Gille in these words: “There was a discontinuity of technical progress but there was probably a continuity of research.” Gille shows clearly that technical progress develops according to a discontinuous rhythm: “It is tied up with demographic or economic rhythms and with certain internal contradictions.” This discontinuity still contributes to evolutionary lag today.
tech to hasten et al.. today have means for global detox leap
The natural consequence of this evolutionary slowness was that technique could be adapted to men. Almost unconsciously, men kept abreast of techniques and controlled their use and influence. This resulted not from an adaptation of men to techniques (as in modern times), but rather from the subordination of techniques to men. Technique did not pose the problem of adaptation because it was firmly enmeshed in the framework of life and culture. It developed so slowly that it did not outstrip the slow evolution of man himself. The progress of the two was so evenly matched that man was able to keep pace with his techniques. From the physical point of view, techniques did not intrude into his life; neither his moral evolution nor his psychic life were influenced by them. Techniques enabled man to make individual progress and facilitated certain developments, but they did not influence him directly. Social equilibrium corresponded to the slowness of general evolution.
beyond keeping pace.. not us (intoxicated) since forever.. need a leap.. for (blank)’s sake
73
I shall point out, then, in a summary fashion, that in our civilization technique is in no way limited. It has been extended to all spheres and encompasses every activity, including human activities. It has led to a multiplication of means without limit. It has perfected indefinitely the instruments available to man, and put at his disposal an almost limitless variety of intermediaries and auxiliaries. Technique has been extended geographically so that it covers the whole earth. It is evolving with a rapidity disconcerting not only to the man in the street but to the technician himself. It poses problems which recur endlessly and every more acutely in human social groups. Moreover, technique has become objective and is transmitted like a physical thing; it leads thereby to a certain unity of civilization, regardless of the environment or the country in which it operates. We are faced with the exact opposite of the traits previously in force. We must, therefore, examine carefully the positive characteristics of the technique of the present.
not for/reaching everyone yet.. so limited
74
There are two essential characteristics of today’s technical phenomenon which I shall not belabor because of their obviousness. These two, incidentally, are the only ones which, in general, are emphasized by the “best authors.”
The first of these obvious characteristics is rationality. In technique, whatever its aspect or the domain in which it is applied, a rational process is present which tends to bring mechanics to bear on all that is spontaneous or irrational. This rationality, best exemplified in systematization, division of labor, creation of standards, production norms, and the like, involves two distinct phases: first, the use of “discourse” in every operation; this excludes spontaneity and personal creativity. Second, there is the reduction of method to its logical dimension alone. Every intervention of technique is, in effect, a reduction of facts, forces, phenomena, means, and instruments to the schema of logic.
The second obvious characteristic of the technical phenomenon is artificiality. Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial: technique as art is the creation of an artificial system. This is not a matter of opinion. The means man has at his disposal as a function of technique are artificial means. For this reason, the comparison proposed by Emmanuel Mounier between the machine and the human body is valueless. The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
rationality ness makes it not it/us.. aka: sea world
I have given only brief descriptions of these two well-known characteristics. But I shall analyze the others at greater length; they are technical automatism, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.
77
From the point of view which most interests modern man, that of yield, every technical activity is superior to every nontechnical activity. Take, for example, politics. It used to be said that politics was an art, consisting of finesse, aptness, a particular kind of ability, even genius; in short, of personal qualities which seemed to operate by chance. If politics was to become a technical activity, chance must be eliminated. The results to be obtained must be certain. Unpredictability, which all men share to a greater or lesser degree, must also be eliminated. Rules had to be established for this particularly unstable game if certainty of result was to be achieved. The difficulty was great, but not greater, perhaps, than the difficulty involved in harnessing atomic energy.
rational = artificial et al
need: means/mech/tech sans any form of m\a\p
78
The milieu into which a technique penetrates becomes completely, and often at a stroke, a technical milieu. If a desired result is stipulated, there is no choice possible between technical means and nontechnical means based on imagination, individual qualities, or tradition. Nothing can compete with the technical means. The choice is made a priori. It is not in the power of the individual or of the group to decide to follow some method other than the technical. The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice..t
but deeper.. reason is because we keep settling for finite set of choices.. spinach or rock ness.. thinking choice ness is a freedom is the flaw..
what we need to try is curiosity over decision making.. because decision making is unmooring us
We are today at the stage of historical evolution in which everything that is not technique is being eliminated. The challenge to a country, an individual, or a system is solely a technical challenge. Only a technical force can be opposed to a technical force. All else is swept away. Serge Tchakotin reminds us of this constantly. In the face of the psychological outrages of propaganda, what reply can there be? It is useless to appeal to culture or religion. It is useless to educate the populace. Only propaganda can retort to propaganda, or psychological rape to psychological rape. Hitler formulated this long before Tchakotin. He writes, in Mein Kampf: “Unless the enemy learns to combat poison gas with poison gas, this tactic, which is based on an accurate evaluation of human weaknesses, must lead almost mathematically to success.”
oi.. of math and men
The exclusive character of technique gives us one of the reasons for its lightning progress. There is no place for an individual today unless he is a technician. No social group is able to resist the pressures of the environment unless it utilizes technique. To be in possession of the lightning thrust of technique is a matter of life or death for individuals and groups alike; no power on earth can withstand its pressures.
perhaps could be .. but not in whalespeak sense in which this is laying out
Will the technical phenomena of today be able to maintain itself, or must it suffer in its turn impairment or even liquidation? It is difficult to see ahead, and, in any case, this is not the place to try to do so. Doubtless, technique has its limits. But when it has reached these limits, will anything exist outside them?
*rather.. just irrelevant s
79
What is decisive is this anonymous accretion of conditions for the leap ahead. When all the conditions concur, only **minimal human intervention is needed to produce important advances. It might almost be maintained that, at this stage of evolution of a technical problem, ***whoever attacked the problem would find the solution.
*hari rat park law and/as detox leap ness.. for (blank)’s sake
**rather no whale intervention.. because advances ness would be irrelevant s
***to me this is about taleb center of problem law ness.. and..
we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8bn today.. a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8bn legit free
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
81
We can hardly agree that mechanical augmentation is decelerating. We are simply in another phase of technical progress: the phase of assimilation, *organization, and conquest of the other areas. Here the progress to be made seems limitless, and consists primarily in the **efficient systematization of society and the conquest of the human being. All that can be said is that, at best, technical activity has changed its field of operation; it cannot be said that it has slowed down.
*rather.. just need a means to org around legit needs
**conquest? rather freeing up of
Moreover, nothing argues that subsequently technical activity will not again turn toward the world of machines with renewed vigor. On the whole, it is the principle of the combination of techniques which causes self-augmentation.
Self-augmentation can be formulated in two laws:
1. In a given civilization, technical progress is irreversible.
yeah i think today we can undo .. ie: via global detox leap
2. Technical progress tends to act, not according to an arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression.
aka: need nonjudgmental expo labeling
The first of these laws—and we base our conviction on the whole of history—makes us certain that every invention calls forth other technical inventions in other domains. There is never any question of an arrest of the process, and even less of a backward movement. Arrest and retreat only occur when an entire society collapses. In the transition to a successor, a certain number of technical procedures are lost. But, in the framework of the same civilization, technical progress is never in question. Later I shall examine the reasons for this. Technical progression is of the same nature as the process of numbering; there is no good ground for halting the progression, because after each number we can always add 1. In technical evolution also, it seems that limits no longer exist. Improvements that result from the application of technique to the matter at hand (whether it be physical or social) can be added uninterruptedly; *there is no reason for arresting the process. In arguing thus, the qualification must be made that this can be said only of the ensemble of techniques, of the technical phenomenon, and not of any particular technique. For every technique taken by itself there apparently exist barriers that act to impede further progress, barriers to the addition of new inventions—**but these can sometimes be cleared, as the sound barrier has been for aircraft. For the technical phenomenon in its ensemble, however, a limitless progress is open. This progress, as Wiener has shown, is a necessity. Since techniques, proportionally to their development, exhaust the resources of nature, it is indispensable to fill the vacuum so created by a more rapid technical progress. ***Only inventions perpetually more numerous and automatically increasing can make good the unheard-of expenditures and the irremediable consumption of raw materials such as wood, coal, petroleum, and even water.
*actually very good reason for it.. why we keep perpetuating sea world and whac-a-mole-ing ness.. makes no diff how many +1’s or whatever.. if iterating on non legit data..
**aka via tech as it could be
***via curiosity over decision making.. ie: infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
What is it that determines this progression today? We can no longer argue that it is an economic or a social condition, or education, or any other human factor. Essentially, the preceding technical situation alone is determinative. When a given technical discovery occurs, it has followed almost of necessity certain other discoveries. Human intervention in this succession appears only as an incidental cause, and no one man can do this by himself. But anyone who is sufficiently up-to-date technically can make a valid discovery which rationally follows its predecessors and rationally heralds what is to follow.
oi.. whalespeak
82
This second law of self-augmentation explains a characteristic of the technical movement which has engaged the attention of contemporary sociologists. This is the unevenness of technical development. Enormous disparities exist not only in the various global areas of technical expansion but also in each field within the various sectors. Technique progresses more rapidly in one branch than in another—and certain retrogressions are always possible. To Frankel this unevenness of development is the key to the disturbances of equilibrium and the social difficulties that the technical phenomenon provokes. According to Frankel, if all branches evolved in the same rhythm, there would be no problem. Frankel’s view, certainly too simple, is probably not inexact. However, it explains little. In fact, these clashing rhythms cannot be altered because of technical automatism..t
to me.. this is whalespeak.. they can be ‘altered’ .. aka: set free.. to spontaneous ness.. ie: humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync..
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
Fourastié is right in arguing that technical progress is unpredictable. It cannot be known with certainty even a short time in advance in what quarter the new technical invention will be produced, precisely because such inventions are, for the most part, the result of self-augmentation. (Of course, a distinction must be made between invention and discovery.) *Short of halting progress by force in an advanced sector, there are no means of bringing these rhythms back into harmony; and the role of the individual is progressively weakened..t
*perhaps until now.. now have means to get back to the dance
83
The mechanization of administrative work in business offices raises the problem of a necessarily different kind of organization. It is not merely a question of replacing human beings with machines or of speeding up the work (of bookkeeping, for example), but rather of effecting operations of a *new type which must be integrated into a new kind of organization. For example, **the organization of the whole system of inventory analysis (with its four functions of entering, grouping, totaling, and comparing) becomes necessary. An ensemble of new techniques must be elaborated without which the machine in question would be good for nothing, resulting only in what Mas terms “pseudo-systematization.”
*if only.. to date .. we haven’t yet tried anything legit new
**all we need is entering, matching.. labeling/matching sans judgement.. and w expo speed so as to get us back into sync.. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling
The implications of self-augmentation become clearer: the individual’s role is less and less important in technical evolution. The more factors there are, the more readily they combine and the more evident is the urgent need for each technical advance. Advance for its own sake becomes proportionately greater and the expression of human autonomy proportionately feebler.
oi.. only because mufleh humanity law et al
Human beings are, indeed, always necessary. But literally anyone can do the job, *provided he is trained to it. Henceforth, men will be able to act only in virtue of their commonest and lowest nature, and not in virtue of what they possess of superiority and individuality. **The qualities which technique requires for its advance are precisely those characteristics of a technical order which do not represent individual intelligence. And here we enter into another area, the nature of the technician.
*oi.. huge red flag/cancerous distraction
**only if by ‘characteristics of tech order’ mean ie: tech w/o judgment..
In this decisive evolution, the human being does not play a part. Technical elements combine among themselves, and they do so more and more spontaneously. In the future, *man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device; he will note the effects of techniques upon one another, and register the results.
*backwards.. tech as recording and matching.. oi
A whole new kind of spontaneous action is taking place here, and we know neither its laws nor its ends. In this sense it is possible to speak of the “reality” of technique—with *its own substance, its own particular mode of being, and a life independent of our power of decision. The evolution of techniques then becomes exclusively causal; it loses all finality. This is what economists such as Alfred Sauvy mean when they say that “by a slow reversal… production is more and more determined by the wishes of individuals in their capacity as producers, than by their decisions as consumers.” In reality, it is not the “wishes” of the “producers” which control, **but the technical necessity of production which forces itself on the consumers. Anything and everything which technique is able to produce is produced and accepted by the consumer. The belief that the human producer is still master of production is a dangerous illusion.
*not a power/life.. rather a machine that does what we tell it.. ie: do nonjudgmental expo labeling for us
**whalespeak.. ie: production ness in itself is irrelevant if people legit free
Technique is organized as a *closed world. It utilizes what the mass of men do not understand. It is even based on human ignorance. As Charles Camichel says: “The worker cannot understand the workings of modern industry.” 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. The human hand no longer spans the complex of means, nor does the human brain synthesize man’s acts. Only the intrinsic monism of technique assures cohesion between human means and acts. ***Technique reigns alone, a blind force and more clear-sighted than the best human intelligence.
*aka: sea world
**even deeper.. the actions et al.. are of whales.. not of legit free people.. so makes no diff how that is org’d..
***in sea world.. because thinking we need intellectness is: intellectness as cancerous distraction.. but too.. at this point.. we do need tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling to detox us from that supposed/assumed intellect/mindset
This phenomenon of self-augmentation gives technique a strangely harsh aspect. It resembles nothing other than itself. Whatever the domain to which it is applied, man or God, technique simply is; it undergoes no modifications in the movement which is its being and essence. It is the only locus where form and being are identical. It is only a form, but everything conforms to it. Here technique assumes the peculiar characteristics which make it a thing apart. A precise and well-defined boundary surrounds it: there is that which is technique, and there is everything else, which is not. *Whoever passes this boundary and enters into technique is constrained to adopt its characteristics. Technique modifies whatever it touches, but it is itself untouchable. Nothing in nature, or in social or human life, is comparable with it. The intelligence of art or war comes nowhere near that of technique, no more than does the industry of ants or bees. **A hybrid but not sterile being, and capable of self-generation, technique traces its own limits and fashions its own image.
*only if in sense of tech w/o judgment ness.. we do need that for global detox leap.. but once all free.. we just dance and tech is just machine
**nah.. just machine.. oi..
84
Monism
endnote [8]: The French word is unicité or insécabilité. I have adopted “monism” as the English equivalent. “Holism” might have been better. In any case, the accumulated philosophical baggage of both these terms must be rejected and the meaning of the term understood contextually. (Trans.)
To analyze these common features is tricky, but it is simple to grasp them. Just as there are principles common to things as different as a wireless set and an internal-combustion engine, so the organization of an office and the construction of an aircraft have certain identical features. This identity is the primary mark of that thoroughgoing unity which makes the technical phenomenon a single essence despite the extreme diversity of its appearances.
single essence = same song
we need to try something legit diff
As a corollary, it is impossible to analyze this or that element out of it—a truth which is today particularly misunderstood. The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being.
It is common practice, for example, to deny the unity of the technical complex so as to be able to fasten one’s hopes on one or another of its branches. Mumford gives a remarkable example of this when he contrasts the grandeur of the printing press with the horridness of the newspaper. “On the one side there is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation… On the other the content of the papers themselves recording the most vulgar and elementary emotional states… There the impersonal, the cooperative, the objective; here the limited, the subjective, the recalcitrant, the ego, violent and full of hate and fear, etc…” Unfortunately, it did not occur to Mumford to ask whether the content of our newspapers is not really necessitated by the social form imposed on man by the machine.
hari rat park law et al
85
This content is not the product of chance or of some economic form. It is the result of precise psychological and psychoanalytical techniques. These techniques have as their goal the bringing to the individual of that which is indispensable for his satisfaction in the conditions in which the machine has placed him, of inhibiting in him the sense of revolution, of subjugating him by flattering him. In other words, journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt the man to the machine.
manufacturing consent ness et al.. voluntary compliance
It is certain that a press of high intellectual tone and great moral elevation either would not be read (and then one would scarcely see the wherefore of these beautiful machines) or would provoke in the long run a violent reaction against every form of technical society, including the machine. This reaction would come about not because of the ideas such a press would disseminate, but because the reader would no longer find in it the indispensable instrument for releasing his repressed passions.
In a sound evaluation of the problem, it ought never to be said: on the one side, technique; on the other, the abuse of it. There are different techniques which correspond to different necessities. But all techniques are inseparably united. Everything hangs together in the technical world, as it does in the mechanical; in both, the advisability of the isolated means must be distinguished from the advisability of the mechanical “complex.” The claims of the mechanical “complex” must prevail when, for example, a machine too costly or overrefined threatens to wreck the ensemble.
There is an attractive notion which would apparently resolve all technical problems: that it is not the technique that is wrong, but the use men make of it. Consequently, if the use is changed, there will no longer be any objection to the technique.
I shall return more than once to this conception. Let us examine a single aspect of it now. First, it manifestly rests on the confusion between machine and technique. A man can use his automobile to take a trip or to kill his neighbors. But the second use is not a use; it is a crime. The automobile was not created to kill people, so the fact is not important. I know, of course, that killing people is not what those who explain things in this way have in mind. They prefer to say that man orients his pursuits in the direction of good and not of evil. They mean that technique seeks to invent rational therapies and not poison gases, useful sources of energy and not atomic bombs, commercial and not military aircraft, etc. This leads them straight back to man—man who decides in what direction to orient his researches. (Must it not be, then, that man is becoming better?) But all this is an error. It resolutely refuses to recognize technical reality. It supposes, to begin with, that men orient technique in a given direction for moral, and consequently nontechnical, reasons. But a principal characteristic of technique (which we shall study at length) is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends, on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality..t
huge to tech w/o judgment and nonjudgmental expo labeling ness
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
86
Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique’s rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians.
This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique, as I believe I have shown, is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed. It evolves in a purely causal way: the combination of preceding elements furnishes the new technical elements. There is no purpose or plan that is being progressively realized. There is not even a tendency toward human ends. We are dealing with a phenomenon blind to the future, in a domain of integral causality. Hence, to pose arbitrarily some goal or other, to propose a direction for technique, is to deny technique and divest it of its character and its strength..t
nonjudgmental expo labeling
There is a final argument against this position. It was said that the use made of technique is bad. But this assertion has no meaning at all. As I have pointed out, a number of uses can always be made of the machine, but only one of them is the technical use. The use of the automobile as a murder weapon does not represent the technical use, that is, the one best way of doing something. Technique is a means with a set of rules for the game. It is a “method of being used” which is unique and not open to arbitrary choice; we gain no advantage from the machine or from organization if it is not used as it ought to be. There is but one method for its use, one possibility. Lacking this, it is not a technique. Technique is in itself a method of action, which is exactly what a use means. To say of such a technical means that a bad use has been made of it is to say that no technical use has been made of it, that it has not been made to yield what it could have yielded and ought to have yielded. The driver who uses his automobile carelessly makes a bad use of it. Such use, incidentally, has nothing to do with the use which moralists wish to ascribe to technique. Technique is a use. Moralists wish to apply another use, with other criteria. What they wish, to be precise, is that technique no longer be technique. Under the circumstances, there are no further significant problems..t
taleb center of problem law et al.. ie: problem deep enough
There is no difference at all between technique and its use. The individual is faced with an exclusive choice, either to use the technique as it should be used according to the technical rules, or not to use it at all. It is impossible to use it otherwise than according to the technical rules.
Unfortunately, men today accept this reality only with difficulty. Thus, when Mumford makes the statement: “The army is the ideal form towards which a purely mechanical industrial system must tend,” he is unable to restrain himself from adding: “But the result is not ideal.” *What is the “ideal” doing here? The ideal is not the problem. The problem is solely to know whether this mode of organization responds to technical criteria. Mumford is able to show that it is nothing of the kind, because he limits techniques to machines. But if he were to accept the role of human techniques in the organization of the army he could account for the fact that the army indeed remains the irreproachable model of a technical organization, and its value has nothing to do with an ideal. It is infantile to wish to submit the machine to the criterion of the ideal.
*like a raised eyebrow .. any form of m\a\p
It is also held that technique could be directed toward that which is positive, constructive, and enriching, omitting that which is negative, destructive, and impoverishing. In demagogic formulation, techniques of peace must be developed and techniques of war rejected. In a less simple-minded version, it is held that means ought to be sought which palliate, without increasing, the drawbacks of technique. Could not atomic engines and atomic power have been discovered without creating the bomb? To reason thus is to separate technical elements with no justification. Techniques of peace and alongside them other and different techniques of war simply do not exist, despite what good folk think to the contrary.
87
The organization of an army comes to resemble more and more that of a great industrial plant. It is the technical phenomenon presenting a formidable unity in all its parts, which are inseparable. The fact that the atomic bomb was created before the atomic engine was not essentially the result of the perversity of technical men. Nor was it solely the attitude of the state which determined this order. The action of the state was certainly the deciding factor in atomic research (I shall take up this point later). Research was greatly accelerated by the necessities of war and consequently directed toward a bomb. If the state had not been oriented toward the ends of war, it would not have devoted so much money to atomic research. All this caused an undeniable factor of orientation to intervene. But if the state had not promoted such efforts, it would have been the whole complex of atomic research which would have been halted without distinction between the uses of war and peace.
If atomic research is encouraged, it is obligatory to pass through the stage of the atomic bomb; the bomb represents by far the simplest utilization of atomic energy. The problems involved in the military use of atomic energy are infinitely more simple to resolve than are those involved in its industrial use. For industrial use, all the problems involved in the bomb must be solved, and in addition certain others, a fact corroborated by J. Robert Oppenheimer in his Paris lecture of 1958. The experience of Great Britain between 1955 and 1960 in producing electricity of nuclear origin is very significant in this respect.
It was, then, necessary to pass through the period of research which culminated in the bomb before proceeding to its normal sequel, atomic motive power. The atomic-bomb period is a transitory, but unfortunately necessary, stage in the general evolution of this technique. In the interim period represented by the bomb, the possessor, finding himself with so powerful an instrument, is led to use it. Why? Because everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available, without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age. We may quote here Jacques Soustelle’s well-known remark of May, 1960, in reference to, the atomic bomb. It expresses the deep feeling of us all: “Since it was possible, it was necessary.” Really a master phrase for all technical evolution.
gershenfeld something else law
Even an author as well disposed toward the machine as Mumford recognizes that there is a tendency to utilize all inventions whether there is need for them or not. Our grandparents used sheet iron for walls although they knew that iron is a good conductor of heat… The introduction of anesthetics led to the performance of superfluous operations…” To say that it could be otherwise is simply to make an abstraction of man.
graeber min\max law et al
Another example is the police. The police have perfected to an unheard of degree technical methods both of research and of action. Everyone is delighted with this development because it would seem to guarantee an increasingly efficient protection against criminals. Let us put aside for the moment the problem of police corruption and concentrate on the technical apparatus, which, as I have noted, is becoming extremely precise. Will this apparatus be applied only to criminals? We know that this is not the case; and we are tempted to react by saying that it is the state which applies this technical apparatus without discrimination. But there is an error of perspective here. The instrument tends to be applied everywhere it can be applied. It functions without discrimination—because it exists without discrimination. The techniques of the police, which are developing at an extremely rapid tempo, have as their necessary end the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp. This is no perverse decision on the part of some party or government. To be sure of apprehending criminals, it is necessary that everyone be supervised. It is necessary to know exactly what every citizen is up to, to know his relations, his amusements, etc. And the state is increasingly in a position to know these things.
88
This does not imply a reign of terror or of arbitrary arrests. The best technique is one which makes itself felt the least and which represents the least burden. But every citizen must be thoroughly known to the police and must live under conditions of discreet surveillance. All this results from the perfection of technical methods.
The police cannot attain technical perfection unless they have total control. And, as Ernst Kohn-Bramstedt has remarked, this total control has both an objective and a subjective side. Subjectively, control satisfies the desire for power and certain sadistic tendencies. But the subjective aspect is not the dominant one. It is not the major aspect, the expression of what is to come. In reality, the objective aspect of control—more and more, that is to say, the pure technique which creates a milieu, an atmosphere, an environment, and even a model of behavior in social relations—dominates more and more. The police must move in the direction of anticipating and forestalling crime. Eventually intervention will be useless. This state of affairs can come about in two ways: first, by constant surveillance, to the end that noxious intentions be known in advance and the police be able to act before the premeditated crime takes place; second, by the climate of social conformity which we have mentioned. This goal presupposes the paternal surveillance of every citizen and, in addition, the closest possible tie-in with all other techniques—administrative, organizational, and psychological. The technique of police control has value only if the police are in close contact with the trade unions and the schools. In particular, it is allied with propaganda. Wherever the phenomenon is observed, this connection exists. Propaganda itself cannot be efficient unless it brings into play the whole state organization, and particularly the police power. Conversely, police power is a genuine technique only when it is supplemented by propaganda, which plays a leading role in the psychological environment necessary to the completeness of the police power. But propaganda must also teach acceptance of what the police power is and what it can do. It must make the police power palatable, justify its actions, and give it its psychosociological structure among the masses of the people.
structural violence et al.. supposed to’s of school/work et al
need: hari rat park law
All this is equally true for dictatorial regimes in which police and propaganda concentrate on terror, and for democratic regimes in which the motion pictures, for example, show the good offices of the police and procure it the friendly feeling of the public. The vicious circle mentioned by Ernst Kohn-Bramstedt (past terror accentuates present propaganda, and present propaganda paves the way for future terror) is as true of democratic as of dictatorial regimes, if the term terror is replaced by efficiency.
This type of police organization is not an arbitrary prospect. It is maintained by every authoritarian government, where every citizen is regarded as a suspect ignorant of his own capabilities. It is the tendency in the United States, and we are beginning to see the first elements of it in France. The administration of the French police was oriented, in 1951, toward an organization of the system “in depth.” This took place, for example, at the level of the Record Office. Certain elements of this are simple and well known: fingerprint files, records of firearms, application of statistical methods which allow the police to obtain in a minimum of time the most varied kinds of information and to know from day to day the current state of criminality in all its forms. Other elements are somewhat more complicated and new. For example, a punched-card mechanical index system (Recherches) has been installed in the Criminal Division. This system offers four hundred possible combinations and permits investigations to begin with any element of the crime: hour of commission, nature, objects stolen, weapons used, etc. The combination obviously does not give the solution but a series of approximations.
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The most important item in this catalogue of police techniques is the creation of the so-called “suspect files,” which show whether the police ever suspected any individual for any reason or at any time whatsoever, even though no legal document or procedure ever existed against him (from the press conference of M. Baylot, Prefect of Police, 1951). This means that any citizen who, once in his life, had anything to do with the police, even for noncriminal reasons, is put under observation—a fact which ought to affect, speaking conservatively, half the adult male population. It is obvious that these lists are only a point of departure, because it will be tempting, as well as necessary, to complete the files with all observations which may have been collected.
Finally, this technical conception of the police supposes the institution of concentration camps, not in their dramatic aspects, but in their administrative aspects. The Nazi’s use of concentration camps has warped our perspectives. The concentration camp is based on two ideas which derive directly from the technical conception of the police: preventive detention (which completes prevention), and re-education. It is not because the use of these terms has not corresponded to reality that we feel it necessary to refuse to see in the concentration camp a very advanced form of the system. Nor is it because the so-called methods of re-education have, on the whole, been methods of destruction that we feel we must consider such a concept of “re-education” an odious joke. The further we advance, the more will the police be considered responsible for the re-education of social misfits, a goal that is a part of the very order which they are charged with protecting.
We are experiencing at present the justification of this development. *It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state’s Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society implies it, of necessity..t The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order, which today represents the highest value. To deny this is to deny the whole course of modern times. This order has nothing spontaneous in it. It is rather a patient accretion of a thousand technical details. And each of us derives a feeling of security from every one of the improvements which make this order more efficient and the future safer. Order receives our complete approval; even when we are hostile to the police, we are, by a strange contradiction, partisans of order..t In the blossoming of modern discoveries and of our own power, a vertigo has taken hold of us which makes us feel this need to an extreme degree. After all, it is the police who are charged, from the external point of view, with insuring this order which covers organization and morals. How then can we possibly deny to the police indispensable improvements in their methods?
We in France are still in the preparatory phase of this development, but the organization of police power has been pushed very far in Canada and New Zealand, to take two examples. Technical necessity imposes the national concentration camp (which, I must point out, does not involve the suffering usually associated with it). Let us take another example. A new machine of great productive power put into circulation “releases” a great quantity of work; it replaces many workers. This is an inevitable consequence of technique. In the crude order of things, these workers are simply thrown out of work. Capitalism is blamed for this state of affairs and we are told that technique itself is not responsible for technological unemployment and that the establishment of socialism would set things right. The capitalist replies: “Technological unemployment always dies out of itself. For example, it creates certain new activities which will in the long run create employment for qualified workers.” This appears to be a dreadful prospect because it implies a readaptation in time and a more or less lengthy period of unemployment. But what does socialism propose? That the “liberated” worker will be used somewhere else and in some other capacity. In the Soviet Union the worker is either adapted to a new skill by means of vocational training or he is sent to another part of the country. In the Beveridge Plan the worker is employed wherever the state opens a plant of any sort. This socialist solution involves readaptation in space. But this solution, too, appears to be completely alien to human nature. Man is not a mere package to be moved about, an object to be molded and applied wherever there is need. These two forms of readaptation, the only ones possible, are both inhumane. The New Work Code promulgated in the (East) German Democratic Republic in November, 1960, shows this inhumanity in operation in the socialist camp. And none of these adaptations can be separated from the machine which replaces human labor. They are its necessary and inevitable consequence. Of course, idealists will speak of the reduction of the work week. But this reduction can only be effected when equivalent technical improvements are produced in all fields of work. According to Colin Clark, it seems that this reduction, too, must “ceiling out” before long. But this consideration passes over into the area of economics.
90
I could cite innumerable examples, but the ones I have given suffice to show that technique in itself (and not the use made of it, or its non-necessary consequences) leads to a certain amount of suffering and to social scourges which cannot be completely separated from it. This is its very mechanism.
again.. gershenfeld something else law
Of course, a technique can be abandoned when it proves to have evil effects which were not provided for. From then on, there will be an improvement in the technique. A characteristic example is furnished by J. de Castro in The Geography of Hunger. De Castro shows in detail, with regard to Brazil, what was already known superficially about other countries, that certain techniques of exploitation have proved disastrous. According to de Castro, certain regions were deforested in order to grow sugar cane. But only the immediate technical productivity was considered. In a further work, de Castro seeks to show that the hunger problem was created by application of the capitalist and colonialist system to agriculture. His reasoning, however, is correct only to a very limited extent. It is true that when an agriculture of diversified crops is replaced by a single-crop economy for commercial ends (tobacco and sugar cane), capitalism is to blame. *But most often crop diversification is not disturbed. What happens is that new areas are brought under cultivation, producing a population increase and also a unilateral utilization of the labor forces. And this is less a capitalist than a technical fact. If the possibility of industrializing agriculture exists, why not use it? Any engineer, agronomist, or economist of a hundred years ago would have agreed that bringing uncultivated lands under cultivation constituted a great advance. The application of European agricultural techniques represented an incomparable forward step, when compared, for example, to Indian methods. But it involved certain unforeseen consequences: the resulting deforestation modified hydrographic features, the rivers became torrents, and the drainage waters provoked catastrophic erosion. The topsoil was completely carried away and agriculture became impossible. The fauna, dependent on the existence of the forest, disappeared. In this way, the food-producing possibilities of vast regions vanished. The same situation is developing as a result of the cultivation of peanuts in Senegal, of cotton in the South of the United States, and so on. None of this represents, as is commonly said, a poor application of technique—one guided by selfish interest. It is simply technique. And if the situation is rectified “too late” by the abandonment of the old technique, it will only be as a consequence of some new technical advance. In any case, the first step was inevitable; man can never foresee the totality of consequences of a given technical action. History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. These effects exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and which represent something valuable and positive.
*i don’t know.. bush mono crop law et al
91
Technique demands the most rapid possible application; the problems of our day are evolving rapidly and require immediate solutions. Modern man is held by the throat by certain demands which will not be resolved simply by the passage of time. The quickest possible counter-thrust, often a matter of life or death, is necessary..t When the parry specific to the attack is found, it is used. It would be foolish not to use the available means. But there is never time to estimate all the repercussions. And, in any case, they are most often unforeseeable. The more we understand the interrelation of all disciplines and the interaction of the instruments, the less time there is to measure these effects accurately.
huge.. for (blank)’s sake
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Moreover, technique demands the most immediate application because it is so expensive. It must “pay off,” in money, prestige, or force (depending on whether the regime is capitalist, Communist, or Fascist, respectively). There is no time for precautions when the distribution of dividends or the salvation of the proletariat is at stake. Nor can we permit ourselves to say that these motives are no affair of technique. If none of them existed, there would be no money for technical research and there would be no technique. Technique cannot be considered in itself, apart from its actual modes of existence.
94
However, *it is not my intention to show that technique will end in disaster. On the contrary, technique has only one principle: efficient ordering. Everything, for technique, is centered on the concept of order. This explains the development of moral and political doctrines at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Everything which represented an ordering principle was taken in deadly earnest..t At the same time the means destined to elaborate this order were exploited as never before. Order and peace were required for the development of the individual techniques (after society had reached the necessary stage of disintegration). Peace is indispensable to the triumph of industrialization. It will be hastily concluded from this that industrialization will promote peace. But, as always, logical deductions falsify reality. J. U. Nef has shown admirably that industrialization cannot act otherwise than to promote wars. This is no accident, but rather an organic relation. It holds not only because of the direct influence of industrialization on the means of destruction but also because of its influence on the means of existence. **Technical progress favors war, according to Nef, because (a) the new weapons have rendered more difficult the distinction between offense and defense; and (b) they have enormously reduced the pain and anguish implied in the act of killing..t
*we need tech for a disorderly order.. sans any form of m\a\p
**need to try gershenfeld something else law
On another plane, the distinction between peaceful industry and military industry is no longer possible. Every industry, every technique, however humane its intentions, has military value. “The humanitarian scientist finds himself confronted by a new dilemma: Must he look for ways to make people live longer so that they are better able to destroy one another?”..t Nef has described all this remarkably well It is no longer a question of simple human behavior, but of technical necessity.
The technical phenomenon cannot be broken down in such a way as to retain the good and reject the bad. It has a “mass” which renders it monistic. To show this we have taken only the simplest, and hence the most easily debatable, examples. To enable the reader to grasp fully the reality of this monism, it would be necessary to present every problem with all its implications and ramifications into other fields. The case of the police, for example, cannot be considered merely within its specific confines; police technique is closely connected with the techniques of propaganda, administration, and even economics. Economics demands, in effect, an increasing productivity; it is impossible to accept the nonproducers into the body social—the loafers, the coupon-clippers, the social misfits, and the saboteurs—none of these have any place. The police must develop methods to put these useless consumers to work. The problem is the same in a capitalist state (where the Communist is the saboteur) and in a Communist state (where the saboteur is the internationalist in the pay of capitalism).
The necessities and the modes of action of all these techniques combine to form a whole, each part supporting and reinforcing the others. They constitute a co-ordinated phenomenon, no element of which can be detached from the others. It is an illusion, a perfectly understandable one, to hope to be able to suppress the “bad” side of technique and preserve the “good.” This belief means that the essence of the technical phenomenon has not been grasped..t
perhaps until now.. ie: gershenfeld something else law.. we have no idea
97
In this description we have constantly encountered the term necessity; it is necessity which characterizes the technical universe. Everything must accommodate itself to it with mathematical certainty. Every successive technique has appeared because the ones which preceded it rendered necessary the ones which followed. Otherwise they would have been inefficacious and would not have been able to deliver their maximum yield.
It is useless to hope for modification of a system like this—so complex and precisely adjusted that no single part can be modified by itself. Moreover, the system perfects and completes itself unremittingly. And, except in print, I see no sign of any modification of the technical edifice, no principle of a different social organization that would not be founded on technical necessity..t
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
98
I am well acquainted with the perfectly valid arguments which turn on economic necessity and the misery of the so-called “backward” peoples. But the problem is not the process involved; it is simply to note that different societies are adopting Western technique. The Vevey Congress of 1960 forcefully emphasized this point. Although, understandably, the primary problem of the underdeveloped peoples is undernourishment, obsession with technique has befuddled them to such a point that what they are demanding, and what we are offering, is the very industrialization that will aggravate the evil. Technique is the same in all latitudes and hence acts to make different civilizations uniform. This tendency arises directly from technique itself. The Oriental, Russian, and South American societies were by no means historically prepared, as was ours, to favor technical development
The best sociologists have noted that technique involves the same effects everywhere. R. P. Lynton writes: “The industrialization of a community of Europe or America, on the one hand; or of Siam, Nigeria, Turkey, or Uruguay, on the other, poses the same problems.” If the technical movement had had its inception in one of these “backward” countries, it would have aborted. But these societies are presented with a technical movement in full vigor and in all its expansive power. No longer is there any question as to whether circumstances favorable to its flowering exist. The technical movement is strong enough to impose itself and to break down all barriers to its progress..t
again.. until now.. now have means for legit global detox leap
But why does this expansion exist at all? Until now it was generally accepted that very similar social environments were necessary if propagation of techniques were to occur. This is no longer true. Today technique imposes itself, whatever the environment. This expansive force can be explained by a whole ensemble of historical reasons (more or less superficial, though true), and by one profound reason (to be examined later on).
99
The historical reasons are bound up with two great currents which have occasioned the technical invasion: commerce and war.
War provokes the sudden and stupefying adaptation of the “savage” to machinery and discipline.
The second factor governing technical invasion is commerce. It was mandatory for the Western powers to conquer the markets necessary for Western industry and technical life. No barrier could oppose this necessity; and primitive peoples were literally swamped by the products of modern technique. In 1945 the Americans sent tons of individual military rations to the Bulgarians, who had no desire at all to adapt themselves to a new kind of butter and to other substitutes. But their resistance necessarily yielded to technical adaptation and, very rapidly, to plain abundance. The excessiveness of the means broke down all traditional and individual desires.
100
There is still another element in the mechanism of technical expansion: the export of technicians. This is not only a question of German technicians going, for example, to the United States or to Russia. (This exodus, incidentally, was accompanied by a certain technical flowering which rendered German technique truly international.) There is the same diffusion of American technique to underdeveloped countries by the application of President Truman’s Point Four Program. Academicians are supplied who are charged with blueprinting the future of underdeveloped peoples. (This form of technical assistance assimilates intellectually the inhabitants of the countries in question.) In addition, the United States directly supplies the necessary technicians for exploiting the natural resources of these countries. The immediate purpose is to raise the standard of living of the population, beginning with a realistic appraisal of the possibilities of the given country, and the final objective is a perfectly humanitarian one; we can refrain from passing judgment on whether American imperialism is involved. Nevertheless, this leads to a diffusion of techniques throughout the world in an accelerated tempo, and at the same time it leads to technical identity in all countries.
oi.. schooling the world et al
A certain educational unity is also involved here. Every citizen of an underdeveloped country must become adept in the use of the new techniques. This leads to the extension of European-style education, allows the colored peoples to participate actively in scientific progress, and provokes as a consequence a kind of a priori adhesion to technical diffusion. Since 1956 we have been witnessing the same diffusion of technicians from the Soviet Union, and more recently from China, to Syria, Guinea, Ghana, and Cuba. Without entertaining political suspicions of these acts, let us bear in mind only that these factors, among others, are an active aid to technical invasion.
oi
101
Even the most classically oriented sociologists today recognize that the impact of techniques is producing a collapse of the non-Western civilizations. This involves the collapse of cultural as well as of economic forms, and of the traditional psychological and sociological structures.
UNESCO has been greatly preoccupied with these questions, and both the Bulletin of the Social Sciences and the reports of Dr. Margaret Mead strike an alarming note. Investigators find, in effect, that it is easy to transfer technical procedures, but that the elaboration of sociological and psychological methods of controlling them is slow, difficult, and laborious.
because not org’d around something our hearts already crave/grok (not to mention because trying to control et al).. ie: missing pieces
One is always running up against the simple-minded tendency to say, as Charles F. Frankel puts it, that “it is sufficient to give technical procedures and their accumulated blessings to the backward peoples in order to put them on their feet, as one might give an injection to a sick man.” This kind of injection may conceivably help. But in giving it, we destroy the traditional ways of life. Technique does not, of itself, carry its own equilibrium. The opposite is nearer the truth. We have seen in the West how technique destroyed communities and brought the relevance of the human being into question, even though technique was born in the Western milieu and grew only slowly. How much more formidable are its effects when it is suddenly implanted in a foreign environment, appearing in all its power at a single stroke. In Africa the worker is separated from his family and, as S. Herbert Frankel says, “his social ego remains attached to the rural group while he himself has been transplanted into an industrial milieu. When his family comes to the city they are completely unprepared for urban life and are destroyed in that environment morally and sociologically.” In Australia we find the same collapse of the traditional way of life. A. P. Elkin says: “In the tribe, authority belonged to the elders… but it is now in process of passing to the corral boss, or to the ranch owner… The mysterious rites, which are associated with the succession of the seasons and with the search for food, and which in the past occupied a great deal of time, are tending to lose their meaning.” It would be easy enough to give many more examples.
Every culture must be considered as a whole. The transformation of a given element through the effect of technique produces shocks in all areas. All the peoples of the world today live in a cultural breakdown provoked by the conflicts and the internal strife resulting from technique. Over and above this—as Margaret Mead points out—since every human being incorporates in his own person the cultural environment in which he lives, its disagreements and incoherences are to be met with again in each individual personality.
Moreover, *we are poorly equipped to respond to this cultural collapse. We have few studies of the mentality and the needs of these peoples, and even fewer studies of their psychological reactions to technique. *We have no studies of the social and administrative measures that might meet their needs..t, or of their changes in aptitudes. We never send along with our technique any civilized environment or adaptable value capable of replacing what is being destroyed. This, at any rate, is the diagnosis of UNESCO, an agency generally characterized by optimism.
*rather.. blinded to how equipped we are if we org around legit needs
*The situation is being studied now, but for the most part we are too late. All the instruments ought long since to have been prepared, for **no natural adaptation or spontaneous reorganization can be counted upon. No hope of this exists. We have no instruments ready..t And while the problem is being studied, the ravages of technique are making steady inroads. We are in a veritable race, but it is evident that we are beaten before we begin. ***The effects of technique are already too far advanced for us to begin again at the beginning. There is no doubt that all the traditional cultures and sociological structures will be destroyed by technique before we can discover or invent social, economic, and psychological forms of adaptation which might possibly have preserved the equilibrium of these peoples and societies.
*actually not.. what’s being studied is same song.. and if it was a legit way/leap.. too late ness is irrelevant.. ie: almaas holes law et al
**perhaps until now.. now have means for legit global detox leap
***whalespeak
103
*Technique cannot be otherwise than totalitarian. It can be truly efficient and scientific only if it absorbs an enormous number of phenomena and brings into play the maximum of data..t In order to co-ordinate and exploit synthetically, technique must be brought to bear on the great masses in every area. **But the existence of technique in every area leads to monopoly. This is noted by Jacques Driencourt when he declares that the technique of propaganda is totalitarian by its very nature. It is totalitarian in message, methods, field of action, and means. What more could be required?
*keep perpetuating science scientifically because keep using non legit data.. so max/min ness of it cancerous distraction
One could require more. Totalitarianism extends to whatever touches it, even things which seem, at first sight, very remote from it. When technique has fastened upon a method, everything must be subordinated to it. There are no longer any neutral objects or situations. Claude Munson forcefully demonstrates that psychological technique, as it operates in the army or in a great industrial plant, entails a direct action on the family. It involves psychological adaptation of family life to military or industrial methods, supervision of family life, and training family life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern.
huge misunderstanding of tech.. case in point.. next ie is of army.. so whalespeak
It will be objected: “If these transformations do take place, technique alone is not responsible. Many other factors have contributed; for example, the intellectual superiority of the white race, the corruption of these other civilizations, and the population growth.” In fact, all these factors refer back to the problems of techniques. Indeed, Western intellectual superiority is only manifested in the technical domain. And the alleged corruption of the Chinese and Islamic civilizations depends solely on the criteria by which they are judged. In making the objection, we are in effect judging solely on the basis of technical criteria.
effect or whatever makes no diff if still judge\ment ness.. need to use tech for what it could be.. tech w/o judgment
We have analyzed the combination of circumstances that favored technical development in the West and guaranteed its easy diffusion. Since technique has engulfed civilization, a very remarkable effect has been observed—in fact, a complete reversal. When technique penetrates a new milieu, it tends to reproduce in this milieu the circumstances which, in a fortuitous way, it found favorable to itself in the nineteenth century in France and England. At least, it reproduces those features which it is possible and necessary to reproduce. It is of small importance for technique to hit upon a long cultural experience or a favorable demographic situation. On the contrary, social plasticity and a clear technical consciousness are the general terms which it forcibly imposes in every area of the world. *It dissociates the sociological forms, destroys the moral framework, desacralizes men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collection of individuals. The most recent sociological studies (even those made by optimists) hold that technique is the destroyer of social groups, of communities (whatever their kind), and of human relations. Technical progress causes the disappearance, as Jerome Scott and R. P. Lynton put it, of that “amalgam of attitudes, customs and social institutions which constitute a community.” Communities break up into their component parts But no new communities form. **The individual in contact with technique loses his social and community sense as the frameworks in which he operated disintegrate under the influence of techniques. This fact is established beyond question by the ***disappearance of responsibilities, functional autonomies, and social spontaneities, the absence of contact between the technical and the human environment, and so forth. In the area of industrial labor, for example, sociologists point out the physical separation between the industrial plant and the social group in which the plant is situated (the city, say). In traditional societies, the social and the economic aspects of life were inextricably meshed into a social whole. But in a technical society the two aspects are strictly separated; this in itself brings about the dissolution of the entire group. Related activities such as production and social relations cannot be separated without ruining the whole society. However, to the degree that production is technique and social relations is not, the two are of necessity dissociated. This is the conclusion reached by innumerable detailed studies of social groups at the point at which technique begins to function. The conclusion is equally true of the industrialized milieus of Europe, America, Asia, and Africa. The situation cannot be otherwise. The technicians themselves are very clear on this point. For example, an official report of 1958 on the perspectives of economic development in Algeria indicated that this development can only be brought about by changing the Algerians’ whole way of life, in particular, by putting the still seminomad masses to work. Development involves economic planning, displacement of populations, mobilization of the local economy, acceptance of authoritarian political power, modification of local moral habits and traditional mentalities; in short, a New Deal of the Emotions! These are the conditions proposed and (and considered normal) for technical progress in the “Third World.” Technique makes its sociological compost pile where it does not find one already made. And it possesses sufficient power and efficiency today to succeed. Before long, it will produce everywhere that clear technical consciousness which is the easiest of its creations to bring about, and which man falls in with so willingly. The world that technique creates cannot be any other than that which was favorable to it from the very beginning. In spite of all the men of good will, all the optimists, all the doers of history, the civilizations of the world are being ringed about with a band of steel. We in the West became familiar with this iron constraint in the nineteenth century. Now technique is mechanically reproducing it everywhere as necessary to its existence. ****What force could prevent technique from so acting, or make it be otherwise than it is?
*this is actually what we need.. ie: maté trump law; brown belonging law; marsh label law; et al
**actually need this.. because need hari present in society law to hari rat park law
****a nother way.. via tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling to facil gershenfeld something else law..
104
Technique has progressively mastered all the elements of civilization. We have already pointed this out with regard to man’s economic and intellectual activities. But man himself is overpowered by technique and becomes its object. The technique which takes man for its object thus becomes the center of society; this extraordinary event (which seems to surprise no one) is often designated as technical civilization. The terminology is exact and we must fully grasp its importance. Technical civilization means that our civilization is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilization only what belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilization must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical form).
We can see that this is actually the case in certain phenomena considered essential to a civilization, for example, art and literature. These activities in modern society are tightly subordinated in different ways to technical necessities by the direct interference of technique. Take, for example, the motion pictures, radio, and television. These media require great capital investments. As a result, artistic expression is subordinated to a censorship of money or of the state. This censorship most often takes the form of indirect influences, which, again, may assume different guises. Personal music is supplanted by the radio; and painting, threatened by photography, is obliged to modify itself by becoming abstract so as not to be a mere substitute for reproduction. Modern art and literature manifest in all points their subordination to the technique which has extended its power over all activity, and hence over all culture.
105
Herein lies the inversion we are witnessing. Without exception in the course of history, technique belonged to a civilization and was merely a single element among a host of nontechnical activities. Today technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Certainly, technique is no longer the simple machine substitute for human labor. It has come to be the “intervention into the very substance not only of the inorganic but also of the organic.”
This intervention into the inorganic world is represented, for example, by the exploration of the atom and its use for purposes as yet unknown. But the world which is most clearly taking on a technical form is the organic. In this realm the necessity of production penetrates to the very sources of life. It controls procreation, influences growth, and alters the individual and the species. Death, procreation, birth, habitat; all must submit to technical efficiency and systematization, the end point of the industrial assembly line. What seems to be most personal in the life of man is now technicized. The manner in which he rests and relaxes becomes the object of techniques of relaxation. The way in which he makes a decision is no longer the domain of the personal and voluntary; it has become the object of the techniques of “operations research.” As Giedion says, all this represents experimentation at the very roots of being.
How is it possible, then, not to believe that all of civilization is affected and engulfed when the very substance of man is questioned? The essence of civilization is thus absorbed.
Concerning art, Giedion goes on to say: “What happened to art in this period gives us the most intimate vision possible of the penetration in depth of the human being by mechanization. Barr’s revealing selections in his Cubism and Abstract Art show us how the artist, who reacts like a seismograph, expresses the influence of full mechanization… Mechanization has penetrated into the subconscious of the artist. Chirico expresses it in a remarkable way in the mixture he makes of man and machine… The anxiety, the solitude of man forms a melancholy architecture of the preceding epoch and its mechanical dolls, painted in the smallest details with a tragic expression.”
another art world et al
We have the large-scale frescoes of Léger which construct the image of cities out of signs, traffic signals, and machine parts. Even the Russians and Hungarians, who in 1920 were far from mechanization, were inspired by his creative power. In the hands of Duchanu and others, the machine, marvel of efficiency, was transformed into an irrational object, charged with irony. At the same time, a new aesthetic language was introduced.
To free themselves from a corrupt art and the prevailing taste, artists have recourse to objects such as machines and mechanisms because these objects contain an objective truth. What is true of the plastic arts is likewise true of music. Preoccupation with “objectivity” is prevalent there, too. Igor Stravinsky writes: “My work is architectonic and not anecdotal; objective construction and not descriptive.” These are the words of a man unconsciously steeped in the technical milieu. Since Stravinsky wrote this, music has been still further transformed by means of techniques which were not originally musical techniques, that is, neither musical methodology nor instrument construction. I have in mind Schaeffer’s “concrete music,” Ussachewsky’s “music for tape,” and Eimert’s electronic music, all of which make use of technical means that are not a priori musical. In none of these types of music is there any longer the need for a performer. The ancestral musical structures disintegrate and are atomized and we have a phenomenon that is fundamentally new. We shall doubtless see ever more refined and exacting research into musical technique, and the dominant musical structure and rhythm will undoubtedly correspond entirely to the technical environment.
aka: whalespeak via all of us
106
The more technique is refined, the more it varies its means of action. Therefore, we shall continue to have the appearance of different civilizations in India and in Greenland. They will indeed be different in certain aspects. But their essence will be identical; they will be techniques. And what differences there are will result from the cold calculation of some technician, instead of being the result of the profound spiritual and material effort of generations of human beings. Instead of being the expression of man’s essence, they will be the accidents of what is essential: technique..t
rather.. monism of whalespeak in sea world.. so what is essential for whales in sea world
The differences which exist today are therefore without importance in relation to the fact of technical identity. The differences to come will bear upon the most diverse activities and give the illusion of liberty. But they will nevertheless be no more than the expression of the monism of technique..t Geographically and qualitatively, technique is universal in its manifestations. It is devoted, by nature and necessity, to the universal. It could not be otherwise. It depends upon a science itself devoted to the universal, and it is becoming the universal language understood by all men. We need not belabor the fact, which everyone recognizes, that science is universal. And this fact in turn leads of necessity to the technical universalism which stems from it.
seat at the table ness et al.. and voluntary compliance ness
The second of the two elements we referred to (production and social relations) requires more explication. In his relation to the world, man has always made use of multiple means, none of which were universal because none were objective. Technique is a means of apprehending reality, of acting on the world, which allows us to neglect all individual differences, all subjectivity. Technique alone is rigorously objective. It blots out all personal opinions..t It effaces all individual, and even all collective, modes of expression. Today man lives by virtue of his participation in a truth become objective. Technique is no more than a neutral bridge between reality and the abstract man..t
need this aspect of tech now most.. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling.. to bridge us back to us
107
Technique, moreover, creates a bond between men. All those who follow the same technique are bound together in a tacit fraternity and all of them take the same attitude toward reality. There is no need for them to converse together or to understand one another. A team of surgeons and assistants who know the technique of a given operation have no need to address one another in order that the necessary motions be correctly performed at the right moment..t
ie: undisturbed ecosystem dances if technique is paul know\love law.. rumi words law
Industrial labor likewise tends more and more to dispense with orders and personal contact. This was pushed to an extreme in the concentration camps, where men of different nations were mixed together so that they should have no contacts and yet be able to perform collective work. It was hasty and superficial work, to be sure, but a little more rigor could easily make this labor really productive (as seems to be the case in the Soviet Union). One cannot speak merely of isolation. These men work in teams, but there is no need for them to know or understand one another. They need only understand the technique involved and know in advance what their teammate will do. It is not necessary for the crew to understand one another in order to run an aircraft The indicator panel controls the actions to be performed; and every crew member, submitting by necessity and conscience to the automatic indications, obeys for the safety of all. Each man’s actions are dictated by the conditions of life and its preservation. This is clear in the case of flying an aircraft But it is equally clear in every other situation involving technique—and this encompasses the most important areas of life. Men do not need to understand each other in order to carry out the most important endeavors of our times.
yeah to rest.. but not this.. unless need only understand love and trust others free enough to grok (hear what’s already in their heart) as well
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
Technique is of necessity, and as compensation, our universal language. It is the fruit of specialization. But *this very specialization prevents mutual understanding. Everyone today has his own professional jargon, modes of thought, and peculiar perception of the world. There was a time when the distortion of overspecialization was the butt of jokes and a subject for vaudeville. Today the sharp knife of specialization has passed like a razor into the living flesh. It has cut the umbilical cord which linked men with each other and with nature. The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe. He no longer understands the vocabulary of the others. Nor does he comprehend the underlying motivations of the others. **Yet technique, having ruptured the relations between man and man, proceeds to rebuild the bridge which links them. It bridges the specializations because it produces a new type of man always and everywhere like his duplicate, who develops along technical lines. He listens to himself and speaks to himself, but he obeys the slightest indications of the apparatus, confident that his neighbor will do the same. Technique has become the bond between men. By its agency they communicate, whatever their languages, beliefs, or race. It has become, for life or death, the universal language which compensates for all the deficiencies and separations it has itself produced. This is the major reason for the great impetus of technique toward the universal.
*well.. today that is just the diff flavors of whalespeak (noted above as from ‘cold calculations) .. what we need.. ie: idiosyncratic jargon ness
**guessing he means this in a bad light.. but could be used for good to detox us
108
*The converse is actually the case, a point I shall develop at length. Technique elicits and conditions social, political, and economic change. It is the prime mover of all the rest, in spite of any appearance to the contrary and in spite of human pride, which pretends that man’s philosophical theories are still determining influences and man’s political regimes decisive factors in technical evolution. External necessities no longer determine technique. Technique’s own internal necessities are determinative. **Technique has become a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own determinations.
*yes.. as means to global detox leap.. because of its tech w/o judgment ness
**not a reality.. any more than meds are reality for unnecessarily sick people (hari present in society law et al).. but do need as temp placebo to reset/detox us
Let us not deceive ourselves on this point. Suppose that the state, for example, intervenes in a technical domain. Either it intervenes for sentimental, theoretical, or intellectual reasons, and the effect of its intervention will be negative or nil; or it intervenes for reasons of political technique, and we have the combined effect of two techniques. There is no other possibility. The historical experience of the last years shows this fully.
oi.. perhaps no other possibility in sea world.. since all of history ness is its non legit data
To go one step further, technical autonomy is apparent in respect to morality and spiritual values. *Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitation..t It is by virtue of technique rather than science that the great principle has become established: chacun chez soi. Morality judges moral problems; as far as technical problems are concerned, it has nothing to say. Only technical criteria are relevant. Technique, in sitting in judgment on itself, is clearly freed from this principal obstacle to human action..t (Whether the obstacle is valid is not the question here. For the moment we merely record that it is an obstacle.) Thus, technique theoretically and systematically assures to itself that liberty which it has been able to win practically. Since it has put itself beyond good and evil, it need fear no limitation whatever. **It was long claimed that technique was neutral. Today this is no longer a useful distinction. The power and autonomy of technique are so well secured that it, in its turn, has become the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new morality..t Thus, it plays the role of creator of a new civilization as well. This morality—internal to technique—is assured of not having to suffer from technique. In any case, in respect to traditional morality, technique affirms itself as an independent power. Man alone is subject, it would seem, to moral judgment. We no longer live in that primitive epoch in which things were good or bad in themselves. Technique in itself is neither, and can therefore do what it will. It is truly autonomous.
*again.. need most.. tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
**rather.. very useful (and we’re missing it) to detox secured/whale technique/whalespeak of sea world
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But this autonomy with respect to man goes much further. To the degree that technique must attain its result with mathematical precision, it has for its object the elimination of all human variability and elasticity. It is a commonplace to say that the machine replaces the human being. But it replaces him to a greater degree than has been believed..t
greater degree: just been playing around with same song ness of the whales ness.. so again.. hari rat park law is huge
110
This progressive elimination of man from the circuit must Inexorably continue. Is the elimination of man so unavoidably necessary? Certainly! Freeing man from toil is in itself an ideal. Beyond this, every intervention of man, however educated or used to machinery he may be, is a source of error and unpredictability. The combination of man and technique is a happy one only if man has no responsibility. Otherwise, he is ceaselessly tempted to make unpredictable choices and is susceptible to emotional motivations which invalidate the mathematical precision of the machinery. He is also susceptible to fatigue and discouragement. All this disturbs the forward thrust of technique.
total whalespeak
Man must have nothing decisive to perform in the course of technical operations; after all, he is the source of error. Political technique is still troubled by certain unpredictable phenomena, in spite of all the precision of the apparatus and the skill of those involved. (But this technique is still in its childhood.) In human reactions, howsoever well calculated they may be; a “coefficient of elasticity causes imprecision, and imprecision is intolerable to technique. As far as possible, this source of error must be eliminated. Eliminate the individual, and excellent results ensue. Any technical man who is aware of this fact is forced to support the opinions voiced by Robert Jungk, which can be summed up thus: The individual is a brake on progress.” Or: “Considered from the modern technical point of view, man is a useless appendage.” For instance, ten per cent of all telephone calls are wrong numbers, due to human error. An excellent use by man of so perfect an apparatus!
Now that statistical operations are carried out by perforated-card machines instead of human beings, they have become exact. Machines no longer perform merely gross operations. They perform a whole complex of subtle ones as well. And before long—what with the electronic brain—they will attain an intellectual power of which man is incapable.
oi
Thus, the “great changing of the guard” is occurring much more extensively than Jacques Duboin envisaged some decades ago. Gaston Bouthoul, a leading sociologist of the phenomena of war, concludes that war breaks out in a social group when there is a “plethora of young men surpassing the indispensable tasks of the economy.” When for one reason or another these men are not employed, they become ready for war. It is the multiplication of men who are excluded from working which provokes war..t We ought at least to bear this in mind when we boast of the continual decrease in human participation in technical operations.
so much deeper.. ie: missing pieces; khan filling the gaps law; et al
It is not a question of causing the human being to disappear, but of making him capitulate, of inducing him to accommodate himself to techniques and not to experience personal feelings and reactions.
to both.. voluntary compliance and re ness.. need hari rat park law
111
*No technique is possible when men are free..t When technique enters into the realm of social life, it collides ceaselessly with the human being to the degree that the combination of man and technique is unavoidable, and that technical action necessarily results in a determined result. **Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being..t For technique, this is a matter of life or death. Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
*resonates with ie: gershenfeld something else law; taleb antifragile law; et al
**graeber unpredictability/surprise law .. fromm spontaneous law.. et al
But it is requisite that man have certain precise inner characteristics. An extreme example is the atomic worker or the jet pilot. He must be of calm temperament, and even temper, he must be phlegmatic, he must not have too much initiative, and he must be devoid of egotism. The ideal jet pilot is already along in years (perhaps thirty-five) and has a settled direction in life. He flies his jet in the way a good civil servant goes to his office..t Human joys and sorrows are fetters on technical aptitude. Jungk cites the case of a test pilot who had to abandon his profession because “his wife behaved in such a way as to lessen his capacity to fly. Every day, when he returned home, he found her shedding tears of joy. Having become in this way accident conscious, he dreaded catastrophe when he had to face a delicate situation.” The individual who is a servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself. Without this quality, his reflexes and his inclinations are not properly adapted to technique.
*rather.. requisite that whales
Moreover, the physiological condition of the individual must answer to technical demands. Jungk gives an impressive picture of the experiments in training and control that jet pilots have to undergo. *The pilot is whilred on centrifuges until he “blacks out” (in order to measure his toleration of acceleration). There are catapults, ultrasonic chambers, etc., in which the candidate is forced to undergo unheard-of tortures in order to determine whether he has adequate resistance and whether he is capable of piloting the new machines. That the human organism is, technically speaking, an imperfect one is demonstrated by the experiments. The sufferings the individual endures in these “laboratories” are considered to be due to “biological weaknesses,” which must be eliminated..t New experiments have pushed even further to determine the reactions of “space pilots” and to prepare these heroes for their roles of tomorrow. This has given birth to new sciences, biometry for example; their one aim is to create the new man, the man adapted to technical functions.
*61.. and need for global detox leap.. ie: hari present in society law
The enormous effort required to put this technical civilization into motion supposes that all individual effort is directed toward this goal alone and that *all social forces are mobilized to attain the mathematically perfect structure of the edifice. (“Mathematically” does not mean “rigidly.” The perfect technique is the most adaptable and, consequently, the most plastic one. True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances!)..t Henceforth it will be wrong for a man to escape this universal effort. It will be inadmissible for any part of the individual not to be integrated in the drive toward technicization; it will be inadmissible that any man even aspire to escape this necessity of the whole society. The individual will no longer be able, materially or spiritually, to disengage himself from society. Materially, he will not be able to release himself because the technical means are so numerous that they invade his whole life and make it impossible for him to escape the collective phenomena. **There is no longer an uninhabited place, or any other geographical locale, for the would-be solitary..t It is no longer possible to refuse entrance into a community to a highway, a high-tension line, or a dam. It is vain to aspire to live alone when one is ***obliged to participate in all collective phenomena and to use all the collective’s tools, without which it is impossible to earn a bare subsistence..t Nothing is gratis any longer in our society; and to live on charity is less and less possible. “Social advantages” are for the workers alone, not for “useless mouths.” The solitary is a useless mouth and will have no ration card—up to the day he is transported to a penal colony. (An attempt was made to institute this procedure during the French Revolution, with deportations to Cayenne.)
*structural violence.. spiritual violence
**need: bachelard oikos law: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
***need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
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Every conscious being today is walking the narrow ridge of a decision with regard to technique. He who maintains that he can escape it is either a hypocrite or unconscious..t
again.. need global detox leap.. because it has to be all of us for the dance to dance..
aka: hari rat park law
113
Once again we are faced with a choice of “all or nothing.”..t If we make use of technique, we must accept the specificity and autonomy of its ends, and the totality of its rules. Our own desires and aspirations can change nothing.
if only we believed that.. ie: part\ial ness is keeping us from us.. a cancerous distraction
The second consequence of technical autonomy is that it renders technique at once sacrilegious and sacred. (Sacrilegious is not used here in the theological but in the sociological sense.) Sociologists have recognized that the world in which man lives is for him not only a material but also a spiritual world; that forces act in it which are unknown and perhaps unknowable; that there are phenomena in it which man interprets as magical; that there are relations and correspondences between things and beings in which material connections are of little consequence. This whole area is mysterious. Mystery (but not in the Catholic sense) is an element of man’s life. Jung has shown that it is catastrophic to make superficially clear what is hidden in man’s innermost depths. Man must make allowance for a background, a great deep above which lie his reason and his clear consciousness. The mystery of man perhaps creates the mystery of the world he inhabits. Or perhaps this mystery is a reality in itself. There is no way to decide between these two alternatives. But, one way or the other, mystery is a necessity of human life.
need global detox leap to hear/see that (on each heart ness)
Man cannot live without a sense of the secret. The psychoanalysts agree on this point. But the invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo. Autonomy makes this so. Technique does not accept the existence of rules outside itself, or of any norm. Still less will it accept any judgment upon it. As a consequence, no matter where it penetrates, what it does is permitted, lawful, justified.
To a great extent, mystery is desired by man. It is not that he cannot understand, or enter into, or grasp mystery, but that he does not desire to do so. The sacred is what man decides unconsciously to respect. The taboo becomes compelling from a social standpoint, but there is always a factor of adoration and respect which does not derive from compulsion and fear.
not sure of adoration and respect as words.. but there is a way beyond compulsion and fear
Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. More than science, which limits itself to explaining the “how,” technique desacralizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist. Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. The sacred cannot resist. Science penetrates to the great depths of the sea to photograph the unknown fish of the deep. Technique captures them, hauls them up to see if they are edible—but before they arrive on deck they burst. And why should technique not act thus? It is autonomous and recognizes as barriers only the temporary limits of its action. In its eyes, this terrain, which is for the moment unknown but not mysterious, must be attacked. Far from being restrained by any scruples before the sacred, technique constantly assails it. Everything which is not yet technique becomes so. It is driven onward by itself, by its character of self-augmentation. Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized.
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But custom and the recurrence of the miracle eventually wear out this primitive adoration. It is scarcely found today in European countries; the proletariat, workers and peasants alike, with their motorcycles, radios, and electrical appliances, have an attitude of condescending pride toward the jinn who is their slave. Their ideal is incarnated in certain things which serve them. Yet they retain some feeling of the sacred, in the sense that life is not worth the trouble of living unless a man has these jinns in his home. This attitude goes much further in the case of the conscious segment of the proletariat, among whom technique is seen as a whole and not merely in its occasional aspects. For them, technique is the instrument of liberation for the proletariat. All that is needed is for technique to make a little more headway, and they will be freed proportionately from their chains. Stalin pointed to industrialization as the sole condition for the realization of Communism. Every gain made by technique is a gain for the proletariat. This represents indeed a belief in the sacred. Technique is the god which brings salvation. It is good in its essence. Capitalism is an abomination because on occasion it opposes technique. Technique is the hope of the proletarians; they can have faith in it because its miracles are visible and progressive. A great part of their sense of the mysterious remains attached to it. Karl Marx may have been able to explain rationally how technique would free the proletariat, but the proletariat itself is scarcely equal to a full understanding of this “how.” It remains mysterious for them. They retain merely the formula of faith. But their faith addresses itself with enthusiasm to the mysterious agent of their liberation.
The nonintellectual classes of the bourgeoisie are perhaps less caught up in this worship of technique. But the technicians of the bourgeoisie are without doubt the ones most powerfully taken with it. For them, technique is sacred, since they have no reason to feel a passion for it. Technical men are always disconcerted when one asks them the motives for their faith. No, they do not expect to be liberated; they expect nothing, yet they sacrifice themselves and devote their lives with frenzy to the development of industrial plants and the organization of banks. The happiness of the human race and suchlike nonsense are the commonplaces they allege. But these are no longer of any service even as justifications, and they certainly have nothing at all to do with man’s passion for technique.
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The technician uses technique perhaps because it is his profession, but he does so with adoration because for him technique is the locus of the sacred. There is neither reason nor explanation in his attitude. The power of technique, mysterious though scientific, which covers the whole earth with its networks of waves, wires, and paper, is to the technician an abstract idol which gives him a reason for living and even for joy. One sign, among many, of the feeling of the sacred that man experiences in the face of technique is the care he takes to treat it with familiarity. Laughter and humor are common human reactions in the presence of the sacred. This is true for primitive peoples; and for the same reason the first atomic bomb was called “Gilda,” the giant cyclotron of Los Alamos “Clementine,” the atomic piles “water pots,” and radioactive contamination “scalding.” The technicians of Los Alamos have banned the word atom from their vocabulary. These things are significant.
In view of the very different forms of technique, there is no question of a technical religion. But there is associated with it the feeling of the sacred, which expresses itself in different ways. The way differs from man to man, but for all men the feeling of the sacred is expressed in this marvelous instrument of the power instinct which is always joined to mystery and magic. The worker brags about his job because it offers him joyous confirmation of his superiority. The young snob speeds along at 100 m.p.h. in his Porsche. The technician contemplates with satisfaction the gradients of his charts, no matter what their reference is. For these men, technique is in every way sacred; it is the common expression of human power without which they would find themselves poor, alone, naked, and stripped of all pretensions..t They would no longer be the heroes, geniuses, or archangels which a motor permits them to be at little expense.
the cope\ing ness of sea world
Even people put out of work or ruined by technique, even those who criticize or attack it (without daring to go so far as to turn worshippers against them) have the bad conscience of all iconoclasts. They find neither within nor without themselves a compensating force for the one they call into question. They do not even live in despair, which would be a sign of their freedom. This bad conscience appears to me to be perhaps the most revealing fact about the new sacralization of modern technique.
The characteristics we have examined permit me to assert with confidence that there is no common denominator between the technique of today and that of yesterday. Today we are dealing with an utterly different phenomenon. Those who claim to deduce from man’s technical situation in past centuries his situation in this one show that they have grasped nothing of the technical phenomenon. These deductions prove that all their reasonings are without foundation and all their analogies are astigmatic.
to me same song.. all have many forms of m\a\p
116
The celebrated formula of Alain has been invalidated: “Tools, instruments of necessity, instruments that neither lie nor cheat, tools with which necessity can be subjugated by obeying her, without the help of false laws; tools that make it possible to conquer by obeying.” This formula is true of the tool which puts man squarely in contact with a reality that will bear no excuses, in contact with matter to be mastered, and *the only way to use it is to obey it. Obedience to the plow and the plane was indeed the only means of dominating earth and wood. But the formula is not true for our techniques. He who serves these techniques enters another realm of necessity. This new necessity is not natural necessity; natural necessity, in fact, no longer exists. It is technique’s necessity, which becomes the more constraining the more nature’s necessity fades and disappears. It cannot be escaped or mastered. The tool was not false. But technique causes us to penetrate into the innermost realm of falsehood, showing us all the while the noble face of objectivity of result. In this innermost recess, **man is no longer able to recognize himself because of the instruments he employs..t
*rather.. it does.. just hidden/covered.. ie: almaas holes law
**black science of people/whales law since forever.. wilde not-us law et al
But this delusion cannot last much longer. The individual obeys and no longer has victory which is his own. He cannot have access even to his apparent triumphs except by becoming himself the object of technique and the offspring of the mating of man and machine. All his accounts are falsified. Alain’s definition no longer corresponds to anything in the modern world. In writing this, I have, of course, omitted innumerable facets of our world. There are still artisans, petty tradesmen, butchers, domestics, and small agricultural landowners. But theirs are the faces of yesterday, the more or less hardy survivals of our past. Our world is not made of these static residues of history, and I have attempted to consider only moving forces. In the complexity of the present world, residues do exist, but they have no future and are consequently disappearing.
In this chapter we have sketched the psychology of the tyrant. Now we must study his biology: the circulatory apparatus, the state; the digestive apparatus, the economy; the cellular tissue, man.
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CHAPTER 3: TECHNIQUE AND ECONOMY
120
It is necessary constantly to uncover new possibilities of investment. For, says Keynes, the more numerous the consumers’ goods—the production of which has been provided for in advance—*the more difficult it is to find corresponding new needs—which must likewise be anticipated and which call for new investments..t What Keynes in fact **fears is that there will not be sufficient new possibilities of investment. There is only one way to ensure limitless possibilities. These possibilities have nothing to do with spontaneous human needs, but involve technical discovery and application, which create new products to replace the old, and also stimulate the need for these products. Technical progress is therefore a decisive factor in the progression of investment. The epicentric position of the theory of investment in Keynes’s system is well known. If a Byzantine phase of technical arrest were to occur in the economic realm, it would represent not only an arrest of economic evolution but a regression as well, with a resultant series of deep crises.
*need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
**any form of m\a\p.. cancerous distractions
121
Moreover, all this is implied in the elementary observation that the progress of production closely depends on technical progress. *It is at the present a truism to say that a new, general economic organization corresponds to certain new forms of production.
*aka: org around legit needs corresponds to the dance of an undisturbed ecosystem
None of the economic modalities (salaries, distribution, reduction of the work week, transfer of the labor force from one area to another, disturbance of the balance of production in the various areas) seems capable of resolution in the present state of affairs... t
all ie’s are for econ of sea world (so cancerous distractions).. need bachelard oikos law as econ
123
The necessity of normalizing products is no longer debated today. It is one of the conditions of economic progress. This normalization is based on technical research. But here, as everywhere else in a capitalist or semiliberal economy, the technical result is in conflict with certain interests. In order to apply it, the good will of the public cannot be counted on. It then becomes indispensable to sanction normalization in some other way. And only the state can apply this sanction. The result is the creation of arbitration commissions armed with public powers to deal with normalization..t
The excess production of home appliances and automobiles is well known. None of this overproduction would represent a waste, if one were judging on the basis of world needs.
still waste if not org’d around legit needs
124
There is no need to go to the extreme and substitute for the organization of production the organization of distribution alone, as Robert Mossé appears to be doing when he writes: “From the moment production becomes sufficient, the essential thing is to distribute goods and leisure.” Without going that far, it is easy, as Lange has done, to see the difference between a science of the production of wealth and a science of administration of scarce goods. More and more, the economic fact covers all human activity. Everything has become function and object of the economy, and this has been effected by the intermediacy of technique. To the extent that technique has demanded complete devotion of man or brought to light a growing number of measurable facts, or rendered economic life richer and more complex, or enveloped the human being in a network of material possibilities that are being gradually realized, it has transformed the object of the economy. The economy now becomes obliged to take into account all human problems..t The development of techniques is responsible for the staggering phenomenon of the absorption by economics of all social activities.
will keep perpetuating same song until we try a diff (oikos) econ
125
the secret way
Economists, not understanding this, want to disengage their technique from its “neutrality” and to bring it into the service of their ends. They reject the definition; “Economics is the science [technique!] of efficient choices.” But when they seek to humanize the economy, they learn quickly enough that such attempts lead directly to the subjugation of the ends to techniques. Those who pose the problem of ends and propose a humane economy as their goal are the very persons who develop techniques further and enhance their specific weights, as Jacques Aventur has shown. But whereas the overpowering phenomenon of the machine strikes home to everyone and makes plain its influence on economic life, the ways of economic technique are secret and everyone remains convinced of its innocuousness and docility.
At the same time economists feel, as a kind of challenge, the ineffectiveness of their system. Nothing has exposed the vanity of political economy better than their contradictory diagnoses and therapies for economic crises. For some the cause of crisis is an unsaleable surplus of goods; for others, insufficiency of production. For some it is an excess of savings; for others, a lack of them. And as far as the proposed remedies are concerned, some economists would raise the discount rate and others would lower it. Some hold that wages must be stabilized and others demonstrate that they must be lowered. Such contradictions can only arise from a defect of method. And the economists bitterly resent the ironical attitude the public has toward them. One of them recently wrote: “The public believes in the physicist, but it has no confidence in the economist.” Policymakers absolutely cannot rely on what the economists say, nor follow their contradictory counsels with respect to action. All this, then, made it mandatory to replace the regime of theories, which gave birth to nothing but opinion, with a rigorous method which “sticks” to facts.
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*The need to stick to the facts became more imperative as the facts themselves became more complex. Here again the effect of techniques made itself felt. The facts of economic life could be grasped directly when economic life was still relatively simple, when economic phenomena (for example, at the end of the eighteenth century) presented a picture which, in magnitudes and elements, was compatible with direct experience. But the enormous growth of the economic milieu has made direct apprehension impossible and brought about the decline of corresponding modes of reasoning. Everyday logic cannot embrace more than a very limited number of data. It was therefore necessary to invent a method corresponding to the increasing complexity and amplitude of economic phenomena. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a “technical state of mind” appeared which developed mightily toward mid-century. This state of mind was characterized, first of all, by an effort to make a hard and fast separation between what is and what should be. The doctrinal character of economics was completely repudiated. The sole interest was in matters of fact. **The goal was simply to know scientifically, to accumulate facts, to put them in mutual relation, and, if possible, to explain them by means of one another.
*fuller too much law et al
**aka: whalespeak
Political economy is no longer a moral science in the traditional sense. It has become technique and has entered into a new ethical framework, which I shall define later on. This represents a decisive step for the creation of a technique. The technical state of mind is likewise evident in the creation of a precise method (which more and more consists in the application of mathematics to economics) and in the precise delimitation of a sphere of action. In effect, in order for technique to exist, method must be applied to a fixed order of phenomena. In the transition of doctrine to technique, the central idea was the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics, as in the work of François Perroux, a leader in this inquiry in France.
We have here a decisive situation. Microeconomics studies economic phenomena at the human level where the relatively humane traditional methods can be applied, where individual decision is respected, but where the complete application of the technical apparatus is not permitted, either with respect to method or with respect to action. The observation of facts on the microeconomic level does not ipso facto entail action, and to promote action is one of the principal characteristics of techniques. Even if microeconomic inquiry is useful and congenial, it nevertheless appears to have no future because it pertains to the limited world of the individual.
don tapscott – radical openness.. if only.. oof
Macroeconomics, on the other hand, opens all roads to technical research and application. Technical application presupposes, as we have already noted, measurable magnitudes, elimination of errors of judgment, and amplitudes of movement wide enough for technique to have an understandable object. These are precisely the characteristics of macroeconomic inquiry. There is no doubt that the methods of macroeconomics are still somewhat uncertain, and many phenomena are recalcitrant to it (for example, scientific techniques applicable to revenues). Nevertheless, this is the domain a priori of technique and we can be assured, as a consequence, that this is where the really effective forces will be concentrated. We are likewise assured that microeconomics, far from being an element in the foundation of macroeconomics, or a complementary element to it, will be absorbed. It will lose its reason for existence to the extent that macroeconomics develops surer techniques. We are heading toward a society in which knowledge of microeconomic phenomena will be the result of simple deduction from knowledge of macroeconomic phenomena.
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The technicians in these new disciplines all have one trait in common: the joy of constituting a closed group in which the layman has no part at all. This represents an unconscious tendency; but we observe it among many modern economists in the form of a secret technique, an esotericism, a certain contempt for whatever does not belong to its new world of means.
yeah.. ha.. again to don tapscott – radical openness closed garden ness.. perpetuating closed garden ness
This “pride of youth” always appears among technicians when they are convinced that their new method is unassailable and that their discoveries are becoming the center of things. The authority in which they clothe themselves takes the form of a secret vocabulary which is incomprehensible to the outsider even when it is employed, as often happens, to enunciate the most obvious facts. Technique always creates a kind of secret society, a closed fraternity of its practitioners. It is a new thing in the milieu of economics to note a kind of studied incommunicability. Up to now, every man with a little education was able to follow the works and theories of the economists. To be able to follow them today, one would have to be both a specialist and a technician. The technique itself is difficult and the necessary instruments cannot be managed without previous education. And there is that caprice of many economists to constitute themselves a closed society. These two factors coincide, indicating the grave consequence of excluding the public from the technical life. Yet it can scarcely be otherwise.
Technique as a general phenomenon (as we shall see when we study the political milieu) always gives rise to an aristocracy of technicians who guard secrets to which no outsider has access. Decisions which have a serious basis take on the appearance of arbitrary and incomprehensible decrees. A cleavage like this, which is inevitable in the advance of technique, is decisive for the future of the *democracies. Economic life, not in its content but in its direction, will henceforth entirely elude popular control. **No democracy is possible in the face of a perfected economic technique. The decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, and technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique. Little by little the elements necessary to the creation of this technique are taking shape; and soon they will be perfected.
*part and parcel of the closed garden.. oof
**actually they dance quite well together.. since.. same song.. oi
The Economic Techniques of Observation
I do not intend to describe these instrumentalities; I am concerned here solely with exhibiting them as an ensemble.
The principal instruments which have been developed are: statistics, accounting procedures, the application of mathematics to economics, the method of models, and techniques of research into public opinion. It is evident that these elements reciprocally condition one another.
nice.. as instruments of observation.. aka: inspectors of inspectors ness
At the base of the structure lies statistics, the instrumentality for determining the raw facts of economics. At one time statistical data were ridiculed on the ground that they were misleading. But this stage lies behind us, and nowadays a large measure of confidence rests in the precision of such data. This change has resulted, in part, from a change in the state of mind of the statisticians themselves. They are immersed in a “statistical atmosphere” and comply with the quantitative and numerical practices of the modern world. To statisticians, statistics is no longer a mere game; it is an essential operation of society. This represents a change not only in perspective and in seriousness, but also in basic position. For a long time statistics was the work of amateurs; today it is a complex organization of specialists. It has become a profession and, as a consequence, is practiced much more earnestly. Moreover, the statisticians have at their disposal increasingly precise instruments. Among these instruments (which have transformed administrative as well as statistical technique) are the calculating machine, the punched-card machine, and microfilm. Not only has the speed of operation been prodigiously accelerated, but also its precision and its dimensions. By means of microfilm, hitherto uncombinable elements can be combined; and by means of the electronic brain, operations can be effected which the human brain could never perform.
ha.. of math and men
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The statistician is, materially speaking, in a position to perform convincingly. This is even more evident in the utilization of statistical data. As we shall see, the combination of the elements is essential, and this combination becomes feasible largely through the intermediacy of the machine.
A final element increases the professional seriousness of the statisticians: their responsibility. In democratic countries, it lies in the realm of private enterprise; the various organs concerned with statistical data in effect sell their studies to the great corporations which must know precisely, for example, the course of a market. If the information proves inexact, the statistician can be sued in civil court, at least in the United States. In countries under authoritarian rule, responsibility is a public matter; in the Soviet Union the statistician who gives false information is regarded as a saboteur.
These elements together make modern statistical data more and more precise. The great scope of statistical operations and of the organs involved generally escapes the nonspecialist. To give a single example, there are in the United States fifty-six federal agencies, each of which specializes in one or several statistical categories. Altogether, twelve categories of weekly statistics are published. One of these, the category of price, takes in four elements. One of these (gross price) comprehends 1,690 weekly quotations combined in 890 series. This indicates the extreme complexity of the operation. It must become even more complex when interpretation is undertaken.
again.. fuller too much law.. and graeber increase b law.. et al
All this work is not motivated by pure scientific interest. It is oriented toward action. Permanent inquiry of this sort is no longer instituted to construct or support doctrines but rather to relate information to action. In order to succeed in effecting this connection, interpretation is necessary, and this is the principal task of the technical discipline called econometrics.
*Econometrics is distinct from mathematical economics. It is much more theoretical. Its principal operations on statistical data are twofold: (1) analysis, comprising operations such as simplification or dissociation of statistical data; and (a) comparison, which can be applied to different kinds of elements. Magnitudes can be compared by establishing what are called equations of regression, which express a constant relation between two magnitudes of the economic domain. Variations can also be compared; here a correlation index is established, according to which two economic phenomena vary in direct or in inverse proportion but with the same velocity. Within the same realm, the econometrician tries to establish certain relations: no fact in the economic domain can be regarded as due to chance; and not satisfied with simply noting and giving the correlation formula, the econometrician goes further and establishes the causal relation between two phenomena, **a procedure which leads into the future.
*in whole scheme.. same song.. as long as any form of m\a\p.. and so .. rather.. which *perpetuates sea world
Until recently, economists operated on concrete data alone. But, for the purposes of action, they must make predictions. A distinction must be drawn between predictions which are made according to the system of covariations, and causal explanations of phenomena. Here the economist leaves the purely technical realm. An equation no longer provides the solution; there is a certain subjectivity, a certain personal judgment. To be sure, it is present in the various other operations, but to a lesser degree.
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Economic technique has taken over a variety of other means; for example, stochastics, the application of the calculus of probabilities to economic phenomena. This technique is extraordinarily difficult to handle. It does not operate on raw figures but on statistical data, on data furnished by econometrics (as, for example, the coefficients of elasticity), and on the data furnished by public-opinion research institutes. In connection with the third element, it is evident that economic phenomena are not mechanical; opinion plays a role. In a very simplified way, it might be said that stochastics seeks to establish a law of probability, or of the frequency, of a given event, starting with a very large number of observations. Stochastics, therefore, represents an instrument of prediction which gives the direction of the most probable evolution of the situation.
This stochastic calculus is limited only by the nature of the economic and social milieu. For example, if a given law is exact, the public which is informed of it tends to react in the inverse sense. But sometimes it reacts by conforming to the law. The act of prediction is thus in a sense self-falsifying. But the public, by so reacting, falls under the influence of a new prediction which is completely determinable. *The economist is able to establish laws of probability for all deviations of opinion. It must be assumed, however, that one remains in the framework of rational behavior. **The system works all the better when it deals with men who are better integrated into the mass, men whose consciousness is partially paralyzed, who lend themselves willingly to statistical observations and systematization. The results obtained by this technique are impressive, even though the technique is still immature.
*gray research law et al
**aka.. works best for whales.. least for crazywise ness
Much more classical, and of a different order, is the whole complex of accounting techniques. These techniques have been much modified and no longer belong merely to the realm of enterprise but rather to that of economics. The accountant is no longer a mere agent for registering the movement of funds in an enterprise. According to the Lutfalla report published by the Conseil Économique, 1948, he has become a veritable “profits engineer.” His operations encompass not only money but all the elements of production. He is oriented toward the past and also toward the future. The more complex manufacturing operations become, the more necessary it is to take adequate precautions and to use foresight. *It is not possible to launch modern industrial processes lightly. They involve too much capital, labor, and social and political modifications. Detailed forecasting is necessary. We shall meet this question again when we discuss planning, but it is appropriate here to call attention to the so-called “input-output” techniques Leontieff has pointed out. These represent a method designed to establish in a precise, numerical way the interconnections among all sectors of production techniques. They determine for each sector what is bought from and sold to the others. This method makes it possible to establish in detail what raw materials, instruments, tools, and machines are required to produce a given product. Under present conditions, one can no longer fix magnitudes approximately or be content with mastering certain key subjects. For even a very ordinary commodity, two or three hundred basic elements must be taken into account. Exact quantities, weights, and times must be fixed. The necessary calculations can only be performed with the help of computing machines. With this method the well-known and hackneyed formula—that everything is reciprocally dependent—becomes a rigorous reality. But it is the technical elements which are reciprocally dependent, welded together by a common necessity and expressed in certain new techniques.
*to graeber min\max law et al
**in out complexity ness = my mind/madness
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Returning to the methods of pure economic technique, we find the method of models. *It is extremely difficult to experiment in economic matters. But experimentation is indispensable in all sciences and even more so in techniques. As Vincent puts it, a model is a “simplified but complete representation in its numerical aspect of the economic evolution of a society; for example, a nation during a given period.” A model is a reproduction in miniature of a certain economic ensemble in the form of mathematical equations. It is impossible, obviously, to put all economic phenomena into a model; a certain arbitrariness is called for. The primary act is therefore a choice, founded on some theoretical decision, of the constants and variables to be put into the model. **This theoretical decision, however, is not arbitrary. It is guided by certain principles, in particular the necessity of linking observation to action. Once the constants and the variables of the system have been selected (and they may be numerous), the relations between them are established. Some of these relations are evident in the sense that they are purely quantitative; others are more unstable and subjective and must be established by the economic technician himself. They are empirical relations, verified or proven false by experiment. Finally, the ensemble of these relations must be put in the form of equations by insertion of the time factor. Then, by solving the equations, it is possible to study the evolution of the system and its incidences. This facilitates the study of the evolution of certain mechanisms determined by a social group, or of the incidence of some exterior intervention into an economic system, or of the influence and importance to the whole of every element in an ensemble. ***Models can be purely theoretical or historical, as when the data arise from statistics (in which case they must be tested against the actual evolution of society). Or they can be predictive, as when the attempt is made to forecast the future. These predictive models are the object of great interest in the study of economic complexes.
*because closed ness.. nothing new/diff.. just re iterations
**all decision ness via finite set of choices/restrictions/oppressions.. that’s why decision making is unmooring us and we need to try curiosity over decision making
***so aka: cancerous distractions via whalespeak
But other results reflect economic currents: opinions concerning prices and wages, commercial choices, urgent economic needs (to the extent that they are measurable), and so on. In sum, anything in the nature of an opinion which can be grasped by a good observer or reporter will henceforth be numerically measured and followed scientifically during all stages of its development. This method represents a great revolution; it permits the integration of opinion in the technical world in general and in economic technique in particular. This system brings into the statistical realm measures of things hitherto unmeasurable. It effects a separation of what is measurable from what is not. Whatever cannot be expressed numerically is to be eliminated from the ensemble, either because it eludes numeration or because it is quantitatively negligible. We have, therefore, a procedure for the elimination of aberrant opinions which is essential to the understanding of the development of this technique. The elimination does not originate in the technique itself. But the investigators who utilize its results are led to it of necessity. No activity can embrace the whole complexity of reality except as a given method permits. For this reason, this elimination procedure is found whenever the results of opinion probings are employed in political economy.
oi
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*An organization for establishing statistical data is extremely costly and cannot continue without profits..t One way of making a profit is to sell statistical products to a capitalist clientele, which will utilize them to guide its business into certain channels. ….certain semipublic corporations finance the operations, but it is clear that the state demands its quid pro quo. If the state is to pay for statistical research, it must get something in return: assistance in directing national affairs. The state requires the economist, on the basis of statistics, to seek out methods of intervention either directly or by subtle means such as those advocated by John Maynard Keynes. When the great private corporations or the state ask the economist for a method to influence reality, they are addressing the economist’s own invincible longing, which in the beginning engendered the improvement of these scientific means. Suppose that we have accumulated enormous quantities of facts, have encompassed the whole of reality, and possess the means to follow the mechanism of economic phenomena and even to a certain degree to predict them. Shall this accumulated force, then, serve no purpose? The 1952 report of the American Bureau of Labor Statistics shows clearly that this ensemble of means leads inevitably to planning.
*need a way that makes money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
We confess that we are unable to follow Closon’s reasoning when he declares that the operations of the Comptabilité Nationale are not a threat to freedom because, in fact, they are not applied. Once the trends of the economy have been recognized and reduced to numerical form, will it be tolerated that no intervention be undertaken when the catastrophic consequences of some decision or other have been clearly perceived?.. t
need: no strings attached
On a more modest but still significant plane, what meaning has a detailed accounting of all the needs of a thoughtless worker (including the number of springs in his mattress and the number of razor blades he uses annually), undertaken in order to establish a minimum wage, if he can spend his money haphazardly? Mere prediction would plainly be absurd. *The irrationality of the individual keeps him from living on the amount he could live on according to calculations. He would die of hunger on a subsistence minimum, unless an authoritarian education made him conform..t
*total whalespeak.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. ie: that they would grok enough ness.. graeber stop at enough law et al
Let us grant that this represents no more than a temptation to the economist. But it *would require superhuman strength not to yield to this temptation once action becomes possible; the more so because the informational techniques described are closely connected to techniques of action, as are the establishment of norms or of accounting plans. We have distinguished somewhat arbitrarily between knowledge and action in order to present in the most objective way possible the normal development of economics produced by the creation of these techniques. Even when they serve solely for the purposes of knowledge, it is clear by how many routes they, end in intervention. Econometrics is only to be understood if it issues in its normal end, the establishment of economic planning. Without this, econometrics is inefficient, and efficiency is the very law of technique. Like a horse chafing at the bit, the techniques of economic science await the **signal to intervene more completely than ever before in the reality they have come to understand.
*why we need spaces of permission et al.. with no judgement.. aka: no **signal to intervene et al
The Economic Techniques of Action
At the same time that the economist has created a technique for knowing, he has created a technique for acting. A new world is awakening, an economic mutation is being effected. Among these techniques of intervention we shall consider only two: plan and norms.
*The establishment of norms by the economist has become necessary, Dieterlen tells us, simply in order to follow and understand economic development (A good example of the transition from techniques of understanding to techniques of action.) It is not sufficient merely to follow the course of statistical data. It is necessary to erect in advance a system of norms of progression of the elements of a given economic system which will permit us at any moment to estimate the divergence of a given element of the system from the norm..t Even in a nondirected economy, it is possible to determine (a) a certain relation among the different economic components; (b) a “normal” tendency for the evolution of each of these elements; and, consequently, (c) a “normal” evolution of their relation. When such a scheme has been established, it is then possible to say whether one of the elements is progressing too rapidly or too slowly, a fact which, in Dieterlen’s opinion, should serve to reveal the causes of an economic crisis.
aka: any form of m\a\p as structural violence
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But if we thus establish certain norms of progression, we are confronted with two facts. First, the necessity of intervention: once the norm has been set and a condition which diverges from it has been observed, it would be folly to permit a dangerously abnormal phenomenon to develop. Second, the possibility of extending such an establishment of norms. Why should inquiry be limited to a given system? Once a calculus of norms is possible, it ought to be extended throughout the economy. This legislative tendency will operate not merely in the area of the organization of labor. A bureau for setting standards, or a service of industrial analysis, is no longer limited to the co-ordination, say, of wages and of the scientific organization of labor. These operations transcend the level of private enterprise and attain the level of the general. They harmonize the complementary activities of wide economic sectors. We are then completely within the technique of intervention; the transition from the one to the other has been imperceptible.
If the term norm is taken in its exact meaning, it is evident that the application of the system of norms orients us in a unique direction. Under capitalism, norms are fundamental to the planning of enterprise, but the tempo of production remains a function of market conditions. In a planned economy, norms are fundamental to all economic calculations..t They determine the quantities to be produced and measure the degree to which the plan is realized in the market (Fedotov). The technique of normalization can only have full scope in a planned economy..t It tends, in proportion to its development, to imply a planned economy, simply because it tends to pass from private planning and an atomized economy to a global economy and general planning (the fundamental condition of its application). A global economy is more exact to the degree that both these aspects of planning are subject to the law and control of the machine, as Mas indicates.
need: no prep.. no train.. no plan.. no norm
All this represents a tendency rather than an accomplished fact. As soon as industrial normalization intervenes, it brings with it this tendency which inevitably devalues the older economic types and the older industrial organizations.
rather.. dehumanizes..
Norms mutually entail each other and presuppose certain synchronizations. It is almost impossible to conceive of localized norms. If it is asked what the motive force behind this tendency is, once again we must answer: efficiency.
I therefore believe that in this area, too, the logic of norms will impose itself everywhere. And if in my analysis of this development I seem to have isolated the technical factor, this is not because I choose to neglect or fail to recognize the others. But, as I have already demonstrated, the technical factor is at present the decisive one. In addition, most of the other developmental factors are well known and almost universally studied, whereas the technical factor remains, in general, obscure.
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As soon as norms become essential because of their obvious utility, they appear to complement the plan. There is no better meant of co-ordinating them or permitting them their full efficiency than to integrate them into a plan. This is what I mean by the logic of norms.
Another technique of intervention which has recently become essential (and which I shall only mention) is so-called operational research. Its basic characteristics, its objectives, and its meaning are identical with those of norms. But the problem here is a problem of decision. Norms and operational research are today the two meant by which the plan is executed.
Planning represents a second aspect of the economic technique of intervention. *Everyone has an approximate idea of what planning means: the state decides everything and regulates everything in advance..t We must analyze at least the characteristics of the planning operation, if not its details. Economic planning is a variety of technique, not a form or a system or an economic theory. Not a single economy of any type whatsoever has been constructed by means of planning. We think otherwise because the Russian adventure has always appeared to us in such a guise. “It was desired to build an economy of the collective type and to succeed in that a plan was elaborated.” But the Russian plan assumed its own meaning independently of all theoretical ideas. In reality, the plan is a technique and ipso facto indifferent to doctrines and opinions; it is least of all concerned with principles of action. In Germany no one had any very clear concept of the economic form that should be adopted, but planning was accepted as an efficient means. In our own day, it is even more true that plans develop in all countries without any foundation of economic doctrine. This, in one sense, is very reassuring. People constantly say: “If we remain true to our old doctrine and the plan is only an instrument, we remain what we were. If planning has sometimes functioned as a socialist instrument, it was only because it was in the service of socialist doctrines.” This is, as consolation, illusory. But it is at least founded on the truth that planning is not connected with any particular doctrine. System or not, however, it perhaps implies a certain definite form of economy.
*the state or whoever.. even a raised eyebrow
*Now let us consider a great difficulty which is an important point of discussion in modern planning: prices and wages. Until now, the plan has been more or less tied to “real” prices and wages. Planning, if not actually established by the market, was at least fixed in temporal or spatial relation to market prices and wages. But this situation could not last long. The intention of the third Soviet plan was precisely to fix prices and wages in a purely abstract, but not arbitrary, way by certain econometric methods, independently of the laws of the market. It would seem from the various wage manipulations which took place in 1949, and the repudiation of Vosnessenski, that this attempt was not a success. **However, we must consider it as the only logical way in which planning could then have been undertaken. And this approach may very well be eliminated by new improvements in economic technique. This would set to rest the objections of Francis Perroux, for whom the plan was thereby deprived of all “economic rationality.”
*oi.. already cancerous distraction
**ie: bachelard oikos law
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A plan is executed in accordance with two constant principles: efficiency and social need..t The plan first answers the constant search for the most efficient use of mechanical means, natural riches, and disposable forces. The problem is to organize, co-ordinate, and normalize these elements in such a way that each instrument produces its maximum yield. Planning has been criticized on all fronts, from the philosophic to the economic. But no one has yet questioned the fundamental efficiency of planning, except at the beginning. This criticism had its origin in two things, the gropings of the planners and the ignorance of the critics. Everyone has since become convinced that the mechanism is efficient—with allowances for a certain bluff that up to now has accompanied planning experiments. As far as technique is concerned, judgment is based solely on efficiency, and planning appears fully justified in this respect..t
oi.. efficiency ness
*The second of the two principal criteria of planning is the satisfaction of social needs. The initial difficulty is to determine just what these needs are at a given moment How shall we effect the balance between social needs and production?..t Theoretically these are insoluble questions (I say theoretically advisedly). The proposed means (opinion polls, ration cards, obligatory absorption by the buyer of whatever is produced) indicate that the question as it is usually posed is abstract If one says: “In planning, the consumer is in command,” one is making abstraction from the fact that the plan, a sociological phenomenon, answers to social need and not to individual need. At the same time one is thinking of an abstract man (a kind of fixed image of man), and this, too, renders the proposed question inoperative. The social man envisaged by the plan is a man integrated more and more into modern technical society. His needs are more and more collectivized, not indeed by direct pressure, but by publicity, standardization of goods, intellectual uniformity, and so on. It is well-known that “to the standardization of production corresponds a standardization of taste which gives to social life its collective character.” Moreover, mass consumption corresponds spontaneously to mass production. There is no need for repressive measures. The adaptation of the public occurs of itself. **The average man becomes the norm in the most liberal system in the world because only the products necessary to the average man are offered on the market..t In fact, ***the problem of understanding social needs is complicated only if planning technique is separated from all the other techniques.. These other techniques spontaneously lead men to feel certain social needs conformable to certain data. ****When the plan is reinserted into its true framework, it is evident that there is no need of forcing social needs. They are prepared in advance, so that the plan is in a position to correspond exactly to them, after a more or less difficult period of adaption.
*need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
**if only we believed this.. we haven’t yet ever tried/seen it (liberal system)
***whalespeak.. let go
****if any plan/agenda then already forcing ness
The whole evolution of human needs, in their “sociologism,” tends toward the plan. There is almost no necessity any longer to exert pressure on these needs. They are already what they should be, provided that we abandon human misfits to their miserable lot, a procedure which is, in any case, the course of all techniques. When it is a question of dominating the world, one cannot stop to consider Kirgiz shepherds or Bantu huntsmen who will not accept the laws of the determining forces..t
ie that need global detox leap
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Finally, it seems to me important, in connection with the plan itself, to emphasize the need for utilizing the labor force efficiently. *It would appear that full employment is an internal necessity, not merely a momentary circumstance, of the plan..t Charles Bettelheim has demonstrated that without full employment there is no possible satisfaction of the totality of social needs..t In this connection, wages change their character and become a part of the social product The plan ought, therefore, to provide for both full employment and the assignment of the labor force in accordance with the requirements of the production plan. It becomes indispensable to extend the plan to the whole labor force. Without this, the mechanism cannot function..t And this then poses the question of the place, of the limitation, of the characteristics of planning.
*supposed to’s of school/work et al.. need sabbatical ish transition
One need not yield to the puerile enthusiasm that considers planning a panacea, a polyvalent remedy like penicillin. But it is necessary to put the plan into a different perspective. Whatever the remedies or proposed reforms for resolving injustice and incoherence in the modern economy, everything occurs through the agency of the plan. The plan in itself is no solution. But it is the indispensable instrument of all solutions. Even if one starts with Knut Wicksell or John Maynard Keynes, one meets again and again the urgency of planning.
oi.. whalespeak
In Mumford’s proposals to release man from the clutches of technique, there is an interesting project for an economic regionalism on a world-wide plane. But this regionalism can, in fact, only be based on the exceedingly complete and rigid planning of production and distribution.
nah.. there’s a nother way.. ie: org around legit needs
Planning and Liberty
Everybody, or almost everybody, is convinced today of the effectiveness of the two techniques of intervention, norm and plan..t And, in fact, in view of the challenges which not only nations but political and social systems hurl at one another, and even more, in view of the challenge that man is making to misery, distress, and hunger, it is difficult to see how the use of the means provided by planning could be avoided. In the complexity of economic phenomena arising from techniques, how could one justify refusal to employ a trenchant weapon that simplifies and resolves all contradictions, orders incoherences, and rationalizes the excesses of production and consumption? And since the techniques of economic observation, if they are to have their full scope, issue directly in the technique of planning, and since there can be no question of renouncing the youthful vigor of these mathematical methods, how is it possible not to see them through to the end?..t
of math and men.. oi.. graeber violence/quantification law et al
*Yet a certain disquiet has appeared among those who cherish human freedom and democracy. They ask if planning is not an all-consuming force. They seek to set three kinds of limits to its power, represented by: (a) flexible planning, (b) the system of limited planning, and (c) the separation of the planning agency from the state (in short, what is usually called the reconciliation of liberty and socialism). No one accepts Friedrich August von Hayek’s proposition (in his Road to Serfdom) that planning is essentially evil. Conscientious economists are unable to renounce technical discovery. They seek a middle term..t[12] Is it to be a limited plan? But then the problem is posed: where lies the limit? For some economists, planning is a purely economic question bearing on key industries. But the debate has lasted a century and no decision has been reached as to which industries are key industries. The decision becomes even more difficult as categories change with time (the extraction of uranium, for example, was not a key industry twenty years ago) and as the interpenetration of economic activities becomes greater and greater. It is becoming extremely difficult to analyze the factors involved in production. Every part of the system is, directly or indirectly, dependent on all the others through financial repercussions or through the structure of labor. How, then, is it possible to set up a planned sector of the economy alongside an unplanned sector? When one rereads what was published on this problem only ten years ago, it is clear that these studies are completely out of date and have been rendered null and void by subsequent technical improvements. Let us assume that a plan has been made for a five-year period. If now the attempt is made to limit it to economics by allowing the greatest possible freedom outside this area (for example, by having no planning in the social domain), how can this economic plan possibly be viable?
*have to pick one or other.. can’t have both legit freedom and any form of democratic admin
137 endnote 1 (12): Ten or so articles attempt to demonstrate that planning is indeed indispensable but that it presents no danger at all to freedom. A complete unreality characterizes these articles. The position of the authors can be summarized as follows. First, they express the hope of saving freedom through liberal and partial planning. (However, other authors in the same volume show that this hope is absurd and ineffective.) Second, the articles contain other formulas, equally absurd and without content. “Planning should have as its object the realization of freedom”; “The more rational planning becomes, the greater the freedom of the people.” These are mere affirmations, and one would seek in vain for corresponding realities or for a possible content..Some of these authors rely for proof of their propositions on a series of simple syllogisms. For example; “(1) Planning increases production, (a) Production allows the satisfaction of more needs. (3) The satisfaction of needs is the condition of freedom. Hence, planning is the condition of freedom.” This reasoning is faulty for two reasons. It is linear and takes no account of the complexity of the facts (for example, put a man in prison, give him everything he needs: he is nonetheless free). It derives its conclusion partly from an economic premise (the first) and partly from an ethical premise (the third), without attempting to distinguish the logical planes on which these premises lie. The third premise is, in any case, wholly questionable from a spiritual or ethical point of view. (I shall return later to a discussion of this.)..But for these authors *the principal hope of saving freedom, in this amazing theory, lies in the claim that an enlightened public opinion has the power to direct the decision of the planners toward the satisfaction of its real needs..t In this case, one would indeed have democratic planning, collectivism on a voluntary base. But to reason like this is surely to move in a world of dreams. The good faith of these intellectuals compels one to think seriously of pathology. . **It will be maintained that public opinion does not really know what it needs… But then the technician makes the decision..t We are familiar enough with the mechanism: first producer goods, then consumer goods. Of course, public opinion will be “consulted” after the technician has made his decision: “You would have preferred woolen goods? Technically impossible; we had to make them of cotton Green? Unfortunately, there is no aniline. But you can choose between light red and dark red See what freedom you have!” In effect, ***these authors seek to baptize obedience to technical necessity with the name freedom. They attempt to hide the real compulsions and write either out of blindness or hypocrisy..t
*problem.. we have no idea what legit needs are.. need global detox.. black science of people/whales law
**part of all of us.. so doesn’t know legit needs either..
***aka: whalespeak
138
These different proposals are extremely deceptive. The flexible plan has only one defect; but that defect is crucial: the plan cannot be realized. The reason is simple. If the plan corresponds to the real nature of planning, it ought to fix objectives, which normally would not be attained by the play of self-interest and a modicum of effort. It must stretch productive forces to the maximum, arouse energies, and exploit existing means with the maximum of efficiency. (That planners do not always succeed, that administrative errors occur, and that not all planning invariably acts with the maximum efficiency is no more a criticism of the system than errors of calculation are a criticism of mathematics.) But if the individual is allowed freedom of decision and there is no plan, he will not make the maximum effort required of him. If the industrialist is allowed to retain full independence, he will seek out other arrangements and not arrive at the objectives proposed. Hence, the plan, in order to be realized, must be paired with an apparatus of sanctions. This appears to be a veritable law of economics; planning is inseparably bound up with coercion..t
need to try curiosity over decision making.. because decision making is unmooring us
139
*Either the plan is flexible but is not realized..useless to expend the great amount of labor which goes into a plan only to reach a stalemate. Or the plan must be realized, but at the cost of loading it with sanctions $0 that it becomes more rigid..t Those who count on the good will of mankind display a delirious, idealistic optimism. Centuries of history, despite the facts, have not been able to convince them of the contrary; reason certainly will not change them But they are **so far removed from reality that their opinion is negligible..t
*both cancerous distractions.. there’s a nother way
**as is all whalespeak.. so need global detox.. otherwise whac-a-mole-ing ness non legit data.. again.. cancerous distraction
The problem of sanctions brings planning into relation with the state. Anyone who claims that planning and the state are separable, or that local plans can be carried out (the TVA is always cited), has forgotten that local plans must be guaranteed by the state or they come to nothing. And this suffices to give back to the state all its prerogatives.
let them both go
How, then, is it possible to retain a belief in the independence of the plan? The bond between planning and the state is organic and not due to chance. *At the minimum, the power of the state is required for a general examination of available resources and to put all the national forces to work. . This kind of planning acquires substance only to the degree that such a state is constituted. This fact corroborates our thesis. Only a supranational state would be able to convince both the national states and the trusts to co-operate in a common economic operation.
*oi
The Americans understood perfectly that the only alternative to a useless expenditure of money in the ECA was a European political organization. Unification, or even economic co-ordination, cannot be conceived of independently. Mere understanding or good Detentions can scarcely result in real planning. Again we are back at the necessary conditions for the realization of a planned economy.
oi
140
That in an ideal society the connection between plan and state is unnecessary, just as the need for penalties disappears in the case of the individual as he exists in himself, I am willing to admit. But that does not make me believe in such an ideal and take it as a reality. In fact, I note that techniques of knowledge engender and necessitate techniques of action, and techniques of action presuppose certain conditions and developments in accordance with a true law which might be called the law of the extension of planning.
also will always be.. any form of m\a\p connected.. by virtue of perpetuating not us ness
This extension of planning does not necessarily bring about a socialist society. Private ownership of the means of production need not be modified in order to have a planned economy. Likewise, planning does not necessarily bring about a dictatorial state.. t The use of sanctions and propaganda can be accommodated to forms other than dictatorships. But when a technique invades a certain domain, in connection with planning, the technique effects its whole operation with completeness. It is useless to try to set limits to it or to seek some other mode of procedure.
actually.. yeah.. it does.. any form of m\a\p does..
141
The Great Hopes
It would seem that we are today unable to escape the facts. And the facts direct us toward the planned economy, regardless of our theoretical judgments in the matter. It is also often asked whether, after long periods of planned economy, the trend could be reversed..t But this is another problem.
oi.. not facts.. whalespeak.. and yeah.. there is a nother way
We must ask why these fixed and rigid programs (which emerge in a planned economy) are adopted on a wider and wider scale, Irrespective of doctrines and intentions. *The only reply is that planning permits us to do more quickly and more completely whatever appears desirable..t Planning in modern society is the technical method. It does not necessarily represent the best economic solution, but **it does represent the best technical solution..t
*in sea world .. where desire = whalespeak.. oof
**oi.. not by a long shot.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
143
The alignment of the two has not yet been fully completed—and this constituted the particular weakness of Hitler’s Germany—but it takes more than a decade to overcome technically great political and economic machines..t
perhaps until now.. now have means for global detox leap
The state no longer leaves the economy to itself; but state intervention is flexible enough to allow the entrepreneurs some initiative and grant *(controlled) freedom to the market. This is the attitude of the best minds in France. They are guided not only by a desire for equilibrium and a traditional confidence in the “middle of the road,” but also by a preoccupation with human and nonconformist elements. I do not deny that these elements are desirable, or that attributing a strategic role to the state (while reserving tactical freedom to the citizens) is a tempting concept. **But I am searching for the possible here. Would such an economic orientation really satisfy technical conditions? Is it realizable in depth? The answer is certainly yes, if we abstract it from reality. But ***when we come back to reality, it is immediately evident that the liberal orientation represents the most difficult of the possible alternatives. ..One must take account, after all, of human nature. This is even more true of a liberally supervised economy than of a totally planned economy, precisely because the former entails a certain degree of freedom for the individual. ****The human being, left to his own devices, will not choose the most difficult paths or the tightest situation. He will choose the line of least resistance. I am speaking of the man of the twentieth century, the product of the society based on ease, security, and comfort
oi oi oi.. you’re right.. if *this.. **nothing but same song is possible..
***perhaps difficulty is in the whac-a-mole-ing ness of insisting on non legit freedom.. aka: controlled freedom et al.. if we give legit freedom a try.. takes a lot of work becomes irrelevant s.. cancerous distraction
****whalespeak.. we have no idea what legit free people (aka: legit human nature) is like (black science of people/whales law).. rather.. in undisturbed ecosystem.. left to own devices is how the dance dances
145
The planned economy seems to represent the most probable solution imposed by economic technique and desired by the greater part of modern society, not only of men but of powers.
oi oi oi.. whalespeak.. voluntary compliance.. et al
The real problem is not to judge but to understand.
oi
Progress
Technique, in its action on the economy, awakened vast hopes in human hearts. And certainly there is no question of denying these hopes. The machine and all that came with it, all it brought in the way of progress, would put into human hands riches perhaps different but as impressive as those of legend. These riches would not be piles of gold or precious stones reserved for the darlings of the gods, but comfort and pleasure for everyone. And if the carved palaces, the chests encrusted with coral and enamel, the sculptures and objects of gold, the precious table services, the arms with handles of emerald and pearl were all fated to disappear, in compensation every man was promised decent glassware and porcelain, a house in which he could be warm, abundant nourishment, and, little by little, comfort and hygienic surroundings that would assure him physical and mental harmony. Everyone was to have in full measure the wherewithal to live. And, more than that, new needs would arise which would no longer be the rare pleasures of initiates but simply the human condition. To drink chilled beverages in the summer or to be warm in the winter would no longer be the costly fancy of a prince.
Poverty was retreating and, with it, man’s suffering. The machine was taking over. The time devoted to work remained time wasted; but it was constantly decreasing and no one imagined that this process would ever stop.
This extreme view of things developed so rapidly that by the end of the nineteenth century people saw in their grasp the moment in which everything would be at the disposal of everyone, in which man, replaced entirely by the machine, would have only pleasures and play. We have had to lower our sights. In practice, things have not turned out to be so simple. Man is not yet relieved of the brutal fate which pursues him. What appeared so near has again been postponed. Yet two wars, two “accidents,” have in no way affected our glorious conception of progress. Spiteful actions of fate, human errors—call them what they will—men refuse to see in them anything that essentially affects the marvelous progress that opens before them. In spite of accidents, they believe that the road is still free. The man of the mid-twentieth century preserves in his heart exactly the same expectations as his grandfather had.
146
No doubt he has repudiated what he thought was naïve. And perhaps a certain distrust keeps him from enjoying the full life to the extent that he might have expected. Even if he is unaware of it, the average man preserves in his collective consciousness the obscure feeling that he has been duped. He had believed so completely in the takeover by the machine, and in plenty, and he does not wish to fall into a trap again. Nevertheless, hope persists wherever tomorrows beckon; say Hitler’s Thousand Years, or the bourgeois’s stupid notion of progress. The hope is still the same, but the human being (model 1950) tells himself that he can only attain Paradise through the destruction of his enemies. His feeling of frustration—occasioned by the abrupt loss of what was possible and even within reach—is one of the elements behind the atrocities of modern wars..t When man finds the foe who stands in his way and who alone has barred Paradise to him (be it Jew, Fascist, capitalist, or Communist), he must strike him down, that from the cadaver may grow the exquisite flower the machine had promised.
thurman interconnectedness law.. khan filling the gaps law.. et al
If we consider the theses of the economists, we find that they, too, affirm the same hope. They locate it elsewhere and prescribe conditions and modalities to it, but the foundation is the same. Technique is for them, too, the only means of abundance and leisure. Fourastié is right in putting the case numerically to dramatize the shortening of the work week and the enormous transformation in living standards and in the qualitative nature of life. The case is indeed simple if 1950 is compared with 1815. But it is no longer quite so simple if 1950 is compared with 1250. It is important to consider, for labor, not only time but intensity. It is possible to make a meaningful comparison between the fifteen-hour workday of a miner in 1830 and the seven-hour workday of 1950. But there *is no common denominator between the seven-hour day of 1950 and the fifteen-hour day of the medieval artisan. We know that the peasant interrupts his workday with innumerable pauses. He chooses his own tempo and rhythm. He converses and cracks jokes with every passer-by.
*and yet.. that still is not the dance of legit free people
147
Centralized Economy
We are now in a position to trace certain characteristics that technique imposes on the economy of the modern world. We must recall that there is no accommodation with technique. It is rigid in its nature and proceeds directly to its end. It can be accepted or rejected. If it is accepted, subjection to its laws necessarily follows.
?
What are the effects of these laws on the economic world? The first trait that can be clearly perceived is the connection between the economic mechanism and the state. This connection exists not by virtue of socialist doctrines, nor because the state wills to intervene, but because there is no other way of proceeding when technical development is present.
mute point when both state and econ (as is) are irrelevant s/cancerous distractions
Technique always supposes centralization. When I use gas, or electricity, or the telephone, it is no plain and simple mechanism which is at my disposal, but a centralized organization. A central telephonic or electrical station gives substance to the whole electric network and to every individual piece of apparatus. The technical “central” is the normal expression of every application. *A coexistence of these centrals is implied: a completely centralized organization which ultimately encompasses all human activities. Technical centralization is one of the major realities of our time. The question is whether these centralized organs can exist independently of one another. Can each develop in its own specific and autonomous way? Jünger, who poses this question, is correct in stressing that the system is not hierarchical,..t that every technical body is independent of its neighbor, and that there is no subordination among them. Economically and politically, however, the risk is very great. Each of the centralized bodies must be put into its proper position and relation with respect to the others. This is a function of the plan, and **only the state is in a position to supervise the whole complex and to co-ordinate these organisms in order to obtain a higher degree of centralization.
*yeah .. but only if go deep enough.. to a diff ‘central’ .. our legit essence
*The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian..t For its own centralization, technique requires interrelated economic and political centralization. And we are speaking here of mechanical technique alone, without going into the motives of political technique.
*perhaps until now.. black science of people/whales law and mufleh humanity law – we have no idea what we can do and what we haven’t yet tried
The state, which by its very nature is the organ of centralization, is at the same time the organ of choice of the technical centralization. Anyone who believes statesmen are malevolent in willing centralization demonstrates thereby only his own naïveté. The state is forced to realize the plan for exclusively technical reasons.
148
We have already seen how the necessity of sanctions brings about a relation between the plan and the state. This relation can also be envisaged as the administrative framework of the state, which supports the techniques of planning and assures them freedom of operation and a certain stability. I must insist on this last characteristic.
oi
149
If statistics are to be given their full scope, it is necessary to coordinate the actions of different organisms to avoid useless repetition, and also to pay the bill, since centers for statistical research do not pay for themselves. When statistical data have been collected, what agency but the state is in a position to exploit them fully and make them yield their total practical value? It is scarcely necessary to recall that the very different factors that result from technique (trusts, atomic energy, capital concentration, the hypertrophic enlargement of the means of production, and many more) all entail state action. The relation established by technical facts, which become the common denominator between state and economy, is neither chance nor fleeting. There is no possibility of reversing the movement, as certain idealistic anti-interventionists would have us believe. Neither is there any hope, short of certain extraordinary transformations, that the conjunction of state and economy is transitory, as the Communists would have us believe.
oi.. perhaps (or perhaps not even) .. until now
Certainly, if production were to become sufficiently great, if the system of distribution were perfect (and, once fixed, were not subject to variation), and if, above all else, men were to become angels (an indispensable condition), the conjunction between state and economy might disappear. The same would be true if modern technique were to vanish. But it is advisable to think in more realistic terms..t
oh my oh my.. huge crux of the problem.. and all because we have no idea what legit free people are like.. so in our non trusting of that.. we keep perpetuating sea world.. whalespeak.. same song
be realistic.. demand the (seemingly) impossible..
The fact that the economy and the state are reciprocally joined is technically founded in such a way that the two tend to become aspects of the same phenomenon, a phenomenon which, moreover, is not the result of a simple accretion of previous phenomena. It seems to me particularly important to emphasize this new character. Because of the existence of techniques, we are beyond the problems of ordinary Étatism or of socialism. It is not the simple phenomenon of the growth of power or the struggle against capitalism which is decisive here. We are witnessing the birth of a new organism, the technical state, which makes economic life more secure in proportion as it becomes more technical. It is no longer even possible to say: “It could be done otherwise.” In the abstract as well as in the concrete, all technical evidence attests to the contrary. What is involved is in fact the logical development of the nation-state.
wow.. is this for real.. hope i’m misunderstanding.. oi
This double relation (the state assuring the national life, and whatever pertains to the nation converging toward the state) becomes more specific, stronger, and more rigid when technical elements come into play. What was mere tendency becomes framework, what was talk becomes means, and the relation of administration to population becomes organization. And because the economy is an aspect of the nation, it, too, comes into the system. The state, too, changes its aspect on contact with technical elements. The principal goals of the economy are at first modified, but its elements of pride and power, potentially always there, emerge subsequently in a more brutal way. Humble humanitarian motives are no longer important. Technique is too neutral and the state too powerful for either to encumber itself with such things. It is no longer even a question of wealth or distribution; in the technical synthesis, the economy becomes again the servant, when (after Marx) it had been thought the master.
what we need for detox.. because yeah.. currently (since forever).. motives (or whatevers).. not legit us..
150
I remarked above that this is not socialism. With the disappearance of humanitarian goals, socialism is rendered unfeasible by the sheer weight of techniques. The ownership of the means of production ceases to be the central problem. Social equality becomes a myth as a result of the emergence of an aristocracy of technicians; and the proletariat is necessarily extended (to no one’s dissatisfaction), instead of disappearing. Certain elements of socialism continue to exist; for example, social security, the redistribution of the national income, and the suppression of individual profit. But they exist as isolated fragments, and not as a system. It is not even certain that these elements will be found in all the syntheses now being created. *Their continued existence depends on whether they are judged to be efficient. They cannot escape this judgment..t An excellent example of fragmentary socialism, based on anything but socialistic motives, is given by Fourastié. He demonstrates (correctly, I believe) that capital decreases in importance in proportion as technique increases in importance. “In a period of technical progress, the wage value of capital tends toward zero, whereas the physical product of capital constantly increases.” Clearly, it is not a question of the absolute value of capital. Yet the capitalist sees his assets lose value in direct proportion to the development of technical progress. I shall not repeat Fourastié’s reasoning—it seems to me convincing. His conclusion, moreover, is of the first importance: that the center of the economic problem is shifting. **The legal question of ownership is no longer important The debate no longer concerns who owns the means of production, or who will take the profits. The crux of the economic problem has moved to the extreme point of technical development. The real debate concerns who will be in a position to support, absorb, and integrate technical progress and to furnish optimal conditions for its development..t
*then let’s use efficient ness in terms of graeber stop at enough law ness..
**oi to profit ness.. and we need to switch up what tech progress means.. ie: mufleh humanity law et al
*It is contrary to the nature of technique to be compatible with anarchy in any sense of the word..t When milieu and action become technical, order and organization are imposed. The state itself, projected into the technical movement, becomes its agent. Technique is, therefore, the most important factor in the destruction of capitalism, much more so than the revolt of the masses. Human revolt can only accompany the destruction of capitalism and philosophize about it. As to socialism, the final result is still indiscernible and no prediction, except of a negative nature, is possible.
*oh my.. perhaps until now..
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
listen & connect to undo our hierarchical listening ie: 2 convers as infra
perhaps we can have tech w/o judgment ie: tech as it could be
Economic centralization has been criticized on humane grounds. Jean François Gravier has attacked the movement on purely technical grounds and has attempted to show that decentralization (at least of the population) is necessary if society is to remain in equilibrium. His thesis is as follows: Technique permits the diffusion of the population over a wide area with as well developed economic potentialities as the great cities. Diffusion would not be subject to present health hazards, oppressive costs to communities (a resident of Paris costs the state five times as much as a resident of Vendée), and so on. This thesis, then, is based on new technical development. But there are three objections: First, decentralization is not possible unless there is a powerful planned organization for decentralization. Such an organization usually operates on the level of the individual, not of the economic organism. Second, population diffusion could lead to an urbanization of the countryside rather than to a true diffusion of the population into a rural milieu. Third, the thesis represents a mere theoretical possibility and not a necessary movement.
1\ as infra 2\ has to be all earth as space 3\ ?
It must be admitted that *actual experience seems to contradict the thesis. Since 1955 a serious and concerted movement has been under way to decentralize Paris and its industrial complex. The result so far is that six hundred industrial plants have left the area. But only four thousand wage earners have been resettled in the provinces, whereas, when the plants in question achieve full operation, they will **employ seventy-five thousand wage earners recruited locally. Moreover, half of these six hundred plants have been settled in the vicinity of Paris. During the five-year period in question, fifty thousand new jobs have been created each year in Paris alone and the population of the city has risen by nearly a million.
*of course.. we haven’t ever yet tried legit freedom.. we haven’t let go enough to see/be that
**evidences in how we perceive progress.. ie: number of jobs/wages et al
151
Decentralization, then, has experienced a radical setback. Economists who have analyzed this setback conclude that in order to decentralize industrially *it is necessary to effect total decentralization, including administrative, financial, and cultural decentralization. Total action, however, would be **difficult to achieve; precise and adequate technical motives for it do not exist Furthermore, it would have to be implemented by authoritarian measures. The state would have to act to constrain the citizens with authoritarian penalties corresponding to authoritarian decisions. It is easily seen that the proposed decentralization would have to rest upon a major aggrandizement of centralized authority.
*irrelevant s/cancerous distractions
The Authoritarian Economy
*An economy completely founded on technique cannot be a liberal economy..t (This is not entirely the same as the preceding idea.) Technique is, in reality, opposed to liberalism, a social form which is unable to absorb and utilize modern techniques. It seems clear that economic liberalism is not in itself a technique. In fact, the attitude represented by laissez-faire, however much mitigated it may have become, is a renunciation of the use of techniques; **techniques suppose conscious human action, not abstention from action.
*but we do need tech to help detox us.. because otherwise.. assumptions of what econ means and judge\ment ness et al will keep us in whac-a-mole-ing ness cycle..
**but conscious free people.. not conscious whales.. we have no idea
When liberalism requires men to put their trust in the obscure alchemy of certain natural “laws,” it in effect restrains them from making use of the technical means at their disposal. These means permit men to intervene in the order of nature, to adjust its “laws” to their purposes, and to exploit them, as in the physical order. They also permit intervention that would appear to contradict natural laws and modify the order of nature. It is clear, then, that they are not really “laws” at all. In view of this, technique does not accord these nonexistent laws the respect recommended by liberalism. Therefore, when technique develops, both the liberal attitude and its doctrine become impossible..t I have posed the problem at its most acute by placing it at the point of contact between liberalism and the economic techniques of intervention (which are the very negation of liberalism). But my thesis is just as true for the simple techniques of production which influence the economy. As I have already shown, every mechanical technique supposes a corresponding organization. And organization is the diametrical opposite of free enterprise; and the organizational state of mind is the diametrical opposite of the liberal state of mind..t
yeah.. if iterate on non legit ness.. but now have means to iterate on legit free people.. an orderly chaos.. et al ie: org around legit needs.. sans doctrine.. attitude.. any form of m\a\p
It will doubtless be pointed out, by way of refutation, that production techniques were developed during the ascendancy of liberalism, which furnished a favorable climate for their development and understood perfectly how to use them. But this is no counter-argument. The simple fact is that liberalism permitted the development of its executioner, exactly as in a healthy tissue a constituent cell may proliferate and give rise to a fatal cancer. The healthy body represented the necessary condition for the cancer. But there was no contradiction between the two. The same relation holds between technique and economic liberalism.
need to let go of all cancerous distractions.. aka: any form of m\a\p
152
Here, then, is the locus of the conflict between technique and the liberal economy, which Jünger, among others, has studied. Technique is inevitably opposed to the liberal economy because the end of technique is efficiency and rationality, and the end of liberalism is money profit. Technique requires of the liberal economy nonprofitable decisions and risks. For example, when expensive new machines are developed before the old ones have been amortized, the industrialist is forced to liquidate the old machines or he runs the risk of being eliminated from the market. This conflict holds good on all levels.
end of liberalism is profit?.. oi
When the state controls the economy, it faces similar problems. But such problems affect every economy. In this perspective, planning is criticized as wasteful. Yet the very criticism shows that the liberal mentality is still in force.
Even in a capitalist context, however, *judgments concerning wastefulness are modified with time and according to the sector. In a report, the ILO has compared ordinary mechanization with the mechanization of offices: “The mechanization of labor in offices will often, against standard practice, be considered justified from the viewpoint of profits, even if it increases the expenses of the office. This is the case when mechanization increases the yield of the productive unit of which the office forms the administrative section” (Mas). But even taking into consideration such partial exceptions, it remains true that conflict between technique and the **liberal economy is inevitable because the liberal economy is essentially based on profit. It does not exist without profit. To a planned economy, however, profit is not the highest value. Certainly, the planned economy does not neglect the profit motive completely, but profit represents only one element in its calculations. ***The principal criterion of the planned economy is rationality (or efficiency): in a word, technique.
*we have no idea.. again.. graeber stop at enough law
**ie that we have no idea.. talking of profit or no profit is cancerous distraction
***again.. would go along with that as long as efficiency grokked graeber stop at enough law et al
In the conflict between technique and the liberal economy, technique, then, is victorious over the liberal economy and bends it to its laws. The process is furthered, as I have shown, by the fact that the liberal economy, insofar as it is thought out, itself becomes technique. The unity between economy and technique is thus restored, but liberalism is eliminated. Economists may seek to justify this by speaking of “public service” or the “common good,” but such talk represents no more than a justification a posteriori, an ideological smoke screen. It is, as such, not without value, but it is not comparable in importance with the major act of technical invasion.
Liberalism is softened and progressively eclipsed in direct proportion to the growth and imposition of techniques. The relation between the degradation of liberalism and the development of these techniques is unavoidable. The oft-heard assertion that liberalism is capable of production but incapable of distribution represents the broadest view of the matter. How is it that liberalism is capable of producing? The answer is that, in free enterprise, production is not a part of the liberal framework. It is, rather, subject to extensive planning, and it could not well be otherwise. What is specifically liberal is the passage of consumer goods and their distribution in the various consumer sectors; and it is precisely the distributive process which works so poorly and which is constantly being hampered, since technique throws such enormous unmeasured quantities of ill-considered products onto the market
irrelevant s to legit freedom.. so cancerous distractions
153
Could we not pass between the horns of the dilemma by means of the less and less likely possibility of competition? *Just as technical progress never attains the absolute, so freedom of competition will doubtless never disappear absolutely. But there is a point at which it is no longer possible to speak of liberalism. In the most authoritarian regime, some freedom remains. It is nonetheless an authoritarian regime. The perspective changes depending on the time and the psychology; **the point at which we stop saying “liberalism” and say “controlled economy” also varies..t But the process cannot be checked No personal choice is possible. Certainly, it is not that a strict automatism comes into play. To clinch the system and complete the process, ***human decision and intervention are necessary...t
**oi.. rather.. same song.. any form of m\a\p
***decision making is unmooring us law
154
Here we are not using the word mass in the sense of great numbers, but in the usual sociological sense of mass opposed to community. It is recognized that our civilization is becoming a mass civilization.
155
The “all” is involved because technique yields results and demands effort to such a degree that no individual can remain outside. But if technique demands the participation of everybody, this means that the individual is reduced to a few essential functions which make him a mass man. He remains “free,” but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient.
156
We now see why the social complex, on contact with technique, becomes mass, rather than a community or an organism..t. Technique demands for its development malleable human ensembles. We have already encountered this characteristic in our discussion of technical expansion, and we find it again (in a very typical way) in our study of the influence of technique on the economy. The economy, oriented in this direction, supposes mobile masses of men available to needs which are simultaneously economic and technical..t
aka: sea world
Every undertaking involving a real community is necessarily anti-technical on the economic level, not only because it is relatively static but because of its particularism. If genuine communities were to develop, no further economic technique would be possible. I am, of course, speaking here of *true communities, not of counterfeit communities such as the corporations have represented since 1935. We conclude, then, that the social form most auspicious to economic technique is the mass. In this form, the **calculus of probabilities and planning both have free play.
*rather.. all counterfeit since forever..
**once calculating.. nothing free
The Antidemocratic Economy
How, under these circumstances, is it possible to speak of the technical economy as antidemocratic? In reply, it would be easy to show that all these different kinds of “progress” become feasible only to the degree that men are subjected in advance to the action of technique. The opposition men manifest to this slavery (and it is a kind of slavery) is merely superficial, a matter of self-interest, and is not due to any basic revolutionary orientation. Men are unable to exert genuine influence on the direction of the economy. They can change certain modalities of wages. They can alter the direction of enterprise and intervene in certain economic forms to compensate for certain mechanical drawbacks; and they can give opinions on fabrication, procedures, and financial methods. None of these is negligible and I have no desire to minimize their importance. But they do not add up to economic democracy.
and even if they did add up to econ demo.. any form of democratic admin is a cancerous distraction.. so.. same song
Collective ownership of the means of production (from the point of view of nationalization, collectivization, or state socialism) is an abstraction, an even greater abstraction than political democracy. We well know to what degree of abstraction political democracy has been pushed and *how little the vote of the citizens actually counts despite all the talk about “popular sovereignty.” The means of production are said to be the property of the people. But can the people do with them what they wish? Can they actually nominate their leaders? These are the real questions.
*if still voting ness.. if still any form of m\a\p.. talking of freedom is mute pt.. no where near real question
oh my
157
At present the working man’s wishes happen to coincide well with the imperatives of a rather exact and profound technique. This is the only reason his wishes are taken into account. The real function, then, of the worker’s desires is to advance and improve technique, and not at all to enhance his freedom.
There can be no doubt that this kind of democratization leads to a certain improvement in the lot of the people. But it is an improvement brought about not by the people themselves, who are mere servitors, but by technique, to the degree and according to the conception of life dictated by technique.
oi.. certain improvement? no doubt?.. rather.. mufleh humanity law
159
The exercise of democracy was the exercise of choice. Where there is no longer any choice, dictatorship exists..t
oi.. again.. finite set of choices of any form of democratic admin.. of any form of m\a\p.. is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
Second, Bertolino supposes standardization to be democratic insofar as it represents the conviction of the individuals who accept it. It is not sufficient that it be egalitarian in fact, It must be accompanied by the popular consciousness that an egalitarian situation and a more complete equality are being realized through its agency and that the people are thus making progress toward a social democracy. If a regime is sanctioned by the people, it can indeed be maintained that it is democratic. But, of course, that is precisely what Hitler said of his regime. We must not lose sight of the fact that today popular support can be secured with great ease by means of certain precise techniques. But this point does not matter much here. What is important is the fact that Bertolino’s desire to show at any price that technique is democratic leads to a strange conception of democracy. We may best illustrate this by means of two quotations: “Democracy is the adhesion of each citizen individually to the opinion of the majority. This majority opinion becomes an irrefragable and indisputable line of conduct. The individual is duty bound to look upon the line (economic or political) dictated by the majority as the best for society. The individual becomes democratic in this way…” “Democracy consists in the practice of regarding and using certain goods in a common way. Democracy supposes that the individual transcends himself in order to realize social values with the others, and in the same way as the others.”
any form of democratic admin as red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
These textual citations recall some strange speeches we have heard. The transition of the majority to a condition of unanimity through the adhesion of the individual, who renounces his individuality to meld with the collectivity, is precisely the transition from democracy to dictatorship. It is true that standardization demands this kind of democracy and that it could not be reconciled with any other democratic form. But democracy in this case is only a name superimposed on the reality of dictatorship. Whatever aspects of economic technique we examine, we always find this opposition between technique and democracy.
161
It is in the realm of economic technique that we experience most clearly the great and dramatic process of modern times, in which both chance and natural laws are transformed into decisions of accountants, rules of planning, and decrees of the state. It is exactly at this point that technique begins to be concerned with natural fact—with the fact of total human behavior, with man’s spontaneous obedience to so-called sociological currents, with his conformity to certain general types, with his responses (almost everywhere the same) to given stimuli. Whether the question is one of understanding public opinion, or of stochastics, or of statistics as a whole, the technical starting point is always the human behavior of the majority. From this behavior, technique draws a number of consequences and modes of action, erecting on it the system into which it will necessarily insert itself. Moreover, it makes this behavior obligatory. It allows certain minor modifications (we shall not concern ourselves with the problem of aberrants), but its real problem is to transform a law spontaneously obeyed into a law made consciously obligatory. In no other domain is this procedure of technique as clear-cut as in the present forward movement of the economy. The effects of technique in other areas are not as evident; for example, the effects of “human techniques” such as propaganda have not yet been rendered obligatory to the same degree as technique in the economic field.
economic technique tends less to eliminate the natural than to integrate it. (In this sense it approaches the mode of action of physical techniques. And François Perroux’s criticism of planning, relative to its “lack of rationality,” rests on the fact that planning suppresses the free mechanism of the economy instead of adhering to it and interpreting it. The latter, for Perroux, should be the ideal of economic technique.)
need deeper .. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling to undo hierarchical listening
162
I will be asked whether there is anything evil in this integration. I make no value judgments; I merely note that the human being who acts on his own personal decisions, following what is in essence a common tendency, a sociological current, acts freely, but that the same tendency, once integrated into a system, becomes essentially and expressly obligatory..t
if decisions (rather than curiosity over decision making) already obliged to finite set of choices.. not a freely ness.. already an obligatory ness
It might be asked whether man had not lost his freedom even before this integration, since he was obeying an already existing although hidden imperative, now revealed by modern techniques. Is man more constrained than formerly merely because this imperative is recognized and written down in textbooks? This does not seem clearly evident. Even without reference to the danger represented by monopoly of the secrets of our actions on the part of a few (and it is always the few who succeed in gaining control of the instruments of technique), the simple act of writing it down changes human obligation. In the sociological and economic world, the result is comparable to the long-recognized transition from morals to law. There, too, sanctions appear to have been decisive. What is the sanction against violating the moral law, or refusing to follow a sociological tendency, or disobeying natural economic law? And what is the sanction against a challenge of the law of the state and the plan? Is not the difference clear? What is at stake here is all of man’s liberty, the liberty to take chances, even to gamble with the death penalty. We see in this loss of liberty the downward path into which technique is leading us.
164
The economic man, that reduced schema of economic activity, *was formulated in the second half of the nineteenth century by a twofold movement. The first was the absorption, to a greater and greater extent, of the entire man in the economic network. The second was the devaluation of all human activities and tendencies other than the economic. Thence arose the validation of the producing-consuming part of man, while all his other facets were gradually erased. This reduction of man is the first movement to come to completion under the reign of the triumphant bourgeoisie. It is hardly necessary at this point, by way of explanation, to recall the predominant importance that money assumed during this period. Everything happened through its agency, in the economic and social structure, in the business world, in private life. Nothing happened without money; everything happened by means of it. All values were reduced to money values, not only by the theoreticians but by practice. The only important human occupation seemed to be to make money. And this became, in fact, the symbol of human submission to economies, an internal submission more serious than the external. ..The bourgeoisie itself submitted and compelled everyone else to submit. The world was divided into two classes: those who created the economy and amassed its rewards, and those who submitted to it and produced its riches. Both classes were possessed by it.
*unless you lived earlier/later.. then said to have happened right before that.. oi.. history ness.. oof
The bourgeois morality was and is primarily a morality of work and of metier. Work purifies, ennobles; it is a virtue and a remedy. Work is the only thing that makes life worthwhile; it replaces God and the life of the spirit. More precisely, it identifies God with work: success becomes a blessing. God expresses his satisfaction by distributing money to those who have worked well. Before this first of all virtues, the others fade into obscurity. If laziness was the mother of all the vices, work was the father of all the virtues. This attitude was carried so far that bourgeois civilization neglected every virtue but work.
supposed to’s of school/work and takes a lot of work ness et al
It is understandable that for the adult bourgeois the only important thing became the exercise of a metier, and for the youth, the choice of an occupation and preparation for it. A kind of economic predestination was established in the great families. Human destiny seemed to revolve about the making of money or the failure to make it. Such was, and is, the viewpoint of the bourgeois.
For the proletariat the result was alienation, which likewise represented the grip of the economic on the human being. In the proletariat, we see human beings emptied of all human content and real substance, and possessed by economic power. The proletarian was alienated not only because he was the servant of the bourgeois but because he became a stranger to the human condition, a sort of automaton filled with economic machinery and worked by an economic switch. But human nature cannot long tolerate such a condition. In creating it, the bourgeoisie signed the death warrant of its own system. The spiritual situation of alienated man implies revolution, and his subordination without hope demanded the creation of the revolutionary myth. It might be thought that the primacy of the economy over man (or, rather, the possession of man by the economy) would have come into question. But unfortunately, the real, not the idealized, proletarian has concentrated entirely on ousting the bourgeoisie and making money. The proletarian instrument for winning this revolution is the labor union. And the union subordinates its members even more closely to the economic function in the process of satisfying their revolutionary will and exhausting their will with regard to purely economic objects..t
any form of m\a\p.. more obscure = deeper spiritual violence
165
The counterpart of the necessary reduction of human life to working is its reduction to gorging. *If man does not already have certain needs, they must be created. .t **The important concern is not the psychic and mental structure of the human being but the uninterrupted flow of any and all goods which invention allows the economy to produce..t Whence the ***measureless trituration of the human soul, the true issue of which is propaganda.. And propaganda, reduced to advertising, relates happiness and a meaningful life to consumption. He who has money is the slave of the money he has. He who has it not is the slave of a mad desire to get it. The first and great law is consumption. Nothing but this imperative has any value in such a life..t
*need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
** mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
***legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
166
It became more and more difficult for anyone to do anything except work in order to live. But for what? Exclusively for consumption. Leisure was granted to man, but only the leisure of the consumer. Man’s primordial functions of creating, praying, judging disappeared in the rising tide of material goods. Conditions were at last ripe for bringing off the decisive operation. Technique completed its movement of encirclement and put the finishing touch to the economic man, in accordance with its unchanging procedure of transforming what is into what ought to be and making out of mere gropings an irrefutable and simple line. Technique was no longer a spontaneous movement; it was a concerted action to shape the economic man it needed.
In order for economic technique (for example, planning) to succeed, men had to satisfy its requirements. There is no such thing as technique by and in itself. In its irresistible forward progress, it forced the human individual, without whom it is nothing, to accompany it. For this reason economic man, a working hypothesis when economics was only a doctrine, was forced to become reality when reality became technical. This mutation (which had been prepared in the manner we have studied) was not completely a creation of technique, but technique found in it what it required. Stalin as well as the liberal economists, considered man as “capital.” And Jacques Aventur has shown that, from the technical point of view, man must be appraised as capital. To recoil before this conception is merely a sentimental reaction. No efficiency is possible for economic technique in the absence of exact calculation of average human production costs and human profit-making ability..t Man is capital, and he must become perfectly adapted to this role. The actions proposed by technique to educate man for this role fall into two distinct categories. The first is essentially economic and does not lead to immediate and direct action on human beings. The second, however, implies the combination of various special techniques and their intervention into human life.
In the first category is found the union of the two concepts, producer and consumer. Although traditionally a distinction was made between them, planning brings them together. It is true that man is thereby restored to a certain unity, but the new reality takes in everything. All human functions are mobilized in the “production-consumption” complex. This restoration of unity is, in a certain sense, a step forward, for it holds that production and consumption are perfectly adapted to each other and that two correlative and interdependent functions may no longer be separated, as in liberal capitalism. But what in one sense restores unity represents in another a circumscribing of the whole human being. To be in technical equilibrium, man cannot live by any but the technical reality, and he cannot escape from the social aspect of things which technique designs for him. And the more his needs are accounted for, the more he is integrated into the technical matrix. It may seem paradoxical to hold that man becomes technicized as his needs are respected. But technique itself teaches him that needs are not individual, or, put more exactly, that individual needs are negligible. What technique envisages as needs is social needs as revealed by statistics..t Technique can and will take into consideration only man’s social requirements. Of course no one denies the existence of individual needs. But when all human forces are attracted by the labor of satisfying social needs, when these forces include education, orientation, proper environment, and hygiene, when at the same time the goods necessary to the satisfaction of social needs are numerous and easy to come by while those satisfying individual needs are rare and hard to find, it is pure utopian abstraction to say that nothing prevents the existence of individual needs. On the contrary, human nature does. Technique entails socialization of needs because it takes only social needs into account. This explains why technical research is more and more compelled to act on the basis of objective criteria of value. The measure of value, which has been made objective, better integrates man into his economic condition. A hierarchy can better be established when precise rules are specified which are based on the economic value of the human being..t
graeber violence/quantification law et al
167
A second category of technical actions that are addressed directly to man and modify him attests strongly to what has just been said. It is necessary to act upon the individual in his capacity of producer so as to make him contribute his small share in carrying out the plan—that part of the operation, negligible in itself but indispensable to the whole, which technique has assigned to him. The operations of hundreds of workers depend with mathematical rigor on the work done by a single individual. The joint responsibility of all the workers subject to the same technique is rigorous. In the name of this common responsibility, it is binding on every worker to execute his task strictly with the kind of enthusiasm that calls for personal devotion. The technical means for compelling this devotion are well known, from human-relations techniques to the different kinds of propaganda: shock brigades, Stakhanovism, socialist rivalry, and so on. The study of these technical means lies outside our study of the economic sphere. But it may be noted in passing that they are closely connected with the technique of economics, which cannot be realized without them.
It is likewise possible to exert pressure upon the individual in his capacity of consumer. Roughly speaking, the problem here is to modify human needs in accordance with the requirements of planning..t The constraints that operate on man as consumer are not as sharp and brutal as those which operate on him as producer. As I have shown, the “spontaneous” creation of social needs among almost all men in our time justifies the application of economic technique. But although planning must satisfy both needs and the technical data, it is not at all certain that the correspondence between the two will be perfect What is required then is a small adjustment. After all, only social needs are in question here; there is small cause for us individualists to become upset. A sociological current is to be modified, but not the conscience of the individual. Moreover, should not the means to this end reassure us? The more techniques develop, the more unobtrusive they become. The use of the police, or even more radical means such as famine, as in the first years of the Soviet Union, shows a certain technical deficiency and a want of tact..t
168
The necessary adjustments are effected through price manipulation and public relations. (Psychoanalysis has shown the malleability of needs under the influence of public relations.) The same influences are here at work on social needs as were operative in the liberal economy. The only difference lies in the orientation of these means and in the person who uses them. Scientific, willed utilization systematically and definitely creates the economic man, who ultimately comes to be nothing more than the “needs-yield complex.”..t But the human being no longer feels any particular distress at this, because the almost magical results of economic technique come from perfect adjustment..t The man who suffered under capitalism because of its spasmodic fits and starts and its spiritual unsatisfactoriness, the individuals who suffered under a Communist regime because of fear and restraint, find themselves released from suffering by this adaptation, when in either regime technique assumes primacy. In both situations, man’s spiritual needs are partially gratified by propaganda and, in both, technique demands active participation of him. It even requires of him that he become intelligent, the better to serve the organization and the machine..t The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself. A spiritual and moral life is required of him because the machine has need of such a life: no technique is possible with amoral and asocial men. Man feels himself to be responsible, but he is not. He does not feel himself an object, but he is. He has been so well assimilated to the economic world, so well adjusted to it by being reduced to the homo economicus, in short, so well conditioned, that the appearance of personal life becomes for him the reality of personal life..t
aka: voluntary compliance of sea world
need means for global detox leap
hari rat park law
Thus, the development of economic techniques does not formally destroy the spiritual, but rather subordinates it to the realization of the Great Design. Henceforth, there is no more need for the hypothesis of the economic man. The whole of man’s life has become a function of economic technique. In its realization, technique itself has far transcended the timid hypotheses of the classical economists. Man knows himself to be more and more free, for technique has eliminated all natural forces and in this way has given him the sense of being master of his fate. The new man being created before our very eyes, correctly tailored to enter into the artificial paradise,..t the detailed and necessary product of the means which he ordains for himself—that man is I.
169
CHAPTER 4: TECHNIQUE AND THE STATE
173
Finally, the state fulfilled a political function, a function of general direction into which all the others were combined and which addressed itself to foreign as well as to domestic affairs. But on the eve of the Revolution this political function was in its infancy. There was no political technique of any sort; “secret diplomacy” could not possibly have been called a technique. Policy was delivered over to the whims of a Minister of the Interior, or an ambassador, or a Chamber of Deputies, or a dictator. There was nothing but flair, personal ability, special interest, routine. *Political theories never gave rise to any realistic practical application, only to bad copies of historical situations and to political circumstances which had to be endured with fortitude. In spite of the frequent mention of Machiavelli’s Prince, the truth is that until the beginning of the twentieth century no one ever drew the technical consequences of that work. What existed, then, was a kind of original chaos in which the man of genius always outclassed his adversaries because they never had at their disposal a technique which sufficed to redress the balance. The beginnings of a political technique had to await the appearance of Lenin. And even Lenin’s political technique in many respects had to be based on certain other techniques which he did not have at his disposal; for example, **techniques for obtaining scientific knowledge of the masses and the modes of action applicable to them, techniques of temporal and spatial co-ordination, techniques of strategy, and social techniques on a global scale. All these are only today in the process of being elaborated.
*and we’re still whac-a-mole-ing via whalespeak.. **ie of still missing it ness: brief history of future
174
We take it, then, that in the present century the state has encountered the technical phenomenon in a far different framework from the traditional
nah.. same song.. just faster/bigger.. still whac-a-mole-ing ness
175
The second cause of the interrelation of state and technique is directly related to the first (rapid extension); the application of techniques is extremely expensive. Whatever realm we survey, we note that it becomes gradually impossible for personal or familial capital, however concentrated, to answer technical requirements.
well.. 1\ doesn’t have to be.. if org around legit needs and 2\ until now.. individual does have enough for ie: sabbatical ish transition
*Modern research in nuclear physics implies that the state must pay the bill. No private person could support the cost of cyclotrons and their auxiliary apparatus. Once a certain degree of technical progress has been achieved, continual improvements give rise to instrumentation so complex and large that the cost price is inaccessible to the individual. The present growth of cost price in all technical domains is unparalleled, even in recent history. The public has gained some faint conception of this through the prices of some of the recently discovered “wonder drugs” such as streptomycin. But it fails to realize the magnitude of the growth of other cost figures. For example, one hour of flight in a B-17 bomber (comparable to the larger commercial passenger aircraft) cost 60,000 francs in 1944. The B-36, which replaced the B-17, cost 400,000 francs per flight hour in 1950. There is a comparable growth in the cost of the machines themselves. The B-17 cost 120 million francs; the B-36, 1 billion 600 million. These cost prices, officially recognized in 1951, have been far surpassed. Thus, the prototype of the B-52 cost, on the day of its commissioning, 40 billion francs. An analogous growth of cost price applies to all techniques. The prices indicated are virtually the same for commercial aviation, equipped with the latest technical improvements. Private companies no longer exist which are able to support such expense. A blast furnace for a modern steel plant costs 8 billion francs; a hot rolling-mill, 12 billion; a cable mill, 7 billion. Altogether, a plant capable of producing a million tons of steel annually requires a primary investment of 125 billion francs. It is impossible not to appeal to the state to make up with subventions the insufficient resources of private enterprise. We have already noted the alternative: the slowdown of technical progress occasioned by private capitalism. Such a slowdown would be regarded as intolerable, and could not last very long.
*oi to research ness
and oh my to ie’s in rest of p.. very counter to (or actually dancing/dying with) p 164 quote on unions tied even closer to death via clinging to econ system.. [the union subordinates its members even more closely to the economic function in the process of satisfying their revolutionary will and exhausting their will with regard to purely economic objects.]
176
The problem has nothing to do with debates about “nationalization.” No more relevant is the allegation that the state frequently applies techniques with “less ability” than private enterprise, or that it “wastes money.” What I am emphasizing here is that the principal menace to capitalistic individualism is not some theory or other, but technical progress. To take another example, it is clear that, as city-planning techniques develop, they will give rise to more extended and precise urban research, to urgent reconstruction plans, and to a new and completely indispensable conception of the city. It is impossible to go on indefinitely contemplating these plans on paper; a technique must be applied. The only question is: who shall apply it?
oh my.. and again.. direct to ari’s doc (brief history of future) that we’re still doing it.. and wrong question (who).. 1\ has to be all of us.. and 2\ the what (kind of tech) is the question.. ie: tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
Electrical networks may remain for some time independent of one another. But this situation cannot last when it is found that independence gives rise to general costs of no inconsiderable magnitude, difficulties in arranging the courses of the lines, and even practical difficulties in electrical technique. The interconnection of electrical networks is demanded by all technical men. Again, the only question is: who will execute it? And it is immediately clear that only the state is in a position to do so. The problem is even more acute when it is a question of the interconnection of the lines of several nations, not merely the domestic lines of a single country. (An international European network is already projected.)
oi to p 174 on tech and state as rev.. when actually same song
Whatever the area of interest, problems are raised by technology which demand technical solutions but which are of such magnitude that they cannot be solved by private enterprise: for example, pollution of water supplies and of the urban atmosphere. These phenomena, which have assumed such proportions that they threaten the whole of city life, are of purely technical origin. Only rigorous and authoritarian measures of general control can solve these problems if they are to be solved at all That is to say, appeal to dictatorial state action is indispensable.
oh my.. cancerous distraction.. need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
These problems all exceed the powers of private individuals. Technique, once developed to a certain point, poses problems that only the state can resolve, both from the point of view of finance and from that of power.
aka: need more whac-a-mole-ing ness to counter all the whac-a-mole-ing ness
The third cause of the interrelation of state and technique is the transformation of the role of the state and of its conceptions of its role. The state takes on increasingly extended and numerous activities. It considers itself the ordainer and preceptor of the nation. It takes charge of the national life and becomes the nation-state. ..all appeal to the state to secure a greater degree of justice and equality. In all these ways the state assumes functions which were formerly the province of private groups. And in performing these functions, the state encounters techniques hitherto employed by individuals.
When, for example, the state takes charge of education, it encounters two technical elements originally developed by private persons: a complete educational organization and a pedagogy. The state, in taking over any activity, encounters the techniques of that activity and sees its technical potential augmented thereby. The augmentation of potential reciprocally brings the state into closer relation with the technique. Nowhere is this relation clearer than in the economic field. When the state establishes itself as producer and consumer, it enters the older domain of exploitation by individuals. It is confronted with a complete technical system the broad outlines of which have already been drawn and focused. *But basically the state enters this domain because productive and economic techniques, the development of which we have already studied, render such action indispensable. Thus, we have a two-way street: technical development inevitably brings about state intervention in the economic world; and, reciprocally, when the state intervenes it finds a technical apparatus which it develops further.
*aka: structural violence of sea world
177
The nation-state was primarily a response to the cessation of economic evolution. That there were other causal factors is clear, but we are seeking to *locate the central cause..t The problem of the adaptation of the whole of society to the economic movement in all its **ramifications is not to be solved by economics alone. It is a technical problem..t The economy, with its enormous productive capacity, volume of trade, mobilization of society, and economic techniques which thirst to be applied, is no longer a closed circle, a single activity among others. It engages the life of the whole society and of all men in it.
*khan filling the gaps law.. because: missing pieces
**nothing ‘solved’ till we get to the healing (roots of).. aka: problem deep enough
Economic problems are now problems of the whole of society. The relation between the economy and all other human activities can no longer be merely empirical. Liberalism sufficed for the economy of a century and a half ago. Today it has no meaning. No economic theory is eternally valid; every period demands its own. The problem of the adaptation of society to economy (and it is in this sense rather than in the inverse, traditional sense that the problem must be posed) is a technical problem. That is to say, the problem has a solution only in a certain arrangement, through the mediation of the social apparatus and social mechanisms. This supposes an adaptative intervention having as its object the whole of society and conscious of end and methods. Only a superior power, limited by nothing and possessing all instrumentalities, is in a position to proceed to this adaptation..t This is what will bring about the mobilization of all means by the state; in our day it is completing the encounter between state and techniques which was already necessitated by the other factors we have studied.
need global detox leap and for that need tech as *nonjudgmental expo labeling.. to facil seeming chaos of the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
*the thing us whales can’t do (stop judging everything/body) and that tech can (tech w/o judgment.. tech as it could be)
Private and Public Techniques
The techniques first developed by individuals and later on encountered by the state present very different characteristics from those of traditional political techniques. In their origin and development they manifest the following traits:
but not legit diff.. still same song.. because none of us yet legit free
1) They are better perfected and better adapted than the techniques of the state. They represent the inspirations of individuals *acting out of personal interest or for those higher motives we call vocation. In either case the individual devotes himself to his task wholeheartedly and with passion; such a devotion is rarely to be found among the creators of state techniques. There **genuine enthusiasm is found only for very limited periods. Thus, the councilors of Philip IV, the prefects of Napoleon, the Nazi Fuhrer, the people’s commissars of the Soviet Union alone seem to have been capable of rivaling the ardor and technical devotion of free workers who have made technical progress. ***Isolated individuals working for personal motives seem to display more imagination. When the ****same problems are posed simultaneously to the state and to individuals, the individuals are usually the first to find the correct method and solution. Whenever it has been of importance to secure acceptance for some brand of goods, doctrine, product, or action, private persons (businessmen or religious groups) confronted with the same necessities as the state have tended to respond much more rapidly. The Church created propaganda; later, private commercial interests created publicity. The state and its propaganda came in a poor third. Even then, it was private persons who applied propaganda long before the great systems of Lenin and Hitler. In France the Maison de la Presse inaugurated efficient propaganda operations in 1916. In England, a private organization, The Central Committee for National Patriotic Organization, performed the same function. Commercial interests found the most efficient propaganda methods by exploiting the discoveries of psychology and psychoanalysis.
*this is why same song.. not legit personal interests.. ie: not itch-in-the-soul.. so not legit/opp energy.. et al
**again.. whac-a-mole-ing ness because warning ness (has to be all of us for the dance to dance)
***more.. but not yet enough
****need diff/deeper problem.. ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
178
In the private creation of techniques there is a *very great diversity of methods. **No one acts in accordance with a general schema. The individual always lives a much more realistic and real life than a collectivity, especially the state. ***The individual considers the problem as it really exists in its individuality and, as a consequence, seeks the method that represents the best solution. The state, on the other hand, acts on masses of men and on multiple problems, and it is inevitably drawn to schematize and to deny the complexity of problems. As a result, it is unable to discover the technique best adapted to their solution. ****This is why techniques created by individuals yield the best output and are better adapted to their objects, why they are techniques in the truest sense. We discover the same thing in the following fact: the individual possesses only limited financial resources and cannot allow himself the luxury of waste and excess. When he seeks the solution of a difficulty, expense is a factor. He must find the least costly mode of action; thus, he is brought around to economy of means, a characteristic of true technique which we have already examined. .. The state rarely discovers and applies any true techniques, for the simple reason that it has too much power and too many financial resources for its agents to seek out economy of means—the first requirement. Its methods are, generally speaking, ponderous and expensive and require an enormous apparatus to secure mediocre results. Its results are obtained, in fact, through the sheer enormity of the means employed rather than through their technical quality. (This is evident today in the French insurance industry.) *****The private person, on the other hand, is constrained by pecuniary necessity to develop true techniques. This also applies sometimes in the case of a poor state. Such was the case in the Third Reich. Another factor operated in favor of private persons throughout the nineteenth century: capitalistic competition. Then techniques had not yet produced machines and methods exceeding human possibilities; it was therefore mandatory to employ the most efficient techniques so as not to be crushed by the competition. Technical improvement usually conferred substantial competitive superiority. This favored an acceleration of private technical progress right up to the time when it was no longer possible for the finances of private entities to keep pace with technical progress.
*but not diverse enough for the dance.. because **we all still do follow the schema of sea world
***we have no idea.. until we detox.. and if we don’t detox all at once.. then whac-a-mole-ing ness and warning ness and costello screen\service law.. et al
****actually not.. again.. same song as long as still in sea world.. need global detox leap
*****makes no diff if still wrong focus/problem.. all cancerous distractions till we org around legit needs
179
The population explosion, for example, has encouraged the proliferation of private research. Suddenly there were too many people. It was impossible to employ all the new workers, and even industrial production could not absorb the extra manpower. *It became a matter of prime necessity to discover new industries and to utilize new work forms. Technique proved to be just the right means for exploring the possibilities. The extension of the factory system, along with technical application in certain new domains, was the (unconscious) means of employing the surplus workers. Simultaneously, however, it precipitated crises of unemployment. (The two facts are intimately related.) Thus, techniques rapidly came to be employed everywhere to a certain extent They have taken over not only all working life but also man’s diversions, which have been transformed into industrial enterprises. **Very soon man himself became the object of technique, a mere means to the end of profitmaking. Among the ***most notable techniques developed and applied in this area are public relations and human relations, which have as their goal to associate, adapt, and integrate the human individual into the technical milieu in such a way that he will not suffer from it.
*? not necessity..
**yeah.. naming the goal as profit making.. yet who is profitting if ie***hari present in society law.. ooof
181
The same phenomenon appeared in the realm of finance under the Third Reich. Hitler’s revolution claimed to have done away with all the classical methods of finance; it wanted to be revolutionary in the management of nationalized enterprises, in the organization of commerce and monetary relations, and even in financial technique. Insofar as National Socialism was a party, it emphasized the struggle against capitalism. Feder’s program provided for a complete transformation of economic and financial life; manipulation of money, prices, and wages would lead to the disappearance of capitalism, and to this end completely new financial forms were recommended. But, *little by little, financial necessity in its most traditional form reasserted itself: to accomplish reforms, money was needed..t In 1938 Schacht reaffirmed the old position that only the orthodox financial technique of capitalism was capable of furnishing the funds necessary to the Nazi state. Rejection of inflation, short-term financing, refusal to use currency for financing—all these were traditional principles of financial technique. The financial machinery of the Third Reich was nearly identical with that of the Empire in 1914. All this is characteristic of the submission of state and revolutionary doctrine to enemy principles through the effects of techniques, which, when they are efficient, are necessarily common to both. In essence, the Nazis turned from technically untenable inventions back to an efficient financial technique, a technique identical with the one that dominated in the capitalistic countries and in the Soviet Union. At a given moment and in a given framework, there are only a limited number of techniques for attaining a given result.
*if so need to just code it as the planned obsolescence .. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
182
*I could go on and show that all technical rules and institutions are identically reproduced in the socialist state..t This means that there are no longer any specifically socialist institutions. Nor are there any administrative or economic organizations which are peculiarly the result of socialism. The socialist state, because it is efficient, has been obliged to adopt the technical principles of capitalism. Hence, in order to distinguish the socialist situation from the others, socialism always falls back on that vaguest of all concepts, teleology. Capitalism, it is said, has regard only for itself; it seeks but to preserve itself. Socialism, on the other hand, is a constructive force on the march. But nothing warrants the belief that the means employed will result in socialism. Teleology can only create a stir for a short time as an instrument of propaganda; but it is far from certain that such propaganda can give character to socialism, which more and more is losing its specific reality as a result of technique.
*everything same song to date
183
The conjunction of state and technique is not a neutral fact. For many it is not surprising and implies nothing but a growth of state power. They ask whether, after all, it is not a good thing that the state perform its functions as well as possible and be well equipped to this end. We have indeed known a state which had only a laughable police force, powerless and incapable of checking criminals. It is a good thing for technical progress in this sphere to collate all other techniques, thus enabling the state to perform its role of arresting crime. These techniques, when utilized by the state, enable it to restore order, to guarantee certain liberties, and even perhaps to master its political destiny. This is how current opinion interprets the conjunction of technique and the state. I believe that such attitudes are superficial and inaccurate. Technique, in its present state of development, is no longer merely a passive instrument under state control, as it was under the control of certain individuals. The question now is what we see when we examine contemporary facts instead of antiquated principles.
ooof.. missing it if still any form of m\a\p
184
This new organization of administration results in part from the creation of a technique of administration and in part from the introduction of the machine into all organizations. The two are related, not only because mechanization entails, as I have already pointed out, a reorganization of administrative units but also because mechanization solves the major problem of administration, the problem of paper work. All organizations are founded on paper work. And when paper work transcends human capacities by virtue of sheer quantity and complexity, the problem of what to do about it arises. The machine is the solution.
letting go is the solution.. too much ness et al.. utopia of rules et al
185
The financial regime of a modern state is highly reminiscent of commercial affairs. The rules of accounting are modified by the application of business machines, for example, punched-card machines. Here machine intervention directly voids an older administrative technique. A certain flexibility is necessary but is rarely found in state structures, which are, for various reasons, rigid. Nothing less than revolution brings about the adaptation of political regimes to the technical improvements which have become mandatory as a result of private enterprise. This is only a corollary of what I have been saying—namely, that political motivations do not dominate technical phenomena, but rather the reverse. The state is usually unable for doctrinal reasons to revolutionize the techniques of public finance. But when technical progress makes this revolution mandatory, the state is obliged to capitulate.
word there is perpetuation.. not revolution.. oi
186
A second consequence of the penetration of the state by techniques is that the state as a whole becomes an enormous technical organism.
not organism.. rather.. organization.. huge diff .. organism as fractal et al.. and we’re missing it
187
It is not sufficient to improve one or another governmental service, or to create isolated new organisms. The whole structure and methodology must be considered; in this process the politician does not count for much.
oooof.. need a legit nother way – the dance of legit organisms
192
The overwhelming majority of Frenchmen had no direct interest in the matter; yet, it ought not to be forgotten that adherence to a technical decision is always a matter of personal interest.
but can’t be if still deciding ness vs curiosity over decision making ness
193
The entire administration is only a machine whose operations must become more and more rigorous. In this way, that ideal theoretical situation is attained in which, to use the words of James K. Feely, Jr, the *“margin of chance between intention and realization” is almost nil..t For, according to Feely, the smaller this margin becomes, the more a check on execution appears possible, and the **more the coefficient of predictability is increased. Such a situation would give maximum security in all the different administrative units, and what Feely proposed as a theoretical ideal becomes practical. The only price tag on its attainment is the conversion of the administration into an apparatus, the civil servants into objects, and the nation into a supplier of working capital.
*tech to hasten ness.. via nonjudgmental expo labeling.. because need global detox leap to get to legit ‘intention’.. aka: itch-in-the-soul
**this is an ie verifying whalespeak.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
The nation becomes the object of the technical state in that it furnishes all the different kinds of material substratum: men, money, economy, and so on. The state becomes a machine designed to exploit the means of the nation. The relation between state and nation is henceforth completely different from what it had been before. The nation is no longer primarily a human, geographic, and historical entity. It is an economic power whose resources must be put to work, and to which a “yield” must be returned. In connection with this yield, the older technicians used the term maximum but the newer ones use the term optimum. Maximum yield is yield that exhausts and debases the resources of the state in a short interval of time; optimum yield is yield that attempts to safeguard substance and vitality, the typical example being the TVA. However this may be, we must regard the nation as an entity whose total resources are to be brought into action precisely because *all the different techniques, mutually conditioning one another, have come into play..t Once the technician has commenced his operations, he cannot recognize any limits. He cannot esteem or respect anything in the nation except the “nature of things.” This promotes the greater coherence of the state-nation which is so characteristic of our times.
*this would only happen with the unconditional part of left to own devices ness (which we haven’t yet to date tried)
196
There is an optimum tax structure which can be completely determined. It gives the best yield to the state, and at the same time equalizes the fortunes of the citizens and saves the fiscal substance. There is no valid reason for not implementing it.
oi.. of math and men.. whalespeak
Planning is being extended to all domains of political life as well as to all state regimes. In 1951, Chancellor Adenauer declared that German youth had not responded to the efforts of the regime, that the youth were anarchic and disorganized, that it was impossible to have any hopes for them, and that planning represented the sole means of reintegrating this wayward youth into the German community..t He announced that a German Youth Plan was being elaborated to cope with the necessity of bringing youth into rigid organizations, giving youth an ideal and a collective soul, discipline and a fixed way of life Adenauer went on to say that all this had to be planned. In a way, he was suggesting a return to totalitarian methods. Fiance in 1952 took steps to provide planning for scholarships and tourism. In 1956 it planned youth organizations, and in 1960 sports. It is to be noted that planning is becoming more and more widespread in the United States, where there is a tendency to apply it not only to economic problems but also to social (for example, city planning) and political questions. Indeed, American planning is becoming a basic element; it is no longer an accidental fact or a mere adjunct. In the United States there are nearly two thousand planning organisms in the service of the various states, not to mention national organisms, some of which are public (The Council of Economic Advisors) and some private (The National Planning Association).
all.. oh my oh my.. planning ness
197
Gaston Bardet has shown that good city planning requires the mobilization of the entire economy. Then, it will be said, the best thing is not to do any city planning at all. But planning cannot possibly be avoided; the explosive increase in the population means that no one will have any living space unless the area at our disposal is organized rationally. Moreover, certain inconveniences of urban life are daily becoming more serious; for example, traffic density, air pollution, and excessive noise. None of these problems can be effectively resolved except by means of a truly regulative plan. In the last few years, numerous medical and administrative congresses have of necessity been concerned with this cluster of problems.
Similar problems are raised by immigration. No country is today in a position to allow free movement in or out: free movement would result in excessive population displacement in the direction of countries with high wages or political stability. Conversely, countries with dictatorial regimes would see their populations dwindle, a state of affairs they would not welcome since it means diminution of power. Democratic countries would see an exaggerated rise in their populations, which they certainly do not desire because of the danger to their economic equilibrium and the risk of a fifth column. What is to be done? Put a complete stop to population displacement? Such a solution is neither possible nor desirable for reasons of manpower and colonization. But this presupposes a plan for immigration, subject moreover to international agreement. Immigration planning will be identical whether we have to do with a dictatorship or a democracy. It will require identical police, economic, and administrative mechanisms. Present-day democracies cannot escape these technical necessities..t
why we need to also let go of any form of democratic admin
The supremacy of technical instruments is a result of their exact correspondence to social necessities. . t
ooooooof.. we have no idea what our legit needs are.. need a means to org for legit necessities
198
Let us consider two examples. The concentration camp is generally taken as characteristic of dictatorial and Fascistic regimes. Such institutions undeniably exist in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Bulgaria. But they existed in France under the Third Republic and in England during the Boer War. We must not be misled by differences in name. Work camps, re-education camps, refugee camps—all represent the same fact. And we are only too aware of how important the use of concentration camps was in Algeria. We are speaking here of the concentration camp in its pure form, which has nothing to do with crematoria or hanging up the inmates by the thumbs. Such tortures are imputable to men, not to technique. *The camp as an institution is making its appearance everywhere, under the most varied political regimes, as a result of the conjunction of social problems and police technique. .t The terms of the problem can be enumerated in this way: given the nationalistic organization and conversely the existence of fifth columns, given the administrative character of the supervision of territory and the population expansion, it is absolutely necessary to establish a police power based not on individuals but on categories of individuals. There is no way of escaping the establishment of police power by categories—which implies, for example, preventive arrest, concentration of masses of innocent persons not for judging but for sorting, and so forth. To effect sorting and checking operations, highly perfected systems have been developed, as, for example, the MVD in the Soviet Union, the FBI in the United States, and the CIC in occupied Germany. Such systems, obviously, often require a considerable length of time for their operations. Suspects may be detained for years before the system finishes its investigations. Its precision and rigor cause it to move slowly. **The technical system of concentration camps has proved so efficient and satisfactory to the state that it is increasingly being incorporated into our society..t It no longer represents the activity of aberrant dictators, but rather the activity of every good administrator.
*need a sabbatical ish transition.. rather than keeping people on hold ness
**exponentiating spiritual violence/structural violence
The concentration-camp system of today is closely linked to the nationalistic state. But it fits so well into administrative systems in general that there is no chance of its disappearing,..t even if the nationalistic structure of the modern world were to change. Certain categories of undesirables would remain, social misfits for whom the camp is the ideal solution, at least until a more efficient technique allows the resolution of the problem at even less expense. But it is highly improbable that this will happen in the near future.
all.. my oh my.. camp ness
199
Friedmann, in order to do something constructive about this downgraded and overspecialized manpower, has put his hopes in the evolution of socialism, which, *by giving man the feeling of socialist brotherhood and the consciousness of working for the common good, would give him pleasure in his work..t But **this psychological remedy (whose value I am not trying to deny) could do nothing at all to bridge the gap between the intellectual incapacity of the mob of specialized workers on the one hand and the monopoly of technical means by a technical elite on the other.
*working for common good ness of socialism ness or whatever.. not deep enough (to last.. because not yet the dance)
**irrelevant s to the dance.. oi
200
The real problem lies in the psychological situation of the individual assailed by a number of equally skillful propagandas acting upon his nervous system, and now, with the discovery of new methods, probing and disturbing his unconscious, working over his intelligence, and exacerbating his reactions. *The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement.t **He can no longer be a smiling and skeptical spectator. t ***He is indeed “engaged,” but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions..t Techniques have taught the organizers how to force him into the game. ****He has been stripped of his power of judgment.t If he has not been “fixed” in advance, he oscillates at random, in obedience not to his own power of judgment but to the law of large numbers. The intensive use of propaganda destroys the citizen’s faculty of discernment *****In a truly democratic regime, everything rests on judicious choice and free will ..t But it is precisely in democracies that propaganda machines proliferate. Where only a single propaganda machine exists, that of the state, it conditions individuals directly and could not be really intensive since there is no competition. In the so-called democracies, propaganda must become more and more intense in order to-dominate its rivals. It becomes thereby more and more insidious.
**smiles ness et al.. part of what’s perpetuating same song
***the voluntary compliance of spiritual violence .. of structural violence.. of graeber violence in care law et al
****thinking life is about the finite set of choices of judge\ment is also what’s perpetuating same song
*****if any form of democratic admin.. not free.. if ‘judicious choice’.. not free.. oi
203
The technological state corresponds directly to modern society itself since it is technically constructed and *exists in the very soul of men who worship efficiency, order, and speed. **The classical state corresponds to vanished forces of an entirely different nature.
*probably not in their soul.. but in the orderliness of the intellect ness.. of the supposed to’s of sea world
**if zoom out far enough.. nothing legit ‘diff nature’ to date.. all same song ie: nothing to date to facil the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
Documents such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights mean nothing to a mankind surrounded by techniques. *It is our responsibility to study man’s situation vis-à-vis techniques and not vis-à-vis some no longer existent force. No one gets worked up about declarations which may be violated with impunity, ..
*need to let go of responsibility ness as well.. if want the dance to dance
204
All the theories concerning “crimes against humanity” are of this order; the charge of genocide is in fact the judicial justification of the need to condemn the vanquished as war criminals.
205
Power is power; but it cannot be exercised without at least the appearance of justice. Doctrine is charged, therefore, with the task of furnishing power with this semblance of justice..t We repeat, it has not always been so. But since, at present, power is technique, these intellectual constructs no longer have any usefulness beyond supplying justification.
206
Driencourt notes with surprise that “the country which boasts of being most liberal [that is, the United States] is the country in which the technique of thought direction is, by its perfection, the closest to totalitarian practices; and is the country in which people, accustomed to living in groups, are most inclined to leave it to the experts to fix lines of spiritual conduct.”.. t
207
Why is this so? The answer is that technique is a mass instrument. One can think of technique only in terms of categories. *Technique has no place for the individual;.. **the personal means nothing to it ..t We certainly cannot deny in theory that every individual is particular; we even concede him his particularity willingly. But in the case of rules of organization and action we are unable to take this particularity into account. It must remain carefully concealed; the particular is identical with the subjective and is not allowed to show. If it could appear it would have to do so by way of technique, and in technique there is no particular. ***Technical procedures, therefore, abstract from the individual and seek traits common to masses of men and mass phenomena..t ****Without these common traits, neither statistics nor the use of the law of great numbers nor the Gaussian curve—indeed, no organization—would be possible..t Abstraction from the individual is doubtless intended only as a formal procedure for the convenience of reasoning. *****But the formal has become terribly real. It has produced the world which constrains man on every side, which leaves him no outlet to that realm which was ostensibly excluded merely for the convenience of reasoning. There no longer exists any form in which the particular can be concretely incarnated because form has become the domain of technique. Technique, in the form of psychotechnique, aspires to take over the individual, that is, ******to transform the qualitative into the quantitative. It knows only two possible solutions: the transformation or the annihilation of the qualitative. It is precisely by way of the former that technique is totalitarian; and when the state becomes technical, it too becomes totalitarian; it has no alternative.
*to me.. rather.. it does.. because of its exponentiating abilities.. it can listen to each and every one of us.. whenever..
**to me what it has no place for..what means nothing to it.. is about non judge\ment ..which is what we desperately need.. and humans can’t seem to do.. in order for the unconditional part of left to own devices ness to allow the dance to dance
***we need to abstract differently.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
****we don’t need all the maths ness to org.. we need to try a diff means to org.. ie: org around legit needs via tech w/o judgment
*****aka: sea world.. since forever
******graeber violence/quantification law et al
208
The democratic states, on the other hand, have not attained to this consciousness and are consequently inhibited in their development Scruples concerning tradition, principles, judicial affirmations, the maintenance of a façade of public and private morality—all these still exist in the democratic state. It may be going too far to say that scruples concerning human beings also exist in democratic states; the democratic state is preoccupied most of all with a very special type of man: the voter..t
any form of democratic admin = cancerous distraction
In the long run it will have to capitulate, but in the meantime its scruples act as a drag on it, if not in the actual application of techniques (which would, in any case, be impossible), at least in its enterprise. In order to force the democratic state to come to any decision there must always be a “present danger,” some direct competition with the dictatorial state, in which action becomes a matter of life or death..t
The superiority of dictatorship stems wholly from its massive exploitation of techniques. Democracy has no choice in the matter: either it utilizes techniques in the same way as the enemy, or it will perish. It is clear enough that the first term of this proposition will prevail For this reason, wars always bring about a prodigious advance in the use of certain techniques in democratic societies. The democracies are, of course, careful to assert that they are using these techniques only because of the state of war. But there are always wars of one kind or another: war preparations, cold war, hot war, new cold war, and so on, ad infinitum..t
david on war.. war, evans polite\ness law, et al
210
However, both Nazism and Communism were working toward the total exploitation of the means which man had created to vanquish necessity.
211
In this context, judicial technique consists in setting reality in a framework of means through legal decisions and in rendering these decisions effective. It can then be reasonably argued that political function and judicial technique are complementary. Political function consists in supplying the substance of the rules, that is, the goal to be attained, the political or social ideal which the law is to realize. By its laws the state will also indicate ways and means of reaching the political goal, and in so doing will approach reality to a sufficient degree, without, however, grappling with it directly.
212
The great task of judicial technique then is to arrange the elements furnished it by the political function in order that the law not be merely a verbalism, a dead letter. And this takes a whole arsenal of proofs, civil and penal sanctions, guarantees, in short, the whole detailed mechanism created to secure the realization of the ends of the law.
aka: structural violence
Haesaert seems to me to have defined this judicial technique excellently as “the ensemble of means by which the subjects of law are induced to take, in the social system in which they exist, the legal attitude,” the active or passive behavior judged necessary. It is really, therefore, a question of obedience, and this is in fact the end toward which judicial technique aims..t
For the technician of the law, all law depends on efficiency. There is no law but in its application. A law which is not applied is not a law. Obedience to rule is the fundamental condition of its being..t Legal abstraction is unreal. The whole technical apparatus (expression of legal norms, publication of laws, applications in jurisprudence or doctrine, voluntary or forced realization) has but one end: the application of the law. And this complex corresponds exactly to the notion of technique in general, that is, an artificial search for efficiency..t In this definition, efficiency is taken in its pure state; we are forced to admit that law does not exist without it. The term artificial is used in the same way; law is no longer obeyed spontaneously, and the popular consciousness which originally created law does not adhere spontaneously and naturally to this system. Application of law no longer arises from popular adhesion to it but from the complex of mechanisms which, by means of artifice and reason, adjust behavior to rule..t
213
But it is not possible to retain it because of the difficulties it involves, the uncertainty of operation and unpredictability it entails. In a word, judicial technique implies that bureaucracy cannot be burdened any longer with justice..t
In Egypt, in Rome in the fourth century after Christ, in fifteenth-century France, and in all of twentieth-century Western civilization, the concept of order and security is substituted for justice as the end and foundation of law when judicial technique becomes sufficiently developed..t
The formula then becomes: “Better injustice than disorder.”..t The notions of order and security are at least as easily reduced to technique as is the impossible notion of justice. One knows exactly what measures must be taken to achieve order. The definition of order may vary, but the means are always the same..t One knows and is in a position to specify the conditions of legal security. Even though these means imply injustice, it is impossible to object, in view of the changeable character of the concept of justice..t The more explicit judicial technique becomes, the more the law tends to ensure order. This is, moreover, one of the major objectives of the state. Therefore, the law and the police become identical, for the law is no longer anything but an instrument of the state. At such a price judicial technique blossoms and yields its consequences. Today we are in a position to study this phenomenon in all its vigor.
judge\ment ness and carhart-harris entropy law
need tech w/o judgment for global detox leap from all the voluntary compliance/structural violence
if we must be efficient.. let’s be efficient about the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
214
The enormous simplicity of technique has deprived the whole ensemble of judicial mechanisms of meaning—mechanisms which had as their end to guarantee the law and to cause it to be obeyed without excessive use of force. The whole apparatus of devices such as penalties, distraints, and the like, no longer makes sense. There is no need of such finesse. Adherence and obedience are secured by extralegal means (among which the police are very often the most innocuous).
We are today in the process of transcending the traditional position. That is to say, law ensures order instead of justice. Hans Kelsen represents the culmination of this development; and it was expressed in certain of the legal forms of Nazism. *The Nazis recognized that a science of human behavior would make it possible to dispense with many legal rules. **If the people to be administered were “persuaded,” if they were made to understand by sufficiently powerful means that the observation of the rule was in their own interest, that rule would become more and more useless..t If a sufficiently functional, realistic, and coherent pattern is established for the organized human milieu (and the technique of organization can furnish such a plan in short order), a great part of the administrative apparatus is rendered superfluous. In this way society is directed toward a progressive emptying of legal forms and a consequent gain in the human techniques which render a gendarmery useless.
*rather black science of people/whales behavior
**yup .. voluntary compliance
A further consequence of the technicization of the law is that the distinction between political technique and judicial technique disappears, for all practical purposes. The subject and object of the law are no longer social, but rather technical, exigencies. The technician approves of proceeding in this way: the very matter of law becomes his object. He has good reason to desire such a situation. He is no longer burdened with absurd methods of procedure. His judgments become completely rational *since he understands the social necessities and the economic situation and can take them into account in his calculations. But it should not be thought that the technician merely translates these necessities into law. Above all, he elaborates them, and they are essentially subordinate to him and his technique.
*social necessities of sea world.. need to org around legit needs
*This explains the enormous proliferation of laws. The technician analyzes and predicts; he cannot endure the indeterminate or tolerate any initiative which upsets order..t These two traits explain the multiplicity of laws. In the past, this multiplicity was attributed to inefficiency. The repeated promulgation of a law, or the indefinite multiplication of laws, accentuated the fact that laws were going unobserved. Legal multiplicity today is something else again. Whatever a technician believes is true must be made into law. But his inferences only concern details. His analytic spirit leads him to perceive, understand, and affirm strictly localized truths; and thus strictly delimited, they then become the objects of law. **There must be a law for each fact; whence the indefinite proliferation of the legal apparatus..t
*fuller too much law.. inspectors of inspectors et al..
The modern proliferation of laws can also be explained by the legal technician’s complete antipathy to the notion of a doctrinal law, to a jurisprudence of “concepts.” A legal system which merely establishes principles and lays down general lines of procedure entrusts to the judge the creation of the living law under the maxim praetor viva vox juris civilis. Such a state of affairs is intolerable to *the technician, who dreads above all else the arbitrary, the personal, and the fortuitous. The technician is the great enemy of chance; he finds the personal element insupportable. For that reason he finds it advisable to enclose the judge or the administrator in a tighter and tighter technical network, more and more hedged about with legal prescriptions, in such a way that the citizen will understand exactly where he is heading and just what consequences are to be expected..t
*graeber unpredictability/surprise law
215
Law, then, must provide for every contingency, so that man cannot disturb its operation. The traditional development of law involved a kind of competition between judges and crooks; but with the progress of technique, this is no longer the case. Society, through the application of extralegal means, is beginning to guarantee public obedience to the law. Its real problem now is to restrain the activities of those who would apply the law only to distort it, from the judge down to the lowest prison guard.
The smallest detail must therefore be invested with the majesty of the law: after all, law concerns an organized society. The law of persons, for example, is now the law of persons technically organized. Even property law has been profoundly modified by the disturbances to which technique has subjected property ownership. We see once more that all the fundamental technical data verify and reinforce one another.
This godlike will of the state is for modern man the most precise expression of technique.
In the second place, we are witnessing the disappearance of the law in the legal proliferation described. This dissolution is notable in two things, the loss by the law of its end and of its domain.
216
In connection with the first point, law, whether we like it or not, is dependent on justice. This is no arbitrary affirmation; further, I do not have in mind a justice which is subject to all manner of intellectual tortures. When law is detached from justice, it becomes a compass without a needle. The substitution of order for justice, useful though this may be for the purpose of making law technical, itself quickly becomes a contributory factor in this dissociation. For what does order signify? In effect, the same thing as efficiency. Law must assure order. Order is the application of the will of the state. Law must be efficient. Efficiency is itself order.. t
carhart-harris entropy law.. efficiency ness.. kelly efficiency law et al.. aziz let go law et al
220
Modern man divines that there is only one reasonable way out: to submit and take what profit he can from what technique otherwise so richly bestows upon him. If he is of a mind to oppose it, he finds himself really alone..t
warning ness.. costello screen\service law.. et al
In the joy of conquest, he has not perceived that what he has created takes from him the possibility of being himself..t
black science of people/whales law.. wilde not-us law
221
The basic effect of state action on techniques is to co-ordinate the whole complex. The state possesses the power of unification, since it is the planning power par excellence in society. In this it plays its true role, that of co-ordinating, adjusting, and equilibrating social forces. ..Planning itself is the result of well-applied techniques, and only the state is in a position to establish plans which are valid on the national level. We are, at present, beginning to see plans on a continental scale, not only the so-called five-year plans, but the Marshall Plan and plans for assisting underdeveloped countries.
only cancerous distractions to date.. for (blank)’s sake
The state alone can undertake the indispensable task of bridging these specializations. The state knows approximately the available resources in men and techniques and can undertake the still embryonic function of co-ordinator. Since discoveries in one technical sector are so useful in others, the role of co-ordinator is bound to become more and more important.
everything to date whalespeak org.. need to org around legit needs
222
In addition to co-ordinating the different techniques, the state furnishes material means far beyond the power of any individuals to supply. An expedition to the North Pole, which only a half century ago was within the resources of one or at most a few private persons, is no longer possible on a private basis. Formerly all that was needed was Eskimo equipment, such as a boat, sledges, dogs—and, above all, courage. Today complicated mechanical equipment is necessary: airplanes (especially equipped for the cold and for ice landings), caterpillar trucks, radio and radio telephones, prefabricated housing, and so on. Every possible means to lessen danger is available to him who dreams of exploring unknown territory. It would doubtless be possible to revive old traditions—by risking one’s life. But why reject the new means? Why endanger one’s life when one can do a better job without that? Obviously, bravado is unreasonable. One must employ the maximum means to assure optimal results with the least danger. But no private person has the means to set into motion the enormous apparatus that is needed. The means must be requisitioned by the state, *which alone is in a position to find indefinite supplies of cash and to exploit financial techniques forbidden to individuals.
*not.. at least no longer.. true.. need: a sabbatical ish transition
But the *state demands something in return for subventions. The state does not think it important for an individual to go to the North Pole, either for sport’s sake or for honors. The state desires tangible technical results. It agrees to furnish assistance for purposes of scientific research and for the acquisition of certain rights it hopes to exploit; for example, mineral resources and aviation. The result must be the technical aggrandizement of the state; that is **the only condition under which a contract between state and individual is possible.
*why nothing yet to date has worked/danced – strings et al
**no longer (if ever) true
223
..Only the state can purchase essential scientific equipment and, in addition, give the scientist the indispensable support of its authority.
If a discovery does not concern the public directly, its reaction is generally enthusiastic, as, for example, in the case of supersonic aircraft. But if the public is directly affected, if the discovery may in fact be applied to it, enthusiasm is notably diminished, the more so because there is always a difference of opinion among the technicians themselves. Here the state intervenes…the state overcomes the objections of individuals to technical progress… Through the authority of the state, technique is no longer at the service of private interests; and this gives the state, if not real freedom, at least additional justification.
oi.. whalespeak
224
Research is blind; it advances gropingly and by means of a thousand experiments which miscarry.
if only.. no truesl
225
Neither individuals nor public opinion nor the structure of the state is oriented toward the acceptance of the kind of culture pure scientific research would represent.
maybe research isn’t a thing for free people
ie: black science of people/whales law et al
Capitalists and state alike become impatient at delays in research, at experiments which a priori “lead to nothing,” and at the “uncertainty” of the scientist when he indulges in pure research without knowing in advance which research will pay off and which will not.
if still talking pay off.. not free
One of its institutes (the Institute for Information) is charged with collating the technical publications of the entire world; for this task alone it employs 2,000 people full-time.
fuller too much law.. utopia of rules.. bs jobs from birth.. et al
227
The state mobilizes all technicians and scientists, and imposes on all a precise and limited technical objective. It forces them to specialize to a greater and greater degree, and remains itself the ordering force behind the specialists. It forbids all research which it deems not to be in its own interests and institutes only that research which has utility. Everything is subordinated to the idea of service and utility. Ends are known in advance; science only furnishes the means.
oi .. non legit data to date.. if we’d even dance like that.. ie: focused on research ness et al
The state and technique—increasingly interrelated—are becoming the most important forces in the modern world; they buttress and reinforce each other in their aim to produce an apparently indestructible, total civilization.
229
5 – human techniques
230
The last techniques to make their appearance are those which relate directly to the human being. They are today the subject of great discoveries—and great hopes. We hear everywhere: “They will save everything.” Before we study them, let us inquire why they have appeared.
oi.. nothing to date has related directly to human being ness.. only to whales ness..
mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh.. still not yet.. need tech as nonjudgmental expo labeling
231
Necessities
we have no idea what legit needs are.. and most desperately need to org around legit needs
Human Tension
Never before has so much been required of the human being. By chance, in the course of history some men have had to perform crushing labors or expose themselves to mortal peril. But those men were slaves or warriors. Never before has the human race as a whole had to exert such efforts in its daily labors as it does today as a result of its absorption into the monstrous technical mechanism—an undifferentiated but complex mechanism which makes it impossible to turn a wheel without the sustained, persevering, and intensive labor of millions of workers, whether in white collars or in blue. The tempo of man’s work is not the traditional, ancestral tempo; nor is its aim the handiwork which man produced with pride, the handiwork in which he contemplated and recognized himself.
I shall not write (after all, so many others already have) about the difference between conditions of work today and in the past—how today’s work is less fatiguing and of shorter duration, on the one hand, but, on the other, is an aimless, useless, and callous business, tied to a clock, an absurdity profoundly felt and resented by the worker whose labor no longer has anything in common with what was traditionally called work.
but/yet/and none to date ‘work’ of the dance.. all to date goes with kilpi work law et al
This is true today even for the peasantry. The important thing, however, is not that work is in a sense harsher than formerly, but that it calls for different qualities in man. It implies in him an absence, whereas previously it implied a presence. This absence is active, critical, efficient; it engages the whole man and supposes that he is subordinated to its necessity and created for its ends.
This is the first time in history that man has been so affected in so many untraditional ways. Carried along by events, he has been plunged into war at periodic intervals. But today’s war is total war, a unique and unbelievable phenomenon. It is the onus and concern of all men. It subjects everyone to the same way of life, puts everyone on a level with everyone else, and threatens everyone with the same deaths Under its sway men have to endure unheard of sufferings and fatigue. War is now beyond human endurance in noise, movement, enormity of means, and precision of machines; and man himself has become merely an object, an object to be killed, and prey to a permanent panic that he is unable to translate into personal action. Man is subjected by modern war to a nervous tension, a psychic pressure, and an animal submission which are beyond human power to support. But, involved and committed to the machine, he does contrive to support all this, admirable machine that he is! In the process, however, he is stretched to the limit of his resistance, like a steel cable which may break at any moment.
hari present in society law.. but since forever
The conditions of war may still be abnormal and exceptional. Nevertheless, even four or five years of war are significant in the life of a man. And the conditions of war eventually become very nearly his daily state; for the “abnormal” and the “exceptional,” with a somewhat lesser intensity, are reproduced regularly during the course of each day. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel..
232
See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.
hari present in society law vs bachelard oikos law
Every man is in this fix, not merely the proletariat, and nothing can be done about it. What was once the abnormal has become the usual, standard condition of things. Even so, *the human being it ill at ease in this strange new environment, and the tension demanded of him weighs heavily on his life and being. He seeks to flee—and tumbles into the snare of dreams; he tries to comply—and falls into the life of organizations; he feels maladjusted—and becomes a hypochondriac. But the new technological society has foresight and ability enough to anticipate these human reactions. It has undertaken, with the help of techniques of every kind, to make supportable what was not previously so, and not, indeed, by modifying anything in man’s environment but by taking action upon man himself. **Psychology is resorted to more and more; everybody knows how important morale isl Man can support the harshest and most inhumane living conditions, provided his morale holds. Innumerable psychological examples and experiments confirm this.
*since forever..
**oi.. whalespeak
In a world where technique demands the utmost of men, this maximum cannot be attained, maintained, or surpassed—as sometimes is required—except by a will that is always steady and taut. Man does not by nature possess such a will. He is by no means naturally prepared for such a sublime condition, and if he sometimes does attain to it naturally, the exaltation endures only a few moments. Yet it must be prolonged. Psychological conditions must be created to enable the individual to give his utmost to war (or peace) and to resist prostration and discouragement in the face of the dreadful conditions of life into which technique has forced him.
oi oi whalespeak
234
Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to *modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.
235
Giedion’s conclusion is that mechanization is “tyrannizing over housing.” Furniture and housing must of course comply with the necessities of mass production. Both must undergo modification because of the mechanization of household interiors; a house must be conceived less for the comfort of its occupants than for the accommodation of the numerous mechanical gadgets to be installed in it.
236
In much the same way technique has modified human time. That man until recently got along well enough without measuring time precisely is something we never even think about, and that we do not think about it shows to what a degree we have been affected by technique. What means there were in the past for measuring time belonged to the rich and, until the fourteenth century, exerted no influence on real time or on life. ..Eating, working, and sleeping were at the beck and call of machinery. ..Mechanical abstraction and rigidity permeated the whole structure of being. “Abstract time became a new milieu, a new framework of existence.” Today the human being is dissociated from the essence of life; instead of living time, he is split up and parceled out by it. Lewis Mumford is right in calling the clock the most important machine of our culture. And he is right too in asserting that the clock has made modern progress and efficiency possible through its rapidity of action and the co-ordination it effects in man’s daily activities. All organization of work and study of motion is based on the clock.
time..
237
The book stresses the fact that technique, as a result of the perfection of means which it has placed at the disposal of modern man, has effectively suppressed the respite of time indispensable to the rhythm of life; between desire and the satisfaction of desire *there is no longer the duration which is **necessary for real choice and examination. There is no longer respite for reflecting or choosing or adapting oneself, or for acting or wishing or pulling oneself together. The rule of life is: No sooner said than done. Life has become a racecourse composed of instantaneous variations of the universe, a succession of objective events which drag us along and lead us astray without anywhere affording us the possibility of standing apart, taking stock, and ceasing to act.
*never was
**not about choice/exam.. but listening to itch
239
The human being does not feel at home in the collective atmosphere.
collective atmosphere of sea world
240
This new sociological mass structure and its new criteria of civilization seem both inevitable and undeniable. They are inevitable because they are imposed by technical forces and economic considerations beyond the reach of man. They are not the result of thought, doctrine, discourse, will. *They are simply there as a condition of fact. All social reforms, all social changes, are located wholly within this condition of fact, unless they are purely utopian. When social change is truly realistic, it accepts this condition buoyantly, vindicates it, and exploits it. Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society. (And then he scarcely differs from a cave man.) But *to become a mass man entails a tremendous effort of psychic mutation. The purpose of the techniques which have man as their object, the so-called human techniques, is to assist him in this mutation, to help him find the quickest way. to calm his fears, and reshape his heart and his brain.
**why we need global detox leap
243
Technical research discovered that the earth contains certain trace elements which become exhausted when the soil is mistreated.
bush mono crop law et al
244
To me, therefore, it seems impossible to speak of a technical humanism.
mufleh humanity law and tech w/o judgment
245
It was thought for a long time that man’s conduct belonged to the realm of art, and it can certainly be said that Freudian psychoanalysis is an art. Behavior based on flair, on intuitive as well as reasoned knowledge, and on personal relations; *the spontaneous devising of means for influencing heart and mind; the wholehearted participation of man in his acts—all these are characteristic of art..t Great leaders, great teachers, and agitators have all been artists. **But art and artistry no longer suffice. We must find solutions to the problems raised by techniques, and only through technical means can we find them..t
**need detox (so yeah tech as it could be) along with.. art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
The means of exerting action on men must answer to the following three criteria: (1) *Generality. Every man must be reached in every area of life because everyone is involved. Individual action is unimportant, (a) Objectivity. Action, since it is a function of society itself, cannot be dependent upon the transient and subjective acts of individuals. The means must be rendered independent of the individual who employs them so as to make them applicable by anyone at all. This criterion alone would imply the transition from art to technique. (3) Permanence. Since the technical challenge to man concerns his whole life, psychic action must be exerted upon him without letup, from the beginning of his existence to its end.
The experiments on the army serve a twofold purpose. First, the recruits are directly influenced in their actions and carry this influence back into civilian life, *where their behavior will be predictable and they themselves will be easily manipulated. The civilian population, therefore, can be influenced through the intermediacy of the army, which is connected with the rest of society by links that are being drawn tighter and tighter. Second, the **knowledge gained through experimentation on soldiers has indirect importance. This knowledge can be applied to other, more complex milieus which might not lend themselves readily to experimentation, even though they are similar to the army in kind. .
*aka: good little whales
246
*A second characteristic of the transition from art to technique is the extensive application of mathematics. Biometry, psychometry, sociometry, and cybernetics have become the chief intermediaries for creating these techniques. **It is considered illusory to think it possible to construct a true system of action from nonquantitative laws and observations. This was the traditional stumbling block for psychological techniques. When the attempt was first made to create a ***true technique of propaganda, for example, biology, an exact science, was taken as the basis. Subsequently, other exact disciplines were called upon; for example, public opinion polls and statistics. Progress in this and other human techniques came about ****only when the human sciences took on the exactitude of mathematics. Only metric methods can analyze and predict efficiently. It is striking to note, incidentally, that metric methods applied in different kinds of political regimes by different kinds of technicians come to the same result. This too is characteristic of techniques.
*graeber violence/quantification law.. any form of m\a\p as the death of us
**sublime whalespeak
***voluntary compliance.. manufacturing consent.. et al
****graeber unpredictability/surprise law
247
Educational Technique
All of us who were adult in 1950 in France preserved a vivid memory of dismal schools where teachers were enemies and punishment was a constant menace; of narrow, barred windows, gloomy brown walls, and uncomfortable benches hollowed out by generations of bored students.. We had a healthy fear of the masters, upon whom we played our tricks. We feared some of our fellow pupils too, especially those who sat behind us, against whom we were unarmed. . There was pitiless competition in respect to studies, marks, and places. Categories were simple then: work was a curse, the school was a hostile world, and the greater society outside its walls seemed to be the same. All superiors were enemies. .These were the ancient and familiar categories of school life which were suddenly overthrown by the extension of a series of techniques that we call techniques de l’école nouvelle—progressive education.
nothing over thrown yet.. still same song
Progressive education has as its end the “happiness” of the child. It entails bright classrooms, understanding teachers, and pleasurable work. Its educational formulas are well-known: the child in school must be “relaxed” and enjoy himself; he must exist in a “balanced environment,” get rid of his “complexes,” and “play while he is learning.” All this represents a perfectly valid program. It has the elements of genial scholarship derived from the celebrated saying of Montaigne to the effect that we must stop cramming children’s skulls to pass the baccalaureate; supercharging their brains with encyclopedic knowledge to the detriment of all other activities. . the whole process is supposed to take place with the minimum possible use of force. It is essential to respect the person of the child and to individualize instruction to the maximum. Instruction is part of total education and is not addressed to the intelligence alone. Its method, based on the maieutic of Socrates, consists in bringing the child himself to discover the properties of objects or, starting from facts he himself observes, the principles which underlie them.
need a way sans any form of m\a\p
248
*Clearly, the child so educated will be much better balanced and in a better position to develop his own personality. It is beside the point to note how inadequately this program has been applied in France and how meager have been its results. It has been a problem, for example, to recruit enough qualified teachers to make it possible to assign students to classes of no more than fifteen.
*whales personality:
We come here to one of the most important problems raised by the new method: the child’s personality development. The problem is to put the child in the best possible situation and to prepare him optimally for the tasks that await him..t These are phrases that are heard everywhere, as for example in the following statement drawn from a speech of Mme Montessori to UNESCO:
*if still prep ness.. not best possible
*We must awaken the child’s social conscience. I know that it is a complicated educational question, but the child who will become the man **must be able to understand life and its needs, the fundamental reason for all existence, the search for happiness… He must know exactly what he must do and what he must not do for the good of humanity… To reach these ends, we must prepare the child to understand the meaning and necessity of the entente among the nations. ***Education must become a truly humane science to guide all men to judge the present situation correctly.
*that we put to sleep.. ie: not yet scrambled ness
**cancerous distraction.. need to be all those..
***only happen if go with: to draw out from within..
ie: there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
249
We note first of all that this technique must be implemented by the state, which alone has the means and the breadth to carry it through. But the rigorous application of the psychopedagogic technique means the end of private instruction—and therefore of a traditional freedom.
Second, this technique is “pantocrator.” *It must be exercised over all men. If one man is left who is not trained according to its methods, there is the danger of his becoming a new Hitler. The technique cannot be effected unless all children are obliged to participate and all parents to co-operate. There can be no exceptions. If only a minority are educated to comply, this technique can resolve none of the problems it is intended to meet. Mme Montessori’s statement is therefore neither a metaphor nor an exaggeration; **all human beings, without exception, must be reached. We note again the aggressive character of technique. Mme Montessori emphasizes the fact that “it is necessary to free the child from the slavery of school and family” for him to enter the cycle of freedom proper to this technique. However, this freedom consists in a profound and detailed surveillance of the child’s activities, a complete shaping of his spiritual life, and a precise regulation of his time with a stop watch; in short, in habituating him to a joyful serfdom. The most important aspect of this technique is the forced orientation toward it. It is a social force directed toward a social end.
*oof.. supposed to’s of school/work et al.. so all need detox
This technique of alleged liberation of the child cannot be oriented differently, even if it were so desired. The technique permits the broadening of the child, the development of his social personality and happiness, and consequently, of his equilibrium. Opposition to society, the lack of social adaptation, produces serious personality difficulties which lead to the loss of psychic equilibrium. One of the most important factors in the child’s education therefore is social adaptation. This means that—despite all the pretentious talk about the aims of education—it is not the child in and for himself who is being educated, but the child in and for society.. t And the society, moreover, is not an ideal one, with full justice and truth, but society as it is.
again.. voluntary compliance.. manufacturing consent.. et al
When a society becomes increasingly totalitarian (and I say “society,” not “state”), it creates more and more difficulties of adaptation and requires its citizens to be conformist in the same degree. Thus, this technique becomes all the more necessary. I have no doubt that it makes men better balanced and “happier.” And there is the danger. It makes men happy in a milieu which normally would have made them unhappy, if they had not been worked on, molded, and formed for just that milieu. What looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them. They *must have social consciences that allow them to strive for the same ends as society sets for itself. Clearly, when modern youth are fully educated in the new psychopedagogic technique, many social and political difficulties will disappear. Any form of government or social transformation becomes possible with individuals who have experienced this never-ending process of adaptation. The key word of the new human techniques is, therefore, adaptation, and we shall come upon it repeatedly as we consider each of these techniques separately.
if ends set not free
The Technique of Work
The day is still a long way off when we will have at our disposal men educated in accordance with the new methods. It will be another half century at the earliest before they mature; time is needed for organizing them. In France we must count on two decades for generalizing them and breaking them in and on another two decades for the results to become evident in the whole generation so educated. The tempo of change will perhaps be more rapid in the United States and in the Soviet Union and less rapid in the rest of Europe.
whalespeak.. thinking it takes a lot of work ness et al
In the meantime, society must continue to function. During the interim period, another powerful system of adaptation will be put into effect: the complex of work techniques. This technical complex includes vocational guidance, the organization of labor, the physiology of work, and so on. Here again we find the assertion that progress is in the direction of a certain “humanism.
253
Their activities have nothing whatever to do with a positive cure of the soul, a mission which would suppose at least the possibility of profound changes, new orientations, and an awakening consciousness on the worker’s part, all of which are highly dangerous.. t
254
The technique of so-called human relations, developed to adapt the individual to the technical milieu, to force him to accept his slavery, to make him find happiness by the “normalization” of his relations with his group and integrate him into that group to an ever greater degree—..improve production while subordinating human spontaneity to the mathematical calculations of the technicians. ..t
255
The organization of work, psychological research, the apparent adaptation of the machine to the human being—these in fact permit the aggrandizement of the mechanical. The greater the aggrandizement, the more society requires that countermeasures be taken; but since the countermeasures are themselves of a technical nature, they allow the sphere of the mechanical to develop even further in a vicious circle. To believe that humanist remedies will indeed palliate the drawbacks of the machine is to think of the machine as a static fact. It is nothing of the kind. The progress of the machine depends on the proposed humanist remedies, and they in turn are rendered obsolete by each new mechanical development.
Once again, the result appears to be technical. The worker is becoming more and more “organizable.” He is trapped in labor organizations which are becoming increasingly compulsory and increasingly efficient. He gets habituated to them and even feels a need for them..t Moreover, the modern separation between personality and work favors surrender to organization. The worker easily yields to the conviction that by contributing to his own organization he will be able to modify the broad outlines of the system and alleviate his own discomforts. He does not realize that the organization he is enrolled in is itself part of the complex of technical organisms of depersonalization..t
256
The worker thinks that he is organizing freely and expressing his personality; but in so doing, he is merely yielding to the technical imperatives to which he is subject through the mechanical element in his work..t
A new technique, vocational guidance, is the answer here. It claims to be able to reveal every person’s vocational aptitude and to guide him into the most suitable vocation, the vocation he will be naturally adapted to, the vocation in which he will do the best job with the most enjoyment..t
rather.. need to listen to itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Naville shows with precision that what we call vocational guidance answers the requirements of capitalist economic techniques. As though by accident, the technique “discovers” in the individuals examined precisely the aptitudes which are essential to the needs of the capitalist economy.
257
Consider what would happen if vocational guidance proceeded to isolate itself from other techniques; for example, if it considered first and exclusively the aptitude of the individual. The result would be Otto Neurath’s nonsensical system, which would nevertheless be the only logical system if one were to insist that the exclusive preoccupation of vocational guidance is to find the best job for the individual in terms of his aptitudes.. Neurath envisages a kind of plan of three to five years’ duration, based on the individuals aptitudes as discerned by vocational guidance. The economy would be founded on these aptitudes. If vocational guidance discovered no mechanics, machine shops would be suppressed. If, presumably, it discovered no teachers, the schools would have to be closed. If, on the other hand, vocational guidance were to uncover a supply of mechanics after a number of years, the dismantled machine shops would be reopened. It need scarcely be said that chaos would reign in the field of economics. But such a system would be the only logical one if we really were concerned exclusively with the primacy of the individual If we really wished to take into consideration only the individual’s aptitudes, we would have to tailor the economic system to them. The obvious impossibility of such a system demonstrates that it is senseless to apply the rule of the primacy of the individual and that vocational guidance cannot be isolated from the other techniques.
again.. rather.. listen to itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us
imagine if we ness along with city sketchup ness
Naville, on the other hand, wishes to integrate vocational guidance as far as possible into the technical complex; he maintains that this can be realized only under socialism. He takes as his example the Soviet Union, where vocational guidance tries to discover not so much intrinsic aptitudes as potentialities for adaptation, that is, adaptability. Basically, the Soviets believe it necessary to discover not the individual’s predestination but his adaptability..t Vocational guidance then has the task of adapting the individual, through education, to planned manpower requirements. Vocational guidance is thus subordinated to planning technique. For example, a five-year plan may require a certain number of miners for that period. Vocational guidance then has the task^ of seeking out from among the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds the ones adaptable to this function. It institutes forthwith a twofold operation of general education focused on the particular trade and on the psychic, mechanical, and physiological adaptability of the candidates. The plan thus obtains the necessary manpower; the individual candidates are effectively adapted to the required labor, since they have been recruited at an early enough age and educated from the beginning in a precise direction. The emphasis again is on insuring the happiness of the individual through adaptation. The assumption is that the individual will be happy when he is synchronized with his trade..t
rather.. need to listen for itch in 8b souls.. nothing static/predictable/predestined.. the assumption is no one will be free until we tap into the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
Soviet orientation toward vocational guidance is identical with certain recent tendencies which have appeared in America. In a report to UNESCO on technical education and vocational guidance, Margaret Mead wrote: “Since education must respond, not to the present but to the future needs of society, it is necessary to forecast constantly and as far as possible in advance the evolution of vocational structures.”..t This can only mean that the individual must be educated and adapted in advance to his future job as a function of anticipated technical progress. In Mayo’s analyses and in Lynton’s report to UNESCO, one finds similarly precise expressions of the conditions of community survival in the technical world. The issue in all these cases is the rigorous adaptation of the individual to the world of technique, even going as far as the “reproduction of certain modes of action and forms of spontaneous organization.” More precise expression of technical intrusion into life could scarcely be imagined..t
graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. and so structural violence et al
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It must not be thought that Naville’s version of vocational guidance restricts human potentialities. On the contrary, it is meant to enlarge the child’s possibilities of adaptation..t By means of this technique, according to Naville, “certain newly acquired habits will appear, thanks to which the individual will be able to participate in the whole continuum of social effort… His needs will be guided into a system of new habits which the economic milieu bequeathes to him..t Adaptation will no longer be something natural, but will be acquired at the cost of efforts which will be of short or long duration depending on the complexity of the task.”
In this connection, we are assured that *“vocational guidance will permit the basic satisfaction of any rational need.” I am convinced that this statement is exact. The individual so educated will be satisfied. But it is the flimsiest make-believe to pretend that vocational guidance is in the service of human beings. An arsenal of preconceptions and undemonstrable formulas would be needed to sustain such a thesis. **These presuppositions are as follows: (1) The moment the individual finds himself in a socialist system, his complexes disappear. (2) The moment an institution is integrated into a socialist system, it changes character. (3) The moment the individual’s needs are satisfied, he becomes happy. (4) The moment social harmony is established, every man integrated into that harmonious system realizes his human vocation. (5) The moment the individual escapes from capitalism, he is free. Such nonsense is only a way of refusing to consider facts or to look reality in the face. ***The facts are clear enough. In isolation from certain other techniques, vocational guidance is useless. Put back into its true context, it becomes ****simply a means for subordinating man to the requirements of economic technique..t Even when the task of discovering aptitudes is attributed to vocational guidance, as, for example, in Antoine Mas’s “personnel mechanograph,” there is nevertheless a substantial consideration of “ad-aptitude,” to use Naville’s word, and selection is made in terms of it.
*oh my
**rather.. the moment any form of m\a\p.. maté trump law et al
***oi.. facts.. clear facts
****maté parenting law et al
Once again we are confronted with a mechanism of adaptation which deprives man of freedom and responsibility, makes him into a “thing,” and puts him where he is most desirable from the point of view of another technique, that is where he is most efficient.
We can also state that a kind of encounter is taking place between vocational guidance and the “new school.” Vocational guidance is not obligatory in France. It might even be said that it does not yet exist as a technique. It is still an advisory organ, nothing more. The trend, however, is unmistakable. The number of children counseled went from 60,000 in 1944 to 250,000 in 1950, and, it is estimated, an average of 75 per cent of the parents followed the advice of the vocational counselor. (The actual figure grew slowly from 73 per cent in 1944 to 78 per cent in 1950.) As to the long-term effects of guidance upon those guided, it need only be remarked that either the counselor was right or the counseled child, once embarked on a trade, is faced with an accomplished fact. Practically speaking, there is no retreat, and in fact, a retreat is seldom desired. The statement that vocational guidance, considering its rate of growth, is not obligatory in reality signifies very little.
An analysis of the method itself should be made. Although the tests employed at the moment are not very dangerous, the aim of vocational guidance is to card-index the individual totally (naturally, for his own good), and it is unlikely that its practitioners will remain very long content with the common psychotechnical tests. They will want to go much further, to make systematic investigations of emotional tendencies and to explore the child’s instinctive nature, to inquire into the basic elements in the child’s psychic and moral make-up. Tests like the so-called TAT (“Thematic Apperception Test”) already aim in this direction. Another and balder way of putting it is that vocational guidance represents a totalitarian takeover of the young..t
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But since such a takeover lies in the logic of the system, I hardly think it can be prevented. I shall content myself with referring the interested reader to the excellent critique of the system contained in William Hollingsworth Whyte’s The Organization Man.
not in anarchist library but found clearest pdf on monoskop –
Propaganda
Here we are faced with a new system of human techniques, more complex than the others we have studied, since it involves techniques of different natures, partly hierarchical and partly synthetic. We do not even have a term to describe this system. Propaganda is too limited, but it comes closest to the fact. The term supposes state action and also mass action on public opinion. However, the broader phenomenon we are considering here includes private action and individualized action as well.
nothing new.. voluntary compliance.. manufacturing consent.. et al
The prime consideration is the union of two very different categories of technique which yield this new system of human technique. The first is a complex of mechanical techniques (principally radio, press, and motion pictures) which permit direct communication with a very large number of persons collectively, while simultaneously addressing each individual in the group. These techniques possess an extraordinary power of persuasion and a remarkable capacity to bring psychic and intellectual pressure to bear. The second category consists of a complex of psychological (and even psychoanalytical) techniques which give access to exact knowledge of the human psyche. It can thus be motivated with considerable confidence in the results.
If the press had been devoted exclusively to serial stories, and the radio to music, it might not have been necessary to bring in psychoanalytic methods. But even this is not certain. What could be more innocent in appearance than comic strips? The deep influence of these “comics” on the reader is demonstrable, as is their usefulness from the sociological point of view. And what could seem more harmless than an American musical comedy film? Yet we are all aware of their economic importance.
Even if the radio or the press had been exclusively devoted to amusement, however, there would be this problem: on what basis could or should these techniques be restricted? The moment they could be applied to other spheres (politics, for example), they were applied, and applied guilelessly, without anyone having, at least in the beginning, any clear idea of their utility. As soon as they entered the realm of politics, it became evident that they had to serve not only to educate but also to convince. There is no such thing as purely objective information…t To object that it was man’s fault that technique did not remain objective is tantamount to stating that it was man’s fault to be human. From the moment these techniques were put to use, they had to operate as efficiently as possible, which meant that other techniques for understanding man had to be drawn into the system.
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Political persuasion had as its aim purely intellectual conviction, whereas in advertising the end was to produce reflex action.
What then are the principal directions taken by propaganda techniques? The system of conditioned reflexes has been exploited on a large scale. The technique of measuring and producing such reflexes has been greatly developed. The reduction of political doctrines to programs, of programs to slogans, of slogans to pictures (the direct reflex-stimulating images) has been studied. Systematic efforts are available to create conditioned reflexes, either through education (as, for example, under Nazism or under Communism) or on the basis of already existing, spontaneous reflexes (for example, the American use of erotic reflexes in war propaganda).
The propaganda mechanisms of the totalitarian states have been studied in detail by Tchakotin. Propaganda techniques in the United States have been stressed much less. But that does not mean that instances of propaganda on a grand scale are lacking there. It became necessary, for example, to force the American people to participate in the war and to impress a war psychology upon them by creating certain reflexes. The Americans, protected by their two oceans, did not “feel” they were at war. War for them was not a living reality and had to be made so. Understandably, the feeling of war and civilian involvement in it could be produced only by the enormous pressure of advertising and total propaganda on the human psyche. It was necessary to use the so-called obsessional technique, to subject the citizen to propaganda without letup, never allowing him to be alone with himself..t In the street he is confronted with posters, loud-speakers, ceremonies, and meetings; at work, with handbills and “industrial mobilization”; in his amusements, with motion-picture and theatrical propaganda; at home, with newspaper and radio propaganda. All these means converge on the same point. All exert the same kind of action on the individual and are of such overpowering magnitude that he ceases to be consciously aware of them.
propaganda ness since forever
need: self-talk as data via bachelard oikos law
This last is the greatest importance. Propaganda must become as natural as air or food. It must proceed by psychological inhibition and the least possible shock. The individual is then able to declare in all honesty that no such thing as propaganda exists. In fact, however, he has been so absorbed by it that he is literally no longer able to see the truth..t The natures of man and propaganda have become so inextricably mixed that everything depends not on choice or on free will, but on reflex and myth. The prolonged and hypnotic repetition of the same complex of ideas, the same images, and the same rumors conditions man for the assimilation of his nature to propaganda.
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In addition, human emotions such as hate and resentment are exploited. The procedure is not so much obsessional as suggestive, and depends on the collective fixation of these emotions on a given adversary. Here we witness the crowning absurdity, a completely automatic development of emotions. To exploit resentments, it is sufficient merely to send the individual on his way, equipped with a very simple set of “directions for use.” Later on, one observes a reconstitution of the individual personality around the selected “fixed point” on the basis of the strength of his resentments. Suppose, for example, that the adversary has been designated as the author of all the individual’s misfortunes and sufferings. (The bourgeoisie plays this role for the Communists, as the Jews played it for the Nazis.) After such suggestions have been launched, there is a surge of human resentment among the people. Like a flock of sheep, they stampede much further than they had actually been commanded to go, in obedience to another instinct which comes into play and which causes them to hurl themselves on the object of their resentment like a dog on a cat. Incidentally, this explains why there is no “criminal” in these cases. Pogroms are seldom ordered by the authorities. One need only manipulate popular resentments to bring them about.
The will to self-justification, which is latent in every individual, can also be exploited. It involves the need for a scapegoat; but individuals have difficulty finding a personal scapegoat. Propaganda offers them a collective goat to which they are able to transfer evil and sin, thereby feeling justified, authenticated, and purified. In all countries where this form of propaganda is effective, crime diminishes (not the least of the boasts of totalitarian regimes, Communist and Fascist alike). Morality makes headway. We no longer have to create for ourselves enemies to slay. We have enemies, ready-made for us by propaganda, whom it is lawful to kill. It is as plain as a pikestaff that to kill a bourgeois is not a crime. Moreover, the introduction of scapegoats means that conflict is no longer on a social or political plane but on a moral plane of good and evil. In exploiting the device of the scapegoat, propaganda leads people to transfer evil to the adversary. The adversary here becomes the generalized incarnation of evil, whereas in the exploitation of resentment the adversary appears as the cause of misfortune. This incarnation indicates that there is no rational basis for hate; it results solely from subconscious mechanisms. This explains a surprising statement made by Hitler in Mein Kampf: “It is necessary to suggest to the people that the most varied enemies all belong to the same category; and to lump all adversaries together so that it will appear to the mass of our own partisans that the struggle is being waged against a single enemy. This fortifies their faith in their rights and increases their exasperation against those who would assail them.” Hitler’s statement would have been completely irrational if it had been made about person-to-person combat, about personal reasons for conflict. But from the moment propaganda begins to operate, there is a loss of the sense of reality, a confusion of motives, an identification of opposites, and an interplay of accusations—all of which greatly enhance the operation of subconscious influences. Everything more or less confusedly resented as being evil is transferred to the official enemy. Through the influence of propaganda, a subconscious transference takes place. But instead of the psychoanalyst who causes the transference of guilt feelings to himself, there is a propaganda machine which causes us to make the transference to the generalized enemy. Technique thus creates a separation between all “absolutely good” persons, who are collectively justified and who represent political, social, and historic virtue, and all “absolutely evil” persons, in whom no worth or virtue is to be found..t The phenomenon made a feeble appearance, on the national plane, in the 1914 “War of Law and Civilization,” but it was too weak to bring about complete collective transference. Today we are more successful, but the line of demarcation between good and evil is less national than social and political.
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It is only fair to wonder what consequences these propagandistic manipulations will have. The real consequences are not discernible because the mechanisms have been operating for too short a time..t **And, of course, when the consequences finally appear, we still will not recognize them. We will have been so absorbed and manipulated, rendered so indifferent that objective knowledge on this score will be impossible. We will no longer even have any idea of what men might once have been.
*oi.. rather.. since forever..
result: wilde not-us law ness of sea world
**black science of people/whales law: we have no idea what legit free people are like
Some effects of propaganda, however, are already clear.
1) The critical faculty has been suppressed by the creation of collective passions..Because technique acts upon men collectively, the passions it provokes—which exist in everybody—are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty—man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on—is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.
rather.. to listen to itch-in-the-soul.. ie: curiosity over decision making
2) A good social conscience appears with the suppression of the critical faculty. Technique provides justification to everybody and gives all men the conviction that their actions are just, good, and in the spirit of truth. This conviction is the stronger because it is collectively shared. The individual finds the same conviction in his fellow workers and neighbors and feels himself strengthened in it through the implicit communion of media such as the radio. In countries where propaganda technique is exploited, there is a decrease in neurosis as well as in crime. We can believe the wartime statistics of the Nazis and the Americans because they fit so well with everything else we know. *Conversely, whenever for some reason propaganda technique fails to instill a good collective social conscience, there is a sudden and brutal collapse of the sense of individual justification, and individual morale falls drastically. This, among other things, would explain the extraordinary increase in neuroses in the United States after 1945. A similar situation among the Germans may have other explanations, but I am convinced that the sudden halting in the Nazi propaganda machine played a significant role in German postwar neurosis. The problem in the United States has been so serious that it has led to the dramatic development of psychoanalytic therapy in the past few years. This development in reality represents a resumption, on an individual level, of the activity which collective technique had abandoned. When a good collective social conscience has been created, the individual becomes addicted to it, as to a drug. And when the Americans realize that individual psychoanalysis is more costly, less efficient (because it cannot integrate the individual), and more difficult, they will return to **a collective psychotherapeutic technique.
**need global detox leap
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3) Propaganda technique, moreover, creates a new sphere of the “sacred.” As Monnerot puts it: “When an entire category of events, beings, and ideas is outside criticism, it constitutes a sacred realm, in contrast to the realm of the profane.” As a result of the profound influence of the mechanisms of propaganda, a new zone of the forbidden is created in the heart of man, but it is artificially induced, in contrast to the taboos of primitive societies. When there is propaganda, we are no longer able to evaluate certain questions, or even to discuss them. A series of protective reflexes organized by technique immediately intervene.
To summarize: the suppression of the critical faculty, the formation of a good social conscience, and the creation of a sphere of the sacred are all aspects of a single manifestation, the first and clearest consequence of the application of psychoanalytic mass techniques. Incidentally, our analysis confirms a social phenomenon frequently analyzed by modern sociologists: the “creation of the masses.” These three elements add a new dimension to the masses; the masses thereby gain an internal cohesion they did not possess naturally. A unifying psychism has come into being.
used to amplify/solidify us & them ness
A second consequence of the application of propaganda techniques is the creation of a kind of manipulability of the masses. Here again Monnerot gives a definition worth repeating. According to Monnerot, propaganda technique “has for its object the production and cultivation among the masses of certain predispositions and a special facility for doing at a given moment whatever is strategically opportune. As political circumstances change, it is necessary at intervals to cultivate successive predispositions.” This is a remarkable notion; the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definitive adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a kind of long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can be easily set into motion.
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A third consequence of technical propaganda manipulations is the creation of an abstract universe, representing a complete reconstruction of reality in the minds of its citizens
aka: sea world.. but since forever
At this point, the reader will protest that our analysis may apply to others, but not to him. But if he listens regularly to the radio, reads the newspapers, and goes to the movies, the description does fit him. He will not be aware of it because the essence of propaganda is to act upon the human subconscious but to leave men the illusion of complete freedom..t . When once the masses have become inured to the practices of propaganda techniques, it is *impossible to turn back.
*not impossible.. almaas holes law et al
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And there is a permanent factor operating in the United States to facilitate the application of propaganda technique: the rapidly developing and remarkable mechanism of public relations. This technique is a system of propaganda applied to all economic and human relations.
A citizen may have an original, valid, and true political idea, one which might even have had every chance of success with his fellow citizens. But if he does not possess the millions necessary to elaborate it the length and breadth of the country, it counts for nothing.
oi.. warning ness.. sabbatical ish transition ness.. oooof
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Amusement seeks to distract, propaganda to lead. The principal difference, however, relates to spontaneity. Propaganda technique Is calculated and deliberate, whereas amusement technique is spontaneous and nondeliberate. The former is the result of the organizer’s decision; the latter, of the mob’s need.
well assumed need.. sea world cope\ing ness need
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One cannot but marvel at an organization which provides the antidote as it distills the poison..t
What shall he talk about? Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life’s vexations. Not fear, nor anguish, despair, or passion. All that has always been suppressed in his subconscious. but he has always been able to talk companionably about vexatious things, hail on his vines, mildew, machinery out of order, a troublesome prostate, and so forth. Now technique intervenes, repairs everything, and creates a world in which everything works well, or well enough. Even if some petty vexations persist, the individual feels no need to speak of them and turns toward the efficient silence-fillers, television and radio, prodigiously useful refuges for those who find that family life has become impossible. Jean Laloup and Jean Nelis evince a curious optimism when they write that radio and television have reconstituted the family. Television doubtless facilitates material reunion. Because of it the children no longer go out in the evenings. The members of the family are indeed all present materially, but centered on the television set, they are unaware of one another. If they cannot stand or understand one another, if they have nothing to say, radio and television make this easy to bear by 1 re-establishing external relations and avoiding friction. Thanks to these technical devices, it is no longer necessary for the members of a family to have anything at all to do with one another or even to be conscious of the fact that family relations are impossible. It is no longer necessary to make decisions. It is possible for a married couple to live together a long time without ever meeting each other in the resonant emptiness of television. This too is a curious means of escape, of hiding from others instead of from oneself. It is the modern mask man puts on every evening, which unfortunately, lacks the virtues of the ancient mask, demoniac and divine.
so see.. not just cell phones.. but too.. before tv.. since forever.. since missing pieces
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Butlin grasped the fact that in a world at once exacting and depersonalizing in the extreme, the vacation most men prefer must be a genuine vacuum, an ever greater depersonalization which gives the impression of freedom but which never allows the individual to come face to face with himself, even materially..t To achieve this end, Butlin in 1938 organized his “family vacation camps.”..t The vacationer lives in a crowd on a strict timetable judiciously arranged so that each day will be different, giving the impression of constant novelty and variety. Games, songs, theater, eating, “fun” succeed one another at a rapid tempo from seven o’clock in the morning until midnight. “The important thing,” says Butlin, “is that no one is ever left to himself even for a moment.’ Everything takes place in a spirit of gaiety and liveliness and under the direction of game leaders who are “specialists.” All available means are employed to persuade the individual that he is happy..t ..Our thesis is verified by the prodigious success of Butlin’s camps, a success which is perhaps the most astonishing thing about them. In 1947, four hundred thousand persons vacationed in them, and the number has been growing steadily. And bear in mind that these figures represent Englishmen, who by their very nature would seem the most hostile to this kind of thing.
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The Russian citizen subjected to his government’s daily propaganda (the most highly developed in the world) is unaware of anxiety. But, then, the same was true of Hitler’s Germany..t
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Sport is tied to industry because it represents a reaction against industrial life. In fact, the best athletes come from working-class environments. Peasants, woodsmen, and the like, may be more vigorous than the proletariat, but they are not as good athletes. In part, the reason for this is that machine work develops the musculature necessary for sport, which is very different from peasant musculature. Machine work also develops the speed and precision of actions and reflexes.
Moreover, sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today. Everyone knows the difference between a fisherman, a sailor, a swimmer, a cyclist, and people who fish, sail, swim, and cycle for sport. The last are technicians; as Jünger says, they “tend to carry to perfection the mechanical side of their activity.” This mechanization of actions is accompanied by the mechanization of sporting goods—stop watches, starting machines, and so on. In this exact measurement of time, in this precision training of muscular actions, and in the principle of the “record,” we find repeated in sport one of the essential elements of industrial life..t
Here too the human being becomes a kind of machine, and his machine-controlled activity becomes a technique. This technical civilization profits by this mechanization: the individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. A familiar process is repeated: real play and enjoyment, contact with air and water, improvisation and spontaneity all disappear..t These values are lost to the pursuit of efficiency, records, and strict rules. Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joy of exploiting his body and winning..t
The most important thing, however, is not the education of a few specialists, but the extension of the sporting mentality to the masses. Insofar as this represents a vigorous reaction to the mere passivity of spectator sports, it is good. But the usual result is the integration of more and more innocents into an insidious technique..t
It is needless to speak of the totalitarian frame of mind for which the exercise of sports paves the way. We constantly hear that the vital thing is “team spirit,” and so on..t It is worth noting that technicized sport was first developed in the United States, the most conformist of all countries, and that it was then developed as a matter of course by the dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi, and Communist, to the point that it became an indispensable constituent element of totalitarian regimes.
Sport is an essential factor in the creation of the mass man. It is, at the time, a disciplinary factor, and this in a twofold way. It coincides exactly with totalitarian and with technical culture. In the “new” countries, an interpenetration of technique and the practice of sport is to be observed. The authoritarian states understand and exploit fully the efficiency of technicized sport in making their citizens into conformists and mass men. It is one of the chief boasts of Communist states that they fabricate champions in countries which hitherto had never heard the word sport..t This is an effect of the totalitarian society, but it also represents one of its modes of action. In every conceivable way sport is an extension of the technical spirit. Its mechanisms reach into the individual’s innermost life, working a transformation of his body and its motions as a function of technique and not as a function of some traditional end foreign to technique, as, for example, harmony, joy, or the realization of a spiritual good. In sport, as elsewhere, nothing gratuitous is allowed to exist; everything must be useful and must come up to technical expectations..t
same with music/art et al
and too.. the fact that we separate them all in the first place..
Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions, and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory..t
above sport section here as well: sport ness
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As for medical technique, what is to be feared and hoped from its application? And with what other technical system will this technique be interrelated? The answer is: solely with the state. And this indicates what we have to fear. It is universally understood that technical means begin to be dangerous when the state begins to exploit them, utilizing them in connection with its arbitrary, omnipotent decisions. When the individual undertakes to systematize a number of techniques, he seldom creates a sturdy structure. *The technical framework of our world is linked together naturally, not by arbitrary human decision, and it is this which gives it its solidity..t The field of application of these medical techniques will of necessity be very limited, since they will be applied only to persons expressly designated by the state as enemies or undesirables. These techniques can essentially serve only the state’s designs—whether they are to break the spirit of the last remaining free men or to eliminate the old or to obtain sensational confessions or declarations during a fake trial. And these designs must be limited, since in the last analysis the state can have no interest in generalizing methods which appear to degrade the human being. The state, on the contrary, has need of whole, strong human beings, in full moral, intellectual, and physical vigor, who alone can serve it best. What the state requires is the technical means for integrating completely whole beings, and these means are on the point of becoming a reality. The technical state will not be a party to the deterioration of its material. Only with regard to already useless material (because it is refractory or weak) could the technical state be driven to use one of these techniques. It is certainly not altogether out of the question that the state might employ these techniques. But the state has many other means of attaining its ends. Since it has at its disposal concentration camps and the death sentence, it would hardly go out of its way to find more complicated means, except perhaps for the sake of occasional propaganda. And certainly the population need not become so alarmed about what is, after all, only a lesser evil.
*if we could only let that be.. ie: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
Surgical and medical intervention have another defect from the state’s point of view. They cannot be generalized, and are as a consequence indeterminate except for special cases. Each new case requires the state to make a special decision; these techniques cannot function with the autonomous regularity of such state organs as the police. Indeed, it is necessary to limit application, because the general public must be kept in ignorance. The citizens are far from ready to accept the use of these techniques, and would be easily aroused if they learned of it. The danger of a popular reaction, even a momentary one, against the state is too great to risk for the limited advantages the state might draw from their use.
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The public, unable to see the real problem of technique because it gravitates unerringly to glaring superficialities and wavers between unreasoning fear and false security, never penetrates to the heart of the problem of modern society.
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Because it is first of all scientific, technique obeys the great law of specialization; it can be efficient only if it is specialized. In the case of human beings, efficiency has a double meaning. It means that technique must be applicable without raising storms of protest. And it means that it must not neglect the scientific aspect (which is the most important) of this specialization. Techniques are designed for application to a relatively limited number of cases; as a consequence, general applicability cannot be envisaged. Every human technique has its circumscribed sphere of action, and none of them covers the whole of man. As we have seen, there are psychological techniques, educational techniques, and many others. Each of these answers one and only one particular need. If one of them is applied, it does indeed encroach on some private sphere or other of the individual, but the greatest part remains private. There is therefore never any clear reason to protest. This relatively impersonal technical operation is a far cry from one which would hurl man brutally into a world of concentration camps where the most strident, dramatic, overwhelming techniques suddenly descend on him.
A further mistake of Nazism was to dress its techniques in a demoniac mask designed to inspire terror. Because the use of terror is also a technique, the Nazis made it an invariable accompaniment of all their other techniques, shocking the rest of the world by useless excess. We do better. We dress technique in the aseptic mask of the surgeon. Impassivity is an attribute of the new god, as it was an attribute of the old. The true face of modern technique is far more like the Deist’s triangle than the grimacing mask of Siva.
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The result is that every technique can assert its innocence. Where, then, or by whom, is the human individual being attacked? Nowhere and by no one. Such is the reply of technique and technician. They ask indignantly how it can be alleged that the human being is being attacked through the application of the new school of technique. According to them, the charge itself demonstrates an absence of comprehension and the presence of erroneous, not to say malicious, prejudices. And, in fact, every technician taken separately can affirm that he is innocent of aggressive designs against the human being. The biologist, working on a living embryo with the consent of the mother, is guilty of no assault on her life or her honor. Thus, since no technician applies his technique to the whole man, he can wash his hands of responsibility and declare that the human being remains intact.
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I must add that I am much more interested in real men who actually exist than in that ideal Man which has no existence except as an image and an abstraction.
yeah.. but we exist in sea world.. so wilde not-us law et al.. and so then.. hari rat park law.. for (blank)’s sake
It will be impossible to escape this system of adaptation because it will be articulated with so much scientific understanding of the human being.
science scientifically.. so yeah.. we can escape.. almaas holes law et al
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We thereby admit that, when all is said and done, the ideal state, higher than consciousness, is a dreaming sleep.
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
via bachelard oikos law et al
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We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. *It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man’s ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself. As to the second condition, it is simply not the case that the individual, left on his own, will devote himself to the education of his personality or to a spiritual and cultural life. We are perpetually falling into this idealism. In fact, modern man himself seeks to give a technical form to his leisure time and rebels against entering the sphere of human creativity. Since his youth, and in his vocational activity, he has been unrelentingly “adapted.” If the individual must be regimented into intelligent use of his free time, if he is obliged to spend this time learning how to be “human,” of what value are vacations and leisure? Where in this new framework of propaganda is there room for the transcendingly important elements of personality formation, choice, personal experience, and spontaneous participation in creative activity? Who or what is to be his guide in the collective, educative employment of leisure? The employer? the administration? the labor unions? To put the question at all is to recognize its fatuity. What if man’s leisure allowed him to judge his own work? What if, in becoming “cultivated” or, even better, “a real person,” he should rebel against his stupid, mechanized job? Or find his four hours of obligatory servitude an intolerable abasement? It is unimaginable.
*that’s not leisure.. decision making is unmooring us law et al
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There are people who have hobbies such as gardening or puttering about the house. But what is the proportion of such people to those who do nothing? The melancholy fact is that the human personality has been almost wholly disassociated and dissolved through mechanization.
All this shows once again how illusory it is to pin to one sector of technique the hopes which serious analysis denies all of them. We must conclude that the organizers of work, who have clearly recognized the nature of modern labor, have failed to recognize the nature of leisure. If it is asked whether leisure could be otherwise, the answer is that it could. So could the conditions of work. And the state and human nature. But if we are going in for all these conditionals, paradise could also find a place on earth.
graeber make it diff law et al
The individual who engages in party politics, with its program of activities, meetings, and fellowship, may well discover in it an answer to the problems of disequilibration. Indeed, the more demanding the party, the more efficacious the remedy. Communism long ago denounced the political activity of the democracies as an intolerable hoax and a “flight into unreality.” For them, democratic political “action” is completely useless. I will not go into Marx’s analysis of democracy, which I hold to be true. But everything Marx has to say about democratic political action seems to me to hold, feature for feature, for Communist politics as well. The individual who throws himself into political activity of any coloration has the gratifying impression that he is accomplishing something, and justification and satisfaction. But the sad truth is that he is resolutely by-passing the real problem and repressing it..t This kind of compensation, which is natural and easily understandable, can nonetheless only result in human disintegration and a new technical alienation. A detailed consideration of political activity would bring us back once more to the same point. Political activity allows the human being to exist in the technical milieu, but it is regression nonetheless, and a corollary to the general flight into unconsciousness.
But this is true of work and, in fact, of all elements of human life..t All of them, to the extent that they are encircled and repressed by technique, tend to pass over the lower threshold of consciousness. The unconscious tends, therefore, to play an ever more important role in the conduct of human life.
yeah that.. cancerous distractions
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As long as modern art was concerned with an aesthetic of movement (as opposed to the older aesthetic of form), with the integration of duration into graphic representation, with the “simultaneity” of Miro, Picasso, and Klee, an artistic world capable of development was still possible. But although the artist of the present can still master and represent the impulse of the machine, he is completely overwhelmed and impotent in a world that has a place only for a human being who has been stripped of his real self. Contemporary art forms bear witness to this impotence..t
We must pay due respect to the honorable struggle being waged by those who wish to deliver men from the clutches of technique and restore certain possibilities of living to man. If I have criticized their research on work and leisure, I did so not because I object to their aims but because I distrust their illusions and idealism.
“The only person who still remains a private individual is he who is asleep,” declared Robert Ley in a noteworthy phrase..t
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
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One of the great designs of advertising is to create needs; but this is possible only if these needs correspond to an ideal of life that man accepts.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
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But there are more compelling realities. The tendency toward psychological collectivization does not have man’s welfare as its end. It is designed just as well for his exploitation. *In today’s world, psychological collectivization is the sine qua non of technical action. Munson says: “By building the morale of the troops, we are trying to increase their yield, to substitute enthusiastic self-discipline for forced obedience, to stimulate their will and their attention—in short, we are pursuing success.”..t There he gives us **the key to this kind of psychological action: the yield is greater when man acts from consent, rather than constraint. The problem then is to get the individual’s consent artificially through depth psychology, since he will not give it of his own free will. But the decision to give consent must appear to be spontaneous..t Anyone who prates about furnishing man an ideal or a faith to live by is helping to bring about technique’s ascendency, however much he talks about “good will.” The “ideal” becomes so through the agency of purely technical means whose purpose is to enable men to support an insupportable situation created within the framework of technical culture. This attitude is not the antithesis of the humanistic attitude; the two are interwoven and it is completely artificial to try to separate them.
*manufacturing consent.. voluntary compliance
**public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
The conditions for psychological efficiency are, first, group integration and, second, group unanimity..t (This should not be taken to mean that on a larger scale there may not be a certain diversity.) I am speaking of a determinate group (for example, a political party, the army, an industrial plant) which has a definite technical function to fulfill. The purpose of psychological methods is to neutralize or eliminate aberrant individuals and tendencies to fractionation. Simultaneously, the tendency to collectivization is reinforced in order to “immunize” the environment against any possible virus of disagreement..t
When psychological techniques, in close co-operation with material techniques, have at last succeeded in creating unity, all possible diversity will have disappeared and the human race will have become a bloc of complete and irrational solidarity.
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Total Integration
Until recently, we were obliged to think of man as divided in his relation to the technical world. One part of him was given over completely to the monster and subjected to the interior and exterior rules; but the other part he could keep for himself: his inner life, his family life, his psychic life. He suffered from this division, but nonetheless he retained a very considerable measure of freedom. (When he insisted on retaining too much, he was said to be suffering from a proportionate lack of social adaptation.) Many more aspects of the human personality have been exposed to the technical society, and today very nearly the entire human race is experiencing this progressive cleavage of personality. The average man, with his sentimental and intellectual attachments to the past, suffers acutely. Rare are the men who have so completely renounced the inner life as to hurl themselves gladly and without regret into a completely technicized mode of being. Such persons may exist, but it is probable that the “joyous robot” has not yet been born.
not freedom
I have repeated time and again that this tension, this dichotomy, is harder and harder to bear and begins to appear more and more baneful in its influence even to the psychologists, sociologists, and teachers, that is, to the psychotechnicians in general. They want to restore man’s lost unity, and patch together that which technical advances have separated. But only one way to accomplish this ever occurs to them, and that is to use technical means. Since the human sciences are applications of technical means, this entails rounding up those elements of the human personality that are still free and forcing (“reintegrating”) them into the expanding technical order of things. What yet remains of private life must be forced into line by invisible techniques, which are also implacable because they are derived from personal conviction. Reintegration involves man’s covert spiritual activities as well as his overt actions. Amusements, friendship, art—all must be compelled toward the new integration, thanks to which there is to be no more social maladjustment or neurosis. Man is to be smoothed out, like a pair of pants under a steam iron.
There is no other way to regroup the elements of the human personality: the human being must be completely subjected to an omnipotent technique, and all his acts and thoughts must be the object of the human techniques. Those men, undoubtedly “men of good will,” who are so preoccupied with the technical restoration of man’s lost unity certainly have not willed things as they have turned out. Their error lies much more in not having clearly seen genuine alternatives..t The conscientious psychologist, sympathetic though he may be to human suffering, does not even consider alternative solutions to the problem. For him, technique imposes a technical solution. And this solution indeed restores unity to the human being, but only by virtue of the total integration of man into the process which originally produced his dismemberment. The psychologist sees this dismemberment (and civilization’s neuroses, too) as symptomatic of the incompleteness of the absorptive process. To achieve unity, then, means to complete the process.
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Technical Anesthesia
It seems odd that the application of a technique designed to liberate men from the machine should end in subjecting them the more harshly to it. But given the technological state of mind, the paradox is easily explained. Consider a worker..must follow the machine’s tempo and breathe its waste products..must fight off fatigue and boredom..efficiency expert comes and institutes procedures to automate actions ..But the psychologist is dead set against this; he finds insupportable the total subjection of the worker to the machine..and he proposes to liberate him..elaborates a science of human behavior with its own laws of human psychology; for example, laws concerning worker fatigue, and so on. He draws up a program not merely of the worker’s actions in the factory, but of his whole life. The human being ends by being encased in an even broader technical framework. It will doubtless make life easier and enable him to work with a minimum of effort, but only on condition that he follow its rules to the letter. The example is a simple one, but it can be found in every sphere of human activity, wherever the psychotechnician has felt himself called upon to “liberate” mankind. Progress must obviously be paid for by even harsher subjection to the instrument of salvation. The worker is in the same situation as the invalid racked by pain who receives an anodyne narcotic which makes him an addict—the addiction persists even after he has been “cured.” In much the same way, a nation that has been subjected to a totalitarian propaganda barrage is unable to get its bearings in a direct and natural way after the barrage has ceased; the psychic trauma was too profound. The sole means of liberating people from “ideas” so inculcated is through another propaganda campaign at least as intense as the first. But the new propaganda only subjects them to a psychic pressure that kills a little more of their freedom.
perhaps until now
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One answer to this question is that technique possesses monopoly of action. No human activity is possible except as it is mediated and censored by the technical medium. This is the great law of the technical society. Thought or will can only be realized by borrowing from technique its modes of expression. Not even the simplest initiative can have an original, independent existence.
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Suppose one were to write a revolutionary book. If it is to be published, it must enter into the framework of the technical organization of book publishing. In a predominantly capitalistic technical culture, the book can be published only if it can return a profit. Thus, it must appeal to some public and hence must refrain from attacking the real taboos of the public for which it is destined..t The bourgeois publishing house will not publish Lenin; the “revolutionary” publishing house will not publish Paul Bourget; and no one will publish a book attacking the real religion of our times, by which I mean the dominant social forces of the technological society. Any author who seeks to have his manuscript published must make it conform to certain lines laid down by the potential publishers. A manuscript which in subject matter and format does not conform has no chance. This is the situation at the most elementary level of the technical publishing organization. One step further and we encounter the notorious system of the “rewrite.”
If the publishing system is state-owned, the publication of revolutionary literature cannot even be considered. All this amounts to saying that technical forces, which were put into operation ostensibly for the diffusion of thought, lead in practice to its emasculation. The same holds true for broadcasting under private capitalism or under state ownership. It is impossible to agree with the ideologues who assert that capitalism is synonymous with freedom of broadcasting or with those who assert that state ownership means humanization.
Of course, we can write or teach anything, including pornography, inflammatory revolutionary manifestoes, and new economic and political doctrines. But as soon as any of these appear to have any real effect in subverting the universal social order (which is establishing itself in every country of the world with the support of the overwhelming majority of the respective populations), they are forthwith excluded from the technical channels of communication..t As Crozier justly remarks: “The intellectual has a difficult life. He can only live by communicating, but he has been deprived of the means without which he cannot communicate.” The intellectual has become a mere mouthpiece subject to the demands of the various techniques. According to Wiener, this is the cause of the progressive sterilization of intellectual life in the modern world. As Wiener puts it, present-day methods of communication exclude all intellectual activity except what is so conventional that it has no decisive value.
rather sterilization of human spirit.. need to free up communication ness.. ie: idiosyncratic jargon
When an individual engages in political action a corresponding technical mechanism is set in motion. Political action is no longer possible except as a mass phenomenon, and “engagement” presupposes participation in a collectivity. Only a collectivity is wealthy enough to have at its disposal the means to “play politics.” Only a collectivity can make itself felt in a world in which technique has given primacy to the quantitative rather than the qualitative. Since an inorganic mass would be inefficient, the collectivity must be optimally organized, with all that this implies in the way of unity, discipline, and tactical flexibility. These are the exclusive province of technical organization, a fact which straightway leads to the formation of monolithic political parties, which alone can hope for success. Once again technique imposes its iron law on the generous strivings of the individual heart.
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These brief examples, taken from as diverse spheres as possible, make it evident that *today every human initiative must use technical means to express itself. These technical means ipso facto “censor” initiative. First, they screen out whatever does not lend itself to technical expression; initiative remains a purely private matter, with no importance to the technical society. Second, they compel a rigid conformism; initiative is reduced to the lowest common denominator..t and is, in effect, emasculated. The interplay of the technical censorship with the pretended “anarchic” spiritual initiatives of the individual automatically produces the situation desired by Dr. Goebbels in his formulation of the great law of the technical society: “You are at liberty to seek your salvation as you understand it, provided you do nothing to change the social order.”
*perhaps we can have (& need) tech w/o judgment ie: tech as it could be
A second answer to our question of how technique has transformed man’s quest for the spiritual involves an examination of the fate of the ecstatic impulses and phenomena of the human spirit. It is not difficult to observe that ecstatic phenomena proliferate in proportion to the technicization of society. They play an important role in modern society, but not the role usually assigned them. They function not as causes but as effects. It is childish to believe that Communism and Fascism, for example, created a mystique out of whole cloth, which they then imposed on their peoples; that they have blown up a vast bag of wind with which they “seduce” or “delude” the world. On the other hand, it is too easy to say that the Russian soul and the German soul were naturally “predisposed” to these systems. We would then have to hold that the Italian (and now the Yugoslav and Chinese) souls, are similarly predisposed. *The myth presupposes a psychological basis—that people adhere to systems because these systems respond to something “true” in them..t But this truth is certainly not very specific since very different sorts of people adhere to it. Further, mystic systems are not arbitrary creations of dictatorial regimes. No more are they the result of the demented will to power of the mighty. No “popular movement” can produce them; the requirements far exceed the spontaneous mystic capabilities of man. **The real reason for the emergence of society as we know it is not mystic or psychic but technical.
*we haven’t tried/seen that yet.. but could be
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it ie: a sabbatical ish transition
**again.. until now
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We have noted that jazz has become universal. The reason is now clear: it is the music of men who are satisfied with the illusion of freedom provoked by its sounds, while the chains of iron wind round them ever tighter.
not improv enough
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With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of these human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited. We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.
aka: sea world
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CHAPTER 6: A LOOK AT THE FUTURE
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Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.
until now.. and not about history ness
The further the technical mechanism develops which allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities. (I have analyzed human victory over hunger in this vein.) The artificial necessity of technique is not less harsh and implacable for being much less obviously menacing than natural necessity.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs (beyond hunger)
Alongside these parades of mere verbalisms, there has been a real effort, on the part of the technicians themselves, to control the future of technical evolution. The principle here is the old one we have so often encountered: “A technical problem demands a technical solution.” At present, there are two kinds of new techniques which the technicians propose as solutions.
The first solution hinges on the creation of new technical instruments able to mediate between man and his new technical milieu. ..The best and most striking example of such subsidiary instruments is furnished by the complex of so-called “thinking machines,” which certainly belong to a very different category of techniques than those that have been applied up to now
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The second solution revolves about the effort to discover (or rediscover) a new end for human society in the technical age.
Comprehending that the proliferation of means brings about the disappearance of the ends, we have become preoccupied with rediscovering a purpose or a goal. Some optimists of good will assert that they have rediscovered a Humanism to which the technical movement is subordinated. The orientation of this Humanism may be Communist or non-Communist, but it hardly makes any difference. In both cases it is merely a pious hope with no chance whatsoever of influencing technical evolution. The further we advance, the more the purpose of our techniques fades out of sight Even things which not long ago seemed to be immediate objectives—rising living standards, hygiene, comfort—no longer seem to have that character, possibly because man finds the endless adaptation to new circumstances disagreeable.
cancerous distractions keeping us from us
But the optimistic technician is not a man to lose heart If ends and goals are required, he will find them in a finality which can be imposed on technical evolution precisely because this finality can be technically established and calculated. It seems clear that there must be some common measure between the means and the ends subordinated to it The required solution, then, must be a technical inquiry into ends, and this alone can bring about a systematization of ends and means. The problem becomes that of analyzing individual and social requirements technically, of establishing, numerically and mechanistically, the constancy of human needs. It follows that a complete knowledge of ends is requisite for mastery of means. But, as Jacques Aventur has demonstrated, such knowledge can only be technical knowledge. Alas, the panacea of merely theoretical humanism is as vain as any other.[38]
oooof
endnote 7 (38): It must be clear that the ends sought cannot be determined by moral science. The dubiousness of ethical judgments, and the differences between systems, make moral science unfit for establishing these ends- But, above all, its subjectivity is a fatal blemish. It depends essentially on the refinement of the individual moral conscience. An average morality is ceaselessly confronted with excessive demands with which it cannot comply. Technical modalities cannot tolerate subjectivity.
“Man, in his biological reality, must remain the sole possible reference point for classifying needs,” writes Aventur. Aventur’s dictum must be extended to include man’s psychology and sociology, since these have also been reduced to mathematical calculation. Technology cannot put up with intuitions and “literature.” It must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded—because it is not a possible end for technique—and left to the sphere of dreams.
could be true.. but since all in sea world.. since forever.. supposed needs are cancerous distractions
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Who is too blind to see that a profound mutation is being advocated here? A new dismembering and a complete reconstitution of the human being so that he can at last become the objective (and also the total object) of techniques. Excluding all but the mathematical element, he is indeed a fit end for the means he has constructed. He is also completely despoiled of everything that traditionally constituted his essence. Man becomes a pure appearance, a kaleidoscope of external shapes, an abstraction in a milieu that is frighteningly concrete—an abstraction armed with all the sovereign signs of Jupiter the Thunderer.
yeah.. whales.. but not new.. since forever..
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A Look at the Year 2000
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