Notes on technology

In science studies, the classic critiques from Marcuse and Heidegger against the framing of persyns (Humyn and non) as passive so as to imbue them with a dependency apparatus (i.e., Domestication) is given short shrift, most notably by Don Ihde. Of course, Marcuse predicted Ihde's pragmatic response--Political Universals are just a little too structuralist in a postmodern world--and so, the Heideggerian rhetoric of Technology is quickly chopped down to size, managed, neutralized, if only because seeing Technology as destructive, as Agamben sees it, goes against our collectively manipulated (yet desired, alas) sense of beautiful living.   

Of course, both Heidegger and Marcuse in fact suggest that Technology/Domestication, that political universal, can be neutralized. In Heidegger, calculation (Gestell) opens Dasein to possibility, with attendant danger; for Marcuse, Technology can serve the needs of Necessity, a Marxist promise that has long passed for the obvious reason that Capitalism is egoistic in the passive nihilist sense. Of course, the obvious objection against Marcuse and Heidegger is that one is already modified under the repressive hypothesis; one is displaced, cut into (constituted as distinct from nature). Pace Marcuse, one is not really distinct about necessary natural desires and non-necessary natural desires; automation of Necessity can never be necessarily best. (This is the rupture that Agamben introduces in What is An Apparatus?, yet his move against the subject (as whatever being in resistance) might perhaps not be sufficiently post-left. That is to say, Agamben's position is ambiguous, although perhaps for strategic purposes).

In any event, Ihde's argument isn't very persuasive; obviously it points to the limits of the academy and reveals it as essentially invested in the Progress mantra, that is, passing privilege around, so long as its ultimate telos, mechanization, is not disclosed; and this is pricisely what Heidegger does when he calls to attention that which holds sway in this modern age: it is calculative logic and efficiency which essences.

This thinking about a tension concerning Technology as a Universal to be resisted and technology as a pragmatic issue that we can overcome generates the purported difference between tools and technology; or rather, such is kicking about in this discussion. Potentially any technology can become a tool provided that its use in no way depends on the Quantitative (the grid as an assemblage of structured cells, or 'enframed' substances--that is, beings ordered to work according to capitalism's telos--mechanized efficiency). Yet, if this statement is understood, it is apparent that is not the case that potentially any technology can become independent of the Quantitative; for many require background conditions; many require of necessity the ordering of other substances.

It is of course theoretically possible to build the entire technological apparatus from scratch provided one is a member of those privileged in the know. Then tools depend on tools; it would be tools all the way down, so to speak. Putting aside the intentional ambiguity here concerning ordering substances--what isn't a potentially ordered substance?--the re/sources in this constitution would be purchased, and the products would therefore be (re)constituted by the independent builder. In practise I can build primitive tools. For anything requiring background technologies, I consume what you produce; and the more intense the technology being built, the less the tool is independent; the more intense, the more reliant on ordering substances--which is to say nothing of ordering oneself to do anything at all.

This point can be further sketched out by noting a direct relation and self-reflexive relation. To run your car you have to buy gas, parts, et cetera. One can make all of these oneself, ideally, and this is the cash value of any technology potentially being a tool. The mode of desire calling us forth, responsible for our being as such towards its end is a shifting movement from non-autonomy to autonomy; from direct dependency to, ideally, a closed circuit of autonomy. Other technologies are less directly involved with the system. Consider the hammer. Once purchased, no specialists are necessary, even to the point that it might simply be a rock appended to a stick with some rope so that it only relied on acquiring objects from an original source independent of production by humyn and animal life. My point above recommends that unless one constitutes the tool, entirely from scratch, it is a Technology. Autonomy, its opposite Universal, is to go it alone, to contain the tools' relations to other tools without remainder, without Technology.

Given that this is a tall task, and assuming that we want to move from Technology to owning tools completely, putting them in a closed circuit of Autonomy, perhaps it will be suggested, in a syndicalist mode, that to get at the tool-user from any Technology is the collapsing of (humyn) hierarchy put in play via a massive expropriation. Together, collectively that is to say, we can make a mass expropriation so that we share in the production of making X a tool, whatever X. Then it would seem to follow that any technology could become a tool because I, personally, do not have to consult some specialist in its fixing; we learn how to do it ourselves; it's, at least potentially, even stevens all around. Still, even so, the issue that Heidegger brings forth is that I would thereby have to depend on you going to work, and worse, on myself becoming a socialist, and I try not to be cruel (especially towards myself). If we are to avoid Technology, in the sense of turning objects into grid constituted objects for use, we have to abolish hierarchy. Then, perhaps, dependence wouldn't be a matter of unfair conditions. Yet, work itself is brutal and you simply cannot depend on me showing up no matter how much violence you wish to do to yourself. Therefore it seems more plausible to suppose that only some tools do not depend on quantitative functioning of (other) working bodies for the duration of their functioning existence. Computers are tight in their possible trajectories and it is without a doubt that they require support. Even a typewriter requires ribbons, just as a tape player requires tapes.What of the hammer? The writing device?

The ultimate truth at play caught up in the rhetoric of Heidegger and undisclosed in the dismissal of his sense by Ihde's rhetoric, is that substances, humyn or otherwise, are always modified so long as these whatever-substances are not free to idle, so long as each is not let-be, whether at work, and even at work in the post-revolution. So Technology as a Universal to be negated is still relevant; after all, it is clear, rational and obvious, that only some technologies can be tools.