The opposing, disjunctive terms,
“technophilia” and “technophobia” are rhetorical terms; they signal the
characterization of the other in a rhetorical debate. Romantics are typically
labeled “technophobes” and “want to recapture tradition”. There are good reasons
to be afraid of Technology. If Technology has taken over a technique,
automating or displacing workers, what’s to stop the ongoing lottery? Is it
ongoing? Are certain routines exempt from displacement? Are some jobs not
routines? It doesn’t seem impossible that the logic of capital, our being in
space that we control minimally, if at all, could always dissolve our
livelihood, automated or not, forcing one to learn new techniques. I want to
define <technique> as a way of doing something, as in “You sure have the
technique down pat!”, and Technology as
a system of Enframing Oppression in which techniques are rendered automated. The difference that I mean to gesture at here is that there is a felt difference between a technique that is a form of Art, and a technique that has become routine. When one says 'you sure have the technique down pat' I want to insist that one doesn't mean one has nailed repetition, but rather that one has produced the good. Hence, going against Technology, the automated Totality—Technology as a system—could mean gaining autonomy concerning techniques.
But I want to qualify this political-aesthetic stance by noting that I do not wish to
suggest that only machines are automated, and, furthermore, that Heidegger’s
distinction between technology and modern technology, (techniques and automated
techniques) is useful to see that machines aren’t essentially automated.
Now while
privileging autonomy is presumably a reasonable way to go about finding support
in Romantic circles, given that affirming autonomy implies that full-automation
is ultimately dystopic and therefore worse than some level of autonomy, still, there is no way to settle
on the best form. And it seems to me that this result is perfectly consistent
with the meaning of the term <autonomy>, for how can one speak about how autonomous another should be? Doesn’t that
necessarily undermine the right for one to be autonomous, to make decisions for
oneself? One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous depends on labor
saving automated techniques. One might find that ones’ ability to be autonomous
depends on communing with others.
Now, it seems
plausible that full autonomy is as impossible as full automation. Therefore,
what ‘full automation’ means in the context of saying that one is like a machine is that the machine-like is under the sway
of seeing “the better” in civilizing oneself and falling in line, obeying final
causes designed for oneself. In
this context it seems possible to say that X has chosen to use privilege to their advantage. And while this
may be a minimal form of autonomy, it would seem that in this instance one has
merely affirmed final causes set in play by the system, rather than made an
effort to design techniques for oneself.
However, settling
on any level of autonomy, so long as it is not ‘full automation’, is not
sufficient to forestall general anxiety concerning automation. Consider the
problem of maintaining nuclear reactors. If these get out of control—which is
to say, break down or break free from their designed final causes—it may be
impossible to regain control, and it may become impossible to live. Don Ihde
argues that just as there is an intentional fallacy in thinking that the
meaning of a text can be reduced to the authors’ intent, there is a designer
fallacy in thinking that technologies, in terms of use, function and effect can
be reduced to designed intent.
So if we rely on automated techniques to co-constitute our sense of
becoming-identity, it is possible that the final causes that we fix for them
may not function according to the desired identity. Tying the designer fallacy in
with the intentional fallacy is precisely to the point in gesturing at the
difficulty in forming a
unique identity
given ongoing governmentality all around us; however, importantly, the fallacy
also entails the view that one cannot be given a fixed identity as a system of automated techniques.
In getting clear
on this point, it is helpful to draw on a distinction made by Giorgio Agamben
in his recent
What is an Apparatus.
According to Agamben, the Judeo-Christian
theological problem of God’s unity and trinity was negotiated by noting that
God’s substance is one, while God’s administration, or oikonomia of the world, was divided into distinct hierarchical
roles (9-10). Just as God’s administration through oikonomia produces Christian subjects, the State is interested
in producing civilized subjects. For Agamben, “apparatuses must always imply a
process of subjectification, that is to say, must produce their subject” (11).
But if this follows, if there is a process of subjectification, there is a
prior mode of being distinct from those forms of oikonomia “that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient—in
a way that purports to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human
beings” (Agamben, 12). Therefore, following a theological formula, the
same living substance can be “the place of
multiple processes of subjectification” (Agamben, 14). But for Agamben, the
process of subjectification, is a process of desubjectification; for this
‘natural’ place, where multiple subjects arise, is a process of “separate[ing]
the living being from itself and its immediate relationship with its
environment” (16). The example that Agamben uses is Foucault’s docile subject,
and the example of coming to see oneself as a sinner requiring confession (20).
For Agamben, being
a subject is not just a matter of mere relation to apparatuses; it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a process of resistance
to these forms of governmentality (14). What Ihde’s designer fallacy coupled
with technophobia can be taken to point out is that one cannot be sure that
resistance isn’t already automated, an anticipated feature of governmentality
out of our control.
The question that
Agamben opens, therefore, is whether it is possible to see an apparatus as true
subject affirming, that is to say, whether it is possible to see any apparatus functioning outside of a process of
desubjectification. If it is possible, might we then open the way to recapturing
ourselves within apparatuses of our own
desires?
Since
we are arguing for autonomy over the design process of ourselves, we are not
arguing for full-automation. So we can avoid the Romantic’s charge of having a
dystopic view. I said above that there are good reasons to be technophobic; but
I want to insist that it is possible to creatively resist. The subjectivities
that are produced in us are
also ready
to hand; we can exemplify them or we can idle; they are not fully independent
and already co-opted. Therefore, under our control, these designed ways of
being-citizen can be readily swerved. We can push back “indeterminately”
against the automated techniques that Enframe “us”.
It seems to me that the difference between necessary and sufficient causes
helps shed light on the difference between automation and autonomy. To be
autonomous is to be able to take responsibility for what one has become, saying
that one’s decision and design is a necessary cause alongside other necessary causes.
Only if we supposed that one were fully autonomous, which is impossible, could
we say that our choice is sufficient for what is produced. Why is this
impossible? To be able to say, “thus, I willed it”, is to be able to show that
nothing else was a necessary cause. Take an example of reaching for a glass of
water. Simple enough. But surely the desire to drink water coming from my body
cannot be ruled out as contributing to the choice to grab water in the first
place. Thus, Hayles claims that there is no a priori way of discerning that one’s choice was sufficient
for X. Anything a posteriori here
would be a matter of negotiation.
What someone else
makes of our artful lives is not peculiar to the machine-apparatuses that might
be enlisted for this cause; such is a general problem with interpretations
proper to structuralist imposition and the attempt to be unique. If we are
automated, and we are, Agamben’s question is whether we are autonomous with the
automatons (the apparatuses) or whether we too are automatons. In answering
this question I want to trouble the dichotomy by pointing out that machines
that may be used to fashion a sense of self, need not be challenged as standing
reserve. I want to hold out for the possibility of romantic machines that
co-produce a
becoming self. This is
because a moving target is far more Uncontrollable, the more its parts are
Uncontrollable. In other words, the metaphysics of becoming and emergence—what
bubbles up in processes of resistance marked by Agamben—is far more liberating
than fixed, boring and repeated identities; and if machines can be let be in
the register of becoming rather than being-enframed, ones’ actual self is that
much more free. If we enframe techniques from the Enframing—an
ongoing process without end—perhaps we can break free from the automation of
self to be part of the ongoing and resulting romantic picture of autonomous
relations with “romantic machines”.
In order to come
to this point I want to closely read Minsoo Kang in order to develop the
concept of Nature as Machine historically and show its Sentimentalist and
Romantic reaction from 1741 onwards. Following that, I want to segue into John
Tresch’s text as developing a provocative middle ground captured in his notion
of <the romantic machine>. This reading will compound multiple senses of
Romanticism in order to undermine the standard association of Romanticism with
technophobia, without trivializing this view. With a synthesis between
“mechanization” and Romanticism shown in Romanticism’s historical traces, more
particularly, between technology in Heidegger’s sense and “the” decentralized
subject, I mean to come full circle, gesturing at “subject”-affirming
apparatuses as an answer to Agamben’s question.
2. Minsoo Kang notes that a feeling
of uneasiness and chaos generated by the Thirty Years War and the civil war in
England precipitated the desire for a mechanistic worldview, an ordered polis
maintained by the mechanic-sovereign, perhaps reflective of a perfect engineer
God who, as first cause, ordered the cosmos (bodies included) according to
rational laws.
More
generally, Kang notes three features characteristic of mainstream mechanistic
physiology from 1637-1748 (131; 144). First, metaphysically, humans were
dualistic, with an immaterial soul and a material body; second, mechanistic
descriptions were limited to bodies; and finally, when they were so analogously
described, such was seen as
positive
given that Nature was created by God. By the middle of the eighteenth century
and onwards, however, the automaton lost its ability to be compared to anything
autonomous; it took on a derogatory sense in describing the mentally
handicapped, the peasant toiling in the field, the conformist and the Absolute
tyrant (Kang, 148). These characters were imaged as mere automatons because they lacked the principle of autonomy. But Kang
exemplifies careful scholarship in showing that that this shift is not a clean
break. Rather, from 1740, there was increasing tension between the positivity
and negativity of imaging a human substance as automaton (Kang, 158).
Kang outlines
three reasons that contribute to this shift. The first is that imaging the body
as a machine, with discrete interworking parts, was beginning to give way to a
new holistic picture of the body that presupposed something similar to Aquinas’
principle of activation, or Scotus’ principle of individuation. Buffon, for
instance, argued that mechanistic methodology was useless and inappropriate for
“the study of the living world” (Kang, 150). The tension mentioned above
translates into a questioning about this methodology. Is it totally useless to
see human bodies as machines or does the picture simply require
supplementation? For if one wanted to replace dualism with hylomorphism, viz.,
that the body and the mind are not ‘really distinct’ substances, that they are
connected harmoniously, if, that is, the mind just is the principle of vitalism
in a mechanized body, it is contentious
to simply suppose that vitalism is anathema to mechanization (Kang, 152).
So far we have
been talking about the mechanization of the body; but it is not impossible to
talk about the mechanization of the mind; for within the Cartesian lineage
there is a sense of training one’s mind to avoid bodily passions. If the
analogy between the soul governing the body and the Monarch governing subjects
holds, then in naming the sovereign an automaton-man, one is taking issue with
the way the centralized state, and by analogy, the governed humyn substance, is
ordered. In the sentimental age, character traits of moderation and order, or
centralized authority, started to lose their privilege, opening the way to
“passionate and sensitive” nonconformity, intuition and imagination, which made
possible the desire for the decentralization of the state (Kang 153-4). Kang
explains this general, and increasing tension in Western Europe by pointing to
the failures of the centralized sovereigns in the 1740’s, 50’s and 60’s to
provide freedom from strife (his second reason) (148; 154-5), and the
concomitant growing tendency to accept radical enlightenment ideas (his third)
(155-6; 158).
Kang wants us to
see that the classical and late enlightenment tension concerning humans as
automatons, from this being a permissible characterization to it being a
debasement of proper humynity, in the emotional response to automatons. In the
classical period, there was a general sense of awe in the presence of
Vaucanson’s duck because such mechanical devices signified God’s laws through
their creators. Kempelen’s chess player, however, did not generate a feeling of
awe because, generally speaking, it could no longer be taken as animate and
humyn-like. By the late enlightenment period, as the mechanistic metaphor was
continuing to wane, inanimate reason was automatically taken up as an artifact
with humyn efficient causality (Kang, 182).
We saw above that
the centralized rigidity of the state, once desired for security, gave way to
ideas of organic harmony and decentralization in the sentimentalist period.
Reason needed to be used holistically. But the hope for sentimental reason,
reason embodied in the French Revolution, gave way to “the murderous
monstrosity of the Terror”, and finally Napoleon (Kang, 190; 195). In order to
explain this tension, that is, that sentimental reason was not the end of
history, the German Romantics developed a comforting teleological Metaphysical
narrative based upon rupture and dialectical union between Spirit and Matter,
set in motion at the birth of the cosmos. The explanation for the Terror, then,
was that Spirit and Matter will become One only at the end of Cosmic history. But this way of conceptualizing Matter
generated a more extensive picture of redemption than was permissible in
sentimentalist late enlightenment. According to the above Metaphysical picture,
all things, animate and inanimate were the site (or potential site) of this
rupturing and union (Kang, 193).
To be sure, the
relationship between Romanticism and sentimentalism was not mutually exclusive;
in Romanticism, while the automaton-man was still perceived as debased
humynity, a consequence of its metaphysics entailed that an inanimate automaton
figure could be an “instrument of the supernatural”, fully alive,
uncontrollable (Kang 211). Perhaps fear of this possibility explains the
disdain that privileged people have towards revolutionary subjects, perceived
as machine-like beings with genuine potential to revolt by way of bodily
knowledge. According to Kang, Romanticism included these beings, metaphorical
and otherwise, in its eschatological vision.
So the need to
find comfort in a Transcendent metaphysics coupled with agreement with the Sentimentalists
against mechanization precipitated anxiety and technophobia about automatons
because of their possible use in Cosmic History. This Romantic tension about
automatons, between the worry of seeing oneself as one and yet at the same time
seeing machines as worthy of Spirit, can be given flesh with John Tresch’s
concept of the Romantic Machine.
Tresch’s narrative, stretching from the 1820’s to the 1850’s in Paris can be
taken to be about
Romantic thinkers that
see the problem with Enframing, just as the sentimentalist turn rejected the
outright mechanization of Nature, but without opposing Machines to Nature.
According to Tresch’s narrative, the thinkers he discusses wanted to draw
closer to Final Cosmic Unity, “a more just, free and harmonious society” and
did so by joining themselves with
romantic machines (xvi-xvii; 10).
The mechanization
of nature as an (En)framing hypothesis, with component primitive parts under
the sign of a division of labor, in this period, is replaced by an epistemology
that doesn’t start with phenomenal fragmentation, but speculates and ultimately
aims to discover through enframing
intervention, a unified “noumenal” theory, an approximation towards what could
be named Schelling’s world-soul. (Tresch, 31; 45; 53). Unlike research that
stipulates theories in advance, “as detached, calculating reason” (Enframing),
“this is research that does not seek to confirm or reject hypotheses, but
simply to become familiar with a phenomena and its extensions” (Tresch, 57;
39). In this <aesthetic state>, “everything—even the tool which
serves…—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest” (Tresch, 75).
That is to say, “the observer had to gain the instrument’s assent by entering
into a dialog, “playing” with it, becoming familiar with its limits and habits” (emphasis added, Tresch, 80). In
this way, instruments became autonomous organs of sense, “autonomous” in the
sense that “they were disciplined and interconnected but at the same time,
spontaneous, active and free” (Tresch, 111).
Clearly
instruments were rendered to serve a purpose, but not in a deterministic way;
rather, they were rendered on their own terms to signify Nature, a dynamic, awe-inspiring, unfolding process. The
Romantic Scientist enters into the open with the instrument, letting it be in order to exemplify
Beauty and Order. But where does this (the aesthetic state) come from? Who
designed it? If we are trying to exemplify the end of history, where Mind
infuses Matter, why should it correspond to what We, collectively, take it to
be? If this has anything to do with Kant’s noumenal realm—if Nature is
Noumena—surely the fact that noumena by definition entails the impossibility of
knowing it implies an impossibility of saying some theory signifies it.
But obviously it is
better to take a stab here, designing a harmonious frame that captures what is
good for all, than to presume that All is Well when it clearly never has been;
but what seems to me to be much more interesting is
not collective Harmony, designed by the priests of
Order, but distributed harmonies
modified by autonomous desires. In Humboldt’s orchestra, the machines,
non-human and human alike, must abide by the rule that they are disciplined to
follow; the “law was only a law of freedom if it adjusted to the living
particularity of the individual” (Tresch, 80). But what if adjustment here
makes the law no longer identical with itself? What are the limits of
disciplined-freedom? Conformity? Consumerism? Is that a wild and free
Noumenal-Nature, set loose in the dynamics of becoming, or a domesticated
Phenomenal-Form to which we must submit? Must our imaginations fit the form, or
are we free to imagine forms that we want? The promise of Romanticism,
in Kang’s sense, seems to entail the promise of possibility, which cannot be
contained by the straightjacket of Spinoza’s Enlightenment Reason.
In other words,
what Ought to be can never be reduced to what Is; and even Spinoza’s view of what
Ought to be must therefore be insufficient. What is this picture? Spinoza, like Hobbes, takes the city and the sovereign to be sources (and therefore limits) of freedom, outside the gnashing of Nature, in an all too typical view of Enlightenment reason; yet, Marcuse's idea of a qualitative difference strikes me as obviously open to its own negation, even if 'practicality' would go by the boards. Decentralization coupled with
imagination (sentimentality) produces a picture that I want to disclose below.
3. Decentralization: The story that
we have been unraveling can be put in terms of awe and fear. In the ‘classical
enlightenment’ machines were awe-inspiring signifiers of God’s design. But this
way of viewing the humyn gave way to Sentimental feelings of fear and
confinement, which generated desires to imagine different forms of
decentralized government, forms proper to humyns. With the failure of this
promise in the actuality of the Terror, we saw Romanticism generate a story
about Unfolding Spirit that in turn generated the horrific possibility of
automatons coming alive, which, in turn, was tempered by seeing machines as
awe-inspiring actants in the realization of Cosmic History, a picture that I
want to re-characterize in sentimentalist-autonomist terms as horrific and
confining, if not completely boring. We might be able to explain the reason
that automated techniques can be simultaneously awe-inspiring and horrific by
way of Don Ihde’s designer fallacy, which points automated techniques out of
their final causes, permanently destabilizing them, and shoring up the
possibility of fixed regiments of bringing-forth. This permits the
fearful—because unhinged—and awe-inspiring—because not fixed—figure of
Possibility, a figure properly named Imagination, placed within the
intersection of Romanticism and Sentimentalism. But the fallacy doesn’t inspire
hope, not in the least, because there may only be Imagination and Desire—there
may only be Becoming; there may be Nothing to save us.
It seems to me
that this does not provide a way of
thinking about un-Enframed techniques in the network that is ones’ life without
technophobia; but the worry that one can control what one is, strikes me as misplaced, even if one minimizes
the number of techniques “utilized” to this end. The best that we can do is
swerve the apparatuses we are caught under to the imaginative creation of our
autonomous desires. Tresch’s narrative strikes me as complementing Kang’s in
that it sketches a way in which we might properly open automated techniques
according to our desires, in a way that permits them to live too; but in this
living—whatever that may become—we
are left in the Open of Possibility, a place truly in opposition to automation, and so, truly in an ongoing ‘place’ of opposition
to Technology.
What seems clearest
here is that automation can become unhinged from its final causality, not in a
way that permits it to be whatever we might make it, but simply not only what it
was made to be. Given that one's own final causality is therefore not written, to say that one has automated oneself in this unfolding strikes me as misplaced. What better way to smash the machines.
