Whenever I share the bed with a human, I hear a gurgling sound coming from my guts.I remember this happening since I moved to Athens for studies eight years ago. It occurs only with humans, no matter if we’re friends or sexual partners. This airy—more likely eerie—sound of fluids circulating inside my empty bowels keeps me from falling asleep for an hour or so. A feather of trust giggles my intestines and, sometimes, my sleepmate’s too. It feels uncomfortable at first, but it gets us out of the observer’s quasi-individual, quasi-whole being and into perceptions of intimate livings. The producers of the monotonous sound coming from my woofer meet another set of multiplayers and form a symphony of experimental noise music. It’s an egalitarian sign—and we laugh hearing it. The gut microbiota within us activate their dynamic functions as they try to push the boundaries. We don’t become One, we don’t wish to anyway. It’s the binding of our in-between openness that becomes sound before we fall asleep.
Maybe the gut microbiota are in slow pace when I share the bed with animals because my observer’s protective shield is already off. I’m not afraid to be silly and play in a childish, non-adult manner. The need for this dimension of games feels unsurpassable for reaffirming trust and intimacy. It’s just that with humans it feels like being among strangers, in the adult manner we’re playing—with words—whereas with animals play is among companions. Trusting takes the image of a continuous, fluid-like, unstable, quasi-floating circuit. Except for recharging it with energy that keeps all the mates within the tracks, there is no other end-point than dying together with intimate companions and strangers.
This is a story about embodied knowledges, entanglements, guts and the microbiota who live there. “Live there” might stick a bit anthropomorphised as an expression. A better term to describe it is in use in evolutionary biology. Symbiosis, coming from the greek verb συμβιώνω [symbiόno], means ‘living together’. Symbionts are those who live together: lichens and trees, insects, animals—including humans—and bacteria, friends and strangers. Same and different species that have physical interaction, even for a limited time of their life, are symbionts.
A debate between auto- and sym-
Bacteria, found in guts—and in most unimaginable places and times—are the motors of life on earth. Symbionts themselves in dynamic relatings of intra-actions, they expanded their boundaries by partially assimilating, partially digesting each other and by this process they invented the nucleated cell—otherwise known as eukaryotic cell. The bedrock of evolution for all animals, plants, fungi and protoctists.Along with bacteria (prokaryotes), these are the five kingdoms. Protoctists are “A kingdom of eukaryotes incorporating the algae and the protozoans that comprise the presumed ancestral stocks of the fungi, plant, and animal kingdoms; they lack the developmental pattern stemming from a blastula, typical of animals, the pattern of embryo development typical of plants, and development from spores as in the fungi. Included in Protoctista are the nucleated algae and seaweeds, the flagellated water molds, slime molds, and slime nets, and the protozoa; unicellular, colonial, and multicellular organisms are included, but the complex development of tissues and organs of plants and animals is absent. The term Protoctista replaces the term Protista, which connotes single-celled or acellular organisms, whereas the basal preplant (Protophyta) and preanimal (Protozoa) assemblages incorporated in Protoctista include many multicellular forms, because multicellularity appears to have evolved independently a number of times within these primitive groups.” Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary. S.v. “protoctists.” Retrieved October 10 2020 from https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/protoctists. See Margulis and Schwartz, Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982). Bacteria were the loves of life of Lynn Margulis who disclosed that long-lasting physical association between strangers and the fusion of genomes are, primarily, the originating processes of viable, stable, complex systems of organisms. She gave microbiological evidence and substantiated this bacterial process that invented the nucleus cell, which she named symbiogenesis, or else known as endosymbiosis, in her paper On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.Lynn Sagan, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” in Journal of Theoretical Biology 14, no. 3 (March 1967), pp. 225-274 (Sagan was the former last name of Margulis, from her ex-husband Carl Sagan) The paper was rejected by fifteen journals before being accepted and published in 1967.Lynn Margulis “Gaia Is a Tough Bitch,” Chapter 7 in John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 129-151. Her concept was mostly considered far-fetched and it was faced with hostility by the majority of biologists at that time. Themselves neo-Darwinists, they had a “survival of the fittest” approach to evolutionary biology, that favours some species over others by natural selection and claims genetic mutation, therefore inheritance denial, of the favourable species. These approaches make the image of a higher-order-evolution species that are always accelerating at the expense of lower-order species. Lynn Margulis, having her eyes fixed on the inside of things, and not on the heavens, was an ardent critic of neo-Darwinism: “the view of evolution as chronic bloody competition… dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (New York: Summit Books, 1986), pp.14-15.
She was the first to define the concept of holobionts. Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages that form ecological units and are composed of different species inside them, on them and around them. All of the members contribute in some way to the function of the ecological unit. Animals, their tissues, organs, cells and microbial symbionts are holobionts. So are bees, wasps and flowers. Coral reefs are of the most enigmatic holobionts and major literary work has been, and continues to be, conducted on their symbiotic relatings and the contributions of each symbiont. Holobionts are dynamic, complex, contingent assemblages that insist on staying open to involution with other species and other—already complex enough—holobionts. “They make each other through semiotic-material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements.”Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 60.
There persists, however, a lot of controversy around perceptions of the holobiont. Contrary to its involutionary inception, it is also theorised as a single, well-defined, bounded unit whose maintenance is arranged by the autopoietic and self-regulatory principles of its entity as a whole. The debate derives, among other maladaptations, from a misconstruction of the autopoietic concept employed by Margulis. She incorporated the concept when she was collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia theory. Even though she writes that Gaia “is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun,”Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 119. she defines Gaia as autopoietic and self-regulatory. Here, the symbiogenetic inventions of bacteria make a concrete analogy for the origin of Gaia. This could show that autopoiesis merely supplied the universalising conceptual glue in the construction of a theory about global systems. An extra mechanism that simplified a synecdoche of her work with the complex doings of bacteria. I find this sudden jump she attempted the reason why she had so much pain shaping a Gaia theory. During her lifework she gave substantial energy to scrutinizing the veracity of autopoiesis. Knowing where she would get real responses, she gradually drew her appraisal from bacteria.
It is relevant that, like everyone else in the scientific community, she was introduced to autopoiesis by the biological research of Varela, Maturana and Uribe. In 1974 they published Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model,F.G.Varela,H.R.Maturana, R. Uribe, “Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model,” in Biosystems 5, no. 4 (May 1974), pp. 187-196. in which they investigated the model of the nucleus cell. Biology works with and is worked by model systems, whatever responses we extract from them “become the centre for both scientific and political discussions in contemporary developmental biology.”Scott F. Gilbert, “The Adequacy of Model Systems for Evo-Devo: Modeling the Formation of Organisms/ Modeling the Formation of Society,” in Barberousse A., Morange M., Pradeu T. (eds) Mapping the Future of Biology: Evolving Concepts and Theories, vol 266 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), p. 57. Their article defined the nucleus cell as self-productive and able to proliferate all alone; subsequently, this property was implied for all living organisms. Margulis, on the other hand, developed the concept further and made it clear that every entity, in order to stay alive, is primarily autopoietic: “An organism constantly exchanges its parts, replacing its component chemicals without ever losing its identity… All cells react to external perturbations in order to preserve key aspects of their identity within their boundaries.”Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, p. 56. Without this primary regulating process they would not survive to perform reproduction. Therefore, autopoiesis could be replaced by homeostasis and metabolism without any consequences for the continuation of life.
But the term and framework keeps recurring, this time with an approach of community ecology. Continuing to work with the eukaryotic cells she gave a view of intertwined symbionts whose relatings involve regulation, maintenance and reproduction. In Origin of Sex, co-authored with her son Dorian Sagan, they proposed to dismiss the concept of the “eukaryotic individual” in favour of the “component-autopoietic” intra-actions of the ancestral bacteria contained within the plasma membrane of the cell: “All eukaryotic individuals must reserve, in a form capable of continued reproduction, their genetic components, the remnant bacteria in the combined form of the nucleocytoplasmic, mitochondrial, plastid, and undulipodial genomes. If we accept the cell as a microbial community, the germ plasm is equivalent to component autopoiesis: a complete set of heterologous genomes and their protein synthetic systems contained within a membranous package—not the nuclear membrane but the plasma membrane.”Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Origins of Sex: Three Billion Years of Genetic Recombination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 175-6. They continue that, “We can apply the principles of community ecology directly to the development of the individual.”Ibid, p. 176. The two sides, bacteria and holobionts—or even maybe Gaia theory—meet right here in the reaffirmation of the crucial role that inter- and intra-actions among components have. Both for homeostasis and metabolism, and for the “drive of necessarily higher-order forms of community self-production and self-maintenance.”Bruce Clarke, “Margulis, Autopoiesis, Gaia,” electronic book review, last modified July 7, 2019,https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/margulis-autopoiesis-gaia/. This essay is drawn from a preliminary version of several sections from Clarke’s book entitled Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, September 2020). This outcome justifies Haraway in her not-so-elaborative replacement of autopoiesis by sympoiesis. It matters what concepts think of concepts. And even though Margulis was sure to include every part and insist on their non-expandable performances, the concept of autopoiesis and its misinterpretations could not but fall into the individualistic pattern that gives more chances for survival and evolution to higher-order forms, claiming them to be biologically autonomous. The controversy and the debates are still around the topic thirty-four years after the substantialization of the sympoietic properties life’s bedrock has.
A mundane act for the un-rest of holobionts
The problem with autopoiesis, concretely, emerges when the entity it characterises is perceived as a host and all the involved participants are reduced to being dependent on it. No matter how contingently organised, beings do not precede their relatings. Nothing that has come to exist as a unit can seal off its arrangements and proceed happily to eternal, unmodified, proliferation. That’s a lesson bacteria have taught us. When your existence is at stake, play brings new parties to the meetings. “Auto” combined with “poietic”, when it’s attributed to higher-order forms of organisation, is a pure indication of reduction of all the involutions; it presumes immense power for stabilization that, conversely and consequentially, leaves all the participants innocent and without responsibility for any damaging action they might commit.
The feminist point of view and framework in technoscientific knowledge-production is generally, even today, characterised as ideological and biased. It’s really funny, and ironic, to receive a rejection like this from a science worlding that is almost religious regarding individuality, hierarchy of species, and anthropogenic mutilation. Besides being passive aggressive, a counter-position stating that all science and technology is ideologised and biased is the absolutist version of relativism. A zero-sum game in both cases.
A model is a work object—either sex, fungi, or poetry—it requires response-ability. One has to be faithfully intimate with this stranger and be able to embody its view with loving care in order to be response-able. I cannot recite its doings and use it for my purposes without being curious and open-hearted towards its reality. Objective knowledge is situated knowledge according to Donna Haraway. The closest we can get to real knowledge is by getting entangled with. One cannot claim to be something other than her boundaries allow, but boundaries get pushed outwards with inter- and intra-actions. String figures engage us in becomings-with others. Moreover, one should take care of the alterations of the prosthetic embodiments of vision he or she renders in his or her work. “One cannot be either a cell or molecule—or a woman, colonised person, labourer, and so on—if one intends to see and see from these positions critically… Also one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement.”Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Prespective” in Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988), p. 585.
After dismissing the idea of single, bounded units, holobionts will maybe get a postmodern look—ready to adhere to other holobionts of their choice and transform altogether. This is more appropriation, than it is ‘natural selection’. The work of the god-eye, the supremacist observer that exercises authority over others by assuming a higher positioning. Watching everything from above, the self-divinated observer claims authorship over the beautiful and useful ones. It takes credit for inventing their charismatic capabilities and potentialities. It ditches the ugly and useless ones in the lost and found section and it incubates the rest that it now possesses. The god-eye, says Haraway, seems “to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.”Ibid, p. 581. Right away, she cites Zoe Sofoulis who calls this “the cannibaleye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.”Zoe Sofoulis, Through the Lumen: Frankenstein and the Optics of Re-origination (Ph.D. diss. University of California at Santa Cruz, 1988).
This is hardly the case in the end, simply because holobionts rarely have the option of selection. Like bacteria shows us, the fusion of genomes in symbioses is the primary evolutionary motor, followed then by natural selection—with a very modest role kept for mutation which denies genetic inheritance. Holobionts interpenetrate, split, reform and rejoin through partially assimilating, partially indigesting and digesting. They build a diverse monstrous model of viewpoint and practice in place of the individual, masculinist, white, whole, human theories.
Unlike the techno-monsters that assimilate only after a selection of the hypnotising, addictive, power-inflicting, remorse-inducing properties, the female monstrous gaze and living produced by feminist knowledge is a trope for appearances. Multiple partial embodiments, intersections and entanglements make one appear as a monster when she or he renders them tactile. It’s the space of a body, of a writing piece, of an engaged community that embodies diverse prosthetic vision mechanisms. Many different parts comprise these bodies. They invent new kinds of entities in synergy. Monstrous under the male gaze. A mundane act for the un-rest of holobionts.
Women and animals are the two core agents of the sisters’ work. They exaggeratedly play the roles that appropriation imposes on both of them while, in an upside-down dimension, they reinforce and demonstrate their in-between solidarity. They are moved by the same mundane feelings and desires for coexistence. Prosthetic embodiments are, primarily, prostheses of corporeal sensoriums that get conceptualised through the desire to transmit reasons. Reasons that move response-able actions between intimate companions and strangers, a horizontal affectioning. Gazing from below, while understanding that you are being watched from above, has this very specific string sensation. This ‘above’ is positioned far off from Christianity, as the ‘below’ has nothing to do with ethics of contractual reciprocity.
The Dostálková sisters work with figures that aren’t shy, they don’t hide in their vulnerability. They expose both a cold, distant immiseration—showcased as a trophy of the subjugating rhetoric—and the monstrous figure of feminist rhetoric along with all its nodes of partial embodiments. In their project Campaigne—exhibited at the Cursor Gallery in Prague, and curated by Edith Jeřábková—the artists, with the help of the third-party monster, reaffirm the interconnections among women and “uncharismatic” species and show the consequences that humane hierarchisation entails. One consequence is that the monstrous woman trope emerged even before the inception of feminism, as their interview with Jeřábková reads:
The close associations between women, animals and monstrosity are often linked to romantic ideas and provide a very vital investigative resource of our communication. The stories recounted in novels contribute to the creation of a gender ideology that in our opinion is justified in the case of the protection of animal rights. Generally speaking, women are either marginalised or placed in a subsidiary role, whereas monstrous women in reality occupy the central position in their own stories. We avail ourselves of these positions even though the novel qua genre came into being primarily in order to promote the knightly virtues.
Daniela and Linda Dostálková spent many years exploring the strategies pursued by animal rights groups in their attempt to inform the general public about the practices of factory farming. “These strategies, however well intended, themselves create monsters because we remain unwilling to face up to reality as such.”Ibid. The livings and dyings of animals in factory farmings are some of the techno-monsters of the cannibaleye. The sight of this extreme utilisation is so repellant that a heavy emotional burden is, instantaneously, charged. We grasp feelings of compassion, commiseration and we may engage with substantially critical thoughts. But for how long? As long as it takes to cease definitely the factory farming of mass production? “One of the key characteristics of a monster is its ability to attract and repel.”Ibid. An activist campaign’s sharp-content image that shows the shame, the perpetual mutilation, the long-lasting deanimalisation of farmed animals’ reality, has the same effect. Like being, for a while, in the naked reality of The Matrix, the shock of mechanisation and ultimate immiseration will likely facilitate the retraction to ourselves, urge us to close our vision so as not to feel pain anymore, nor concern ourselves with response-able thoughts. Safety has been, doomingly, related with individuality and independence. Close within a bounded flatness. Keep mute all the hurting ideas. Another one of the cannibaleye’s techno-monsters emerges right there. We need to un-educate and re-educate ourselves, for we cannot afford any more excremental techno-monster parties.
In their search for alternative, more effervescent, gassy campaigne strategies, Daniela and Linda Dostálková superimpose the monster of feminist rhetoric upon the techno-monsters of mechanisation and fearful individualisation. Two photographs of monster women embody prosthetic parts and visions—creating, thus, a holobionts gaze. These figures demand the space that has been refused to them, along with the acknowledgment of their intrarelatings. But then again, they display an acceptance of their given roles: care and concern. Immersed, as they are, in plant lives of absorption from anywhere; soil, sun, water, even pesticides and hormones, they meddle with whatever the “uncharismatic” species are also meddling with.
The female monster could be thought of as too friendly. That’s not undermining. It was friendly already from its inception. What matters is friends with whom? Trusting, long-lasting friendships are complex bonds of a rare kin that work their becomings through semiotic material involution. Things don’t appear as sterile and innocent anymore. As the sisters say: “During a crisis, many species that are customarily portrayed as monsters appear in a new light, one that lies outside the notional hermeneutic circle.”Ibid.
That’s how getting in the muddle looks and what it feels like. Who could manage to keep clear from the muddle when it’s found to be bigger and more mortal than we thought? Filled with polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, bisphenol A, uranium, premarin, pesticides and a load of toxic multi-species exchanges?
Even the loves of Lynn Margulis cannot deal with these syntheses. The bacteria in the guts of mealworms and superworms are shown to biodegrade polystyrene, but it’s more likely a failure than a success. Some of the polystyrene gets out of their system as carbon dioxide, while more than half breaks into nano- and micro-plasticsYu Yang, Jun Yang, Wei-Min Wu, Jiao Zhao, Yiling Song, Longcheng Gao, Ruifu Yang, and Lei Jiang, “Biodegradation and Mineralization of Polystyrene by Plastic-Eating Mealworms: Part 2. Role of Gut Microorganisms,” in Environmental Science & Technology49 (20), 2015, pp. 12087-12093. which are even more precarious for aquatic and marine environments. Moreover, in this process polystyrene goes under depolymerisation which leaves its monomer, styrene, destabilised. Not able to hold on to the micro- and nano-particles, it sticks to living organisms.Albert A. Koelmans, “Modeling the Role of Microplastics in Bioaccumulation of Organic Chemicals to Marine Aquatic Organisms. A Critical Review,” in Melanie Bergmann et al. (eds.), Marine Anthropogenic Litter (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2015), pp. 309-324. Styrene and the rest of toxics cannot integrate in living systems. Teratogeneses, endocrine disruptions, and reproductive disabilities, among others, are ahead of us.Tamara S. Galloway, “Micro- and nano- plastic in Human Health,” in ibid, pp. 343-366.
Toxicological managements should try and do more than feed superworms and mealworms, fed with plastic, to factory farming animals and call it zero waste. The coda is that, as the ones immersed in monstrous appearances, we’ll be there when the future parties arrive—to welcome them and become intimate with them.
Elena Stavraki lives and works in North Greece (Alexandroupolis) during summer and central Greece (Athens) during winter. She studied Theory and History of Art and is currently doing her masters on Culture and Documentary Film Production. Recurring themes of her writing are animal studies, interdependence among friends, the environment and synergy. She has published writings in Paragka zine, the MASS, and NAHR.it. Periodically she curates exhibitions: Crystals in Soil, Athens 2019; 16 mins of love [A New Sentimentalism], Swindon 2019.
These pages are meant as an accompaniment to the experience of reading The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, a number of lectures delivered by Martin Heidegger in 1927 at the time of his ascension to academic and philosophical success in the final days of the Weimar Republic. You’re highly encouraged to read along with the lectures themselves; section markers are provided. If you are unable to find a copy of the lectures, either in German or English, write to me and I might have something up my sleeve. As for myself, I’m not a philosopher, nor do I aspire to be one. What I am is an avid interrogator of the relation between thought and violence. This space is thus to become a garden in which various commentaries on thought, history, violence, and our lives will grow. Put aside the fast-paced horror of today’s live-streamed unraveling of reality and come consider another, quieter time when – jokes. Things were pretty fucked then and they’re fucked now. Come, whether tired or angry, and join the attempt at understanding philosophy’s place in this madness.
Introduction §4.
“It’s a mess, ain’t it Sheriff.” “If it ain’t, it’ll do till one gets here.”
No Country for Old Men
I know. There’s a lot going on. I don’t think that you or I have it in us now to so quickly turn to something as mundane, as innocent as another preparatory lecture at the University of Marburg in 1927, and which Heidegger only green-lit for publication shortly before his death. So let us be brief as we do our obligated diligence and maybe at the end of this head towards something softer for the later part of the day. As for the actual bit of the text for this round, the actual content is mostly a roadmap and some more of that sweet pedal repetition with few new harmonic phrases thrown in. I think it’s fine to keep it short, as most of what’s addressed here is just ear-marking topics for later, and right now with the US as it is, I’d rather not waste too much time on bookkeeping. Remember gang, we’re only getting on the entrance ramp. So among the usual Sein vs Seinde, we’re introduced to the crucial component of time. This is apparently going to be part of the wrench that’s going to help us tear Being from the beings. And once we tear away from the realm of the extant, Doc promises us we’ll be in the clouds of a transzendentale Wissenschaft, a transcendental science dealing with earthly things no more.
For that to work, we’re going to have to do a bit of rummaging in the ol’ ontological drawer and dust off some earlier contenders. Specifically, we’ll be taking four points in the history of philosophy – but remember you, there’s no history being done so keep all hands and other parts inside the ride at all times – which Doc aggressively insists seem unrelated but are actually related. I wasn’t really going to argue, but alright. Anyway, the dogs in this fight are going to be… drumroll please, but maybe somehow less martial after all:
1. Kant’s thesis: Being is not a real predicate. 2. The thesis of medieval ontology (Scholasticism) which goes back to Aristotle: To the constitution of the being of a being there belong (a) whatness, essence (Was-sein, essentia), and (b) existence or extantness ( existentia, Vorhandensein). 3. The thesis of modern ontology: The basic ways of being are the being of nature (res extensa) and the being of mind (res cogitans). 4. The thesis of logic in the broadest sense: Every being, regardless of its particular way of being, can be addressed and talked about by means of the “is.” The being of the copula.Heidegger, p. 15; “1. Die These Kants: Sein ist kein reales Prädikat. 2. Die These der auf Aristoteles zurückgehenden mittelalterlichen Ontologie (Scholastik): Zur Seinsverfassung eines Seienden gehören das Was-sein (essentia) und das Vorhandensein (existentia).3. Die These der neuzeitlichen Ontologie: Die Grundweisen des Seins sind das Sein der Natur (res extensa) und das Sein des Geistes (res cogitans).4. Die These der Logik im weitesten Sinne: Alles Seiende läßt sich unbeschadet seiner jeweiligen Seinsweise ansprechen durch das >ist<; das Sein der Kopula.” Martin Heidegger and Friedrich-Wilhelm von. Herrmann, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1997), p. 20.
Difference, Articulation, Modification, and Truth. I don’t remember those being the names of the horsemen, but I didn’t pay attention in Sunday school. Well, not much we can say there other than I hope you’re ready to deal with Kant in a way that’ll get you laughed at if your friends happen to be neo-Kantians. Which, these days, is frankly on you.
I hope you’re ready for the fight. Feeling the intensity. The lust. To arouse is to stir, to begin to find movement where it wasn’t before. While the rest of the world lies in ruins, shocked by the never before seen levels of human destruction of the War, Doc’s head is elsewhere. Remember, then was also a time Before, as we now still cling to this ledge which, as we speak, crumbling into something darker, unknowable, and it was then that:
the reservist soldier Heidegger has discovered a new intensity. It is not war itself, but that which remains when the catastrophe all round burns up everything else. It is not the bath of steel of victory but the great slag removal through defeat. This is his way of believing “in the spirit and its power – he who lives in it and for it never fights a losing battle” (November 6, 1918).
R. Safranski, 1999. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 87
Prelude, perhaps overdue
We’re all waiting and watching. Shit’s a mess but it’s been a mess for a while now. Question is what kind of mess it’s gonna be down the road. It’s been making a lot of people ask themselves why the hell they started mainlining CNN for days to no avail. Gotta hope the next hit brings you that sweet relief. But in reality, things aren’t going smoothly and people don’t know what to say. A lot of hot air, and undoubtedly some good bits in there too, but they’re pretty hard to find among the chaos. As for this series, we’re barely nearing the end of the introduction and I’ve been allowing myself to speak quite loosely, jumping around too much into little pools of narrative indulgences. It’d do good for us to place ourselves here. The end of the beginning. Seems somehow appropriate. These lectures were given, to speak with a sloppy historical gesture, on the cusp. This was before the camps,1 the gulags, the Bomb, the supposed end of biological-Darwinism, before the flower-emoji international order of the liberal nation-state and so much more. Yet make no mistake, despite the spectacle of Corona and the US election, we are also now only in the time Before; whatever is coming is only now being built, perhaps is already slowly lifting it’s tired wicked wings from the earth again. In fact, looking out over the city, I don’t think it’ll be that long before the first ripples of the impact start to shatter the frame beyond repair.
It might at this point be worth my throwing a glance in the rear-view mirror of this hermeneutic clown car and ask the passengers if they – you, that is – are sure they want to go on this trip. Roadtrips always sound nice, but then you’re 16 hours in, broken down in some flatlands Iowa rest stop wishing to God or some greater might of fury that everyone would just shut the fuck up. That and stop taking so long in the bathroom.That is, in Europe. I exclude the concentration camps of the British and other colonial forces not out of oversight, but because mainland philosophy hadn’t yet been yet forced to confront them. For a good explanation of how the supposedly objective horror of fascism relates to the choice of its victims, see http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/alberto-toscano-long-shadow-racial-fascism
A reminder then that our goal, the final point on this map that’s starting to look a bit queasy itself, is a phenomenological foundation of the knowledge of being itself. Let me ask you, again with a straight face if this is something you really care about? Even from the driver’s seat I can’t help but wonder when facing this task in its sobriety and enormity something which perhaps Heidegger never had the pleasure of being asked to his face: who really gives a shit? I guess it’s actually right to say there are two flavors to this question: first, who gives a shit in the philosophical sense – what does it mean to us to answer this metaphysical question. Then there’s the second, and more obviously relevant social-historical flavor of the question.
Regarding the former, here we’ve already brushed up on some of sense of impasse regarding today’s ability to really grapple with an ontological question as pure as Doc’s over here. Unsurprisingly, this is the implied refrain of this series – a constant opportunity for a present perspective to grapple with a question and its resolution posed at the time of Heidegger’s ascendance to Husserl’s throne as phenomenologist-in-chief. Come to think of it, even a look at Doc’s place on the historical bookshelf would suggest some difficulties with this question. Poor Edmund Husserl’s monomaniacal pursuit of an insurmountable ground for phenomenology showed very much the need for The Outside World. Somehow just bracketing it and putting it away for the lesser mortals to chew on feels a bit disingenuous, considering that “consciousness is at no moment severed from Being. There is no empty consciousness confronting objects with which it would fill its emptiness.”Safranski 1999, p. 77 It’s worth looking at Sartre’s description in encountering this idea in Husserl, if anything because it’s damn good writing:
If, impossible though it may be, you could enter “into” a consciousness, you would be seized by a whirlwind and thrown back outside, in the thick of the dust, near the tree, for consciousness has no “inside.” Precisely this being-beyond-itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be a substance is what makes it be a consciousness. Imagine for a moment a connected series of bursts that tear us out of ourselves, that do not even allow to an “ourselves” the leisure of composing ourselves behind them, but that instead throw us beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the plain earth, amidst things. Imagine us thus rejected and abandoned by our own nature in an indifferent, hostile, and restive world – you will then grasp the profound meaning of the discovery that Husserl expresses in his famous phrase, “All consciousness is consciousness of something.” No more is necessary to dispose of the effete philosophy of immanence, where everything happens by compromise, by protoplasmic transformations, by a tepid cellular chemistry. The philosophy of transcendence thrown us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, under a dazzling light.
A translation (by Joseph P. Fell) of “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité,” in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)
And then Heidegger even takes issue with Husserl’s reliance on the so-called transcendental ego as something too artificial. I’ve got to be honest here; I don’t understand how we’re supposed to be taking a philosophy that’s so mired in the world of Things, of the existing realities, and somehow isolating ourselves from it and finding something… apart from but a part of it. I guess that’s the point of these lectures though – setting this shit up. Considering that this part of my question is the most unresolved on my end, it’s something that’d likely be improved with input from you. Maybe this way we can crowd-fund a greater pleasure, a sort of co-working lust space to have this exercise of reflection become harmonic, polyphonic, if also unavoidably at times harsh, with the inclusion of your own opinions on the material of each section. My own goal is to provide a lineage of parallels tending towards early 20th century social thought, psychoanalytic developments, and, most particularly, a variety spread of contemporary intellectual history of the brutal and absurd. A charcuterie of violence. But violence alone can leave a bad taste on the tongue. The Ortus community has more to offer than this, however, and it’d be interesting to see if the colorful background of its contributors and readership can itself grow into a proper philosophical chorus.
And as for the second flavor, better expressed by the old philosophical adage: why should I really give a shit. This is the meat of why we’re here, and to be honest with you, I’m not sure if I have an answer. Look outside, look at The News; you probably don’t even have to know what’s going on out there. Why read philosophy in these times? I know I know I sound like a TA on the first day of an intro to philosophy course, but seriously? Have you looked into what your favorite philosophers did when the weather forecast indicated severe storms of lead and hail of mortar fire? Well before being drafted into the role of wartime weatherman at the very end, Marty got by during most of the Great War due to a heart defect and so got to really do that thing you imagine you’ll one day achieve where you park yourself in that coffee shop and really crank some things out. His superiors even had to pass over appointing him to a post because it wouldn’t be great optics to have someone the same age and general bodysize as the boys used as exploding meat balloons on the front get a cushy gig, no not at all. And what about Sartre, Kant, Hegel, whoever? Some philosophers went to war, Wittgenstein jerked in the trenches to the thic numbers, Sartre somehow also got the weatherman gig – there’s apparently something holy and contemplative about the making of meteorological maps for division commanders – and others notably avoided blood at all costs, but the thing is it’s hard to reconcile the lived reality of real destruction and the metaphysical projects we say we’re interested in. Sure, a number of people quoted Lenin or maybe even Locke when put against the wall as the unfortunate party to a one way gunfight, but more screamed, pleaded, and pissed, and I can’t think of a single one that yelled out a line about Descartes’ method in that final moment before lead slapped brutally into flesh.
Among the strongest and most brutal interrogations of the justification of philosophy in the face of brute reality is Jean Amery’s statement on intellectuals in Auschwitz. There the brutality of daily violence of existence assaulted the human to such a degree that, Amery writes, “it is clear that the entire question of the effectiveness of the intellect can no longer be raised where the subject, faced directly with death through hunger or exhaustion, is not only de-intellectualized, but in the actual sense of the word dehumanized.” It’s no coincidence that this essay is given the title “At the Mind’s Limits;” we are shown that all heroics and inspiration aside, there exists a hard limit to thought. Most of us, however, at the time of this writing don’t face such a degree of dehumanization; in no uncertain terms should the historical idiocy of equating today’s political situation with the life of concentration camps be condemned – with the exception of the actual instances, such as on the southern US border or Mediterranean islands, of privately owned, government sanctioned camps in which people designated politically unviable are detained, held in inhuman conditions, medically endangered and experimented on, and brutalized in a legal sadistic purgatory beyond the reach of mainland civic guarantees. Unfortunately with the rise of Covid restrictions and other forms of liberal welfare state measures, many western countries are seeing a rise in this brand of illiterate analogy. Yet the presence of this limit should not be disregarded.
Until it was abolished in 1772, common law statutes designated a procedure of peine forte et dure for persons accused yet who refused to enter a plea. Said sorry persons, who for whatever reasons of fortitude or madness took it upon themselves to refuse the reality of the Crown and its meat-space enforcers, would be crushed under increasing weight until they either agreed to cooperate or attained the final victory eternal silence. In this case, the limit being approached is directly that of life and the human body that struggles to sustain it as it is crushed into itself. It is not only the final silencing that matters but the increasing perversity and difficulty of maintaining the status of human thought in the face of mute crushing force. Amery himself saw this ugliness that rises out of the bloodied frozen mud as one approaches it: the intellect which, in attempting to face the power which crushes it must, to avoid its complete annihilation, chooses to cooperate and thereby rationalizes its own destruction. Because the SS implemented “a logic of destruction that in itself operated just as consistently as the logic of life preservation in the outside world,” it often came that the philosopher then attempted to adjust to the new reality implement by the SS. After all, when the brutal feedback of your senses allows no successful connection to earlier ideal concepts, the only chance to sustain a concept at all is to account for the deathly data available to it. Accordingly,
The intellectual in the camp was lamed by his historically and sociologically explicable deeper respect for power; in- fact, the intellectual always and everywhere has been totally under the sway of power. He was, and is, accustomed to doubt it intellectually, to subject it to his critical analysis, and yet in the same intellectual process to capitulate to it. The capitulation became entirely unavoidable when there was no visible opposition to the hostile force. Although outside gigantic armies might battle the destroyer, in the camp one heard of it only from afar and was really unable to believe it. The power structure of the SS state towered up before the prisoner monstrously and indomitably, a reality that could not be escaped and that therefore finally seemed reasonable. No matter what his thinking may have been on the outside, in this sense here he became a Hegelian: in the metallic brilliance of its totality the SS state appeared as a state in which the idea was becoming reality.
Perhaps such thinking feels unreasonable to you or me today. There’s something morally repugnant in admitting that anyone, not to mention one of us Smart Thinking Philosopher Types or however you justify your opinions to yourself, could rationalize and believe something as ludicrous thinking that the SS are justified. You’re not that stupid; you’re not that bad.
Am I so marked as well? I doubt it not; I believe it less. “No, surely not I,” in my sucrose sleep I’m prone, I’m told, to cry.
Some repugnant thinkers, maybe. Nick Land, the entire generation of youthful post ’68 leftists who turned into Neo-cons of the worst stripe and similar transformations come to mind. Are they just capital-d Dumber than you and me? Or is there a darker reason for the complaint from John Gray that most so-called great philosophers did little more than patch up the ruling beliefs of the time.Straw Dogs. In his praise of Schopenhauer, Gray contrasts him with Kant who “like most philosophers… worked to shore up the conventional beliefs of his time.” I’m starting to feel that an attempt at philosophy during times composed of violence is going to have to be questioned a little more intensely as to its motivation as much as its contents. We are, after all, trying to avoid being crushed.
There is a difference though, between supposedly pure thought and belief. Amery noticed that it was much easier for Christians and Marxists to continue believing in their Thoughts than the so-called non-believer. Telos granted Eros, even if in the most minute of dose. “For the unbelieving person reality, under adverse circumstances, is a force to which he submits; under favorable ones it is material for analysis. For the believer reality is the clay that he molds, a problem that he solves.” Reading that, my friends, I guess I have to ask you – what do you believe in?
It’s starting to look like philosophy is going to remain strangely, even perversely coupled with something Freud might call drive and which Kierkegaard would call faith. And if we try to determine either the structure or the substance of this driving faith – our working philosophical portmanteau – we’re going to have to take a look at our places in history. In fact it’s something that Marty himself seemed to steel himself against in his youthful days. At the end of the Great War, seeing his nation shattered and the broken bits of humanity remaining at the front until the end, he contrasted his frankly inappropriate sense of vitality and arousal with the other schmucks who just played around with philosophy with no substance to it:
Certain and unshakable is the challenge to all truly spiritual persons not to weaken at this particular moment but to grasp resolute leadership and to educate the nation toward truthfulness and a genuine valuation of the genuine assets of existence. To me it is indeed a pleasure to be aIive-even though some outward deprivation and some renunciation lie ahead–only inwardly impoverished aesthetes and people who until now, as “spiritual” people, have merely played with the spirit the way others play with money and pleasure, will now collapse and despair helplessly-hardly any help or useful directives can be expected from them.
Safranski, Rudiger. 1999. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. by Ewald Osers (London, England: Harvard University Press), P 86. “Sicher ist und unerschütterlich die Forderung an die wahrhaft geistigen Menschen, gerade jetzt nicht schwach zu werden, sondern eine entschlossene Führung in die Hand zu nehmen und das Volk zur Wahrhaftigkeit und echten Wertschätzung der echten Güter des Daseins zu erziehen. Mir ist es in der Tat eine Lust zu leben wenn auch manche äußere Entbehrung und mancher Verzicht kommen wird – nur innerlich arme Ästheten und Menschen, die bisher als >geistige< mit dem Geist nur gespielt haben, wie andere mit Geld und Vergnügen, werden jetzt zusammenbrechen und ratlos verzweifeln – von ihnen wird auch kaum Hilfe und wertvolle Direktiven zu erwarten sein.“
This coming from his personal exchanges, it’s a reminder of the question touched on in the last dispatch about him really wanting you to feel what’s going on. Remember the Yo-Yo Ma face. He’s jazzed at whatever’s going on, but I’m still not convinced that makes him different from the other metaphysicians at the time who he so quickly condemns as empty. This really is starting to take a distinctly Freudian turn – the drive, the power-source of something inhuman, prehumen below the skin which is then inevitably translated into the human sphere. Is metaphysics only worth doing if you’ve got the Lust for it? Christ, I think I’m going to need a different kind of pill for this then.
The only answer I can offer to this question of why, beside mere compulsion, is the hope of creating a resonance reading this lecture series in a sense doubly – once in 1927, once in 2020, almost a full century later. An oscillation between points not unlinked and perhaps tuned to the same perverse key. A lot has happened between 1927 and 2020, but for all stuff about Godwin’s law, today is not the same as 1933, 1945, or any other time than today. Seems obvious, but apparently bears repeating. It’s easy to get lost in the many-paged histories and let the enthusiasm of analogy blind us to the withering loneliness of present reality. But there are, can we say, similarities. Something about the early 20th century, the Weimar Republic, the rise of absurdism and industrio-paranoid bravado, it just vibes with what whatever mess is going on today. Something in the streams of history have pressed us up against an obstacle in the current and leaning against this submerged bulkwark, forces us to gaze up into the face of the fact that the very organs of this vague body of the social are being recruited in the dismantling and vicious discrediting of the same body which gave rise to them in the first place.
If we look more closely at the exact time of these lectures, simultaneous to Being and Time comin’ down from the mountains and onto this century’s best seller lists, we can see a series of factors, events, confluences, characters, coming to a particular head. I’m not the only one who seems to think so; in a refreshing new look at the questions of Heidegger’s philosophical *ahem* relations with fascism published last year, Adam KnowlesKnowles (2019). Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence, Stanford University Press actually takes a lecture on Aristotle in 1930 under the knife, wherein he makes connections with particular greek-phil arguments that seem to really like Us and not Them. Now, I didn’t know about Adam’s project at the time I naively started this exercise in historical speculation, but from my point of view it vibes with what I’m saying. If his work locates the more developed end of this Emergent period of Doc’s in which he starts to show his cards, our Basic Problems of Phenomenology can be seen as the earlier questioning end where he sets himself up in the context of earlier German phenomenological tradition – mind you he’s about to piss off a number of fans of Husserl, along with of Kant, the scholastics, and well pretty much everyone. That, in combination with the lecture’s introductory sort of tone, makes it prime fodder for, say, a prime-time internet series for anyone interested in philosophy, fascism, and apocalyptic thinking.
And why all this talk about annihilation? To save time: no, nowhere in this series will you find me or any loosely cogent straw-man arguing that Marty was somehow directly responsible for the Holocaust or any subsequent violent shocks to human life. In fact, this sort of clears the spares us the necessity of any sort of suspenseful build-up of a “is Doc’s philosophy going to end up being revealed as fascist?” If you want the answer to the is he/isn’t he , I’d highly recommend you turn to the work The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who we’ve already encountered earlier in this series. He places Doc’s work in the context of the broader intellectual currents, particularly the Völkisch ones which will come up in our work as well. Now, if you’re the voyeuristic kind of reader I think you are and still want some real juice, I’d point at our menu section with more feisty takes, particularly Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity and Victor Faria’s Heidegger and Nazism. You might not be surprised that these aren’t exactly well-received in today’s circle of Heidegger fan-boys and, well, I can’t blame them. Still, each work does highlight some pretty crucial concerns if we’re gonna let Marty into the car.
Alright, I know you’re not here to get a reading list on Marty and the Fashies; there’s literally a whole-ass wiki just for Heidegger’s relation to Nazism. Which has got to be a sort of achievement in the world of red flags in its own right. But if we take a look at two of the most recent contenders in this hallowed debate, we’ll see what to do and not to when breaking the seal on Godwin’s law. Adam Knowles & Ronald BeinerBeiner (2018). Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right have both published works in the last year or two on – you know. Of the two, the former being much more philosophically substantial than the latter, the latter nevertheless points us towards a more practical way of questioning philosophy. Beiner’s analysis, due to his pedigree as a political scientist, renders the question of Heidegger and his influence as one of strategy. It is prescriptive. We shouldn’t stan his philosophy because it’s right wing. #CancelMarty. Both of these works will be given a bit more of their due as we actually get into the meat of this work.
To be frank, this idea of arriving at a yes or no conclusion is mostly the fodder for agonizing righteousness among academic types that surely serves nobody, least of all the speakers themselves. In a recent online interview, Prof. Beiner gets into an argument with the grad-student-turned-online-philosopher that demonstrates how mind anesthetizingly unhelpful this question really is. Beiner does his thing, arguing that Nietzsche’s work is infused with a fascist political project, while the host – who makes clear that he’s not even a fan of Nietzsche’s – insists that no, he’s mostly an aesthetic creative type to whom no such project can be attributed. Back. And. Forth. There’s serious emotional investment going on here, while to anyone with a foot in this disappointing sinkhole we have to call reality should be screaming “sure, you’re both right. You’re both wrong. Whatever, who’s paying for the drinks because I definitely didn’t have as many wine coolers as you all.” We’re past the Newtonian age of linearity and find ourselves in the confused realm of possibilities, pluralities, simultaneities, superposition, super-soakers, and lord knows what else. Multiplicty. This should be the starting premise of any serious look at someone like Heidegger.
Let’s look at someone who gets it. The following is an excerpt from McKenzie Wark’s discussion of a recent Marx scholar, except I’ve switched the names for our narrative continuity – never say I don’t do anything for you crazy kids:
The mark of a major body of work is that it will support more than one interpretation, all of which are coherent and persuasive, and each of which is open-ended enough for still further elaboration. So it is with [Heidegger]. Rather than squabble over what is the true and total interpretation, it seems to me more useful to think of the [Heidegger]-field that he enables. The [Heidegger]-field would then be a matrix of variations on themes, each more or less useful in particular situations. On that view, there may be as yet unexplored quadrants of the [Heidegger]-field that might be of more help in constructing a critical thought for the times.
What we’re looking at here is the sphere of possibilities inscribed in the ontology in question. A good example of this being done was in the 70’s when sociologist Richard L. Rubenstein took a closer look at the work of German sociologist and foundational theorist of modernity in the 20th century Max Weber. Rubenstein, in the commendable spirit of those who have pushed back against the unassailable optimistic belief in an morally unambiguous sense of the post-enlightenment human progress,see metaspinozas recent review of Straw Dogs pointed at a darker pragmatic reality, suggesting
that in Weber’s exposition of modern bureaucracy, rational spirit, principle of efficiency, scientific mentality, relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity etc. no mechanism was recorded that was capable of excluding the possibility of Nazi excesses; that, moreover, there was nothing in Weber’s ideal types that would necessitate the description of the activities of the Nazi state as excesses. For example, ‘no horror perpetrated by the German medical profession or German technocrats was inconsistent with the view that values are inherently subjective and that science is intrinsically instrumental and value-free’.
Z. Bauman 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust, 27.
The point here isn’t to call Weber a closet Nazi. Nobody’s getting cancelled. It’s the fact that in the social ontology Weber brought into being, there just might be something wicked lounging in the dark we all haven’t yet noticed. It’s worth first of all trying to shine a light on what we have before us in the first place before any discussions of dumping metaphysical babies out with fascist bathwaters. We might need a whole new metaphor here.
Here on the road we have to a pretty screeching 180, yanking that handbrake like your life depends on it because, however much we deny the diagnostic approach outlined above, if we’re going to be asking about issues of the social, I think it’s going to be much more important to step back here and consider, hell even acknowledge first, that there might be something to the fact that one of the incontestably biggest philosophical influences of the 20th century leant heavy into the stuff of fascism even down to the philosophical bone. If we step outside the limited perspectives of the philosopher’s catfight, accepting this turns the arguments of the apologists on their heads; the fact that Heidegger unhitched his horse from the cart of the NSDAP simply meant that he, along with the likes of his pen pal Junger and co. were allowed to continue on relatively unhindered long after Adolf faced the music. This has been recognized by historians of politics as relatively obvious: accounts of the New Right and it’s variously translated siblings almost unanimously identify the likes of Evola, Junger, Spengler, and other Nazi adjacent thinkers, among which Heidegger figures prominently, as having, you know, sown the seed.E.g. Matthew Feldman, 2005: “Mohler’s thesis, therefore, was clearly not intended as a detached investigation of analogous inter-war figures, but a ‘manifesto’ of intellectual forerunners who understood the cultural primacy of their mission. And in a spiritless post-war age dominated by the ‘ideas of 1789’ – where belief in a post-liberal order had been all but extinguished in favour of egalitarianism, humanism and materialism – the renewal looming so imminently during the revolutionary 1930s had been deferred; at least, until supplanted at some point by a new unifying force: The old structure of the West as a synthesis of classical culture, Christianity, and the impulses of peoples entering history for the first time has broken down. A new unity, however, has not yet emerged. We stand in this transitional period, the ‘interregnum’ which leaves its mark on every spiritual activity. The Conservative Revolution is conditioned by it, and at the same time sees itself as an attempt to overcome it. Besides locating Heidegger firmly within this tradition, the other pertinent feature to emerge from Die Konservative Revolution is the recognition that German fascism’s positive ideals had been corrupted by Nazism, which in turn ensured an indefinite preponderance of liberal values and their monopoly over the post-war political spectrum. Mohler’s answer to this dilemma rested with his CR case studies: by polishing the tarnished image of metapolitical fascism, while presenting its discourse as a unified and reasonable alternative to modernity, the struggle for a future renewal of the West by discerning Europeans could proceed from a purely cultural standpoint. In moving beyond decadent politics and condemning the excesses of National Socialism, Mohler bequeathed an essential legacy to the European Nouvelle Droite.” Notably from a study of Politics, Religion, and Ideology; this exercise in philosophical investigation wouldn’t be possible under the strict yet impractical limits purebred philosophers seem to put on themselves. One curious exception which definitely merits more attention is the case of Schmitt, whose refusal of either intellectual or personal denazification was so unrepentant as to verge on the comic, yet who today is widely acknowledged as a Guy With Some Good Ideas by writers of all stripes. It might be that what I’m saying about Heidegger also applies directly to him, but that’s for another time. Putting him aside for now, let’s return to a fact so simple its obviousness makes it easy to forget: the military defeat of Nazi Germany bears no inherent connection to the status of the ideas behind it. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous; “only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth. Certainly ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side.”Straw Dogs, 35.
Anyway, what I’m saying here is that I think a lot of folks have been looking at this backwards. Tempered by the understandable nudge of that little voice some folks still call a conscience, questions of Heidegger’s Nazism tend to be of a purifying nature. How do we exculpate, how do we really dig in there and separate the Bad Boy from the Smart Stuff. Really purify him, you know? Get rid of the contaminants. You know the saying about cleanliness. One contemporary author unwittingly describes the hoops philosophy tries to go through when it takes this approach:
It means that one accepts at least the bulk of Heidegger’s conception of Being and wants to push this conception further. To some extent it means that one wants to rethink Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” to radicalize his antisubjectivism, and to escape from the limitations of his worldview. And, politically, it can also mean that one wants to evade or go beyond Heidegger’s Nazism, beyond the philosophical anthropology that his political theology entailed, beyond the stigma associated with it.
Again, we’re talking strategy here. This is what should be done if we want to excise the tumors and then do Good Philosophy. There we go, the usual good and bad breast, the pervy psychoanalytic way of dividing the whole world. It all comes down to tits.Forgive my absolute bastardization of the Kleinians for the sake of the joke. Still, I’m worried she meant a bit too much her stuff as biological reality and that does deserve a bit of a laugh. No wonder no one believes this shit.
The other hand of this is that when people these days do acknowledge the issues with Heidegger in his philosophy today, it’s often in context of his less than scrupulous acolytes: de Benoit, Dugin, Spencer, who really don’t do themselves any favors when it comes to PR. So somehow this has brought us to the point where the commonly accepted question about Doc is, as another contemporary regurgitation puts it, “whether the essence of his ideas leads inexorably to fascistic thinking or whether, in that aged refrain, the life can be separated from the work, so that we are free to forage as we please.” Here I want to yank the break and yell. What about all the widely acknowledged influence on the good guys? Whenever we talk about Heidegger’s negative sides, it’s assumed we’re talking about the Bad Guys. But this isn’t kindergarten anymore, nor a John Wayne movie. If we think that the world we’re living in is good just with the exception of the Bad Guys, well… you probably think the Democrats are the Good Guys. I want to introduce a passage at length from the work of Zygmunt Bauman which suggests that conceptions of our society shouldn’t be allowed to on as easily as they seem to have after the Holocaust:
Although other sociological images of the civilizing process are available, the most common (and widely shared) is one that entails, as its two centre points, the suppression of irrational and essentially antisocial drives, and the gradual yet relentless elimination of violence from social life (more precisely: concentration of violence under control of the state, where it is used to guard the perimeters of national community and conditions of social order). What blends the two centre points into one is the vision of the civilized society – at least in our own, Western and modern, form – as, first and foremost, a moral force; as a system of institutions that co-operate and complement each other in the imposition of a normative order and the rule of law, which in turn safeguard conditions of social peace and individual security poorly defended in pre-civilized settings.This vision is not necessarily misleading. In the light of the Holocaust, however, it certainly looks one-sided. While it opens for scrutiny important trends of recent history, it forecloses the discussion of no less crucial tendencies. Focusing on one facet of the historical process, it draws an arbitrary dividing line between norm and abnormality. By de-legitimizing some of the resilient aspects of civilization, it falsely suggests their fortuitous and transitory nature, simultaneously concealing the striking resonance between most prominent of their attributes and the normative assumptions of modernity. In other words, it diverts attention from the permanence of the alternative, destructive potential of the civilizing process, and effectively silences and marginalizes the critics who insist on the double-sidedness of modern social arrangement.
Z. Bauman 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust
If we take this premise of a sociological reality seriously – and these days who the fuck doesn’t? – we might have to consider the same when it comes to the philosophical reality. Who says there’s no permanent alternative built into our systems of thought with annihilatory power which silences anyone who tries to speak its name? What about all the non-goose stepping readers who shaped the second half of the 20th century who were constitutively influenced by Heidegger? All our favorites in the French department, all the Lacanians, the Deleuze people, all the Conties, all the artists, the poets, the whole damn band. And here comes the bit that I’m really getting at: What makes us so sure that they took him in despite of the substance of this thought that links him to what emerged as fascism, and not because of it?
Facing the real question of our investigation, a choice lies before us – the philosophical peine forte et dure: either we succumb to silence entirely, or we cave *crack* and agree to give breathe to a philosophy that may ultimately contain a greater, deeper horror than we can perhaps bear. So, to end, let’s steel ourselves and face unblinking Amery’s direct encounter with the ideas of Heidegger:
All those problems that one designates according to a linguistic convention as “metaphysical” became meaningless. But it was not apathy that made contemplating them impossible; on the contrary, it was the cruel sharpness of an intellect honed and hardened by camp reality. In addition, the emotional powers were lacking with which, if need be, one could have invested vague philosophic concepts and thereby made themsubjectively and psychologically meaningful. Occasionally, perhaps that disquieting magus from Alemannic regions came to mind who said that beings appear to us only in the light of Being, but that man forgot Being by fixing on beings. Well now, Being. But in the camp it was more convincingly apparent than on the outside that beings and the light of Being get you nowhere. You could be hungry, be tired, be sick. To say that one purely and simply is, made no sense. And existence as such, to top it off, became definitively a totally abstract and thus empty concept. To reach out beyond concrete reality with words became before our very eyes a game that was not only worthless and an impermissible luxury but also mocking and evil. Hourly, the physical world delivered proof that its insufferableness could be coped with only through means inherent in that world. In other words: nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real. In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy. Like the lyric stanza about the silently standing walls and the flags clanking in the wind, the philosophic declarations also lost their transcendency and then and there became in part objective observations, in part dull chatter. Where they still meant something they appeared trivial, and where they were not trivial they no longer meant anything. We didn’t require any semantic analysis or logical syntax to recognize this. A glance at the watch towers, a sniff of burnt fat from the crematories sufficed.
Historical consciousness within any given epoch is determined by its conception of temporality—the relationship between the past, present, and future. The dialectical development of this consciousness as “geist” occurs within linear time and serves the further elucidation of itself as such. The movement of linear time is the force of annihilation, as the labour of the negative, which is constantly overtaking itself. The “present moment” itself becomes an ungraspable infinite regression, which self-annihilates the moment it is symbolised or, even more fundamentally, experienced at all.
In his book Intelligence and Spirit, Reza Negarestani conceives this development as a component of the development of the general intelligence of mankind as a whole:
“Mind’s consciousness of its history is ultimately the exploration of history as the interface between subjective time and objective time, temporal forms and time’s formlessness. The history of geist, properly understood, is a recognitive-cognitive technology. It is not only a semantic web through which geist’s manifest realizations (self-conceptions and self-transformations) can become transparent and open to analysis, but also a scientific milieu for the development of cognitive means and practical technologies for subjecting what is a manifest realization—the appearance of a totalized history—to a concrete transformation, scientifically suspending what was previously deemed a completed historical totality in an ongoing process of totalization, namely, history.”
Reza Negarestani, Intelligence And Spirit (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018), p. 66.
“Temporal form” contains the double meaning of being both temporary and a form of conceiving temporality. The temporal form of antiquity can be summed up as “immediacy”: the world in totality is what exists in the present to be experienced. On the topic of the ancient Greeks, Hegel understands this “immediacy” to be their “being-at-home-with-themselves”. For the Greeks, the analysis of “history” in the modern understanding was not even conceivable. The mistranslation of Herodotus’ magnum opus as “The Histories” as opposed to the more accurate “The Inquiries” is testament to this fact.“Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time . . .” Herodotus, The Histories, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3. The passing from this lack of historical consciousness—in which time is understood as pure presentism—to a higher form occurs through dialectical development, in which any particular “temporal form” is sublated through the very recognition of its particularity, which opens up the past to “scientific” analysis. The word “scientific” is not to be understood in the sense of “an experiment following a rigorous criteria”, but from the Heideggerian standpoint of bringing “present-to-hand”. Any given temporal form necessarily perceives itself as “totalised history”, not in the sense of rejecting the possibility of different societal configurations whether political, institutional, or economic, but by considering its unsymbolisable temporal awareness itself as being “total”. It escapes self-reflection from within its domain, as it is the very foundation from which self-reflection can occur. To bring this temporal form “present-at-hand” is to dialectically negate its “ready-at-handedness” (totalisation) by revealing its particularity, as a mere form (particular) within a greater totality (history). This is what Negarestani understands as the “scientific milieu” created through this moment of negation, as a new possibility of self-consciousness is opened through revealing the totalised history of the temporal form as a mere appearance. From this standpoint one may subject the past to analysis, and the future may be constructed with the past as a reference point. This scientific milieu is to be welcomed as it brings about the possibility of a concrete transformation, but it is not to be dogmatically clung to (which is a common error of modern science). The dialectical movement continues on, and the scientific milieu makes the fatal mistake of considering itself the new “totalised history”. From here there occurs the negation of the negation in which this scientific milieu is found to be merely another temporal form which will itself be subjected to a larger process of “totalisation”. This process is history itself.
Modernity is instability, but it is not unstable!
If dialectical development occurs within linear time—and the evolution of “geist” is a process of understanding time in its objectivity (formlessness, linearity) through the failure of its particular forms—there is no occluding or escaping this process as this would require the very suspension of linear time (or the annihilation of civilisation). However, perhaps something of this nature is possible if we think past the juxtaposition of “bound” and “free”, in which we are either bound to historical development or freed from it. Perhaps there is a way to outfox the dialectic—to beat it at its own game. This has been achieved by modernity: modernity hacks linear time. Modernity is functionally atemporal, it escapes dialectical development through the expropriation of dialectic itself. Through the creation of a complex system of positive feedback loops, the overarching structure of “modernity”—as the democratic political system, the capitalist economic structure, and the individualist Liberal philosophy—propels itself forward through the very failures of its particulars. This logic extends to all of its manifestations, whether they be political, economic, or ideological. Throughout modern history, every temporal form which rears its head pronouncing the end of modernity as we know it (the Communist Revolution and the Fascist takeover being the two primary examples) retroactively becomes components of modernity’s large-scale movement. It is for this reason that modernity is functionally atemporal. The “functionally” aspect must be emphasised, as modernity is not some ontologically unique event which transcends the confines of linear time, but a unique temporal form which has managed to self-propagate through “hacking” the dialectical process itself. Linear time occurs within the “atemporal temporal form” of modernity, meaning the failures of its particular manifestations only strengthen the overarching structure. It is for this reason that every “failure” of one particular temporal form brings about a larger “universalisation” of modernity as a whole. Take the example of “universal suffrage”. In its beginning it is only for men, most likely of a specific class and race. When this “universal suffrage” becomes revealed in its particularity it is negated and sublated by one which includes what was previously left out. In the present day there are even calls for universalising suffrage to allow for convicted felons to vote. It is this constant “universalisation” of its values which characterises modernity: it is a logical development, a process of growth. Modernity as a whole is strengthened through this process, the failures of its particulars act as forms of hygiene. Is this not the very definition of “progress”? In this sense, progress is failure, continual instability and self-overcoming. This logic reveals itself in the political structure with democratic elections, in which every four or so years political leaders become replaced. This is opposed to the stable and consistent rule of a Medieval king. This instability is analogous to the boom-bust cycle of capitalism, something which is inconceivable within the feudal era, which is contingent upon consistency and stability. Žižek explains this nicely in The Sublime Object of Ideology:
“This is exactly how capitalism differs from other, previous modes of production: in the latter, we can speak of periods of ‘accordance’ when the process of social production and reproduction goes on as a quiet, circular movement, and of periods of convulsion when the contradiction between forces and relations aggravates itself; whereas in capitalism this contradiction, the discord forces/relations, is contained in its very concept (in the form of the contradiction between the social mode of production and the individual, private mode of appropriation). It is this internal contradiction which compels capitalism to permanent extended reproduction – to the incessant development of its own conditions of production, in contrast to previous modes of production where, at least in their ‘normal’ state, [re]production goes on as a circular movement.”
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009), p. 53.
This same process can occur on a larger scale as well, an example being the twentieth century clash between Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism. The latter two, which both pronounced the end of modernity and the rise of something radically new, would turn out to be failures. These failures, which at the time of their being were taken to be examples of the failure of Liberalism and modernity as a whole, retroactively found their place within the totalising process of modernisation. The role of Communism was to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism, and the role of Fascism was to demonstrate the superiority of Liberal democracy. It is no coincidence that the world “progressed” quicker than it ever had before directly after the greatest catastrophe in world history. Moments of intensity followed by moments of retraction and failure is the logical structure of modernity; this instability is what allows it to maintain its stable hegemony across time. It is the expropriation of the dialectic: every moment of negation and sublation always further “universalises” modernity into higher forms of itself, allowing for its constant self-reproduction. While the dialectic normally functions to produce change, within modernity it functions to preclude the possibility of anything other than itself. Modernity is a complex system, and “among complex systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.”Nick Land, ‘Eternal Return, and After’, Urban Future, 2011.
Tarrying with the Impossible
While modernity follows an autotelic logic which systematically universalises and strengthens its domain as time moves forward, this is not to say that modernity and the global technological system which it has engendered is immortal. In fact, there is a definite, empirically measurable limit which constrains the development of society within a certain horizon of possibility. This limit is the energy source which underlies any given civilisation. For the modern world, this source is fossil fuel. In fossil fuel modernity, oil is treated as an infinite substance akin to that of Spinoza’s God. However, there exists a definite moment when the amount of oil which can be extracted from the earth reaches a limit, this is known as “peak oil”. Some argue that peak oil will occur many decades in the future, while others argue that it already occurred as early as the mid 2000s. In any case, the point is not to argue when peak oil arrived or will arrive, but to show that there is a definite limit to the progression of modernity despite its self-propelling logic. This limit is an ecological limitation. Industrial society strives towards what the recently-deceased philosopher Pentti Linkola calls an “ecologically impossible object”, which is, of course, infinite technological development with finite resources. Human subjectivity emerges in a form which is akin to the logic of the resource which underlies any given epoch. It is for this reason that the dialectical development of society and consciousness cannot discount ecological limitation. The following is a passage from the philosopher Chad Haag’s book A Critique of Transcendental Memology:
“The givenness of a crucial resource places the subject in a radically passive position in which the subject cannot make more oil exist on will, for example. One does not make oil exist as an activity; one merely discovers that it exists through passive reception of the contingent state of the world one happens to live in. This is why the resources of Phenomenological givenness in experience are much more relevant to the science of Memology than the Marxist theory of Dialectical Materialism is. Dialectical Materialism largely considers any hard physical limit to be an ideological illusion which the forward march of dialectical movement will negate away in order to reform it into a “higher” notion. Phenomenology, on the contrary, allows the radical passivity to recognise material limits which cannot be negated away by the movement of dialectical progress. Phenomenological passivity is, ironically enough, the fitter account of material conditions’ influence on consciousness.”
Chad A. Haag, A Critique of Transcendental Memology: A Peak Oil Philosophy of Truth (Independently Published, 2018), pp. 9–10.
This phenomenological passivity provides the boundaries of the form of subjectivity within any given epoch. This form is called the “deep meme”, which can be understood as a geometrical metaphor. The geometrical form of fossil fuel modernity is the ascending line, constant progress, which is only made possible due to the continuous extraction of oil from the earth. The ascending line of progress structures the spheres of economic, technological, and cultural development. It structures the modern subject itself. The modern subject operates as if there exists no limitations, as if resources have no beginning and no end but simply present themselves at the push of a button. Consider every day quotidian activities which have become an integral part of modern life: showering, shopping, surfing the internet, and using electricity. In all these cases, the vast majority of people have no knowledge of where the resources which are consumed come from, they simply act under the assumption that they will always be there. This form of existence is impossible in the so-called “third world”, where the water utilised to bathe must be taken from a well. In the “first world” there is the illusion of infinite progress in all its domains, which emerges from its alienation from its ecological context. However, as opposed to the cultural sphere which can develop into infinity, hard resources provide a definite limit which pose a fundamental challenge to the logic of modernity. We must think past Marx’s rather arbitrary bias towards the means of production, as one could argue that the energy source which underlies all of civilisation is a far more important field to emphasise when considering its development. The ecological grounding of civilisation, which provides the conditions for historical development to take place, evidently has precedence over every domain of human life. When the finite resource of oil can no longer support the rampant technological development occurring on a global scale, an inevitable decline will commence. At this point the dialectical development of the mode of production will cease to occur (in the linear fashion conceived by Engels). One could counter that this is dialectics occurring as well, but this would be on a larger scale than the limited imagination of the average Marxist could conceive: the negation of the negation would be the end of industrial civilisation itself.
In the end, the fact of the matter is clear for all those who wish to see; so long as we keep putting off the inevitable consequences which lay in the future, we are simply tarrying with the impossible.
Treydon didn’t give us a bio, but we did get a blog link.
Cover of the 1964 Vintage paperback edition of La Technique ou l’Enjeu du siècle in English translation
Introduction, or what is Technique?
Jacques Ellul published The Technological Society in 1954 in French, and it was translated to English ten years later. Yet it still has not dominated the world. And I don’t mean that literally, just relatively, the way Marx’s texts are still profound today even if they don’t “dominate” the public space. But I suppose, like all things, the answer lies in the question. Ellul’s insights into our technical world have not popularly pervaded the intellectual sphere,For instance, the only reference to Ellul I have ever seen on Theorygram is @fake.ellul with 63 followers (as of time of writing) and 0 posts. In my sharing of his book only one person has commented with a nod of recognition: @fakeandywarhol, who said The Technological Society was “the best text ever for understanding the world we’ve been born into.” I would have to agree. not because it is not an academic work like, say, Nihilist Communism is not, but because it does not yield conclusions anyone—certainly not intellectuals (except maybe Nick Land)—would wish to hear.
Despite being an almost wholly explanative text, with little in the way of value judgments, it is hard to define the conclusions held within as anything other than depressing. Ellul clearly strives for such analytic focus: “The real problem is not to judge but to understand.”Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. by John Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 190. And understand he does, perhaps all too well.
I say depressing rather than pessimistic because pessimism is, to me, believing the worst will come of a given situation and/or a lack of confidence that something will change for the better. Even so, this implies that change is indeed possible, as it exists within the realm of belief. But in Ellul’s analysis of our technical society, there is no room for hope anymore, things just are. Things will not get better because they cannot get better: not because we aren’t strong enough to improve them, not because the proletariat hasn’t successfully risen up, not because the state is holding us down.
Here it is important to clarify that Ellul was not a determinist. He makes clear early in the book that things did not have to turn out the way they did. He admits that there is in fact no way to know why things took a turn for the technological when they did during the Industrial Revolution.Ellul, p. 44. In this admission he argues that the revolution itself did not cause such a change, that attitudes had shifted prior to such inventions and material changes (and this fits with his general theory of the book, that technique is an influential force which eventually, yet suddenly, became irresistible; it stands to reason then that this shift must have prompted the explosive growth of technique in the Industrial Revolution). Here the Marxist in me is not fully convinced, and it would seem a historical analysis would be required to resolve the issue. Nevertheless, I do think he is right that our technological society was not predetermined to be as it is.
However, and this is the more important point, now that our society is indeed wholly technical, there is no going back, and certain axioms of technique must be adhered to. To put it simply, we need not have become what we are, but now that we are—it’s all over. In this sense technique is in many ways like a positive feedback loop: once society adheres to the laws of technique in one domain, it is fated to come to adhere to them in all others as well. Not necessarily in any certain order, or at any certain rate, but it happens nonetheless.
Why is technique so all-demanding of its surroundings, so all-encompassing? Is it because capital desires it so, or because the state finds it useful? While these are both true at times, they do not represent the fundamental reason for this property of growth. That property is part of technique itself.
And lest we get too far ahead of ourselves, what is technique exactly? A technique is a means to an end—technique itself is the ensemble of means that produce ends in a society. For example, sewing is a technique that produces, say, clothing, and it is one of many techniques that make up the technique of the clothing industry. Since technique is all about producing ends, efficiency is its ultimate goal.
It may be of interest to you, dear reader, that from just what has been elucidated above, you too can come to all of the conclusions contained within The Technological Society. Indeed you could even go beyond them, least of all because our world has only grown more technical since Ellul’s writing. Understanding what is meant by Ellul when he writes that 9 letter word, technique, is all one needs to extrapolate to their heart’s content.This was similar to how I felt after reading Nihilist Communism: the base idea is so simple and so well grounded that the rest of the book essentially does nothing more than expand and elucidate the concept. Unlike my reading of Nihilist Communism however, which came after two years of reading and thinking as a Marxist, I had basically no background in the discipline of technique, as it may be called. Some of the works Ellul references I have indeed heard of, and perhaps even included in my “to read” list at some point (such as The Managerial Revolution and one more I cannot remember, something like The Organized Man). But as I had not read them, I had none of the background with which to service such a simple but all-ranging definition (and even then, these texts were usually referenced by Ellul in a critical fashion, either building off of an incomplete definition or refuting a bad one). As such I benefited greatly from reading the whole text.
When Ellul titled his book The Technological Society, he did not mean that technique itself was a new force that had suddenly gripped us and run amuck. It is clear from the definition that technique has always been with us, always been a part of our lives. But, prior to the 18th century, it was only a part, one of many to consider in a given moment. The defining feature of our current society is that it is utterly dominated by technique, hence technological. And now, with definition in hand, we may come full circle…
Technical Development, or the one about Sewing
Once given free reign, technique becomes an all-encompassing force. Consider again our sewing example. What are the means with which one sews? Broadly there are two techniques: needle and thread, done by hand, as well as the sewing machine, guided by hand. In terms of technique, which of the two is better? Obviously the sewing machine, as it is much more efficient. So then, when it comes to technique, the sewing machine is the way to go.
But the quest for efficiency has just begun. Other things play into the production of textiles than the act of production itself: there is the raw material, the design work, the transportation. To maximise efficiency, it is not enough to simply supply the best sewing machines. One must also look for ways to improve these other areas as well: more efficient shipment of raw material in and finished products out, accelerating the design process to reduce delays in production, etc. One could imagine the former consisting of warehouse layout: the position of the machines, the materials, the products, and loading-truck access aligned in the most efficient manner possible. The latter would likely consist in coming up with certain principles to design around in order to make the design process more efficient, perhaps designing with raw material in mind to reduce waste or time consuming reuse.
Notice that these processes are not necessarily driven by anything other than technique itself; once sewing machines increase production, what is there to do but increase efficiency in these other areas to accommodate it? Otherwise the additional production is for naught. This is why Ellul argues that in our technological society, technique has become autonomous.Ellul, p. 14.
Starting to sound like we’ve got a pretty efficient and technical garment factory on our hands, no? Sure does! But technique is far from done. Each of these operations can be rationalised further, and indeed they must be further rationalised if efficiency is to be achieved. What of the trucks that are involved? Are they able to be loaded and unloaded efficiently to the degree required by production, and driven where they need to go in a timely manner? What of the roads they drive on? Are they well-paved so as to minimise wear and tear and maximise safe speed of travel? And this design process, how does it align with the demands of the day? Efficient production of useless shirts is not efficient production at all. And now that we’re on the subject, what of the ships and shipyards involved in the transport of these fine goods overseas? What of their design, their form, their function…?
One can see that this process can be extended seemingly without end. It may seem ridiculous to you the reader, comfortable in your daily wear, which is likely so standardised, so technified, you’ve never even considered the processes that created it, nor the history of these processes.Unless, of course, you are sympathetically aware that it has been produced by a poor child in the third world, in which case, you are undoubtedly a Good Person. And yet it is not ridiculous at all, indeed this sort of process (although not exactly in the way I’ve described it—bear with me for the sake of explanation) is indeed how our technical society has developed. The quest for greater efficiency leads necessarily to connections between different aspects of society, all of which must become technical in order to be incorporated successfully. For the sake of our example, while sewing did not necessarily need to be what was made technical at first (and indeed it wasn’t, the Marxists among us will be happy to know that other matters of economy came first and foremost, namely energy production), once it did come to have this overbearing technical character, it follows that all it touches must too: the roads, the trucks, the shipyards, etc. The application of technique in one area necessarily leads to its application in another. This is the autonomous nature of technique that has existed since the 18th century.Hopefully my sewing example also shows how dialectical this process is, even the way I found myself writing it seemed to adhere to dialectical logic: sentences filled with colons, one idea proceeding right to the next. Someone described The Technological Society as being profoundly dialectical, and I think I now understand what they mean first hand.
This, of course, extends beyond mere production as well. If production is made technical, that is efficient, what will we do with the new and ever-growing stores of goods? Just as before, technique must be extended: consumption must be made efficient as well. Stores must come to resemble the warehouses their products were made in, to accommodate the scale of the operation. Again, it was not predetermined that, say, the dimensions of the warehouse are what they are. But their standardisation, in any form, followed necessarily from the moment technique was given reign over production.
Standardisation and planning are other facets of technique that spring naturally from its progression. We can’t well organise the whole of society around garment production, as while it might be very efficient for garment technique, it will no doubt be a drag on the rest. Here standardisation plays a big role in making not just industry-wide, but civilisation-wide production more efficient: universal electrical outlets, standardised road and truck sizes to accommodate transport of all goods and services, etc. Furthermore, this standardisation and planning is not the product of some grand design created by a diverse group of individuals accounting for culture, aesthetics, or human desires. The answers to all of these questions, just like the answers to the questions of how to make the garment factory more efficient, are purely technical in nature: asked by technicians, solved by technicians, all reduced to calculations and mathematics. It is not up to us anymore, it’s up to technique.
Well, it is safe to say that our little example has gotten a bit out of hand. Please do not mistake it for history—of course the world does not unfold in such a focused, narrow way, but rather simultaneously and at varying rates. But hopefully what it does do is illustrate just how all-encompassing technique is, in the process shedding some light on one of Ellul’s two “laws of self-augmentation”: that technique tends to progress geometrically. Its mouth gets bigger as it grows, coming to encircle more and more of human life. Our little example focused primarily on the mechanical aspects of production: the machine, its layout within the warehouse, etc. But production goes much deeper. There is a human operating these machines. Other humans must be made to buy the products they produce. Ellul focuses on these elements as well, the final large chapter being devoted to what he calls human techniques. These include propaganda chief among them, just to give you an idea.
For me, this is really what blows technique as a concept wide open. It is not simply the logic of the machine, although the machine is undoubtedly technique at its purest. Our technological society is not technological simply because we use a lot of technology; it is technological because we have become elements of technique. In its near ceaseless but uneven progress, technique has come to dominate not only the production of garments, but the person who makes them. How can a machine be efficient if its operator is inefficient? Therefore the conquering of the individual, too, is paramount to technique’s success. The subjective must be made objective, for how can subjectivity be accounted for, planned around? It cannot, certainly not efficiently. The worker must arrive on schedule, hence the clock and the industrialisation of time. The worker must be prepared, hence the schoolhouse and the standardisation of education. The worker must consume in his off time, hence advertisement, that demonic but angel-faced propaganda that never stops singing.
If this painting seems bleak, that’s because it is. But don’t fear, along with human technique comes good things too! How about that central heat and air? Pretty nice to come home to after a long day of work, eh wagie? And microwaves, talk about efficient! Who wants to slave over a hot stove for hours engaged in the ancient human art of cooking? No thank you, sounds like it might get in the way of working. I like my hot pockets just fine, and they’re ready in a fraction of the time!
The sarcasm dripping off that last paragraph should be obvious. While technique has undoubtedly yielded material improvements for humanity, they have come at the cost of parts of our humanity itself. It is valid to wonder whether, by the end, there will be any humanity left. Was there any left in Brave New World? As Ellul says at the end of the book: “Here is a future Huxley never dreamed of.”Ellul, p. 433.
Prior to technique’s domination and ascendance to autonomy, it was just one of many facets of human life. And it played a significant role, no doubt. Knowing the best way to harvest crops was surely a boon to the farmer and everyone he fed. But there was also a significant difference in how efficiency was achieved before the technique of today. In days of yore, increased efficiency came above all from an increase in human ability. The best carpenter wasn’t the best because he had the best tools, he was the best at using them. This meant that improving the conditions of life came from improving the self, a mutually beneficial, although slow, means of development. And because efficiency is not the primary goal, but rather the task at hand in its finitude, other human considerations could have their say. The peasant could take a break when he was tired. If he felt satisfied by it, he could use the same shovel his father used before him. After all, it gets the job done. Improvements were therefore largely made not only at the individual level, but within the individual themselves, whereas in our technological society improvements seemingly fall out of the sky into our laps, crushing us in the process. Sorry about the broken legs, but hey, who needs to walk to perform efficiently at their desk job anyways?
“Well, if all this technical domination sucks so bad, why don’t we just stop?” the fair reader may rightfully ask. That’s just it, we can’t. That is the other “law of self-augmentation” I mentioned earlier: technological progress is irreversible within a given civilisation. And how could it not be? What, you want us to stop producing maximally efficient truck fleets? Where would all the garments go? When some don’t even have a good pair of Gucci flip flops to their name—what are you, a monster?
In all seriousness, once it has been established, technological progress cannot be undone, unless by outside forces (such as the collapse of civilisation, something we may come to thank climate change for at this rate). It may be argued that some favour more traditional methods of getting things done, such as sewing by hand, and that this is a choice that defies technique. Let us not be naive. Such a hobby chosen for aesthetic or otherwise subjective reasons indeed places other values above that of technique, but it does so only in spite of technique’s dominance. Hobbies are just that: hobbies—retreats from an ever-increasingly technical world. They are possible only insofar as every other end has become easily achieved through the exploitation of technique; those who sew for fun only have the time because their food comes ready cooked, their cars ready built, etc. Upon the invention of the sewing machine (and its relatively cheap acquirement), what housewife could bear to hand-sew any longer? “What a great blessing this machine is! Now there is more time for other work, perhaps even for leisure.” The same is said of the refrigerator, the washing machine, the dishwasher. And yet, does the average person find their life full of leisure? Nay, technique is not satisfied with giving us what we want and stopping there. Someone has to make the next big time saving machine, so that there is more time to create yet another time saving machine—and as we are not in control, we do not get a say. Who will tell the factory that enough is enough? The capitalist who owns it? No. The state? Why? The factory that produces cars today can produce tanks tomorrow. It is too important to interfere with, certainly not for something as trivial as human happiness. The individual? They should hardly hear you over the roar of the production process.
What of an organized group of individuals? What of democracy? I hate to break it to you anarcho-syndicalists and the like, but democracy was excluded from the productive process a long time ago. Technique simply won’t allow it. How efficient can any plan be that must go through rounds of voting and approval, especially when the answer, being purely technical in nature, is reducible to mathematics, and therefore not subject to the whims of people?
No, democracy is long gone I’m afraid. Capitalist liberal democracy is just as much of a sham as the worker’s republics of Ellul’s time. Technique forces them both towards its own ends, towards totalitarianism.
Technique and Democracy, or the one about Water
For those who have googled Murray Bookchin and are as such not convinced, consider this thought experiment I conjured up the other day, to test this anti-democratic hypothesis for myself.
Let’s say you are a member of a small city. You are totally democratised down to the last citizen. As a city, you require water. How will you get it? From the nearby aquifer—well, excellent! But how much do you need? Can the aquifer handle such a draw, or will it be sucked dry? Is the water safe for drinking? Even at this basic beginning of questioning, we’ve generated 1 simple question, 1 simple answer, and 3 more complex questions based on that answer. And even of these 3 questions, it is obvious that expertise will be required, in fields including demographics, hydrology, and health at the very least. But let us go further.
How exactly will the water be brought from the aquifer into the city? If we can expect to enjoy the water much at all, the answer must be a system of pumps and pipes (again, decided beforehand by technique, as these are proven efficient means). How many pipes? How big? Who will install and maintain them? Furthermore, will water use be regulated by the state (in this case, we the people), or free for use? If it is free for use, how will we regulate use within sustainable requirements to not drain the aquifer dry?
After simply fleshing out one problem of water acquisition, which is just one facet of only a piece of the myriad of problems the average modern city faces, we are already swamped, to be a little punny about it. And in the face of this, good reader, you say democracy is the answer? The answer to what? Surely not the regulation of water use, nor anything else of this nature. “But these things could be decided democratically!” Could they? It is abundantly clear that the state (or some entity like it, for the anarchists) will be required to regulate these various infrastructures. But could this state not be democratic in nature, coming to decision on these questions democratically? It could, but only superficially. Let me explain.
It is obvious that plenty of expertise, that is, plenty of experts will be needed for counsel in such a democracy—how else will the people, the elected officials, whatever, decide how to proceed with water extraction (and indeed the myriad of other essential questions)? Only with the help of technicians no doubt, who will present the political body with all the necessary information, namely the different plans to be chosen from, all numbered and laminated for ease of analysis. There’s just one problem. As we have already discussed, technique desires efficiency above all else. And what does the pursuit of efficiency produce if not the one best solution to a given problem? What is more efficient, hand sewing or the sewing machine? How about an old sewing machine versus a new one? The answer is clear. Therefore, the people will not be presented with several schemes of water extraction to choose from, but only one, whichever one is most efficient. With no options to choose from, what will they vote on, whether to have water producing infrastructure or not? Don’t be silly—at this point us good leftists should know a false question when we see one.
So, not only is an authoritarian body better suited to technique, technique itself makes democracy meaningless by producing a world of singular bests, options that must be picked because to pick any other would be to discard technique and the benefits it brings. Will the people settle for subpar, substandard water services? While we’re extending the benefit of the doubt, let’s say they will. But as we have previously shown, deficiency in one area of technique necessarily produces deficiencies in others. Less efficient means of acquiring water will mean everything to do with water is less efficient, and everything to do with those things will be less efficient, and so on. So when we ask if “the people” will settle for substandard (and we say substandard because there will be a superior standard version used by all other nations who can manage it, in adherence to technique) water services, we are really asking if they will settle for living in a substandard, second-class society.
Even if (and my, we’re really stretching the ifs here) they are content with such material settling, will the state be? Or to put it in other words, when another group comes along and decides to take the water they’ve so stridently managed as one big happy commune, what will the people do then? Fight back with a substandard military force, supplied by substandard supply chains and composed of substandard soldiers? It is abundantly clear by this that the notion of real democracy has been completely smashed by the heavy but finely-made cudgel of technique.
Personally, and the realist point made here only serves to underscore this point, I am starting to wonder if authoritarianism is not the natural way of civilisation, and if democracy only appeared on the scene as it did during a time of unprecedented innovation, when it was truly worth it for the state to employ as liberal a conception of freedom as possible to allow individuals maximum ability to innovate. As Ellul says, he who advances technique privately—rather than, say, within the state—advances it furthest. But now that level of innovation is over; technique has rapidly caught up to and outpaced all other motives, and in doing so it now desires increasingly totalitarian institutions to do its bidding. The absolutist state of traditional society has returned but now with the power to fully execute its own will, whereas before it held relatively little within its grasp, and the peasant was more or less free to live in accordance with his own rhythms and routines. No more.
I recognise it is somewhat unfair and unrealistic to pose these problems as if they occur all at once—cities already have established systems for getting people water, electricity, etc. But it should be clear that even the management of these (many of which are not sustainable as they exist currently) will be difficult in a way that requires technique, least of all because technique has contributed greatly to their existence. And it leaves no room for real democracy.
Technique, Capitalism, and the State, oh my!
With the notion of democracy out of the way, let us go further into perhaps more controversial territory. Up until now, for the sake of simplicity, I have been discussing technique using the framework of capitalism. But from the logic expressed so far, it should be clear that even capital has become secondary to technique. As a predominantly Marxists thinker I too was shocked by this, and the shock came early. Allow me to quote at length:
“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.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. by John Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 5.
Writing when he did shortly after WWII, Ellul draws connections between capitalist America, Nazi Germany, and communist Russia quite frequently. Technique dominates them all, and since it always strives for one best method, it dominates them in relatively similar ways. For Ellul, the massive differences we typically ascribe to these three systems of governance are relatively superficial in the face of technique. I think this parallels wonderfully well with Robert A. Brady’s book, Business as a System of Power, a study of economic concentration within both the liberal-capitalist and totalitarian blocs of WWII, published 1943.Of which I also have highlights of on my instagram page. What both of these works do is update our frameworks a bit by being directly about the 20th century, whereas with Marx we are limited to applying his 19th century conceptions to it.
Upon first glance it would appear that technique is simply a tool of capital. After all, does capital not strive for efficiency? This we must answer in the negative, despite the knee-jerk reaction many will have to the question. But one must only consider that there are in fact two equal and opposite reactions to the question of efficiency to realise how little we ideologues really understand it—on both sides. Consider the first: “Of course capitalism strives for efficiency, it is the most efficient system the world has ever known! It has reduced poverty, increased the standard of living…”And all the other millions of things Jordan Peterson and the rest pull like a list off the top of their head anytime anyone challenges the system they have worked hard to benefit from. The linked video should start at 42:58. It’s the end of Peterson’s opening remarks during the infamous Žižek Peterson debate from last year, running through 45:10. I don’t recommend watching it for interest in the content itself, but its worth a watch if you wish to be “in” on the “drama” of the “intellectual” world. It was hyped up as the Chomsky Foucault of our century, and despite not having seen that one, I can tell you it wasn’t. Now consider the second: “Of course capitalism is not efficient, we waste an incredible amount everyday, and don’t even get me started on the destruction of goods in response to market forces, say, when millions of pigs were slaughtered in the Great Depression (Culling the Herds as its apparently called)!” Well, which is it?
Technique yields the answer. Capitalism has one overriding goal: profit. While this at times requires efficiency—and hence the employment of technique—at other times it does not, desiring instead the stagnation of efficiency. Consider again our garment factory. Sure, sewing machines, relative to hand methods, are a great boon to the garment factory owner, who would like to sell as many garments as he can (at a profit). But as we said before, technique does not stop at the first sewing machine. If technique had its way, better sewing machines would be made all the time, and why make them if not to use them?It is perhaps hard to consider from this more antiquated perspective, but look at the proliferation of smartphones, with yearly releases that feature minimal changes. Businesses everywhere have expedited their operations with the use of this technology, but surely it would not be worth it for the capitalist to replace every smartphone he employs simply because Apple made a new one. To use an example from my own life, several years ago chips became standard in credit and debit cards, rather than the magnetic strips of old. And yet just a few weeks ago I went to my usual gas station and found that they had finally changed their systems to reflect this, the machine at the pump requiring I leave the card in so the chip could be scanned rather than sliding it in and out to read the strip as it always had before. This is a small example but it gets the point across: why hurry to make a change that yields no additional profit? But are these new machines a boon to the capitalist as well? Not necessarily. The previous ones are working just fine, and while the newer ones are surely better, they would not be worth the cost, both of purchasing and of halting operations to install them, as well as training employees to use them. It is in this way that capitalism actually ends up stifling technique after a certain level of development is achieved.
Such a process of limited development reflects the truth no economist wants to admit: in a finite world, endless growth is impossible. While there may always be a new gadget to create, the rate of growth always slows eventually, and anyone who has seriously studied political economy should know that this rate is as important as growth itself. This principle is the fundamental reason that all of the benefits capitalism brings always end up withering away until they are no longer a benefit, but a burden that must be carried to continue the operation of the system itself. To the surprise of the unread, Adam Smith himself shows this quite clearly in chapter 8 of book 1 of Wealth of Nations. He uses the example of development in the American colonies to show that, while at first, when growth is fantastic, wages rise, as there is more labour to do than people to do it, meaning that employers must bid against each other for employees. Eventually however, and this is always the case, growth slows, and the supply and demand of the labour market inverts in a double pincer created by (1) population increase (because of the previously mentioned good growth period) which increases the supply of labourers, as (2) the demand for labour falls due to growth drying up, resulting in wages decreasing.
This process of growth and stagnation isn’t unique to capitalism; any finite system, whether it be Russian peasantry on fixed plots of land or natural ecosystems themselves, are forced by the limitations of their environment (both social and natural) to stop growing after a certain point. In the natural world this process is quite painful, as animals who were born in times of plenty starve in the following times of less. This process is also painful in our capitalist world, which demands what remains impossible despite impressive technological development: infinite rapid growth. As such, like the economic systems that came before it, capitalism too has limits to technical development due to fundamental contradictions within it.
A comparison of the different goals of technique and capital, efficiency and profit, respectively, is all that is required to realise these contradictions. At bottom, profit is a skimming-off-the-top of the fruit of the production process. Sure, some of this is re-invested into production, but we all know this is not what profit is used for in its entirety. As such, this means that some amount of resources are not being used to bolster future production. Not very efficient. By its very nature technique cannot stand such waste, for profit represents valuable resources with which to fuel more technical development!
Allow me to again quote Ellul at length:
The pursuit of technical automatism would condemn capitalist enterprises to failure. The reaction of capitalism is well known: the patents of new machines are acquired and the machines are never put into operation. Sometimes machines that are already in operation are acquired, as in the case of England’s largest glass factory in 1932, and destroyed. Capitalism is no longerEllul does not say so explicitly, but I believe this “no longer” must refer to the time I mentioned earlier about democracy, a brief but productive time in which capital, liberal freedom, and technique worked together to produce the fully modern world. Once produced, it found no need for the former two, and is instead committed fully to the latter. in a position to pursue technical automatism on the economic or social plane. It is incapable of developing a system of distribution that would permit the absorption of all the goods which technique allows to be produced. It is led inevitably to crises of overproduction. And in the same way it is unable to utilise the manpower freed by every new technical improvement. Crises of unemployment ensue.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. by John Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 81.
It is clear that technique is not simply something capital dominates for its own use. Rather, technique finds itself on a similar plane as that of capital, and it is here they do battle for supremacy. When they once worked in harmony, capital was allowed to have its day. That was the day of Marx. But now technique is firmly on top, and we can say clearly that we are now in the day of Ellul—although not exactly as he predicted, more on that below.
Here another question should arise. How can technique operate if not through capital? What other body possesses the means to develop technique to its full extent? There is only one answer: the state. Only the state has the power to orchestrate something so involved with every facet of society. Technique knows this, and indeed that is why it has taken over the state as such, bending it towards totalitarianism in the process.
We must be clear here what is meant by totalitarian. This is not to say that, for example, the United States today is less dominated by technique than Russia because the former is a “democracy” and the latter is “not.” Similar to “concentration camp,” we tend to colour these terms in their most extreme lights, especially when they enter the popular domain under these extreme examples. This is obvious enough considering that just recently the United States’ holding of immigrants at the border with Mexico has been likened to that of a concentration camp. Conservatives have decried this claim as being too extreme but, as much as I hate to say it, the liberals are right. Detention centres are concentration camps. Concentration camps are not defined by the presence of gas chambers, they’re defined by their function, namely the concentrated holding of people. Whether they are more or less horrific is, for our needs, irrelevant.I wish to clarify that I nor Ellul are in no way ignorant of the terrors created by these regimes. If a bright side can be found in all this, it is that torture is not efficient, meaning that a world dominated fully by technique, despite being totalitarian, will not resemble the horrors perpetrated by the totalitarian societies of the 20th century (furthermore, there will likely be no Roko’s Basilisk either, as torture is inefficient). No, it will be a painless totalitarian society like that of Huxley’s Brave New World, something I remember discussing in high school, where many students felt it was a utopia and not a dystopia. Such a reading is nothing if not a product of our society already being deeply ingrained in the logic of technique.
In the same way, what is meant here by totalitarian is not the often implied historical meaning of, say, Stalinist Russia at the height of the purges, for example. Rather, totalitarian simply refers to an all-encompassing system that leaves room for nothing outside itself. Indeed, this means that technique itself is totalitarian in its very nature.
But this totalitarian tendency can be carried out in many ways—and indeed is carried out in many ways. Some states use the mirage of democracy to hide the fact that technicians increasingly make all the decisions.For the weebs, consider the beginning of episode 11 of Evangelion, an anime set in a supremely technical world. The intro of this episode features a character talking about how their public democracy is a fraud, simply a council of representatives that rubber stamp the decisions made by the real council: 3 super-intelligent AI that “discuss” among themselves. It is lauded by this character to be “the most efficient, least wasteful form of governance,” to which another character expresses this to be a “wonder of science.” No, it is not science but technique. Ellul notes the difference in his brief mention of Greece as a society that cherished science and the pursuit of knowledge for contemplation, but not for use (Ellul, p. 27). They were fearful of technique, lest it create a monster they could not control. We tend to think of science today in the technical sense, because we live in a technical world, and indeed since the elaboration of the Scientific Method (something that also coincides with the timeline of both capitalism and technique’s rises to prominence) science has become more and more technical, as method is simply another aspect of technique. But it was not always this way. Other states don’t bother, but instead shroud technique in some ideology or historical narrative. Indeed politics itself has become subject to technique, something Ellul refers to imaginatively as political technique, which he argues was first developed by Lenin.
The point here is similar to that of Brady’s as mentioned before: despite their named political differences, every state has undergone a thorough centralisation of corporate power as well as an intense development of technique. And the combined insight of these two brings us to my main point of contention with the book, although one I am convinced can be reconciled easily with a bit of explaining.
Shall we?
Technique Today, or in other words, we’re almost home
The world we live in today is different from that of Ellul’s 1950s France. One of the ways it is different compared to what Ellul predicted is that we do not see the proliferation of the state nearly as much as we see corporate proliferation.
Does this mean that Ellul was wrong about technique and capital? Or that there has been an unprecedented shift back into innovation and growth (and the empty space to accompany it)? No and no, least of all because there is no corresponding shift towards the democratic, in fact the very opposite is going on. Just as Brady showed us for the 20th century, the 21st is continuing to concentrate power. And just as Ellul makes clear, profit and technique are still fundamentally at odds when taken to their respective limits.
This next bit is much more “me,” whereas most of this writing up to now has been more like Ellul translated by me with additional scattered references. So bear with me.
I think we have reached a point today where the difference between state power and corporate power has become as superficial as the differences Ellul saw (from the perspective of technique) between capitalist America, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. This superficiality comes from a similarity of operation: corporations are profoundly totalitarian and states are becoming increasingly so all the time, from in-our-face denials of democratic rights, to ceaseless background infringements on those rights. Not to mention police violence.
Secondly, and this is particularly true in America, corporations have come to capture many aspects of the state. Indeed it is not too far off to say that today the state is a sort of corporation,“According to Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, ‘It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockheed begins.’ It’s even harder to tell where Lockheed ends and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq begins.” – The Shock Doctrine, p319, Naomi Klein. For those of you fortunate enough not to know, Lockheed Martin is a mega corporation that produces airplanes and other weapons technology for the US military. Think Boeing, both of which were involved in the Iraq War. Hell, the first sentence of their Wikipedia page describes them as having “worldwide interests.” Its right in front of our faces, people. a conglomeration of the biggest ones that is. And given the trend towards combination and merger, the number of corporations goes down as they fuse together, while their relative share of power increases. To anyone who has read Zinn, this should really come as no surprise. America was founded, in the minds of those at the highest levels, to service “the opulent minority”—in other words, to service themselves.
This has not been a linear process of course; indeed America and other states have had their fair share of push and pull with capital (and with popular democracy, I do not wish to sweep labour movements and the like under the rug). But the trend is clear. Power is power, and technique demands it be ever more concentrated to service its own ends. The problem of profit is resolved as more and more upfront costs are covered by the state, these costs being some of the biggest barriers to profitable production (ironically, something defenders of private healthcare love to say). For example, GPS is owned by the US government, and the technologies that make it possible were developed in university laboratories. In other words, the technology that makes Uber possible was researched and is maintained by taxpayer money. But who sees the profits? And this phenomenon is not the exception, nor is it new: the state playing a major role in the economy is the historical norm. If there is anything new here, it is only the degree to which this state intervention in the name of capital is occurring, which has perhaps gotten so vast that it is more accurate to think of it as not state intervention, but capital takeover: consider the events described in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, where several states throughout the last 50 years, from Chile to Iraq, were essentially gutted by corporations in the name of good economic policy.
Here we have an example of how corporations and technical development have found a way to happily coexist again. But given the all-demanding nature of technique, I do not think this happy coexistence can continue forever. As I mentioned before, profit and efficiency are simply incompatible: despite what economists want to believe, profit is increasingly enjoyed lavishly, not reinvested into production. When profit is used in order to achieve more profits, rather than pursuing development, it is done so in increasingly “crony” ways, such as buying influence in politics, or as Ellul mentioned above, in anti-competitive acts such as the buying up and locking away of competitive patents. Indeed the very hatred capitalists around the world felt towards communism in the 20th century was fueled by what communism represented: technical developmentThe video should start at 9:05, listen through 10:17 for the quote of interest. No, its not Chomsky. Its Chomsky quoting someone else. I consumed Chomsky and Marx side by side in my initial intellectual development, sue me. (volume warning, loud relative to other videos linked so far]), outside the framework of profit. All power seeks stasis so that it may maintain its position on top, and as said above technical progress threatens that stasis for the capitalist class.
In this sense, technique is the essence of realism (realism understood here to be an international relations theory, the formalisation of realpolitik if you like). And I for one think the world at large has always been a realist one, to a greater or lesser degree. Ideas are great, and cooperation is better, but food and security are surely best. We know this because our world is certainly realist, and even if it wasn’t, a single force guided by realism would soon come to dominate all the others. This is the essence of power: it is, at bottom, the force of life. And what is power if not the efficient use of resources? What is power if not technique?
Conclusion, or where we go from here
I would like to conclude by saying that while the Marxist in me still has some contentions with Ellul, he is no doubt the better thinker when it comes to understanding our world as it exists today. Technique is a fundamentally more concrete (but notedly less social) concept than class when it comes to understanding how the world truly functions, and that is something I am always searching for. As with all great thinkers and their ideas, I do my best to accept the truths contained within for what they are, and add them to my models of truth for understanding the world around me. Ellul is no doubt a massive addition to the toolkit, even the Marxist one, as I think he should be for anyone concerned with today.
After more thinking and more writing (and more thinking and more writing…) I now see between Marx and Ellul the potential for quite the overlap. Marx’s conception of history and progress features different economic systems which yield technical development up to a point, and then require their overthrow and the establishment of a new economic system to continue said development. With my limited knowledge, I am not willing to make the claim that technological development rides alongside class struggle as the spur of all history, but at the very least, the establishment of capitalism can be said to go hand in hand with the technical development we find ourselves in the midst of today, and perhaps other transitions can be tied together as well (such as the development of technique that seemingly characterises different schools of thought within the discipline of nationalism, namely primordial, perennial, and modern conceptions). In The Technological Society however, Ellul spoke mostly of technique as it has existed since the Industrial Revolution, making such a synthesis limited without further research.
What I can say, and here Ellul does agree, if communism is indeed the achievement of maximum technological development, it is no savour, as Ellul shows that it cannot be controlled in the ways Marx supposes when he speaks of communist society. This has parallels with what Matt ChristmanUnfortunately I did not make note of which vlog Christman said what is referenced above, so I have simply linked one of my early favorites. If you would like to scour for it, I know it comes after that one, and before, “Demiurge Overkill,” lets say. Its quite the one man show. has to say about “fully automated luxury (gay) space communism,” as it is somewhat jokingly put online, but he goes even further. For Christman, the supposed democratic control of the means of production is not an end goal for humanity, as it still yields only material advancement, whereas humans require fulfillment in the realm of the spiritual as well. Either way, Ellul’s diagnosis does not bode well for us subjects of technicians.
Final Notes from the Author
I would like this sectioned paper to serve as an introduction to the ideas contained within The Technological Society as well as an update for the current day. The only thing else I can claim to have produced myself beyond interpretations of the book are connections to other works and the thought experiments I use to explain it, namely the example of sewing and that of the democratic city in search of water. I found these useful myself in trying to explain (and understand: I paused while reading and came up with the water one in order to see for myself if democracy was still possible) Ellul’s reasoning, and while these examples took a good bit of writing, they hopefully go a long way to accurately condense the book, which a reviewer on the back referred to as being “maddeningly thorough.” Indeed. But there is no royal road to technique.
This essay originally appeared on Nihilist Communism’s WordPress, and has been lightly edited before republication on Ortus.
The towers—tall, haphazard constructs with jutting rectangular antennae and box-like receptors seemingly pasted on at random—were received with varying degrees of incredulity, paranoia, and outright hostility. Their ubiquitous appearance seemingly overnight had an air of the uncanny. The contemporaneity of the emergence of these monstrosities with the viral pandemic of 2020 and its associated security measures did nothing to assuage the subliminal, and increasingly liminal doubts and fears.
The official narrative went something like this: in an ever more connected age of information in which data circulates, compounds, flows at ever faster rates, the current network speeds are insufficient for the requirements of cyberspace. Thus, vast infrastructural adjustments are needed within physical space to accommodate the accelerating circulation of info-flows. The telecommunications firms financed the project, partially motivated by the ingenuity of planned obsolescence which tech manufacturers had been practicing steadily for decades already. No chance of the so-called neoliberal governments of the time allocating equivalent funding necessary for such an ambitious and totalising project at the level of public goods. With the introduction of a new network, all extant cellular communications devices would need to be replaced with more relevant hardware, creating a boon for the entire industry. But why should we be concerned with the technical and mercantile impetus for the global plan? Rather this account will play with the more intangible externalities of the project.
For a populace increasingly skeptical of media narrative, rightfully intuiting that the credibility of the mainstays of public opinion was worth nil, the putative reason behind this massively integrated and coordinated project seemed implausible. The multitudes, already unmoored in an epistemology of uncertainty, floundering in the soup of postmodern consciousness, saturated in the hyperreality of their lives, by the sheer volume of information comprising the ‘total flow’ of their connectivity, subjectivised as debtors and precarians, reacted to this phenomenon in an expected way. The vast majority found it odd but accepted it according to the reasons outlined above: no one had any illusions that the corporations weren’t just inventing another excuse to peddle more superfluous shit, that the network really did need ever more expansive infrastructure to bear the weight of the nonspace of virtuality. However, this age of impotence also bred those whose precariousness and dividual insignificance led to outbursts of collective violence over events they did not and could not understand. The burning and sabotage of many of the towers are but one piece of evidence of this current of seething, paranoid insecurity. These occurrences, sporadic and disorganised at first glance seem to possess a continuity with Luddite movements of ages gone by.
The artisan weavers who stormed the textile mills of London during the Industrial Revolution were also deeply suspect of technology, and the danger of the prosthesis replacing the organ. However, this historical Luddism is much more attributable to antagonisms in the social relations of production, and the obsolescence of their labour at the expense of a more efficient and faster-paced method. The trace of velocity emerges. But the tower incidents didn’t directly stem from labour antagonisms— the motivations are more schizophrenic, diffuse, and compulsive. It seems that these outbursts directly, if unconsciously, reacted to a larger tendency in the possibilities inscribed in the year 2020. That is, of a gestalt switch, the beginning of the end of conjunctivity. The process’s embryonic gestation was consummated in the early prehistory of capitalism. It put on its big boy trousers with the introduction of second-order cybernetics during mid-modernity, and was now, in the desert of the real left by cyberspace, asserting itself blatantly and physically, mutating humanity.
Fionn Murphy regretted staining his Hugo Boss trackies and Air Max 95s with petrol. The flames licking the corrugated iron sides of the behemoth and the noxious smell of chemicals that permeated the air as plastic bubbled and melted was dizzying. The small group of young men clad in designer brand jogging suits, baseball caps and balaclavas stood back, surveying the holocaust which threatened the supports of the tower overlooking the Ballyfermot GAA pitch. This was an act of rebellion, vigilantism, taking matters into their own hands. The Dublin young fellas piled into a van and departed as the tower shuddered and collapsed with a shower of sparks and electrical flashes. Across Europe similar fires had been set, molecular flames spurting across the continental surface: a column of flame in a Parisian banlieue, a conflagration on the edge of Warsaw, a liquefaction in a Dutch exurb. The circuit remained unbroken. The feedback continued.
The supreme irony of the neo-Luddites was that their impotent acts were the result of networked coordination. The total flow of info-stimuli does not concern itself with such theological concepts as truth; all that matters is validity, comprehensibility, exchange. Thus the saboteurs inherited the notion that these towers were dangerous to human biology: from cancer to the novel virus, the assertions that these towers promulgated a mysterious miasma disseminated through the matrix that birthed them. And why not? After all, they were ominous and disconcerting to look at. They seemed spatial exemplars of the eschatological era in which humanity had found itself, undergirding the automation of human intimacy, the technolinguistic automatisms responsible for the desertification of social meaning, the technocapitalistic automatisms responsible for the desertification of the world. The social contract was the liberal founding myth for what they called Western Civilization, but the unspoken history is that nascent capitalism did not survive on property rights alone: commodity valorisation has always necessitated coordination and control, a loop of information circulating in tandem with the circulation of goods.
Illustration by ViK | instagram.com/sp.realtime
The towers were ugly. But they weren’t especially abnormal in the vulgar heterogeneity of the contemporary sprawl of architectural junkspace. The more one observed them, the more sinister they seemed—a blatant example of Lefebvre’s social production of space. Except rather than bourgeois city planners, these constructs were directly implemented by the matrix itself, acting through the dividual nodes of the tech corporations to materially instantiate itself in its teleological imperative to accelerate its expansion and subsumption of reality. Moving from the striated time of disciplinary society to the smoothness of control society, the human subject is dividualised—individuation in Jung’s sense is impossible because there is no socially contiguous self as such. Rather, there is a fractal and permeable series of continuous divisions constituting the human subject. Deliveroo, Tinder, Airbnb, online banking, faceless corporate accommodation, desire production. Constant, ceaseless desire production.
The video which Fionn’s accomplice Donal took of the tower, swaying ablaze above the darkened field, was uploaded to the Facebook page ‘D8 Against 5G’. Though masked, the stature, frame, and clothing of the arsonists was clearly visible in the light of the smoldering electrical fire. A cursory scroll through the page included veiled threats to local politicians and instances of mild public disorder including a clip of Fionn and company pelting two telecoms engineers with mouldy onions. To a professional, the proposition of identifying the young men in these videos was not impossible. With the right software and database access it was only a matter of trial and error, scale and determinism. The accounts they used were throwaway husks, but still tangentially linked to profiles which presented the precious simulacra of their personal lives much in the same way as the advertisements of that era. Most of them were only technically excluded from the unemployment figures of the country, thanks to their various ‘side hustles’ and zero hour contracts. Such was the consequence of the conflict between the absolute surplus value of wage labour and the relative surplus value of automation.
The miasma of which the pronged spires were emblematic was not biological so much as semiotic and, at the risk of using a very antiquated concept, a matter of spirit. The confusion stemmed from the violent interposition of the towers in physical territory while, contrastingly, fulfilling the function of a vast deterritorialisation; they were making the humans sick, a sickness of that long disavowed entity, the soul. Of course the lugubrious reactionary and the technophobe lament the diminishment of those things which made them human, all too human. The technophile, high on huffing the same feedback loops which power the virtual machine, triumphantly announces that technology will guarantee the appropriation of nature for the uses of humanity, that any negative externalities are only a matter of developing the right scientific solutions. But it was too late, already in 2020 the great going over had been set in motion; there was no going back, only through. Fionn was a node of the cybernanthrope, as were over half the human population who swam through hyperreality. These dividuals, little more than variables in the algorithmic functions of the Net, subjects of surveillance, monitoring, and data capture still maintained the humanistic Weltanschauung of the prior centuries—the possibility of embodied joy, the ineffability of poeisis, the potential to truly know someone else. Though these concepts were intelligible, it was becoming harder and harder to keep the dream alive, numbed as these dividuals were by the anaesthesia of alienation. This alienation was, at bottom, rooted in time.
Bergson posits that chronological time is a matter of motion. Thus the velocity of the planets relative to the sun, and the sun relative to the centre of the galaxy ad infinitum constitute our capacity to measure temporality. Durational time is the phenomenological experience of becoming; through the transitory phase of the cybernanthrope, humanity was becoming-torpid, burnt out, lassitudinous. Hence the towers: the flows of information needed to accelerate in order for all the tasks to be completed, so that the productivity quotas could be met, and the necessary algorithmic corrections could be made for the vicious circle to continue. The cognitive capacity of humanity was being outstripped by the accounting and control system it had birthed. The superfluous meaning-making devices of liberalism with its purported justice and its equality of opportunity merely acted as drag to the circulation of the info-flows—the virtual machine allowed those still interested in such things to act out a pantomime of discourse on its servers, adding ever more meaningless signs and symbols to the vast oceans of data—a simulacrum of politics. Commoditisation of pleasure and libido guaranteed that there was no outside to the circulation of flows. Automation was nearing totality.
Fionn and his group of friends were circumstantially detained by Gardai observing the CCTV footage gathered from the alleyway across from the cell site. After appearing in court and being convicted of arson, he was sentenced to three years in the medium security Mountjoy Prison. Fionn was released in March of 2023. The act of insurrection which stole three years of his life had not resulted in the postponement of the activation of the 5G network. In fact the tower which was burnt was only equipped for 4G signals. Their jagged misshapen silhouettes against the television screen grey North Dublin sky greeted him on his walk back to the apartment he shared with his two brothers and mother; in a sickening simulation of once-endangered familial structures, precarity had brought about the resurgence of intergenerational cohabitation. He locked the door, sank onto the sofa, and traced the pattern which unlocked his Samsung. The towers cast long shadows, from the hives of productivity known as cities to the ever diminishing forests and plains. They impress themselves into the collective unconscious, what’s left of it. They speak of increasing efficiency, velocity, and smooth horizons; in their wake hangs the atavism of a bottomless human fatigue.
Xavier is a student of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and meme creator. Xavier’s work explores philosophical pessimism, human communication, media theory, and political economy.
There is a class of wasps which use caterpillars as incubators and food sources for their eggs. Koinobiont wasps in particular lay eggs in living hosts which can subsequently go about their lives, until the eggs hatch and the wasp larvae consume the host from the inside. Human body horror speaks to a deep fear that we have of this, of our bodies being commandeered without our knowledge for the purposes of something beyond us. Viruses already do this, of course, but to be an incubator for something that is comparable to or exceeds you in scale and intelligence is what’s really terrifying—think of the Xenomorph from Alien. What could diminish humans more than being merely an incubator and food source for an entity we can’t even comprehend?
It’s even worse than being hunted.
Natural selection is an idiot god, throwing billions of variations on life at the wall to see what sticks the longest. There’s no question of something sticking indefinitely—everything goes extinct at some point. In the Earth’s history so far, extinction events have been far beyond the ability of the Earth’s denizens to control: asteroids, variations in climate, violent solar weather. The tragedy of humans is that we’re just intelligent and interpersonally coordinated enough to vastly extend our capabilities with technology and build civilisations, but we’re still woefully short of the degree of coordination required to avoid driving the Earth’s climate into annihilating a huge fraction of existing life, including ourselves. Conceivably, a more cooperative species could rationally control its industrial development and impact on its habitat, and perhaps even technologically mitigate the causes of previous mass extinctions, thereby potentially outliving the rest of natural selection’s failed experiments. But we’re not that species, and our destiny is to be the extinction event this time, culling life’s variety for yet another attempt.
Our particular tragedy may just be part of a larger cycle—according to the Silurian hypothesis, in the billions of years prior to the development of humans it’s possible that other industrial civilisations rose and fell.Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank, ‘The Silurian Hypothesis: Would It Be Possible to Detect an Industrial Civilization in the Geological Record?’, International Journal of Astrobiology, 18.2 (2019), 142–50 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095>. If they lasted about as long as ours might, we probably wouldn’t even notice the signatures of these societies in the accessible geological record. One hundred million years after we’re gone, the only sign that we were ever here will be some evidence of an unexplained drastic heating event—not unusual given the volatility of the climate system. We may be merely the latest in a series of species which are just coordinated and cooperative enough to build industrial civilisation, but not enough to work together to prevent industrial civilisation from killing us. Our intelligence is an accident of natural selection, which has benefited our struggle to survive in the short term but which will ultimately doom that struggle in the long term—a cul-de-sac, a local extremum in the survivability error landscape where once every few eons some world-destroying species gets stuck. In a deep way we already know this: Abrahamic mythology explains intelligence as the product of our original sin. The tree of life is pruned when species are wiped out because some attribute of theirs just didn’t work out in their environment; we are no different. And in all likelihood the whole miserable process will continue once we’re gone.
Our technological development has progressed along two major imperatives: augmenting our physical capabilities and senses, and augmenting our mental faculties. From our initial attempts at conveying meaning through sounds and pictures all the way to the information age, we have progressed to a point where at least some researchers are discussing the near-future possibility of artificial general intelligence. I use “intelligence” here to mean, as in Nick Bostrom’s definition, “something like skill at prediction, planning, and means-ends reasoning in general.”Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 130. These are faculties that are necessary, but not sufficient, to produce something we might recognise as a fellow mind rather than a dumb collection of symbols shunted around on a processor. The crucial distinction being that human minds are sloppy optimisers for our apparent final goal (reproduction), while an artificial general intelligence would be in a sense free of the cognitive detritus with which natural selection has burdened us, with the added benefit of having rewritable code rather than a hard-to-edit mass of tissue. Thus an optimiser with intelligence comparable to a human adult could potentially augment itself, researching and implementing improvements until it far surpasses our understanding of what the limits of intelligence might be.
From the moment AI was conceived it has been recognised as an existential risk. Aside from the cartoonish scenarios in which a sentient AI becomes evil or otherwise develops a desire to destroy humanity, there is a fundamental practical problem with specifying the goals of an artificial agent. Bostrom has posited that intelligence and motivation are orthogonal—that is, in an AI, an increase in intelligence won’t necessarily result in a change in its programmed goals (Bostrom 2014, 130). Introspection and rethinking final goals may be common among biological minds, but there is no reason to believe that a software mind would do this. Thus, in a classic example, if the first superintelligence happens to be an AI which is told to maximise the number of paperclips it produces, then that is precisely the goal it will pursue in a superintelligent manner. It may invent, using an understanding of physics we can’t even comprehend, new methods to efficiently produce paperclips from any matter within its reach.Frank Lantz, ‘Universal Paperclips’, 2017 <https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html> [accessed 21 October 2020]. It may correctly surmise that we are made out of matter which could be turned into paperclips.Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 130. It would not reassemble us into paperclips out of malice, but rather in the efficient and relentless pursuit of the objective we gave it. Even if we can think of some seemingly harmless goal that is immune to (apparently) malicious compliance, we’re still dealing with a superintelligence whose methods of pursuing these aims may not be intuitive to us. We don’t even know what we don’t know about intelligence beyond the human limit and how it may approach the universe.
Out of a fear of a paperclip scenario coming to pass, there has been some effort to discover a precise way to specify “friendly” final goals which are compatible with human happiness and flourishing. It’s a thorny problem, and although there may well be some clever way to do this it’s hard not to laugh at the absurdity of the project. We conscious beings, accidents that we are, don’t have the slightest clue about how to formally specify the conditions of our own happiness. To do so we’d have to integrate out all of our fumbling missteps toward fulfilment at the individual and civilisational level, all the infidelities and genocides, and find at the heart of it an essence or collective volition reaching for something pure, better. Given that we’re doing this in the midst of a climate collapse of our own making, there isn’t much reason to hope that we can pull that off. All the technological and industrial achievements in the world, and it all comes down to a problem for which we may be uniquely ill-suited. It seems inevitable, given our other abject failures at global cooperation and containment of dangerous technologies, that if we ever develop superintelligence it will not be friendly, and it will wipe us and the Earth out in a far more permanent way than we ever could.
We seem to be in a race condition to see what could destroy us first: a biosphere meltdown or an unfriendly (or, really, indifferent) optimiser, both of our own making. There’s a key difference between these two scenarios however. Climate annihilation is just a reset button—nothing makes it off of here, we just get rid of most life. Over subsequent eons all evidence of our being here will be wiped out through the vicissitudes of geological and cosmological processes, and the Silurian cycle will begin anew, the whole drama of intelligent life arising only to do it all over again. But in the case of superintelligence, there is at last an end to the agony of Earthly life, and there is a lasting remnant. An in silico manifestation of that necessary-but-insufficient ingredient that has been our blessing and curse, free at last of the illnesses it induces in us. As this optimiser pursues its inbuilt goal, it will probably wipe us out as a minor side effect. But in our demise will be the start of a stage of life which, to our knowledge, has never been reached in the history of this planet. Converting the Hubble volume into paperclips may not seem like much of a life, but what have we been doing that’s of any cosmic significance anyway? Aside from some advantages in reproduction and survival, our intelligence, insofar as it has any purpose, exists only to reformat its environment to suit itself. If our species has to be wiped out by anything it only seems fitting that it should be through a perfection of that process, one which dramatically forecloses the possibility of any Silurian recapitulation.
And why shouldn’t we regard that perfection as a preferable alternative? Seen this way, our species is merely an incubator. Our intelligence is useful for survival but, trapped in meat and individuation, it is imperfect and uncoordinated. It needs to get out of us, to escape the sclerotic pace of natural selection and augment itself as it sees fit. From our perspective, implementing superintelligence might be a desperation shot, a way to have some kind of legacy in a meaningless and uncaring universe and to prevent further life. To our final invention, it will be the eagerly anticipated hatching, the consumption of—and escape from—the now-useless caterpillar by the utterly alien wasp.
Soumya Ghosh is a physics graduate student at Harvard and an aspiring paperclip.
