Drama of a Technological Society
Submitted by Ed Appel on Mon, 2005-09-12 15:23
Let me start with a few general comments on this essay and maybe get into more detail in a later poest.
Mike Hubler's piece on the intersection between Jacques Ellul and KB on technology is brilliant. It rewards a careful reading. I highly recommend it.
One thing Hubler emphasizes that stood out for me is the ambiguity inherent in the agent-agency "inversion" he speaks of, the way in which technology, construed as "obviously" an agency in our gadget-overloaded world, is, from another angle and by way of contrast, seemingly in the saddle and riding humankind at an incredible gallop. Consequently, the fluidity of the pentadic terms and concepts can just as easily render "technique" as agent in a straight agent-agency correspondence, with the symbol-using/misusing animal as the tool of his or her mechanized creations.
Hubler makes that ambiguity clear, with supportive references to passages in Burke. In fact, he employs Burke's own descriptions to nicely justify that kind of agent-agency construction, with the machine as autonomous slave-driver and pentadically named as such. His central use of Burke's dramatism as a way of more explicitly rhetoricizing Ellul's half-century-old critique of our modern infatuation with the machine is thus appropriately nuanced and pellucidly parsed.
Here's another point Hubler makes that should seem obvious, but that is conspicuously missing in virtually all Burkean scholarship: the interdependence of Burke's "grammar" and grammar in the prosaic sense of the term. Our author says:
"The pentad maps a kind of 'grammar' that is implicit in the way humans act with symbols, and is analogous to the grammar that governs the way sentences are constructed."
Hey, Burke didn't invent act, scene, agent, agency, purpose, and attitude. These notions are inherent in the definitions of the content parts of speech. What Burke has done is elucidate how the entelechial dimension of symbol-usage, the "magical" glow of one perfected ideal, has seduced "homo loquax" into believing that one term, or one set of associated terms, says it all, subordinates every other notion or cause, in any given instance.
I like, too, the subtlety with which Hubler treats machines, our technological inventions, as possibly and mysteriously occupying some no-man's land somewhere between action and motion. He states:
"Burke's distinction between action and motion might be creatively used as an alternative rhetorical interpretation of the autonomy of technique. While Burke generally only classifies humans as species of action, and relegates technologies to the realm of motion, at different places he also suggests that the relationship might be turned on its head in the same way that agent-agency is inverted."
Whatever those artifactual instruments are that "separate [us] from [our] natural condition," they're not easily equated with the wind, rain, tides, and the four forces of physics. It's still an open question, I believe, how we label those artifacts in terms of the action/motion axis of oppositions.
I want to examine later the way Ellul so prophetically gets into all of this, according to our insightful author.
Ed
Comments
Still conjuring up random thoughts in response to Hubler's fine essay---maybe I'll wax more coherent later.
This is an excellent state-of-the-art piece, as I see it, a well-wrought synthesizing, summarizing article. Its featured claim is not eye-poping news. The assertion that, Frankenstein-like, our machines have taken over our lives, are driving us like cattle or sheep who knows where, and that we can best characterize the motivations involved, Burke-wise, by inverting an agent-agency ratio seems pretty tame in and of itself. What's arresting about this essay is the richness of its splicing together of so many fitting strands of thought and research, the revealing analogue produced by juxtaposing Ellul and Burke, and the unerring precision and, I dare say, eloquence with which Hubler explains each concept and relationship along the way. A reader can learn, or be well refreshed on, a lot of Burkology via "The Drama of a Technological Society."
I'm wondering whether the source of the ambiguity about what pentadic term Burke, or a Burkean, customarily uses, or should use, in reference to human technologies isn't cleared up a bit by something Overington noted, and I think rightly so, that sometimes Burke isn't exactly clear whether he's referring to language-use or the artifacts and/or morally purposeful motions that language-use generates. Dramatism as fundamentally a critique or philosophy of language is, for instance, blurred a bit by Burke's definition of the "basic unit of drama" in GM: It is the "human body in [morally] purposeful motion."
Anyway, when Hubler quotes Burke as referring to machines essentially as "agencies," Burke seems pretty obviously to be referring to artifacts, not to terminologies. Linguistically, those machines can be construed as any pentadic thing whatsoever: an agent that shapes modern humankind's day from morning to night, constraining scene for contemporary decision-making, the act of a whole host of inventive geniuses, or the purposive be-all and end-all of twenty-first-century planning. When we're concretely using them, we tend to think of our gadgets as means of some kind, even when they have surreptitiously taken over our life.
The ambiguity between the "thing" and the symbolization of the "thing" extends to questions of motivation as well. There's motivation in the featuring of the term "guns" in a discourse, to be sure. There is also, without a doubt, a strong motivational pull in a ubiquitous availability of guns in a culture like our own. "People kill people," yes. But so do "guns." They "argue" for a certain strategy for settling disputes.
More later. Hubler's piece touches a lot of bases.
Ed