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
I want to say something now about the intersection of Jacques Ellul's thought and that of Burke that Hubler features in his essay.
We might tend today to think of Ellul as being prophetic. His book on LA TECHNIQUE was completed by 1950 and was published in 1955. Mid-20th-century Western societies were, however, extremely technological. They have just grown that much more so, along with third-world cultures, during the intervening decades. Our machines were riding us pretty hard even back then. They're simply more imperious still in our digital age.
Under the larger heading of what Ellul calls "technical intention," Hubler cites three Ellulian terms that epitomize what modern technololgy is doing to industrial nations and the worldview or ideological climate that forms rhetorical contexts.
These trends or concepts are "autonomy," "technical necessity," and "demystification."
"Technical intention" simply means our tools, machines, and methodological processes "ironically" become an "end, rather than a means to perpetuate [traditionally human] social or individual goals." This shift in priorities leads to the "autonomy" of "every method and technological invention," whereby "each technique seems to follow its own efficient course without regard to its positive or negative effects." It "deflect[s] human moral concerns." It results in a "moral autonomy."
"Technology [then] grows expnentially and irreversibly" out of "necessity." The tech worldview fosters "the belief that whatever can be produced must be produced . . . , pushing the boundaries of the possible without concern for practical consequences." It assumes the need for "advancement for its own sake."
In tar baby fashion, "Each technique tends to create problems that can only be addressed by introducing new technologies," leading to a "cycle of problem solving/creating inventions."
Finally, tech culture "demystifies the sacred value of every part of society except LA TECHNIQUE." "Purpose" having been folded back into "means," "the only sacred left in a technological society is LA TECHNIQUE itself. And it is embraced with near dogmatic and perhaps naive faith sometimes expressed in the belief that 'whenever a difficulty arises, technical progress will deal with it.'"
Ellul's formulation resonates well with Burke's dramatism/logology, I do believe, with one possible exception, and that exception is a significant one.
Viewing the "autonomy" of the machine, "follow[ing] its own efficient course," as problematic, like Ellul, I think of Burke's great proto-comic manifesto in COUNTER-STATEMENT. It appears in the chapter "Program." There Burke contrasts "practical" folks (the bad guys) and "aesthetic Bohemians" (the good guys). The aesthetes are characerized by "inefficiency, indolence, dissipation, vacillation, mockery, distrust, 'hypochondria,' non-conformity, bad sportsmanship, . . . negativism, . . . experimentalism, curiosity, risk, dislike of propaganda, dislike of certainty,---tentative[ness]" (pp. 111-12). This "democrat . . . has no hope in perfection---as the 'opposition,' his [sic] nearest approach to a doctrine is the doctrine of interference" (p. 115).
Burke's "artist" is especially "anti-industrial," anti-"commercial." He or she generates "a babble of discordant voices" to sew "confusion" among the "hero[s] of economic warfare" (pp. 114-15).
Ergo, Burke does offer a sliver of hope, or at least a call to and a program for concerted opposition, in the face of the seemingly inexorable march of technology. Burke summons humankind to perspective by incongruity and dialectical or double vision. He admonishes us to pay attention to all the parliamentary voices, even those of the naysayers. He askes for metareflection on the sometimes siren motives inherent in language itself, particularly those that destructively drive us blindly toward an imagined "necessity" in the working out of our inventions.
How are we Burkophiles shaping up today in our realistic, not just our scholarly, implementation of Burke's call to halfway adequate symbolic action?
To be continued.
Ed