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
From a dramatistic perspective, how fares Ellul's claim that the tech society "demystifies the sacred value of every part of society except LA TECHNIQUE," as Hubler puts it, as these wondrous tools are "embraced with near dogmatic and perhaps naive faith"? Embodying "perfect" agency, Ellul says, our technologies are "exalted," are seen as "sacred."
On first glimmer, such an interpretation sounds thoroughly Burkean. Isn't contemplation of the ways of perfection and mystification/demystification very much a part of what Burke's enterprise is about? A passage from GM Hubler highlights further underscores its dramatistic bona fides:
"And since," Burke says, "the requirements of such science [like that of today, theoretical and applied] favor the elimination of Purpose, or final cause, the means-ends relation provokes a shift to the term nearest of kin [means or agency], which can supply the function of purpose even when the term is formally omitted as a locus of motives."
To make sure we get it, Hubler epitomizes Burke's take thusly: "Applied science as technology is not only an agency-turned-agent, it is a means turned into an end (a[n] [ultimately] purposeless purpose)." "It debunks the sacred by eliminating purpose" in the transcendental sense.
We can even note an analogous phenomenon in the fields of evolutionary science, biological as well as cosmological. The "mystery" of our origins having been stripped away by a seemingly well-supported theory about fortuitous planetary conditions; spontaneous generation of living, membranous cells out of carbon molecutles, peptides, and amino acids; blind chance mutations from generation to generation; and natural selection or deflection of those sudden, randomly appearing traits---this narrative has but reinforced a thousandfold LaPlace's famed reply to the question of where God fitted into his account of Earth's formation: "I have no need of the hypothesis."
There is, therefore, little need to posit and worship a mysterious and transcendent Cause of Everything, since we now know the "cause" of just about everything. The so-called "God of the Gaps" grows dimmer and dimmer as the gaps in our knowledge recede. There's no need to pray to some Power that is presumed to control Everything, because we have pretty much brought everything under our own control via our Wondrously Potent and Versatile Technologies. Sort of like the archaic devotees of the cargo cults, we are constrained to genuflect toward the bounteous artifacts that have made our life so much "better," even if they didn't exactly fall out of the sky as cargo.
One glaring problem surfaces in respect to Ellul's rationale of demystification: He theorized and wrote at mid-century, well before the paradoxes of the postmodern condition presented themselves full force. True, the march of secularization and immanentized thinking has continued unabated. Not, though, without a countervailing and almost equally intense revival of fundamentalist religion of many varieties. Just as we've seen ethnic and nationalistic movements cut across advancing globalization, so have we witnessed near primitive and obscurantist expressions of transcendental faith grow and do fierce battle with the practical agnosticism of the sophisticated. The "sacred" in the traditional sense of the term is vigorously alive in North America, the Middle East, and across the Third World.
What gives? And does Burke have an answer?
He surely does. For although he offers up a fitting and apparently supportive passage in GM for this facet of Ellul's thesis, KB elsewhere makes clear his belief that the "magic spell" of language is "impossible" to break (PLF, pp. 1-8, 119). Transcendencies are ineradicatble in the life of the symbol-using animal (RM). Magic and mystery can only be moderated, not eliminated. A full drama containing mysticism as well as realism, pragmatism, idealism, and materialism will surface across populations, if not in the life of each and every symbol-user. Call it a division of dramatic labor, if you will. Logology postulates theology as its paradigm case. LA TECHNIQUE may seem "perfect," but it's not perfect enough for a being unsettled by the siren call of the infinite-negative of command.
I know Bob Wess and I don't see eye to eye on this matter. We went round and round on it last issue. I think history so far is on my side, and on Burke's, as I read him.
Ed