The Technological Society

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Ellul begins with a strange argument: the machine comes before technique. Although he draws extensively on Marcel Mauss to develop his concept of technique, this notion runs counter to the latter’s understanding of “techniques of the body.” The contradiction begins to make sense, though, if one considers that Ellul is not making a claim about the origins of technique but rather the state of affairs following the industrial revolution. For Ellul, the machine is “deeply symptomatic: it represents the ideal toward which technique strives” (4). The machine comes before technique, then, in the sense that it is the model that organizes technique. It is the goal of all technique, or, as Ellul puts it: the machine is “pure technique” (4). Thus, the machine is the perfection of technique, and it is the role of technique to produce society as a machine: “Technique integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order where the incoherent banging of machinery heaped up ruins” (5).

A central idea for Ellul is that in modern life technique has become autonomous. It is not merely applied science. It is not a set of practices among others. Technique is rather an “ensemble of means” (19) characterized by self-direction (79), self-augmentation (85), and geometrical progression (91). Ellul develops this definition of technique as a revision of Mauss’ concept of technique. For Ellul, Mauss’ definition holds only for sociological analysis of primitive societies and is insufficient to explain modern technique. For one thing, Ellul argues that modern techniques are usually not manual. The operations of machines are not manual but instead require secondary manual labor. Interestingly, prefiguring the premise of The Matrix, Ellul speculates that the volume of secondary manual operations will increase faster than the volume of technical operations, essentially relegating humans to positions of subservience to the machine.

Ellul begins to define technique by searching for points of commonality among the great diversity of individual technical operations. He seeks the tendencies and principles shared by all techniques, and goes on to argue, “what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency” (19). Ellul is quick to point out, however, that it is no longer a matter of technical phenomena seeking the most efficient means relative to other technical operations. Now the question is of “finding the best means in an absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation” (21). In this sense, the notion of efficiency is basically synonymous with the machine, and it would seem that Ellul’s understanding of technique is totalizing and tautological: pure technique is characterized by absolute efficiency: the machine is pure technique: the machine is the model of absolute efficiency. But this seeming tautology begins to make sense when one considers that Ellul believes that technique always has an aspect of magic in it. Part of the goal of all technique is strictly unknowable, either because it is spiritual and thus cannot be measured in material terms or because it involves material phenomena over a long period of time. In a way, then, it makes sense that Ellul would posit a totalizing definition of technique, because the phenomenon itself aspires to the beyond.

Ellul offers an extended account of the historical development of technique, extending from ancient Greece to the modern Western world. He makes several gross generalizations that perhaps explain why his account of technology is often dismissed by cultural historians and theorists of technology. But, in the end, this historical account is unnecessary for his argument, or, rather, not necessary in this form. A more responsible and informed account could still be developed based on his (more important) concept of technique. Among the most blatant errors, Ellul claims that Christian society from the 10th through the 14th centuries was a-capitalist and a-technical (contrast Lynn White, Medieval Technologies).

An interesting consideration: Ellul believes that there is a necessary linking together of techniques: “Each new machine disturbs the equilibrium of production; the restoration of equilibrium entails the creation of one or more additional machines in other areas of operation.” In this sense, Ellul understands technological self-augmentation as a continual process of striving for equilibrium through the very means that disrupt equilibrium. Also interesting, in a move that prefigures Foucault’s chapter on “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Ellul makes the claim that technique is essentially “biopower” (though he doesn’t use this term), saying that technique holds control over life, orders it and makes it grow. And lastly, Ellul has an interesting section where he considers the totality of modern industrial life as developing on the model of the concentration camp (cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer).