The Question Concerning Technology

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977.

- “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (4).
- If we regard technology as neutral, we are blind to its essence.
- Two common statements regarding technology:

1. Technology is a means to an end.
2. Technology is a human activity.

- Technology is a contrivance or, in Latin, instrumentum.
- “Wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality” (6). Four causes:

1. causa materialis: matter out of which
2. causa formalis: shape into which
3. causa finalis: the end to which the material or form is put
4. causa efficiens: that which brings about the effect

- “What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality” (6).
- Causa, from Latin cadere (to fall), translates Greek aition, that to which something else is indebted (7).
- The four causes are responsible for that which lies ready before us. The four ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. Being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival (9).
- Poiesis: a bringing-forth. Physis: arising of something from out of itself. Physis is poiesis in its highest sense (10).
- The essence of technology has everything to do with revealing. “The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is a way of revealing. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. (12)
- Technikon: that which belongs to techne, skills and activities of craftsmen, arts of the mind, fine arts.
- Techne, according to Aristotle, opens up; it reveals that which does not bring itself forth. For Heidegger, “It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth” (13).
- “What is modern technology? It too is a revealing.” “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (14).
- Setting-upon as expediting: it unlocks and exposes; it drives toward maximum yield, minimum expense. For instance, coal is stock-piled; it is on call; challenged for heat; ordered to deliver steam to keep a factory running. (15)
- “The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth.” Ways of revealing: energy: unlocked, transformed, stored up, distributed, switched.
- On the standing-reserve in modern life: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” and “it designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing” (17).
- “Modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing” (19).
- Enframing: “We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing reserve: ‘Ge-stell’ [Enframing]” (19). Enframing is fundamentally a calling-forth, a gathering so as to reveal. Gestell is a common German word, meaning a kind of apparatus, e.g. a bookrack, also a skeleton. “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve” (20). The implication of Enframing is that man in the technological age is challenged forth into revealing (21). At another point Heidegger says that Enframing is “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (23).
- This definition of Enframing has an important implication for Heidegger: “The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable And it cannot be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious explanation that undergirds it” (21).
- The essence of modern technology is already in mathematical physics, which precedes it: “The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. For already in physics the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing holds sway” (22).
- Destining: sending-that-gathers which first starts man upon a way of revealing, “Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing” (25).
- “The destining of revealing is as such, in every one of its modes, and therefore necessarily, danger.” “The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such.” (26)
- Taking everything as standing-standing reserve, man comes to take himself also as standing-reserve. The consequence of this, and being in italics emphasizes its importance, is that “nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (27).
- “What is dangerous is not technology […] The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (28).
- “The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth” (33).
- In the end, Heidegger suggests that above all it is necessary to continue questioning technology: “For questioning is the piety of thought” (35).

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).