Modern society can be characterized by its convergence on universal principles and tools whether that be “human rights”, global soyslop, or the standardization of global business and governance. At the core of this convergence lays a unitary phenomenon; Technique. The work of Jacques Ellul on technique can be difficult to understand and define, it doesn’t help that most people who write about technique also seemingly don’t quite understand what it means either. David Menninger rightfully claims that "few social or political critics have been as misunderstood or underestimated as Jacques Ellul." This is quite unfortunate because technique as a unitary theory of sociology provides great explanatory power; its worth understanding what Ellul had to say. No single article can provide a comprehensive understanding of technique, to fully understand technique requires extensive reading of Jacque Ellul’s work, and then personal engagement with technique theory. However, I hope with this article you find a place to start.
Jacque Ellul introduces us to technique in his book The Technological Society and it remains a constant centrality to all of his work. Technique animates modern society; technique premises every thought, defines every question, and constrains every answer. Many readers understand technique as an abstract force, flowing around in the ether like monads. This is a mistake. Technique is an identifiable phenomenon. Although Ellul disdained empirical data, one could easily quantify technique through various observable proxies.
In the preface to the American edition of The Technological Society Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” Technique is not, as often misunderstood, the sum of existing technologies, but the social reality characterizing modern society. Mistakenly, many understand technique as technology or the machine. Technology and machines are products and compositions of technique but not what technique is. Just as much as technology is part of technique so are the processes that commission, design, create, maintain, and decommission the machine including the political and economic systems that makes these processes possible. Technique isn't mechanical but rather moral and psychological, it requires human responsibility.
Consciousness is a recurrent theme for Ellul; he states that "all-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world." Some misunderstand this as something akin to geist – the spirit of the the spirit of the technical world. But Menninger points out that there exists a technical intention dependent on direct human involvement. Ellul describes this intention as “a precise view of technical possibilities, the will to attain certain ends, application in all areas, and adherence of the whole of society to a conspicuous technical objective.”
Ellul intends technique to be understood as human consciousness; this consciousness directs the material aspects of technique. Technique is more appropriately understood as a societal nous.
Although human participation and adherence are necessary to technique, technique is ultimately autonomous; technique's own internal necessities are determinative. This ideology is common in our understanding of the modern world. Innovations are often presented as creations of necessity, and requirements of modernity. It would be ridiculous to blame anyone for creating such an environment, global technique wasn't imposed by any particular actor, instead, it was simply a necessity of technical "progress". Consider the invention of the nuclear bomb, bioweapons, or even things we assume as normatively good like medicine. While we may have normative opinions on these inventions we rarely ever consider the normativity of their creation.
Necessity, for Ellul, is the human condition in society. Because all aspects of human activity are determined by technical imperatives, it is outside of individual control “to alter the direction of social, political or even economic matters, much less to evaluate the criteria implied in the notions of progress”.
For Ellul the particulars of a political or economic system become irrelevant. The system, whatever it may be, is converted by technical elites into actions that direct the economy and governing systems towards maximal efficiency. The development of technique is self-sustained and autonomous, while a condition of the mind, the condition comes with pre-determined exogenous imperatives. Systems, complexes, and technologies largely determine future action. In some cases, this is to fix or assist previous techniques. For example, when the machine first came about, its integration into society did not happen by itself. In mostly-agricultural societies the factory was largely inefficient. To integrate the machine into 19th-century society the entire landscape had to be changed. Dense housing had to be built near the factories for workers to live in, government had to subsidize the great cost of the factory, and city infrastructure had to be changed to include public transport which treats men as parcels being transported to their wage cages.
The pursuit of these ends raises the problem of means. Ellul writes that “technique is nothing more than means and the ensemble of means.” Our civilization is a chiefly a civilization of means. Ellul argues that the operations of technique present common characteristics and tendencies. The technical operation includes every operation carried out with method to achieve an end. The method “may be more or less effective or more or less complex, but its nature is always the same. It is this which leads us to think that there is a continuity in technical operations and that only the great refinement resulting from scientific progress differentiates the modern technical operation from the primitive one.” What separates primitive means from modern technique is consciousness and judgment; “Essentially, it takes what was previously tentative, unconscious, and spontaneous and brings it into the realm of clear, voluntary, and reasoned concepts.”
“It is in the realm of economic technique that we experience most clearly the great and dramatic process of modern times, in which both chance and natural laws are transformed into decisions of accountants, rules of planning, and decrees of the state…Whether the question is one of understanding public opinion, or of stochastics, or of statistics as a whole, the technical starting point is always the human behavior of the majority. From this behavior, technique draws a number of consequences and modes of action, erecting on it the system into which it will necessarily insert itself. Moreover, it makes this behavior obligator.”
Ultimately man pays the cost of techniques because we’ve been sold an ideology of progress. In its action in the economy, technique gives rise to great hopes within man; hopes of putting riches into the hands of every man, not gold or silver, but conveniences and comforts. Comforts like staying warm in the winter, drinking chilled beverages in the summer, and accessing endless nourishment. This myth of paradise is why the average man plays along with the economy of technique despite knowing deep down that they’ve been duped.
Often I hear “but we’ve always built stuff. Technique isn’t new, it’s what humans have been doing forever.” This is true, Ellul acknowledges this. In fact, he even says that “technical activity is the most primitive activity of man.” However, the nature of technique has changed. In the past there existed limitations which made historical technique incomparable to modern technique; four limitations in particular.
First, in the past “technique was applied only in certain narrow, limited areas.” Even when activities could have been considered technical, the technical aspects were not uppermost. Technical activities were secondary to leisure, man tried to work as little as possible so technique was applied as little as possible. Technique was not considered nearly as important and functioned only in certain well-defined times. Second, in the past technique was not considered nearly as important as today. Previously man didn’t bind with technique, technical progress was an instrument and not a god. He didn’t expect much from technique. Ellul gives as an example the perception of comfort. Today man understands comfort as “bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing machines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and promote rest and physical euphoria.” In contrast, the man of the middle ages understood comfort as the feeling of a moral and aesthetic order. The goal wasn’t convenience but atmosphere, to project oneself onto space was what it meant to be comfortable. Third, Technique was once limited by geography; past technique was global while modern technique is universal. Social groups were strong and closed making the spread of technique slow, on the scale of millennia and centuries. Technique was an intrinsic part of society, each technique was linked to the society it was created in and developed as a function of the whole and shared its fate with that whole. Technique remained closed in its societal framework. Technique was unable to spread from one group to another except when societies were evolutionary equal and of the same type. “In the past, in other words, technique was not objective, but subjective in relation to its own culture.” Finally, the technique of the past was limited by time, Ellul writes that up until the eighteenth century “techniques evolved very slowly. Technical work was purely pragmatic, inquiry was empirical, and transmission slow and feeble.” Centuries were required for invention and popularization. These limitations no longer exist in modern society; technique develops daily, is spread globally, instantly, and has become the motivation for all activity. The lack of these limitations characterizes the technological society.
Why does technique matter? The consequence of limitless technique is that in the technological society Effective Choice no longer exists. “Effective choice exists when people are under no compulsion to favor one political solution over another because that solution happens to be more efficient, or more economical, or more administratively correct.” If a choice is made out of consideration of efficiency it is no longer a choice but an imperative. Decisions cease to be a process of struggle and become acquiescence to necessity. The necessary displaces effective choice "[the need for] efficiency renders our choices more limited and the penalties [of inefficiency] harder and more immediate."
NPCs can be NPCs because all decision-making has been predetermined for them through technical imperatives. Even those of us who aren’t NPCs are constantly restricted by exogenous technical imperatives. Even when an individual decides to check out of civilization by moving to a cabin in the woods he is never truly free of technique. He is subject to planes flying over them and the knocking of the tax collector. In the days of the Roman empire if one moved far enough from a major city he would be totally free of global technique. A tax collector would never show up at his door, he wouldn’t be hassled by police, his children were not forced into schools, a train track would not be built by his house. Technique would not consume his life.
Technique casts a wide net. Ellul took issue with definitions of similar concepts which were too restricted and narrow like Lewis Mumford’s analysis which focused too heavily on technology. “If one adopts Ellul’s worldview, it is almost more of a challenge to figure out what is not technique than what is.” This, however, is what makes Technique a unique and valuable understanding of modernity. Once understood its universality reveals the modern world for what it is: a predestined suicide cult of sober rationality.
Nice article. A few questions:
is anything today outside Technique? Maybe some general inefficiency for the sake of beauty? Or is that going to be also considered Technique? Could you ever conceive Technique as being a good thing in relation to other alternatives? Do you think God is a sustainer of things such as Technique?