The View from Nowhere: Technique and the Metaphysics of Inscription

Abstract#

There is a great deal of confusion as to the precise nature of Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique, the centrepiece of his The Technological Society; it has even been panned by some critics as an empty abstraction or pessimistic reification. This paper will seek to shed light on the nature of Technique by way of a study of the role of mediating inscriptions—text and images alike, legal codes, maps, engineering drawings, and so on—in constituting a technical universe. Here our line is influenced in particular by Bruno Latour, Gilbert Simondon, and Jack Goody. The aim will be to see whether there is an illuminating alignment between the place of inscription as an essential aspect of modern material culture and the nature of Ellul’s concept of Technique. This will proceed in two parts: first, a treatment of inscriptions; second, an examination of Technique in light of this treatment. Taken together, it will be argued that the material activity of, and mindset inculcated by, dealing with the world through inscriptions—that is, the metaphysics of inscription—provides a way of understanding many of the peculiar characteristics which Ellul describes Technique as having. This is because inscriptions create a world abstracted from immediate experience by way of a process of enfoldment. This translation is not a neutral process but rather entails an essential transformation—including, for instance, rendering the implicit explicit and flattening the three-dimensional. The result of this process is a manipulable virtual reality; and it is the ordering principles of this mode of representation, serving doubly as an instrument of perception and design, which this paper will argue elucidates the essence of Technique and justifies its unity.

For Rose, without whom this would never have been.

1. Introduction#

The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.¹ Uexküll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, p. 5.

Uexküll opens his A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men with the above, and here we may take it also as our opening: we share in many ways a common task, though after this meadow our paths will soon diverge. Until then, however, we may walk together a while. The topic with which Uexküll is concerned is the “soap bubble around each creature”—that is, the lived world of an animal’s experience, what he calls an Umwelt. Our concern is here much the same yet taken, as stated, in a somewhat different direction.

The topic presents itself here as a question of Umwelts, specifically the way in which for humans these have been extended by inscriptions—as in the case of a map or this paper itself. The use of these has proved to be essential for the development of human social organisation at a scale beyond the immediate, and we are particularly interested in how a study of inscriptions dovetails with the broader philosophy of technology outlined by Jacques Ellul under the banner of Technique. Our interest, in other words, is in how inscriptions establish the metaphysics or ordering principle within which Technique moves and which justifies the unity of this idea.

We may begin, nevertheless, with the Umwelt of any animal; it is constituted by the twin poles of perception and action: the world flows into the animal through receptors and, in turn, the animal as effector flows into the world. The Umwelt is immediately experienced; yet is constituted by the receptor and effector channels of individual embodiment. We see that to which our eyes are attuned, say, or the form of our hands entails the various possibilities of their functional potential. From this perspective, the world with which we are presented is a negative image of the embodiment with which we have been endowed—that is to say, for instance that we represent the world by taking the light on our retinas and projecting this back to constitute our experience of ‘immediate’ reality. Yet we may still say, for our purposes, that the world of presence is characterised foremost by immediacy.

Here the chief characteristic, of course, is that this is a situated perspective; it is determined by my position, not only spatially but in terms of my bodily endowments at species-level and individually—as my Umwelt will differ from, say, a deaf-blind individual; or if without my glasses, from someone with perfect vision. The immediate world is constituted twofold: first, by way of various receptor and effector channels according to my embodiment; second, by my position in spatiotemporal terms.

Uexküll gives as a particularly simple example the Umwelt of a tick, whose world entails a very simple schema consisting of three receptor–effector pairs:

The approaching prey is revealed to the blind and deaf highway woman by her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, that emanates from the skin glands of all mammals, acts on the tick as a signal to leave her watchtower and hurl herself downwards. If, in so doing, she lands on something warm—a fine sense of temperature betrays this to her—she has reached her prey, the warm-blooded creature. It only remains for her to find a hairless spot. There she burrows deep into the skin of her prey, and slowly pumps herself full of blood.² Uexküll, p. 7.

These are the receptor-triggers for each pair: “the chemical stimulus of the butyric acid, … the mechanical stimulus (released by the hairs), … [and] the temperature stimulus of the skin.”³ Uexküll, p. 11. Taken together as a totality, this simple set is nevertheless experienced as a unified Umwelt:

… all animals, from the simplest to the most complex, are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness. A simple world corresponds to a simple animal, a well-articulated world to a complex one.⁴ Uexküll, p. 11.

Our concern here is not, of course, the simple world of a tick but rather that complexity which constitutes the human Umwelt, and here we have in some sense an advantage by way of our first-hand experience; yet that this is so obvious also renders it obscure—for we cannot easily see beyond the bubble of sight. While a person blinded in later life may feel the absence of this sense, few are likely to have bemoaned their deficit as regards ultraviolet light. The Umwelt encompasses as a soap bubble; it is the immediate unity of embodied presence and the totality that this entails:

As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characters of the things around him, and weaves them into a firm web which carries his existence.⁵ Uexküll, p. 4.

The reference here to a spider’s web is particularly pertinent for our purposes, as the spider’s web is not only a home but also operates as a perceptual instrument. A spider senses with their web the vibrations of objects entangled by its sticky silk; it then reads these haptic stimuli to locate the source whereat they may apprehend their prey. Indeed, this phenomenon broadly speaking is not limited to spiders, as cat whiskers operate similarly; so also human beings can, for instance, use a stick to locate an object submerged in a dark pool.⁶ See Miller et al., p. 241: “Our results suggest that the human nervous system contains finely tuned mechanisms for decoding vibratory motifs, including sensorimotor internal models that can anticipate structural dynamics of rods. Object localization with a rod therefore represents an important human model of extending sensing, in which somatosensory processing is distributed across the mechanical response of the tool, the biomechanics of the extremities, and the neural circuits of the sensorimotor system.” Thus there are a variety of means whereby the embodied sensory apparatus can be extended.⁷ An essential point here, however, is that these entail a secondary mediation; it is no longer an immediate stimulus–receptor relation but rather the stimuli are mediated by way of some instrument—whiskers, webs, sticks, etc. Here we can consider via Mumford’s broad conception of technics:

With man’s persistent exploration of his own organic capabilities, nose, eyes, ears, tongue, lips, and sexual organs were given new roles to play. … Tool-technics, in fact, is but a fragment of biotechnics: man’s total equipment for life.⁸ Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, p. 308.

Our specific interest here are those instruments of perception which extend the Umwelt of an individual beyond the ordinary capacity of their embodied apparatus. The taming of glass, for instance, has played an essential role in the development of human instruments of perception; namely, the telescope and microscope:

By means of these two instruments man touched, one might say, the two infinities. With the aid of glass, he could contemplate at his leisure the mite and the ring of Saturn.⁹ Maistre, An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon, p. 46–47.

Spiders further provide an interesting example, moreover, in that their webs have been implicated not only as perceptual instruments but also instances of extended cognition:

To build each orb-web, spiders make thousands of measurements, keeping track of the distances travelled so as to make decisions throughout the process. … spiders can rely on previously laid threads as cues for new navigation decisions. Since web threads are reliably out there while the spider is building its trap, there is no need to memorise all the details of the emerging structure … because at each new step of the building process the spider can reset the memory used in the previous step.¹⁰ Japyassú & Laland, ‘Extended spider cognition,’ p. 384.

The idea is that such spiders, due to their relatively small size, are likely to offload aspects of their cognitive functioning to environmental constructions. This allows them to minimise the necessary brain size, thus reducing the costly energy requirements of neural tissues.¹¹ Japyassú & Laland, p. 377.

It has been suggested that humans also operate similarly, and this seems plausible. One response, however, might be that the human brain is hardly tiny—particularly not when compared to that of an orb-weaver. Yet we may look to the contemporary world and see that while the human brain may not be small relative to other creatures, it certainly is compared to the extent of construction we actively manage. Indeed, even earlier the complexity of the human lifeworld was such as to exceed the cognitive capacity of individuals. This has been understood as one cause of specialisation and the division of labour.

There are, however, other ways in which cognition can be distributed. One such is captured most plainly by Bernard Stiegler’s concept of tertiary retention:

When we listen to a melody, what is retained immediately is the primary retention; if tomorrow I recall the melody, this testifies to a secondary retention. What Stiegler calls tertiary retention, then, would be, for example, the musical score, the gramophone, or any other recording device that externalises the memory in a stable and enduring form outside of consciousness proper.¹² Hui, The question concerning technology in China, p. 215.

This is precisely like the externalisation of spiders’ webs, wherein “there is no need to memorise all the details of the emerging structure … [since] the spider can reset the memory used in the previous step.”¹³ Japyassú & Laland, 384. These are thus alike means whereby memory is externalised “in a stable and enduring form.”¹⁴ Hui, p. 215.

Stiegler’s emphasis as described here, however, is on retention—that is, use by the self-same creature that first generated the representation as materiality. If we take up at this point the topic of inscriptions, however, we can see how tertiary retention goes hand-in-hand with communication. The document or chart provides a form of retention accessible to anyone who has been initiated into the medium. Thus inscription facilitates recall, no doubt, but by way of the externalisation entailed it also allows for communication between individuals. Indeed, we might understand retention as intra-individual communication—in other words, within an individual but between two points in time.

Inscription can thus be considered from the perspective of two major aspects: enfoldment and displacement. Firstly, the inscription allows for a spatiotemporal enfoldment; an experience or memory is enfolded in the material form of an inscription, as when one sketches a scene. Secondly, and this is really another side of the same coin, this enfoldment allows an aspect of reality to be displaced; that is, it is stable and enduring—hence can be preserved and transported. While we may not be able to see the Colosseum, for instance, perhaps a traveller might bring with them a sketch from when they were there. This enfolds a time as much as a place, since the Colosseum may well since have been destroyed.

There is thus a sense that the inscription enfolds an aspect of actuality and, this being displaced, allows for an individual to ‘enter into’ the reality therein enfolded. This process of enfoldment can either be as a rendering enacted on the scene (from primary retention) or so as to make explicit what has been drawn from recollection (from secondary retention). Yet this is not so simple, it seems, as an externalisation; it entails also a translation and abstraction. The mode of communication is an obscure and yet undeniably important aspect of this process. There is always a transformation, even a distortion, in this act of enfoldment.

When we enter into the world as depicted by an inscription, it is not the world of immediacy which we encountered as Umwelt in the meadow at our outset. The inscription itself is immediate, but the relevant referent exists here only as mediated by the inscription. Yet we must note that in some sense the inscription itself does not exist; it constitutes itself in relation to a referent. This is not a relation of identity but one in which there is a process of identification, that is, where activity on the basis of an inscription constitutes the link between the form on paper and its referent. This distinction is particularly apparent in the case of plans, in which the construction of the referent is effected by way of the inscription itself; a design is realised in, for instance, the completion of a building.

And yet this active and constitutive relationship is at work whatever the inscription, hence the whole is not properly a question of mediation at all—or this must be tempered with an awareness that the process here involves something more than a passive medium for storage or exchange. We might instead say that, properly conceived, inscription is the process whereby the technical universe is constituted; that this is a virtual reality which is linked to the actuality from which it has been drawn only by the activity which proceeds upon its basis. This is apparent if we consider the issue concretely, that the form exists as two-dimensional lines on paper until enacted; it exists only as potential. We will in this paper consider the history and characteristics of this realm of paper—and through Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique, the world which has thereby been wrought.

1.1. Technique#

In the modern world, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it. How is this to be done? I do not yet know. That is why this book is an appeal to the individual’s sense of responsibility. The first step in the quest, the first act of freedom, is to become aware of the necessity. … by grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being.¹⁵ Ellul, The Technological Society, p. xxxiii.

I do not maintain that the individual is more determined today than he has been in the past; rather, that he is differently determined. Primitive man, hemmed in by prohibitions, taboos, and rites, was, of course, socially determined. But it is an illusion—unfortunately very widespread—to think that because we have broken through the prohibitions, taboos, and rites that bound primitive man, we have become free. We are conditioned by something new …¹⁶ Ellul, p. xxix.

This ‘something new’ can be seen as the centre of Jacques Ellul’s philosophy of technology; it is also the central focus of this paper, in particular, a book of Ellul’s which was first published in 1954. While the title of this particular text is rendered in English translation as The Technological Society, we will here instead use the French title: La Technique. This is to avoid at the outset any confusion that comes along with our conception of technology and, therefore, what a technological society might look like. What Ellul has in mind is something far exceeding the devices or machines which may come to mind when we think of technology. What Ellul means, rather, is captured by his concept of ‘Technique’—that is, the ‘something new’ referred to by Ellul in the excerpt at our outset—which we will capitalise, in line with Ellul’s later works, so as to reflect the particularity of this conception; that it cannot be assimilated to our ordinary notion of technique.¹⁷ Early on, however, Technique was not yet capitalised by Ellul; hence it will not be in the excerpts drawn from La Technique. Indeed, to address the complexity of this concept of Technique is the principal task of the present paper; hence our desire at the outset to clear away any unnecessary confusion—what remains will be a sufficient task already.

The eponymous concept in La Technique is, of course, Technique; it is this which we will here address and seek to shed some light on. Throughout the text, Ellul turns over the various aspects of ‘the technological society’ and examines how these are manifestations of this unifying concept: Technique. This tour entails three main sections: economic, political, and human—to which we may well add also the mechanical, that which Ellul speaks of as having heralded the ascendance of Technique more broadly: “The machine is now not even the most important aspect of technique (though it is perhaps the most spectacular); technique has taken over all of man’s activities, not just his productive activity.”¹⁸ Ellul, p. 4. Here we see a contrast with Marx, who was a major influence on Ellul, in that Technique takes into account broader forces than the means of production; it is concerned with the totality of means. Ellul was also cautiously sceptical about this direction, whereas Marx saw in it the promise of salvation.

What then is the relationship between Technique and the machine?

… the machine is deeply symptomatic: it represents the ideal toward which technique strives. The machine is solely, exclusively, technique; it is pure technique, one might say. For whenever a technical factor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanisation: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.¹⁹ Ellul, p. 4.

Of course, it is still not entirely clear what this means—though for many it may have the ring of truth to it; how can this be accounted for? This is the task Ellul sets himself, to outline the characteristics of Technique and demonstrate the unity of this technical phenomenon. The extent to which he achieves this in La Technique has been subject to considerable debate:

When discussing Ellul’s work it is tempting to gloss over Technique and argue about its finer points as though one is sure what it is. However, there is widespread if subtle disagreement amongst Ellul’s critics as to the exact definition of Technique. Most analysts simply repeat Ellul’s own statements that Technique is autonomous and self-expanding, without exploring his more poetic descriptions or discussing what, if it has these qualities of autonomy and self-expansion, Technique actually is.²⁰ DeMeulemeester, ‘Understanding Technique,’ p. 22.

The aim of the present paper, therefore, is to examine precisely this question: what is Technique and how can its characteristics be accounted for?

If we recall the areas into which Technique has protruded, those which Ellul details as beyond the mechanical, we may note that the very analogy with a machine is here unclear—what does it mean for a social organisation or human being to be “turned into a machine”? Some hint of an answer can be glimpsed by analogy of the technical mindset with that of a mechanical engineer, only here applied also in the realm of the social and the human:

This systematization, unification, and clarification was applied to everything—it resulted not only in the establishment of budgetary rules and in fiscal organization, but in the systematization of weights and measures and the planning of roads. All this represented technique at work. From this point of view, it might be said that technique is the translation into action of man’s concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it.²¹ Ellul, p. 43.

Of course, the mechanical is a peculiarly human order; it is an order constructed by reason—as against the unthinking organic order from which all else emerges. Yet everywhere the mechanical is for its origins dependent upon the organic, that it is the organic mind which enacts the mechanical so as to bring order to itself and the world.

While the most spectacular examples of Technique, Ellul admits, are the machines themselves, it is this mechanical ordering of the organic—of the social and human— which is at the centre of La Technique. It is this, after all, which constitutes the novelty and importance of what Ellul describes. We can compare, for instance, the narrative in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon to the emphasis in* La Technique* where Ellul’s interest exceeds obvious machinery. The protagonist in Butler’s novel comes upon a civilisation hidden away in the mountain ranges of New Zealand. They arrive in this place with a wristwatch, and upon encountering the people of Erewhon—as the place is called—are apprehended and imprisoned for the possession of a machine. We are later told that a book was published long ago within Erewhon which led them to destroy all of the machines. Their fear—that outlined in this ‘Book of Machines,’ as Butler calls it—was that there would be a reversal of the proper relations between humanity and its creations:

… I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?²² Butler, Erewhon, p. 196.

The cause for concern in Erewhon, in other words, was that the machines themselves may acquire a capacity whereby humanity would be displaced from its throne. This is superficially akin to the line in La Technique, but it would be a mistake to interpret Ellul as arguing as much. Our use of the French title, rather than The Technological Society, is meant to avoid such misconceptions. Ellul is no Luddite. He does not call for machines to be destroyed. Indeed, it is apparent that he thinks any such violence would be without cause. The matter has gone far beyond this point; it is the task set by La Technique to describe how this has happened and what it means.

And yet even those sympathetic to Ellul who might more carefully read La Technique will encounter difficulties in comprehending Technique. There remains even then the question of binds these disparate instances of Technique, which Ellul calls various mechanical, social, and human manifestations of this singular technical phenomenon. What can be accomplished towards this is only a prolegomenon prior to any future study of Technique. The line to be taken here intends only to make the argument that this is a direction which merits further study; that this is to be accomplished by a comparison which perhaps falls short of any exhaustive logical linkage—but again, that is not our purpose. Our approach will takes as its point of departure Bruno Latour’s notion of inscription as outlined most directly in his article ‘Visualisation and Cognition.’²³ Latour, ‘Visualisation and Cognition.’ We will further seek, following the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, to ground our understanding of Technique in terms of material activity; that we thus oppose the idealist readings of Ellul which have been rightly ridiculed.

What follows, however, intends only to make the following case: that a study of inscription, that of written language and visual representation, can illuminate the nature of Technique as described by Jacques Ellul in La Technique:

[Technique] resembles nothing other than itself. Whatever the domain to which it is applied, man or God, technique simply is; it undergoes no modifications in the movement which is its being and essence. It is the only locus where form and being are identical. It is only form, but everything conforms to it. Here technique assumes the particular characteristics which make it a thing apart. A precise and well-defined boundary surrounds it: there is that which is technique, and there is everything else, which is not. Whoever passes this boundary and enters into technique is constrained to adopt its characteristics. Technique modifies whatever it touches, but is itself untouchable. Nothing in nature, or in social or human life, is comparable with it. The intelligence of art or war comes nowhere near that of technique, no more than does the industry of art or bees. A hybrid but sterile being, and capable of self-generation, technique traces its own limits and fashions its own image.²⁴ Ellul, p. 94.

This will be done in two major chapters. The first entails a treatment of inscriptions drawing on several sources, with the central concept here being that of inscription—as drawn from the work of Bruno Latour. This will be supplemented by the work of Gilbert Simondon, Jack Goody, Jean Piaget, and more. This chapter will outline the mode of thought which is associated with a reliance on inscriptions. After this, the second chapter will deal with Technique; it will use the preceding treatment of inscriptions to illuminate the concept as it is outlined by Ellul in La Technique. The aim of this chapter is to establish that the metaphysics of inscription, so to speak, can be seen to correspond with the particular characteristics of Technique as described by Ellul. This will be done by taking Technique in hand and examining several facets in the light of the treatment of inscription—automatism, self-augmentation, monism, and so on. At this point, however, we will first provide a more detailed structural outline.

1.2. A structural outline of this paper#

The task thus indicated will be accomplished by considering in-depth the specific nature of the transformation entailed by inscriptions and, in particular, its role in the emergence of the modern world. We will take here as our focus—alongside inscription, a notion drawn from the work of Bruno Latour—Ellul’s concept of Technique. This will be supplemented by way of an extended analysis of what Simondon calls ‘encyclopaedism’ and which we will ultimately characterise as the allocentric mode. To this end, we will seek to demonstrate how the process of inscription has cultivated the ‘view from nowhere’ which serves as our title; and moreover, how this worldview can be seen to underlie the specific characteristics of Technique as described by Jacques Ellul.

The primary influence in this line is the French philosopher Bruno Latour; in particular, his treatment of inscriptions. This notion will first be detailed briefly in his terms, then expanded into a variety of related literature. For Latour, inscriptions are foremost characterised by their nature as immutable mobiles.²⁵ Latour, p. 7. The point being that some aspect of perception may be rendered as a stable representation that can be transported, transmitted—and perhaps most importantly, transformed. This can be seen, for instance, in the expeditions of explorers such as Lapérouse and James Cook. These expeditions entailed the generation of charts and the like which were then transported back to Europe and integrated into the knowledge networks there.

Some historical treatment will here be necessary, specifically concerning the circumstances which enabled inscriptions to take centre stage. This means, in particular, the popular uptake of the printing press in Europe from the fifteenth century. Here we will take up as emblematic of this trend the famous Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. We will examine this not only a physical level but as representing the symbolic form of inscription. This argument draws on the work of Gilbert Simondon, in particular his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Simondon in this work emphasises the historical importance of a new technical mindset which he associates with the advent of the Encyclopédie. Of course, we need not see this mindset as a direct result of the Encyclopédie but rather as a totemic form of an important historical undercurrent. The line, in short, is that the Encyclopédie represented an open invitation to initiation into the technical universe; it thus stands contrary to the particularistic initiations of prior stages—i.e., where once apprenticeship took place through immediate relationships and closed guilds, now initiates may buy a book sold widely.

At this point, we will branch out from Simondon’s argument to consider broadly the various theoretical and experimental perspectives in this area: Michael Oakeshott, Jean Piaget, Jack Goody, etc. The type of knowledge emphasised by Simondon as associated with the Encyclopédie, for instance, can be seen as analogous to the ‘technical knowledge’ of Oakeshott—which he contrasts with ‘practical knowledge.’²⁶ Oakeshott, Rationalism in politics and other essays, p. 12. The former is that which can be rendered explicitly, whereas the latter is apparent only in practice. This can similarly be seen in the work of Piaget, wherein it is found that children are capable of learning the rules of a game before they can explicitly formulate these rules. Yet we must be careful to note that written language must be understood as differing in fundamental ways to oral language. Here we will draw on the anthropological research of Goody and others. The specific nature of inscriptions as a type of knowledge, both in terms of word and image, will thus be considered from a variety of perspectives.

This chapter builds towards a description of the ‘allocentric mode’ as reflecting the structuring principle of this world constituted by inscription; it is this which is characterised by the view from nowhere which we have taken from Nagel as our title.²⁷ Nagel, The View from Nowhere. The allocentric mode can be understood in contrast to the egocentric, that it is a ‘view from nowhere’ insofar as the percipient is not situated in relation to the object of their concern; instead the concern is with entirely internal relations. This is a mode of abstraction which seems to partly depend upon and be radically extended by the use of inscriptions. We will conclude this chapter by drawing together the lines thus far— encyclopaedism, practical and technical knowledge, and so on—in the form of a concrete example from Nikolas Rose’s Governing the Soul: that of the intelligence test and its role in the governance of subjectivity. This case will demonstrate how the individual is rendered as an inscription and thereby acted upon according to this representation.

Following this we will turn to Ellul’s concept of Technique, here we will extend this analysis of inscriptions to consider also the technical imagination which proceeds on this basis; it is not only inscription as an instrument of perception but also of design. The treatment which precedes this, however, has established the metaphysics of inscription—that is, the principles which structure the realm of inscriptions: for instance, the allocentric mode as a view from nowhere. These apply to the entirety of the technical universe thus constituted, whether as perception or design. The basis for the technical imagination remains the virtual reality which has been enfolded as inscription; it is this which provides the ground upon which the plan builds.

The first topic to be addressed here is the distinction Ellul draws between traditional technics and modern Technique. This will be understood in terms of a process of multiplicity and collapse, in which process inscription is an essential for assembling said multiplicity—whether by rendering legible the option that were previously implicit or generating new ones by way of design; it is this which is then subjected to the calculative mindset so as to determine the “one best way” which Ellul describes as characterising Technique. Following this section, four of the major aspects Ellul outlines in his chapter on the ‘characterology’ of Technique will be dealt with in turn: automatism, self-augmentation, monism, and universalism. The final section of this chapter will consider more explicitly the relationship between the metaphysics of inscription and the nature of Technique.

To begin, however, we must first turn to our initial treatment of inscription.

2. Inscription#

The much-vaunted ‘virtual reality’ is not so much a navigation through the cyberspace of the networks. It is, first and foremost, the amplification of the optical density of the appearances of the real world.²⁸ Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 14.

Five o’clock was not the end of the working day but only of its less important daytime part. Now everyone would go home and have dinner and a nap, but at ten the lights would burn again in the thousand upon thousand windows of the sixty-five Moscow ministries. Sitting up behind his fortress walls, one man suffered from insomnia—and he had trained the whole of Moscow’s officialdom to watch with him into the early hours. Knowing the habits of their sovereign, all three-score ministers sat like schoolboys, waiting for his summons. To keep themselves awake they summoned their deputies, the deputies harried their section heads, research assistants climbed step-ladders and looked up card indexes, clerks dashed up and down corridors and typists broke pencils.²⁹ Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, p. 1.

Here, in his The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn portrays Stalin as a spider at the centre of a vast web of agents and information. We might well take up this comparison explicitly by considering how spiders use their own webs, as do Stalin and his ilk, to extend their own cognition. The spider’s web provides a constructed mode of haptic representation, thus the spider may perceive through their web the presence of prey. Stalin uses his networks similarly, albeit for a far more varied set of operations. The further difference is that where the spider’s web provides a haptic representation, Stalin’s archives are visual and verbal. Yet in either case, the point is that these networks provide for the representation of information external, and indeed exceeding, any individual Umwelt.

For Stalin and his ministers, this information provides the material necessary for the more complex calculations of state. One cannot directly compare the efficiency of two policies, for instance, but must instead rely on representations in order to make this calculation. These may be hypothetical, based on argument and backed by intersecting lines of evidence, or they may be empirical, as where tests have been carried out; yet either requires that this information is encoded so that its representation may be rendered manipulable by the relevant decision-maker. They must be able to immediately compare the two, thus must be somehow mediated according to a standard measure; it is not in immediacy to the car engines themselves, for instance, that one must look for their efficiency—rather we must rely upon an inscription (e.g., a table or chart) which represents the relative efficiency of these two.

This mode of representation is basic to the functioning of complex decision-making in modernity, as increasingly action is now taken at a scale either beyond or below the possibilities of immediate experience. We can see, for instance, how a microscope mediates our perception so as to provide sight beyond sight. Something similar is also involved in mapping and statistics. These represent some topic of interest by way of mediating inscriptions; and it is more and more the case that it is on the basis of these that decisions are made. McKinsey and Company, for instance, are a consulting service famed for this process. Such consultants will often decide the employment of people who they have never met, all based on a primarily quantitative analysis in which the concrete topic is mediated by various representations—written reports, spreadsheets, etc.

We will in this chapter analyse this mode of representation by way of mediating inscriptions. The line here will take us through a brief outline of Technique read in light of a history of scientific management, then to the work of Gilbert Simondon wherein we find the notion of the encyclopaedia—in particular, that of Diderot and d’Alambert—as a form symbolic of this mode of representation. From this point we will engage in an extended analysis of the particular features of inscription. The particular line to be taken here is that the material culture and activity associated with inscription corresponds to a particular understanding, that of the allocentric mode; it is a ‘view from nowhere.’ This is a form of abstraction which seems to be scaffolded upon the activity of inscription, that is involved in the translation between egocentric and allocentric—as well as the reverse, when one appropriates the representation which has been abstracted as inscription. Here we will consider inscriptions as the total ensemble of two-dimensional representations, whether as word or image; yet more than the specific form it is the process of translation which constitutes this as a virtual reality.

Before continuing, therefore, we will note the features of visual inscriptions as outlined by Latour.³⁰ Latour, p, 18. First, they are mobile. An island or continent cannot be carried home, but a map of the same can. Second, they are immutable. Where memory is subject to distortion and decay, an inscription remains immutable to the extent it is preserved; any accidental disturbances tend to be quite obvious. Third, they are flat. They thus present a synoptic perspective, one which can be dominated by the eyes at a glance. Fourth, their scale is modifiable at will. An accurate representation of an insect and a city can be presented side-by-side as same-sized inscription simply by varying the scale, all while maintaining the internal relations of the original. Fifth, they are—at least since the advent of the printing press—readily reproducible. This allows for representations from various points in time and space to be disseminated and centralised from the periphery to several centres. Sixth, they can be recombined. The features thus far mean that a vast variety of sources can be arranged so as to form connections between disparate areas. Seventh, they can be superimposed. This is a subcategory of recombination, that “it is possible to superimpose several images of totally different origins and scales.”³¹ Latour, p. 19. Eighth, they can be inset into text. This draws the visual references of a written text into alignment with the text itself, thus the whole can be found within the same piece of paper. Ninth, they can be merged with geometry:

The result is that we can work on paper with rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-dimensional objects “out there” (Ivins, 1973). Better still, because of this optical consistency, everything, no matter where it comes from, can be converted into diagrams and numbers, and combination of numbers and tables can be used which are still easier to handle than words or silhouettes (Dagognet, 1973). You cannot measure the sun, but you can measure a photograph of the sun with a ruler. Then the number of centimeters read can easily migrate through different scales, and provide solar masses for completely different objects.³² Latour, p. 20.

As a final note, before we begin: we are not claiming that anyone involved here would consciously take these inscriptions as actually being their referents or even as equivalents; it is instead our claim that they act as if they were. There is a suspension of disbelief that allows one to operate within the realm of this virtual reality. Here we may take William James’ definition of belief, namely, as the willingness to act as if; it is thus a definition which is foremost concerned with activity insofar as this realises a belief. Activity on the basis of a belief, in other words, to some extent gives effect to or instantiates the reality of that which it relies upon. The chapter deals further with the specific ways in which this occurs, but the basic principle is that the inscriptions provide an operating medium for the networks of power which enable action at a distance; and thus, whereby inscriptions are realised. While those involved in these networks may avow that they know, for instance, a dossier is not identical to the individual it picks out; nevertheless, we find they act upon the individual on the basis of this dossier and thus, from their perspective, the individual is in practice nothing more or less than the dossier. Indeed, the individual might as well not exist. They will more than likely never see any of those whose lives their decisions effect.

2.1. Technique and scientific management#

We will here begin with a brief account of Technique, after which we will explore in-depth a characteristic form associated with it: scientific management—particularly as exemplified by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose name has come to stand for the whole of efficiency engineering which has come to be known as ‘Taylorism.’ First, however, we must briefly address Ellul on his own terms. We will start with the note to the reader that Ellul placed at the outset of La Technique. Here he 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.”³³ Ellul, p. xxv. Of course, this definition is overly broad; yet it is one which we find fills out over the course of reading the text which follows. The notion of ‘absolute efficiency,’ for instance, would require an excess of effort to understand; as would the way in which this is relativised to a stage of development. We can hardly expect so broad and abstract a definition to stand alone.

There are some further preliminary aspects of Technique which we might here deal with, firstly that Ellul differentiates between technique as “technological operation” and Technique as “the technological phenomenon.” While the former has precedent in more primitive activities, the latter he holds to be entirely new; it is something which has protruded into human history in full force only within the last several hundred years. This immediately places a burden upon the definition, for we now have two things which Ellul must account for to make his argument. First, what justifies the unity of Technique as a monistic “technological phenomenon”; and secondly, how can this be distinguished from the “technological operations” which long existed prior.

We will here seek to address these two aspects by defining Technique in terms of its reliance on mediating inscriptions; it will be argued that this essential mode of representation provides an account of the unity of Technique and its particularity. To this end, we will here outline the history of scientific management as providing an especially representative example of Technique. Indeed, Ellul describes Taylor—a “leading technician”—as having “perfectly expressed” an aspect of the defining characteristics of Technique:

[Taylor] takes, as his point of departure, the view that the industrial plant is a whole in itself, a “closed organism,” an end in itself. Giedion adds: “What is fabricated in this plant and what is the goal of its labor—these are questions outside its design.” The complete separation of the goal from the mechanism, the limitation of the problem to the means, and the refusal to interfere in any way with efficiency; all this is clearly expressed by Taylor and lies at the basis of technical autonomy.³⁴ Ellul, p. 133.

We may thus justifiably take Taylor and scientific management as representative of the phenomenon of Technique.

Taylor, moreover, began his career as a mechanical engineer; yet his Principles of Scientific Management were concerned rather with social organisation. The involvement of mechanical engineers carried with it a framework drawn from their prior work. Taylor, for instance, had initially made his name with advances in the cutting efficiency of saw blades; it is this same basic understanding which mechanical engineers translated to organisational problems, thereby conceiving of the social as amenable to engineering.

The key concept here is the system. Engineers opposed the system to chaos; it was a notion synonymous with rationality, measurement, control, etc. From our perspective, of course, it is difficult to imagine a world in which systematisation was less common than ours. The point is that we must ask what constitutes the system— apart from the political career of it as an idea, what is it?

Legitimate invention should be always preceded by a complete study of the field to see what other people have already done. Then some one or more defects should be clearly recognised and analysed, and then it is entirely legitimate for the engineer to use his ingenuity and his inventive faculty in remedying these defects, and in adding his remedy to the existing elements of the machine or the process which have already been found to work well.³⁵ Taylor in Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of scientific management, p. 195.

Thus advised Taylor to young engineers, and in it we may glimpse what constitutes a system for the mechanical engineer. Their first task is a “complete study of the field”—that is, of the machines or processes in prior existence. When it comes to industrial organisation, this means the processes as they exist as well as any known methods. This renders the process legible as system; it entails a method of inscription similar to that of engineering drawing, as the ensemble must be analysed according to its elements.

To take a concrete example, Taylor was renowned for a steam-hammer which he designed early in his career as a mechanical engineer. First, he began by studying existing technical objects in this class, which had thus far been plagued by a tendency to batter themselves to pieces. Taylor took these dead machines and inspected the point of failure:

He spent one or two years in collecting, from all over the world, data about the various machines that had been designed, until he found instances in which some one of the parts of each of the various machines of different designs had never broken. He then copied the design of each of the parts which had not broken, collecting one element from one machine, another from another, another from a third, etc.³⁶ Taylor in Copley, p. 197-198.

There was one element, however, which had failed in every case; it was to this that Taylor directed his ‘legitimate invention.’ Further study led him to design a novel principle by which this, too, could be prevented from failing. In this way he created the first durable steam-hammer, and this method remained essential to his subsequent conception of organisational engineering.

Copley points out the link between mechanical and organisational by noting the principal concern that, for Taylor, united the two: “he was a true engineer in that he was a true economist, with all the economist’s hatred of waste and his instinct for conservation.”³⁷ Copley, p. 205. This was combined, moreover, with a fundamental difference between Taylor and the typical stance of mechanical engineers at the time:

… to this day many engineers consider their work done when they have designed and built and demonstrated the possibilities of a piece of apparatus. They seem to feel that the efficient operation of it is not in their province. Mr. Taylor felt otherwise. To him, perfection in design was worthless without efficiency in operation, and at an early date he turned his attention to the efficient utilisation of human effort.³⁸ Gantt in Copley, p. 201.

It was this analogy between mechanical and human efficiency, as well as the method of inquiry, which constituted the keystone of scientific management according to Taylor. The notion was that one breaks down the ensemble into elements, collects data on each, then sees where improvements might be made; where improvement is required, then invention may legitimately supply the means. A crucial point here is that organisations are analysed in analogous terms to mechanical problems. While whoever conducts the study is surely aware that they are studying people rather than elements of a machine, they nevertheless act as if people were nothing but elements of a machine.

Taylor’s practice of scientific management began in earnest during his time as foreman of a machine-shop at Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia. Here he conceived of his aim in simple terms, as “removing metal from forgings and castings in the quickest time.”³⁹ Taylor in Copley, p. 205. He proceeded by breaking down the entire process into its constituent parts: only by rendering this process legible could he come to understand the ensemble which he sought to engineer. Taylor’s method, in other words, involves reverse-engineering a design—i.e., a system—by rendering legible the various implicit elements of the process.

Thus Taylor began by separating the environmental and the operational components: “the one having to do with the mechanics of the shop’s equipment, and the other with the workers’ operation of that equipment.”⁴⁰ Copley, p. 206. While the former is perhaps the obvious place for a mechanical engineer to begin his inquiry, the latter constitutes the governor for the whole: that is, Taylor believed that “all other industrial problems are swallowed up in the problem of human relations.” What worth, in other words, was a mechanical improvement if workers would only ever realise a small portion of this potential increase. This meant that the primary focus of Taylorism treated the worker as an object of psychological inquiry; it was not only the physical and biomechanical laws which were to be studied: as important—if not more—were the psychological laws of motivation and interest. Simondon describes the perfection of a technical object as increasing to the extent that tensions are integrated smoothly into its design.⁴¹ Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects, p. 29. Taylor took precisely the same line, for he conceived of the human relations aspect of this problem as one of enlisting workers’ interests in line with productivity and economy.

Taylor therefore introduced the piece-rate system, which individualised each worker’s payment in accordance with their productivity; it was thus possible to enlist workers in increasing economy. A labourer was thus rewarded for the exercise of their own ingenuity in optimising their activity. This system, however, has a crucial flaw in that there was no clear standard for what a day’s work ought to entail:

… it came down to the common-sense proposition that the one best way to get what you want—the way that most successfully avoids misunderstanding and quarrelling— lies through knowing what you want and specifying it.⁴² Copley, p. 217.

This gave rise to the specifically scientific aspect of Taylor’s management technique:

the course that he himself came to describe as that of “gathering in on the part of those on the management’s side of all the great mass of traditional knowledge which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen and in the physical skill and knack of the workman,” and of “recording it, tabulating it, and, in many cases, finally reducing it to laws, rules, and even to mathematical formulae.”⁴³ Copley, p. 217.

The first task of scientific management was thus, as it had been for his mechanical engineering, that of perception. The data thereby produced was then gathered at a central point where it is compiled, calculated, and so on—ultimately giving rise to an articulable form. This was the essence of system.

We may note, however, that this process was not an exercise of plain memory and imagination; it entailed the specific use of instruments of perception—stopwatches, statistics, etc. This meant management abstracted inscriptions from the ensemble as process and then rendered it as elements of a legible system; it was, in other words, bringing forth form where, at least from the perspective of management, there had previously been an undifferentiated and chaotic bundle of activity. Taylor’s task was twofold: firstly, determining the optimal capacity of the process at hand; secondly, the prescription of specific tasks and proper standards.

Central to this effort were time studies, which involves first an analytic and then a synthetic step. Indeed, what’s involved is really much the same as in the two examples which we have considered: the task was analysed into elementary movements, with unnecessary parts discarded; after which the execution of these elements is variously studied across scenarios by way of stopwatch and statistical record. This data then provides the basic material for the comparison of elements and the selection of a set of motions optimal to the execution of a given task; it provides further for the calculation of the proper time for this new composite task, and also in determining allowances for inexperience, fatigue, etc. As a result of this method, moreover, it is likely that mechanical and environmental aspects will emerge as undue constraints. This may lead to higher-order standardisation in terms of tools and conditions so as to ensure optimality in this aspect also.

Here we may note that the process that is thereby broken into parts is not that of a machine or mechanical system; it is rather the process of embodied activity which constitutes the subject of analysis. The stopwatch is used, in other words, to divide continuous motion into components which are then seen as if in exploded perspective, as each existing unto itself as a separate piece from the remainder with which it was initially intertwined. The individual, therefore, is divided precisely as with the steam-hammer; it is then reconstituted as a composite prescription:

Imagine a young cadet of industry, a student just out of the technical school, with a stop watch and a huge diagram before him, stationed by Taylor opposite a workman to note minute by minute, aye, almost second by second, each and every movement. Now he takes up a tool; click goes the stop watch, and down on the prepared diagram goes the number of seconds that are required for the movement; and so on, day after day, month after month, until stacks of these diagrams of the time required for the workman to do the simplest act were collected.⁴⁴ Stork in Copley, p. 232-233.

The activity of measurement was further standardised by way of structured forms and diagrams which provide a skeleton for the tabulation of various elements in an ensemble. These formats structure the representation—notably the majority of the form concerns numerical measurements of sub-tasks, with only a small section allocated for more qualitative remarks. The advantage is that this quantitative focus allows a mathematical analysis by which otherwise excessive reams of data can be rendered manageable at a centre of calculation; as for instance the assembly of composite times by reference to element-level data. There is in this model the essence of Technique; it is the application of the machine, its mode of existence, to the technical ensemble—including alike within its ambit objects, individuals, and the operational environment.

Thus far we have considered only one specific case, albeit one which demonstrates the essential characteristics of this method. But we must here make clear that Taylorism and scientific management—while providing a central symbol of this watershed, at which the technical phenomenon emerges in its own right, as well as playing a major role in the dissemination of this mindset—cannot be seen as the origin of Technique more broadly. Rather we must look here for the ‘figure in the carpet,’ to borrow a metaphor from Henry James’ book of the same name:

It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.⁴⁵ James, The Figure in the Carpet, p. 20.

Indeed, here this excerpt is particularly apposite. These words are spoken in James’ short story by an author named Vereker, who is describing the single point which unifies his writing and at which it is all aimed at expressing. Turning to the case of Technique, we find throughout the narrative thus far a point which aligns well with the language of this quote: inscriptions are Technique’s ‘figure in the carpet.’

The time study is itself a technical ensemble which includes the study as process and then, nested within this, the task as studied. The time study comprises the subject of its inquiry as well as various instruments of perception. These are integrated by the individual conducting the study by way of a stopwatch, but it is the standardised document used in time studies as inscription which is the essential aspect of this process. The stopwatch is a critical component, no doubt, but it exhausts itself in measuring and is translated to the standardised document as an inscription. This same manoeuvre was present in the calculations and comparisons which Taylor conducted for his steam-hammer, as there it further included the obvious schematic design; as is present also here in the diagrammatic composite of elementary motions by which the task standard is represented as a prescription. The same process of analysis and construction occurs in each case; and these are alike mediated by way of numerical and diagrammatic inscriptions. Each further involves also a point at which these are compiled, calculated, and compared. This form, then—that of inscription—seems a candidate for the ‘figure in the carpet’ which characterises the unity of Technique:

Under scientific management … the managers assume … the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae …. Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of science.⁴⁶ Scott, Seeing like a State, p. 336.

2.2. The encyclopaedia as symbolic form#

Having thus identified inscription as the theme of our inquiry into the unity of Technique, we may take a step back to consider the material history of this phenomenon. While the lines here stretch far over the horizon, there are more recent and better known moments which seem to constitute a watershed. One such essential point, that which Simondon emphasises, is the Encyclopédie. There are many things which are obscure precisely because they are so obvious. The idea of an encyclopaedia is one such notion, with which we are perhaps so familiar as to easily miss its peculiarity. Here we will argue that the encyclopaedia represents the symbolic form of a technical universe, that is, of a cosmos as constituted by inscriptions. Our argument in this section relies particularly on the work of Gilbert Simondon in part two of his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. The argument, in short, is that the encyclopaedia was emblematic of a “new visual culture [which] redefines both what it is to see, and what there is to see.”⁴⁷ Latour, p. 9. Of course, today the encyclopaedia as a concept is commonplace, even outmoded—yet we have noted that by being so obvious its true meaning is as much obscured; only a historical and ontogenetic account can shed light upon such a phenomenon.

Perhaps the first such explicit form of such a thing as an encylopaedia was Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, published in 1728. More famous, however, was that which started out as a French translation of Chambers’ text: namely, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopaedia, or a Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts). This is the plain source of our word, of which the root refers back to an ‘all-round education.’ But more, we might note that this is a dictionnaire raisonné; here is our first clue to its particular distinction:

It did not merely provide information about everything from A to Z; it recorded knowledge according to philosophical principles expounded by d’Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse. Although he formally acknowledged the authority of the church, d’Alembert made it clear that knowledge came from the senses and not from Rome or Revelation. The great ordering agent was reason, which combined sense data, working with the sister faculties of memory and imagination. Thus everything man knew derived from the world around him and the operations of his own mind. The Encyclopédie made the point graphically, with an engraving of a tree of knowledge showing how all the arts and sciences grew out of the three mental faculties. Philosophy formed the trunk of the tree, while theology occupied a remote branch, next to black magic. Diderot and d’Alembert had dethroned the ancient queen of the sciences. They had rearranged the cognitive universe and reoriented man within it, while elbowing God outside.⁴⁸ Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 209.

Yet the underlying epistemology here is somewhat more complex than the simple empiricist formulation of Bacon and the encyclopaedists who followed his way; their abstract philosophy differs from the actuality as social enterprise: empiricism was individual whereas science was a collective effort. Empiricism was what underpinned faith in knowledge, as by the somewhat nebulous doctrine of scientific method; yet this new form of knowledge was not so much individual sensory knowledge as that inscribed and compiled by the human collective—as represented by the Encyclopédie, compiled of the work of countless contributors.

An encyclopaedia, moreover, entails the collation of technical knowledge which emerges from collective mental labour. The eye may provides the initial source and theoretical justification, but in reality the form for most is socially-determined based on rationality and authority. This results not from any intent to deceive but by virtue of the division of labour which enables technical progress in the first place. The Encyclopédie as a physical object, a book or set of volumes, represents a form in which man’s knowledge (fragmented by time and the division of labour) can finally be seen to coalesce. This is, moreover, referred to as an ‘all-round education’—in which sense the object can be seen as something worn or even inhabited; it has the characteristic of being somehow encompassing. We can thus see the Encyclopédie from two perspectives: internally, it stands as an image of the whole; externally, this entering-into can be seen to contain the individual—that is, the individual takes this as a virtual environment.

How can we attribute such power to a mere book? Somehow this all sounds too much like magic, perhaps madness; yet the world has known of such a book before, and in this can be seen a prototype for such a relation. This is seen in the model of revelatory scripture; as the Bible or Quran. Here the written word is invested with something above mere human language; it is taken as divine revelation—it is the Word—in which we encounter the truth not of mere men but an architect in relation to his own creation. The Bible, for instance, is not taken to be true in a merely incidental sense, does not speak as mere spectator or inhabitant; rather it is taken as entailing Truth itself. This link between encyclopaedism and the Word is strengthened by historical details—for instance, Simondon notes that:

The first manifestation of encyclopedic spirit is what constitutes the Renaissance and is contemporary with the ethical and religious revolution of the Reformation.⁴⁹ Simondon, p. 113.

To take a brief detour, we may note that the printing press was inseparably intertwined with the Reformation, in which it can even be seen to play a determinative role. Where prior movements had failed, because of the printing press the Church was now incapable of preventing the spread of information. Print gave rise to a playing-field entirely unlike that which had thus far been dominated by the Catholic church; ultimately it was the Church’s response—the Counter-Reformation Congregatio de Propaganda Fide—which gave rise to the modern word propaganda; although in all fairness, the proponents of Reformation were the first to wield this particular weapon.

The success of the Reformation went hand-in-hand with an emphasis on individual access to and acquisition of truth above that mediated by the Church; yet this was not the truth of any isolated mystic, rather it is that the scripture itself was seen as containing truth rather than this being held exclusively by an institution. This follows not only from the pattern of Reformation doctrine but also the specific interrelation of this with increasing literacy and the mechanical reproduction of written text; it was a theological and technological opening to individual study and autodidactic interpretation, as well as various discursive practices among the lay community. Encyclopaedism thus can be seen to parallel this broad revaluation and, with the Enlightenment, takes on new meaning by way of its unifying symbolic form:

The technical world discovers its independence when it realises its unity; the Encyclopedia is a kind of Fete de la Federation of technics discovering their solidarity for the first time.⁵⁰ Simondon, p. 111.

While initial printings of the Encyclopédie were prohibitively expensive, during which period it spread only among the elite, later editions brought the price within reach of most. The Encyclopédie’s dissemination was driven by steady demand. The market was such that those involved in its publishing were at each other’s throats to maximise their profits. If Diderot and d’Alembert were driven by a moral imperative, the same cannot be said for the publishers; their imperatives were purely economic with greed driving them to all manner of immoralities.⁵¹ Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment. That the Encyclopédie was a profitable endeavour is described by Darnton in The Business of Enlightenment. Indeed, that it was so profitable suggests that the culture was somehow already primed for the Encyclopédie, that it met a calling already present yet hitherto latent; it is thus best seen not as an initiator but rather an event totemic of some obscure undercurrent.

We can thus see in the Encyclopédie a symbol of this historical movement, one which reflected a fundamental inversion taking place below the surface of events: a tree is pulped, turned to paper—on it is then printed the tree of human knowledge; it is thus to this that we turn, rather than the tree itself, in search of arboreal knowledge. This conceit is rendered metaphorically as a cartographic enterprise; it thus constitutes the unity of the technical universe,

a kind of world map which is to show the principal countries, their position and their mutual dependence, the roads that lead directly from one to the other. This road is often cut by a thousand obstacles, which are known in each country only to the inhabitants or to travellers, and which cannot be represented except in individual, highly detailed maps. These individual maps will be the different articles of the Encyclopédie and the Tree or Systematic Chart will be its world map.⁵² D’Alembert in Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 195.

This was thus a map of the world suitable for the introspective travels of an autodidact; it at once expresses the unity of human knowledge and, moreover, constitutes a symbolic form around which the technical universe could coalesce—as Benedict has Anderson held for rituals of the daily newspaper, so the Encyclopédie at once symbolised and constituted an imagined community of its own.⁵³ Anderson, Imagined Communities.

The Encyclopédie represents, therefore, a new* imago mundi*; at the centre of this technical universe we find a book—moreover, one produced by and for men. Simondon argues specifically for the Encyclopédie as exemplifying the form of knowledge appropriate to the technological ‘adulthood’ of humanity:

… it is rational and doubly universal; this is why it is adult. It is rational because it employs measurement, calculation, procedures of geometric figuration and descriptive analysis; it is also rational because it calls upon objective explanations, and invokes experimental results, with the aim of a precise presentation of conditions, treating as a hypothesis whatever is conjectural and as established fact whatever one must consider as such; not only is scientific explanation required, but it is required with a clear taste for the scientific spirit.⁵⁴ Simondon, p. 110.

2.3. Initiation and the technical universe#

Simondon, we have noted, declares the Encyclopédie to be emblematic of the ‘adulthood’ of humanity; that this represents a further stage—and moreover, one seen as superior to that prior. This line maps onto another distinction, that of Oakeshott, between practical and technical knowledge. According to him, technical knowledge is that which can be explicitly formulated; whereas practical knowledge is precisely that which is not amenable to this treatment.⁵⁵ Oakeshott, p. 12. This is very close to the contrast in Simondon, who thus describes what we have here called practical knowledge as

… a very remarkable aptitude that can only manifest itself in work and not in consciousness or discourse; the craftsman will be like a magician, and his knowledge will be operational rather than intellectual; it will be an ability rather than a knowing; by its very nature, it will be a secret for others, because it will be a secret for himself, for his own consciousness.⁵⁶ Simondon, p. 106.

Simondon contrasts this practical knowledge with the technical knowledge that he associates with encyclopaedism, which is “rational and doubly universal” and thus suited to adulthood.⁵⁷ Simondon, p. 110.

A similar development to the historical observation of Simondon can be noted on the ontogenetic plane in the psychological studies of Jean Piaget. We find, for instance, that the ability to play a game according to its rules markedly precedes the capacity to formulate these rules explicitly:

… while a certain agreement may be reached in the course of one game, ideas about the rules in general are still rather vague. In other words, children of 7-8, who belong to the same class at school and are therefore constantly playing with each other, give, when they are questioned separately, disparate and often entirely contradictory accounts of the rules observed in playing marbles.⁵⁸ Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, p. 17.

This stage thus corresponds to that of practical knowledge, and it is indeed found to be an earlier stage of development—seemingly, therefore, in support of Simondon’s argument. Following this there is a stage, which Piaget refers to as ‘the codification of rules,’ that corresponds to that of technical knowledge:

Not only is every detail of procedure in the game fixed, but the actual code of rules to be observed is known to the whole society. There is remarkable concordance in the information given by children of 10-12 belonging to the same class at school, when they are questioned on the rules of the game and their possible variations.⁵⁹ Piaget, p. 17.

Of course, Piaget’s treatment is more circumscribed than that of Simondon; and yet we may fairly see this as an analogous process supporting the thesis that the explicit formulation of knowledge is subsequent to its existence in practice.

We may here consider in more detail the relation between these two forms, as we have called them, practical and technical knowledge after Oakeshott. The two types are, as Oakeshott notes, separable only in the abstract. If we are to formulate a rule, for instance, then this requires practical knowledge adequate to the task of rendering this explicit. We must grasp the rule and have at hand the language necessary to do so; yet there is also the requirement of practical knowledge moving in the other direction. If we have a rule then it is necessary for us to have the practical knowledge to interpret this and bring the written form into our understanding. Now, Oakeshott says that practical knowledge and technical knowledge are inseparably intertwined in every activity; yet we may question this claim. Practical knowledge seems necessarily prior to technical knowledge, for there can be no technical knowledge without a practical knowledge which provides the key to its meaning. There is no meaning in a rulebook, for instance, but for that which emerges when its written form is dissolved in practical knowledge; a set of shapes in ink carry no inherent meaning outside of the minds that interpret them by way of practical knowledge.⁶⁰ This is a possibility which Simondon (p. 109) leaves open: “It is possible that every technics must to a certain extent contain a coefficient of intuition and instinct necessary for establishing the appropriate communication between man and the technical being.”

Thus we may see that Simondon’s encyclopaedism of technical knowledge is everywhere dependent on a specific type of practical knowledge, that whereby one is initiated into the technical universe constituted by the encyclopaedia and such inscriptions. This can be contrasted with the particularistic initiation of the earlier stage: “In the farmer, the shepherd, the miner, and the sailor, human nature doubles as a second nature which is like an ancestral pact with an element or a region.”⁶¹ Simondon, p. 107. The initiation constituting encyclopaedism, in contrast, is universal as against the closed nature of these ‘childhood’ forms. This closed nature, Simondon notes, is due to the specificity of the practical knowledge which has developed over time by way of immediate participation in a particular environment and has been transmitted intergenerationally within this sphere of tradition: “it is technics itself that corresponds in this case to a closed regime of life, because technical training is valid only for the society that formed it, and is therefore the only one valid for that society.”⁶² Simondon, p. 108. Encyclopaedism, we have noted, can thus be described as entailing a particularistic initiation—that is, into the encyclopaedia—which provides a key to the universal.

We may examine the specifics of this initiation—and the interwoven world itself—further here. Earlier it was noted that technical knowledge cannot exist in itself but everywhere requires some solvent of understanding in order to be brought within the operational realm. This means that the whole of Simondon’s encyclopaedism rests upon a particular basis of practical knowledge. In this respect it is therefore little different from the earlier forms of initiation, insofar as these were also necessarily particular: “a second nature which is like an ancestral pact with an element or a region.”⁶³ Simondon, p. 107. What differs is rather that encyclopaedism means participation in a radically different environment, one so much so as seemingly to differ qualitatively from the environments in which initiation into specific skills and crafts previously took place. Namely, the relevant initiation in encyclopaedism is into the encyclopaedia itself— that is, a world as mediated by inscription; it is this which provides it the appearance of universality. An encyclopaedia may well be an ‘all-round education,’ and yet it is everywhere of a particular form: that of the book. This is a world constituted to the extent that it can be formulated explicitly, whether as words or images; and it is the facility with this mode of activity that constitutes the initiation particular to encyclopaedism. Thus, we are not so much dealing with a true universalism, but rather a particularity which carries in itself the possible integration of a totality that seems to promise universality.

Yet as we have noted, this is not truly a universality but rather a form of enfoldment—that is, the act of inscribing an aspect of actuality in two-dimensional form—which seems to promise something resembling universality in its apparent openness to inclusion. What is not yet represented must be included by an act of enfoldment, that is, nature exists here only insofar as rendered legible—i.e., as inscription. This technical universe, moreover, is foremost that of an imagined community; it is the potential for full realisation which is felt by those that participate. They do not necessarily imagine that each has the totality of nature in whatever set of inscriptions they have on hand, rather they believe—or they act as if they believe—the universe as actuality to be coextensive with a legible reality. The world thus unfolds itself in its progressive enfoldment, and it is realised only insofar as it is rendered legible and subjected to the form of an inscription. What is missing here, of course, is that the only things which enter this technical universe are such as conform to the ordering principles inherent to inscription. This results in the particular nature of the technical universe which we now set out to explore—and, in the following chapter, Ellul’s concept of Technique will be read in light of these features.

2.4. The enfoldment of nature#

The technical universe entails a process by which knowledge is enfolded as inscription, then it is reproduced—and here the place of the printing press cannot be underestimated; it was only with the printing press that the technical universe could be mass-produced so as to allow a sense of unity and reliable progression. As Simondon notes, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alambert can be seen as a major event in the developing self-consciousness of a technical universal as such. Here we can see, in an argument analogous to that of Benedict Anderson, that the technical universe constituted itself as an ‘imagined community.’⁶⁴ Anderson, Imagined Communities. The reality of this universe was realised in the alignment of its referents across space and time as enabled by the reproducibility of the technical universe as constituted by inscriptions; it was that the same reality, virtual though it may be, could be accessed alike far afield. There was thus the possibility of joint attention at a distance.

This joint attention at a distance, moreover, entailed also the possibility of working together across time as well as space. We can see this in Eisenstein’s analysis of the respective trajectories of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe:

As a student in Cracow in the 1480s, the young Copernicus probably found it hard to get a look at a single copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest—even in a corrupted medieval Latin form. Before he died, he had three different editions at hand. As a fourteen-year-old in Copenhagen in 1560, the young Tycho Brahe could purchase all of Ptolemy’s work, including an improved translation of the full Almagest made from the Greek.

Prior to the printing press, while writing enabled the possibility of inscription this yet remained largely as an unrealised potential due to the difficulties of copying by hand. This is particularly the case for images, as these tended to be degraded with repeated copying. The printing press, however, allowed for the rapid reproduction of text; and more so, for this to produce nigh identical forms—particularly, for the mass production of images and tables. This was particularly important for astronomical works such as Ptolemy’s Almagest, where astronomers were dependent on blind trust at first in terms of the accuracy of copying. With the advent of the printing press and the accumulation of copies thereby produced, publishers were able to collate and compare various hand-copied editions so as to determine the relative accuracy and produce the best possible version.

We find, therefore, that by the time of Kepler the reliability of these spatiotemporal enfoldments was such that astronomers were able to augment their sight with sturdy readings from the faraway observatories—as much historically as geographically. This fact, Westman notes, has tended to be missed by those that would emphasise the empiricist lineage of Kepler’s career and, indeed, the whole of modern science:

There is one very important feature of Kepler’s actual procedure that I do not believe has ever come to light. It is, simply, that the hypotheses set forth were not developed inductively from an inspection of nature. Kepler was reading neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture but the books of ancient and contemporary writers.⁶⁵ Westman in Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, p. 193.

Westman’s line here can be contrasted to the view of those, such as Paracelsus, that emphasised instead the standard empiricist line of immediate sense perception as the proper basis of knowledge:

He who wishes to explore nature must tread her books with his feet,” wrote Paracelsus. “Writing is learned from letters. Nature however by travelling from land to land: one land, one page. This is the Codex Nature, thus must its leaves be turned.⁶⁶ Eisenstein, p. 193.

Thus, Eisenstein concludes:

This naive view of science takes Browne’s tricky image of a “universal publick Manuscript” at face value—as if any one observer could actually don “seven-league boots” and see the whole world laid out before him, without recourse to maps and star catalogues, to atlases and travel guides; or as if observations made in varied regions at different times did not have to be collected, preserved, and correlated with each other before plants or animals or minerals could be classified and compared; or finally, as if experiments did not have to be recorded in more than one notebook to be checked out and be of any scientific value at all.⁶⁷ Eisenstein, p. 193.

We see here a continuation of the line whereby nature’s enfoldment as technical universe provided the essential foundation for the development of a new mode of human knowledge. This was made possible by the potential manifest in the invention and popularisation of the printing press, in the capacity for mass-production of identical inscriptions—words, images, tables—that it enabled. The technical universe was thereby constituted with a unity of form that had hitherto been prohibitively difficult or otherwise impossible under the conditions of hand-copied reproductions of inscriptions. With this there comes to prevail circumstances under which, as Eisenstein cites in line with George Sarton, “the large library … is just as much a scientific instrument as is the telescope or cyclotron.”⁶⁸ Eisenstein, p. 206.

One result of this is a shift in the intellectual culture and mode of education, from apprenticeship to autodidactism. This we see exemplified yet again in the case of Tycho Brahe:

… Tycho set out to become an astronomer by defying his tutor and teaching himself. He bypassed the traditional master–apprentice relationship by taking advantage of printed materials. It seems likely that his freedom from prevailing cosmological assumptions owed something to his unusual position as a largely self-made astronomer.⁶⁹ Eisenstein, p. 215.

Here the freedom made possible by initiation into the technical universe is made readily apparent; it is a world in which any with sufficient time and intelligence may move—assuming that they are somehow able to acquire the relevant corpus of textual materials. Indeed, this is a point specifically emphasised by Simondon in his treatment of encyclopaedism as of wider import than merely culture of learning but intellectual culture more broadly:

A society of autodidacts cannot accept tutelage and the status of spiritual minority. It aspires to govern itself on its own, and to manage itself. It is principally in this sense and through its technological power that the Encyclopaedia brought about a new force and a new social dynamic.⁷⁰ Simondon, p. 111.

Of course, we may temper Simondon’s argument by noting that this was apparent already with Brahe some two centuries prior to the publishing of Diderot and d’Alambert’s Encyclopédie. Instead we might see the* Encyclopédie* as crystallising an undercurrent partly resultant upon the shifts in material culture that we have already noted; it was that the proliferation of reliable reproductions and, moreover, the rationalisation and refinement of publishing—as with the improvements in Ptolemy’s Almagest, for instance—provided for a sturdy foundation that found a self-conscious form in the concept of an encyclopaedia as an ‘all-round education.’

There is, furthermore, a second aspect noted by Simondon: that this was also the result of the ‘technological power’ of this new class of autodidacts. This capacity, of course, was realisable only to the extent that the technical universe corresponded to an actuality of reference rather than a fictional world existing only unto itself. Here we may see this as a consequence not only of the accumulation and refinement of prior technical knowledge but also the amplified possibilities for feedback entailed by a widespread reliance on mediating inscriptions:

We learn our geography mostly in school, not through our own personal experience. I have never been to Australia. In my image … however it exists with 100 percent certainty. If I sailed to the place where the map makers tell it is and found nothing there but the ocean, I would be the most surprised man in the world. I hold to this part of my image … however purely on authority … what gives the map this extraordinary authority, an authority greater than that of the sacred books of all religions … is a process of feedback from the users of maps to the map maker. A map maker who puts out an inaccurate map will soon have this feat called to their attention by people … who find that it violates their … personal experience.⁷¹ Boulding in Eisenstein, p. 200.

The point here, however, is not necessarily that of truth per se but rather of utility; it is that these inscriptions provide a successful mediation—not necessarily that they represent the actuality precisely. Indeed, this is par for the course even in our more basic perceptual systems. There is an evolutionary incentive towards parsimonious development that precludes any exhaustive advancements in perceptual acuity:

Natural selection can send perfectly, or partially, true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions that use niche-specific interfaces which hide the truth in order to better represent utility. Fitness and access to truth are logically distinct properties. More truthful perceptions do not entail greater fitness.⁷² Mark, Marion, and Hoffman, ‘Natural selection and veridical perceptions,’ p. 513.

The same incentives apply, of course, to the mediating inscriptions that emerge from an intellectual culture as modified by the economic incentives of intermediaries (publishing houses and so on). This is particularly apparent today, for instance, in the quality of modern news media—as the nauseatingly frequent critique that such outlets are more concerned with mere economic quantities rather than any epistemic or ethical qualities.

Yet while in the case of modern news media this may be taken as somehow a betrayal of their proper purpose, such can hardly be said so easily of, for instance, the mapmakers of yore; it is no betrayal that a mapmaker excludes features deemed inessential—particularly if the map is made with some specialised purpose in mind. The necessity of this, because of the absurdity of the alternative, is rendered apparent in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, titled On Exactitude in Science:

… In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the whole of a city, and the map of the empire took up an entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came up with a map of the empire that had the size of the empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations understood that this extended map was useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole country there are no other relics of the geographical disciplines.⁷³ Borges, On exactitude in science.

The very point of the map, indeed, the point of all mediating inscriptions is precisely that they are reduced forms of the actuality to which they refer; it is that they are specifically crafted to exclude all inessential features and include only that which aligns with the purpose of their creation. Of course, as is so often the case, the source of advantage here is also the origin of their weakness; it is that inscriptions thus contain only so much as is placed within them—that is, as much as is thought desirable to include. This does not only mean that certain things are excluded because they are deemed inessential but, moreover, and perhaps more importantly, that certain aspects can hardly be thought to be included at all. The creation of a mediating inscription is a largely conscious enterprise and depends upon the intentional inclusion of relevant aspects.

If a thing is not included in a map then no trace of it will be found there, though it may well be perfectly obvious in actuality for any that visit: behind the features drawn into the map there is only the blank homogeneity of the surface subjected to this inscription. The features included are rendered more salient precisely by their standing out against this stark absence of detail; it is a simplification by way of reduction that endows the inscription with its particular power. We will follow this aspect more specifically in the following section by considering the way in which inscriptions involve a decontextualisation of information, and this is also a theme that we will return to much later in considering the aesthetics of inscription. For now it will suffice to say that the promise and risk of inscriptions is precisely the same: that they stand for a more complex and fuller actuality to which we do not necessarily have immediate access—whether because of distance or, as is increasingly the case, because the enfoldment entailed exceeds the perceptual apparatus of any living human being alone.

2.5. Knowledge and technologies of the intellect#

There is underlying the argument so far an assertion that material practices such as inscription are not merely a neutral form of memory akin to any other but rather must be considered as technologies of the intellect, each entailing a corresponding transformation of all which it receives; it is this which constitutes the unity of the technical universe according to its growth principle. The result of this process of enfoldment, accumulation, and refinement is a world rendered legible—and it is thus also that legibility becomes all-important. Here by enfoldment we mean, of course, the process wherein actuality is rendered as an inscription; is thus compressed into a two-dimensional form—whence the technical universe arises and whereby it is progressively constituted.

We may here take a step back and consider simply the form of inscription as a technology of the intellect. This has been studied in particular by Jack Goody, and entails an analysis of the ways in which writing alters the surrounding epistemic culture:

When people speak of the development of abstract thought out of the science of the concrete, the shift from signs to concepts, the abandonment of intuition, imagination, perception, these are little more than crude ways of assessing in general terms the kind of processes involved in the cumulative growth of systematic knowledge, a growth that involves elaborate learning procedures (in addition to imaginative leaps) and which is critically dependent upon the presence of the book.⁷⁴ Goody, Domestication of the savage mind, p. 150.

While some may balk at the breadth of this claim, we will here examine one aspect in particular. We have already mentioned Oakeshott’s distinction between practical and technical knowledge; it is the latter which is susceptible to explicit formulation, whereas the former is not. These two, we have also noted, are not separable. The translation of technical knowledge always depends on an insoluble basis of practical knowledge (e.g., a rule requires language and imagination to be instantiated).

Oakeshott further notes a doctrine which he calls ‘the sovereignty of technique.’ This is the view that there is nothing but technical knowledge, that anything which cannot be rendered explicit is not knowledge at all:

… this character of being susceptible of precise formulation gives to technical knowledge at least the appearance of certainty: it appears to be possible to be certain about a technique. On the other hand, it is characteristic of practical knowledge that it is not susceptible of formulation of this kind. Its normal expression is in a customary or traditional way of doing things, or, simply, in practice. And this gives it the appearance of imprecision and consequently of uncertainty, of being a matter of opinion, of probability rather than truth. It is, indeed, a knowledge that is expressed in taste or connoisseurship.⁷⁵ Oakeshott, p. 10.

This distinction maps precisely back onto Simondon’s categories of particularistic ‘childhood’ technics and the universal technics of encyclopaedism. We find here, moreover, that technical knowledge in Oakeshott’s formulation is that of the book— and in this, the two align closely in implicating the place of inscription as a material practice closely associated with a marked difference in epistemic culture between the traditional and technical universe. This can be further supported with reference to Goody’s study of the particular implications of writing for cognition.

The first factor noted by Goody is that writing everywhere renders the implicit explicit, that it can be seen to everywhere entail an effort at abstracting from practical knowledge and rendering this in an explicit written form. Secondly, however, this translation entails an external rendering in material form; it thus effects also a further change in the nature of the representation. Where the spoken ethic, for instance, is always spoken within a certain context and to specific individuals, the written ethic is a pronouncement necessarily decontextualised. We can see this as intimately interwoven with the first aspect, as it is the explicit materiality which externalises knowledge in the form of an inscription; it is this which allows the displacement of knowledge. Information can thus be conveyed from place to place and, if this is to be worthwhile, it must take a form which will be applicable across the full variety of contexts that it might encounter—thus ‘abstraction’ might well be seen as a corollary or requirement of this process:

In written codes there is a tendency to present a single ‘abstract’ formula which overlays, and to some extent replaces, the more contextualised norms of oral societies. … in their very nature written statements of the law, of norms, of rules have had to be abstracted from particular situations in order to be addressed to a universal audience out there, rather than delivered face-to-face to a specific group of people at a particular time and place. The communicative context has changed dramatically both as regards the emitter and as regards the receivers, with consequence implications for the nature of the message.⁷⁶ Goody, The logic of writing and the organisation of society, p. 13

Suppose, for instance, that an individual within an oral culture makes a pronouncement upon some moral issue; it is wrong to kill such and such an individual, or members of some group. This would arise only as concretely required by a particular context: someone suggests or enacts such a thing. There would be no external form of storage such as the Ten Commandments, nothing that might take the form of an inscription. We may thus compare immediately such commandments as are rendered external as explicit inscriptions. Here it is not the practical morality emerging from the individual which operates as a rule but rather the rule itself operates as if an individual; it is taken to be the law which speaks—from which perspective those that implement this are merely the hands of a mind external. The codified law, moreover, speaks universally and always rather than within a specific context. We can see the Ten Commandments as not only of universal application (e.g., “Thou shalt do no murder”) but also as speaking always and to any that can read them. The object exists as the externalised form of an ethical precept; it is the precept which speaks yet without mouth or mind.

The precept, furthermore, here takes the form of an ‘immutable mobile’ in the words of Bruno Latour; it is a form that can be displaced and yet everywhere remains the same. We may note briefly that the latter aspect effectively amounts to a mystification insofar as any interpretation will subtly alter the translation of a given precept. Yet all the same, the inscription itself retains in its materiality an aesthetic durability that gives the appearance of certainty and immutability; it is this that allows it to be displaced and, differences in interpretation aside, retain itself as a self-sufficient entity. We may see that this characteristic of immutable mobiles provides them with a sort of universalism, that the book may be taken anywhere in the universe and applied all the same. An important aspect of this is that the inscription itself comes to be taken as the reason for the precept; it is to the book that we point in seeking to apply a given precept contained therein—to what does the member of an oral culture point? These individuals can point only to themselves; or rather, to the shared moral imagination of a given culture. Of course, much the same occurs without specific books where we may point in appeal to other things in common such as, for instance, a shared value such as honour or honesty.

These forms all share an attribute in that they entail a pointing to an external thing as justification; it is, in other words, that we provide a reason. This corresponds to the rendering explicit noted by Goody and, moreover, explains why the ‘sovereignty of technique’ takes practical knowledge to be nescience. The knowledge of taste and connoisseurship, for instance, cannot be formulated as a thing to which we can point; to the extent that this is possible then they become something else entirely. We can see this most clearly in the case of teaching and learning, for we find often that practical knowledge is conferred in a way that the apprentice and even the master may be entirely unaware of what precisely has been imparted. This can be seen in the case of Piaget’s studies, wherein it was found that children learn to play a game according to its rules well before they are capable of formulating these rules in any explicit form. We can see that in the case of an incongruence during gameplay, the child with only practical knowledge may be unable to point to any reason for their dissatisfaction with the move of another; it may be only an older child that can identify the precise reason that this move was illegal.

We see here, in other words, that the practical knowledge which governs the game is made explicit so as to render legible an incongruence between present conduct and the relevant norm; it is either that one may here express the specific rule or, if there is a rulebook, more literally point to the relevant written regulation. This activity is intended to either cow the offending individual or recruit allies sufficient to the same task; either to enforce the rule or, if absolutely necessary, to ostracise the other. The relevant rulebook is only that which is considered to bear upon the circumstances at hand, hence there is necessarily a rule of recognition (as practical knowledge) which underlies the operation of this mechanism. There is, moreover, the necessity that the argument be persuasive—as a combination of whether the incongruence is successfully rendered legible and, perhaps more importantly, whether this incongruence is of a salience sufficient to merit an opposing response. This will also take place, of course, within the relevant social context and so, for instance, hierarchical dynamics may intervene and render opposition less likely despite a salient incongruence. Whatever the case, our interest remains the same: the inscription is pointed to in support as a means of persuasive reasoning.

The considerations in this section, taken together, have the effect of presenting us with a situation in which it is as if the inscription itself speaks; the existing human being merely draws our attention to the mouth which speaks eternally the same— hence when I cite the Ten Commandments, I am not myself saying “thou shalt not” but rather it is the Word as embedded in materiality that speaks. Our attention, in other words, seems simply to be drawn to an objective aspect of actuality; it is a fact.

2.6. The ‘view from nowhere’ as allocentric mode#

Let us then proceed, but let us not try to deceive one another. I, Johannes Climacus, am a human being, neither more nor less; and I assume that anyone I may have the honour to talk with is also a human being. If he presumes to speculative philosophy in the abstract, pure speculative thought, I must renounce the effort to speak with him; for in that case he instantly vanishes from my sight, and from the feeble sight of every mortal.⁷⁷ Kierkegaard, A Kierkegaard Reader, p. 196.

With these lines Kierkegaard opens his Concluding Unscientific Postscript by way of mocking Hegel, a subject to which he often returns in this piece. His chief complaint against Hegel, of course, is that he has forgotten—whether by mere absent-mindedness or, perhaps more likely, concerted effort—that he is an existing human being. What does this mean for Kierkegaard? It means that a logical system is only complete insofar as it excludes existence itself; it hangs together perfectly but nowhere touches the ground. This leads Kierkegaard to contrast a logical to an existential system, and it is the specific difference between these two that the latter takes the existing human being as its centre point; whereas the former makes every effort to disregard existence:

… he can do his utmost to forget that he is an existing individual, by which he becomes a comic figure, since existence has the remarkable trait of compelling an existing individual to exist whether he wills it or not.⁷⁸ Kierkegaard, p. 202.

The difficulty here is that the finality of a system as Being clashes with the continuity of existence as Becoming; it is that in the existing human being is found an immediate transcendence—that thus the only way to assure solidity in the foundation of a system is to begin with nothing, that is, with the denial of existence itself.

We may see here some echo of the lines of thought we have encountered previously; as the law book lies empty until filled by the legislator, so also the systematiser stands at first before an empty sheet of paper. It is thus the metaphysics of inscription which underlies the miraculous nothing by which the systematiser seeks to stand outside existence. Of course, this can be no true ‘nothing’—there is no possibility here of a void. Instead, this ‘nothing’ is a thing which is rendered uniform, as in the production of paper, so that the markings of an inscription stand stark against the apparent emptiness of a background. Yet the background is itself something, for otherwise it could hardly be written upon, and it is in this relative contrast that the counterfeit of ‘creatio ex nihilo’ can be seen to emerge. We thus begin by an annihilation of anything that would stand against the inscribed form, then the inscription itself can take place as if proceeding from nothing to something; yet there is here no creation but for that of the imagination as facilitated by the immediate materiality in which ideal forms are embedded. The inscription itself as material object thus structures the play of the imagination, and it is by our entering imaginatively into such a world that we come to think ourselves inhabitants of a system.

At this point a concrete example would be useful, and we will, in giving an example—namely, of navigating using a map—return to a more general point concerning the nature of inscriptions after some further remarks about Kierkegaard and about Goody’s anthropology. The point of Kierkegaard’s argument in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, of course, is to oppose objectivity to subjectivity; and then, to define Christianity as fundamentally entailing the task of becoming subjective. We may exclude the latter aspect but note the specific distinction, one which seems to crop up throughout the history of thought in various forms. Already we have dealt with, for instance, a distinction between practical and technical knowledge that would seem to map onto much the same lines. Subjectivity is concerned with the relation between knower and known, that the knowledge here is found between the two. Objectivity, in contrast, seeks knowledge separate from the observer; it aims for a logical certainty which is inconsistent with the nature of existence as Becoming. The only place that a thing like this can be found, and even then only as appearance, is the settled knowledge of books; it is the equational definition, for instance, which seems certain and tangible and entirely objective.

We can see practical knowledge, therefore, as akin to subjectivity, whereas technical knowledge is akin to objectivity. As we have noted, of course, technical knowledge is everywhere dependent on a basis in subjectivity. Kierkegaard makes much the same argument for subjectivity as the foundation of objectivity:

If a dancer could leap very high, we should admire him. But if he tried to give the impression that he could fly, let laughter single him out for suitable punishment, even though it might be true that he could leap as high as any dancer ever had done. Leaping is the accomplishment of a being essentially earthly, one who respects the earth’s gravitational force, since the leaping is only momentary. But flying carries a suggestion of being emancipated from telluric conditions, a privilege reserved for winged creatures, and perhaps also shared by the inhabitants of the moon—and there perhaps the System will first find its true readers.⁷⁹ Kierkegaard, p. 206.

The point of this section, in brief, is to emphasise the impossibility of an existing objectivity; it is that objectivity cannot be considered as a complete break with the conditions of any existing human being. We find further support for this in the analysis as outlined by Oakeshott, as we have here argued that technical knowledge is a particular form of practical knowledge; that is, an exaptation rather than entailing anything like the perfect sight of some formulations. Descartes says, for instance, that he cannot believe that God would have given us an imperfect faculty of understanding, even if we do not always achieve this perfection; yet even those of us that are not outright atheists may accept the obvious implications of evolutionary theory—namely, that the principle of parsimony subordinates truth to utility.⁸⁰ Mark, Marion, and Hoffman, ‘Natural selection and veridical perceptions,’ p. 513. The cognitive capacity of mankind, in other words, maintains a continuity with the simple understanding of animal life; similarly there must be some continuity between the cognition of ‘primitive’ peoples and the more ‘advanced’ cognition characteristic of modernity.

This is a point which Goody emphasises repeatedly in his work, that there need be no ‘great divide’ but nevertheless that some differences seem to be apparent; it is here that we encounter conceptual pairs such as primitive-modern, subjective-objective, intuitive-scientific, etc. The specific contribution of Goody’s anthropological studies, of course, is that these fragment the ‘great divide’ and rather provide evidence of a process of exaptation in which writing and associated technologies of the intellect have provided a crucial scaffold for further developments. Of this we must by necessity note that the path need neither be unilinear nor uniform, that these developments have waxed and waned with the fates of various civilisations; and moreover, that there is no ‘standard’ progression but rather at most a trend determined by the nature of writing and enacted as via the particular circumstances of contexts (e.g., between Italy and England). The point throughout Goody’s treatment of this topic, however, is that there is certainly sufficient reason to characterise a trend following in the wake of writing and its increasing influence in various aspects of social ordering. We will ourselves follow this line.

The argument which we will here deploy is that the material culture of inscription inculcates an allocentric mode of representation; it is this which aligns with objectivity, technical knowledge, and the ‘view from nowhere.’ Against the allocentric mode we will compare the egocentric mode of representation, that which aligns with subjectivity and practical knowledge. These are not to be seen necessarily as stark alternatives but, following what we have said about Kierkegaard and Goody above, the allocentric mode must be seen as an exaptation of the egocentric mode; it is, in brief, a decentring of the individual as constituted by way of mediating inscriptions. The specific nature of this development will here be illustrated by way of a concrete case—namely, that of navigation in the egocentric and allocentric modes.

We will begin by returning to Uexküll:

The best way to find out that no two human Umwelten are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guide unerringly follows a path that you cannot see. Among all the rocks and trees in the environment there are some which, strung together in sequence, stand out as landmarks from all the others, although they are not apparent to a stranger.⁸¹ Uexküll, p. 50.

The case of the familiar path, of course, can be seen as an instance of practical knowledge; it is that which is embodied within the individual and embedded in their relationship to the environment. This can be further seen as reflecting subjectivity insofar as “no two human Umwelten are the same.” While the relationships are cued by aspects of the shared environment, the specific meaning and path are implicit and known foremost by practice—that is, the individual proves their knowledge by following the path. As against this we might compare the navigational task as it is encountered by a stranger, one for whom the cues mentioned are not apparent. Supposing that we were such a stranger in a foreign land and were in need of the ability to navigate, the obvious means of doing so are either by using a local guide or, more likely today, a map.

Suppose that we take up the offer of a local guide, in this case we would follow them; that is, we attend to their movement and take their activity as demonstrative of the path. This is an example of an apprenticeship-type relation, where someone with expertise passes this on by way of verbal direction and observational learning. While the guide may provide a great deal of detail, we will also tend to pick up many aspects unconsciously; perhaps even some of which our teacher is themselves unaware. The learning process is here grounded in this implicit process of transfer between two individuals. They are engaged in an immediate and situated relationship with each other and the environment. We might here consider briefly an alternative environment, rather than the familiar path above, what about if we are being taught orienteering? Here much the same applies but the environment into which we are initiated is not a concrete place but rather a somehow abstract topography; thereby we learn how to navigate using a map—how to translate between the map and immediate environment. Much the same process as that already outlined will take place, including perhaps our picking up on unconscious aspects and even imitating idiosyncrasies. Yet here we find we have rather been initiated into a radically different type of place; and the contrast here corresponds to the difference already addressed between the particular particularism of a familiar path and the open-ended particularism of inscription as an allocentric mode of representation.

Turning now to the case of navigating by way of a map, we find that there is a necessary basis of practical knowledge for anyone to interact with a map. This practice is sometimes known as orienteering, and effectively it entails learning to orient oneself within the world of the map. The individual with a map, in other words, does not need to know the concrete particular path but only the abstract universal ‘path’—that is, how to translate from the map representation to the immediate scene with which they are presented. This entails, moreover, the necessity not only of knowing how to find oneself on the map but also how to find the point which one wants to reach and determining the proper way to move between these. Here again we find that this path, so to speak, may not be apparent to a stranger (i.e., someone unfamiliar with maps). Yet for anyone initiated into this mode of representation, the map provides a way of orientating themselves in space and navigating between two points. This allows even the stranger to create a familiar path by way of a mediating inscription. Of course, this also first requires that the territory be mapped by someone; it means that the stranger is dependent on their own ability to read a map and the ability of the original cartographer—as well as the immutability of the map, whether it has been reproduced reliably, etc.

The simplest instance of such a map takes the form of, say, a fixed map which has a pointer that says “you are here.” These allow one to translate between the frames of representation, although further information may be necessary to determine orientation if this is not included in the marker. Whenever anyone reads a map, the first task is inevitably the same as this: it is to situate oneself within the spatial representation. This entails a translation, in our terms, between egocentric and allocentric space; we situate ourselves within a cartographic frame of reference—then this provides the map with a concrete meaning. While the individual navigating a familiar path begins where they are, the individual with a map must first find themselves. Here is an essential difference between egocentric and allocentric modes: namely, that the allocentric mode of representation requires that we situate ourselves as an object among objects. The task for navigation here is to determine the spatial relations between an array of objects, among which the existing individual exists only as projected on the basis of an act of translation between egocentric and allocentric modes. We then read off from the allocentric representation an egocentric heading, which thus allows us to set our path towards the intended end. This is everywhere the basic process necessitated by allocentric representations: that we must translate by way of projecting our egocentric perspective into a world constituted purely by the internal relations of its constituents.

The allocentric mode, constituted entirely of internal relations, is, moreover, a paper world that touches actuality only by way of an individual imagination, which allows the leap from inscription to existence. This is not to say that the allocentric mode is somehow false, rather that it is meaningful only by virtue of that which the recipient reads into the inscription. We find here only what has been placed by the cartographer, yet also only that which results from something we ourselves must supply. The meaning thereby derived is co-constituted by the joint initiation of cartographer and orienteer; it is within the technical universe that these two meet. This means, in other words, that the allocentric mode entails the superimposition of a virtual reality over the immediate reality of our embodied experience. We may perhaps thus consider the technical universe as an augmented reality which extends the immediate by way of inscriptions and abstractions corresponding to the allocentric mode; it provides an imaginative overlay within which we may understand ourselves and the world.

We can further extend this analysis by considering a particularly modern form of the map, that of the navigational system; here we need only know the two locations and, by entering these, the system calculates our route and announces this. We here see that while we provide the purpose and specifics, nevertheless the whole proceeds by way of an imposition of external forms:

Here it is not the ideal image that is a real function of the individual but, on the contrary, the individual who is a function of the image, which dominates his mind and will as an externally given formal scheme, as an estranged image, as a fetish, as a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.⁸² Ilyenkov, p. 164.

We have here described thus far the allocentric mode in terms of cartography, exemplified by the technical knowledge of a map as against the practical knowledge of a familiar path—with the latter being instead an example of the egocentric mode. Yet the allocentric–egocentric definition goes beyond this example and can be seen to operate in various fields. The gist of our argument, therefore, is that the allocentric mode is inculcated by material activity in which we route ourselves through inscriptions; it is this practice that then entrains an allocentric mode more broadly.

We can see something much the same in the operation of explicit law as against implicit norms, say, in which the legal framework is codified and stands external to the individual; any assessment is here mediated by way of an inscription—or alternatively, of a reification corresponding in form to that of inscription. Indeed, this last point is essential: once the allocentric mode has been engrained into individual cognition then the epistemic culture comes to be modelled more broadly on this basis. There comes to be an aesthetic of the allocentric which operates beyond the standard cases involving literal inscriptions, hence even dialogue between individuals may come to mirror the allocentric mode—for instance, in considering ourselves foremost from an external point of view. This results in an allocentric mode that stems from but extends beyond the immediate use of inscriptions as a material activity; it entails the imaginative possibility of their extension and creative re-combinations of the potential present in existing material culture. We see, for example, the advances of cartography and, in particular, the way in which a section in Ptolemy’s Cosmographia provided the basis for the linear perspective which emerged from Florence during the Renaissance.⁸³ Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. Such examples show how the development of inscriptions proceeds not only horizontally—that is, to include more and more of the world within the ambit of its enfoldment—but also vertically in terms of developing technologies of the intellect in which new aspects are constituted by the progressive elaboration of our perceptual instruments. The two aspects, of course, cannot be entirely separated as often a vertical movement is necessary to allow for the further horizontal protrusion of inscriptions. This will be demonstrated in the example with which we end this chapter, in which psychometric testing and statistical methods were used to bring human subjectivity within the ambit of inscription.

One essential aspect of the allocentric mode can be understood as a decentring of the individual, indeed, that it entails a world in which there is no longer any true centre at all. We might here question the use of ‘allocentric,’ therefore, in that this still entails reference to a centre—even if this is a centre defined by the other (allo) rather than the self (ego). Another term that applies well here is that borrowed from Nagel as the title of this thesis: “the view from nowhere.”⁸⁴ Nagel, The View from Nowhere. Of course, this is also something of a misnomer; yet perhaps between the two we may triangulate the precise meaning we here intend. The use of mediating inscriptions entails a view from nowhere insofar as it is no longer situated as with the egocentric perspective; what happens is that the individual abstracts away from themselves and comes to consider instead only the internal relations between a multiplicity of external objects. Here we find the same problem as that which Kierkegaard identified, namely that the whole may hang together perfectly and yet nowhere does it touch the ground; it has finality only to the extent that it excludes existence.

We can see this particular feature as emerging from the metaphysics of inscription: the mediating inscription stands in place of the actuality towards which it points as its referent. All that is found here, however, is that which has been inscribed—hence the totality of representations are embedded as immutable, as in Latour’s definition of the essential characteristic of inscriptions as “immutable mobiles.”⁸⁵ Latour, p. 7. This line of thought can be seen also in Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, though the philosopher was there not referring to inscriptions directly; namely, that “it is clear that fixed concepts may be extracted by our thought from mobile reality; but there are no means of reconstructing the mobility of the real with fixed concepts.”⁸⁶ Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 68. The completeness of inscriptions is a corollary of their immobility; thus by their nature—that is, according to the metaphysics of inscription—they exclude the dynamic aspect of existence so as to attain the static character which allows for their displacement. As Rose states, here speaking of visualisations representing ordinary childhood development, yet of broader relevance:

The object so produced had, to use Michael Lynch’s term, become docile; it has internalised the norms of the scientific programme in the very form of its inscription. In these little drawings the child was reduced to its essential elements. Only that which was normatively pertinent was worthy of description. … The images are far more concrete, far more real than the child itself. Children are ephemeral, shifting, elusive, changing before one’s eyes, hard to perceive in any stable fashion. These images make the child stable by constructing a perceptual system, a way of rendering the mobile and confusing manifold of the sensible into a legible visible field.⁸⁷ Rose, Governing the Soul, p. 146.

2.7. Example: Governing the Soul#

We have just referred to Nikolas Rose, and here we will provide an example of the concept of enfoldment in his work; namely, the protrusion of inscription into human subjectivity—hence his title, and that of this section: Governing the Soul. Rose’s work illustrates the way in which the invisible interiority of a human individual is rendered legible and thereby governable. Here the specific difficulty was that the relevant differences were no longer visible, for government came to be concerned with factors beyond the external and apparent; it became necessary for the individual’s subjectivity to be rendered legible—that is, for the apparatus of governance to somehow protrude into the human soul. Indeed, it was only this necessity that drove the creation of measures of intelligence. Academic and scientific interest had certainly been present previously, and yet this work was plagued by conceptual and epistemological difficulties. Ultimately, says Rose, “the demands of rational administration triumphed where decades of detailed scientific study had led into a cul-de-sac.”⁸⁸ Rose, p. 139. This is particularly noteworthy as measures thereby improvised were not so much discovered as they were realised as a matter of administrative convenience. The measurement of intelligence, for instance, was enacted in the decisions made on its basis; in this sense, to the extent that it was acted upon, then it was realised by the state apparatus which took it for reality.

This particular case, that which we will take here for our example, refers to the development of a method to separate a target population according to the distribution of its intelligence. Here the particular interest was to “separate subjects of inferior intelligence into categories verifiable by all.”⁸⁹ Rose, p. 139. How was this accomplished? As with our earlier example of the encyclopaedia, the key here was something which is obscure precisely for its being so obvious:

The technique of the test was the most important contribution of the psychological sciences to the human technologies of the first half of the twentieth century. The test routinises the complex ensemble of social judgment on individual variability into an automatic device that makes difference visible and notable. One no longer has to observe children for long periods of time or compare large numbers one with another in the classroom and the asylum in order to reveal their similarities and differences. The test codifies, mathematises, and normalises difference. It is a simple technical device, but one that can be used to realise almost any psychological schema for differentiating individuals in a brief time span, in a manageable space, at the will of the expert. It has become an indispensable part of any modern programme for the government of individual differences.⁹⁰ Rose, p. 140.

We may here note, as well, that the relationship expressed by these results is allocentric in the strict sense of the term; it is taken to express an objective relationship between the individual and the test rather than any subjective judgment taking place between individuals—hence, “categories verifiable by all.”

The individual psyche is thus rendered amenable to government by way of a mechanism which renders differences apparent, thereby allowing discriminating action. Of course, it is not so much that the administration sees these; rather it plays a far more active part in perception here:

We should not think of these procedures of inscription as merely allowing the documentation of a familiar reality … in a more convenient form. … the devices and techniques for visualisation and inscription are not merely technical aids to intellectual processes. To think this is to give too much to a faculty of abstract thought and too little to the technical mechanisms by which thought operates. Technological changes are simultaneously revolutions in consciousness. Techniques for visualising and inscribing individual differences transform the intellectual universe of the scientist and the practical universe of objects and relationships to which things can be done. In short, technological developments make new areas of life practicable.⁹¹ Rose, p. 149.

We see, therefore, that such technologies of the intellect entail the creation of new objects which enfold referents by selecting for phenomena, thus rendering these amenable to manipulation. Here the individual is represented by an inscription: “What can now be judged and administered is not what one does but what one is.”⁹² Rose, p. 140. This is accomplished by way of a process of legibility which renders graspable, for instance, intelligence; it does so by creating an object which can be grasped: “This form of writing has a clear vocation, which is the dossier, the portable cumulative record of individual worth that is central to bureaucracy and psychology alike.”⁹³ Rose, p. 140.

The individual, in other words, is rendered legible by way of a form that makes them graspable in a material sense: they are reduced to the form of documents or files. They can thus be grasped by a bureaucrat, thereby inspected and compared with others; and on the basis of this inspection, acted upon through networks of power. We may see, moreover, that this is accomplished here by the enfoldment of various phenomena. The test entails enfolding a variety of decisions by way of calculative procedure. This can be further supplemented by the statistical concept of a normal distribution:

The simple act of comparison of the respective amount of a particular quality or attribute possessed by two members of the population enabled the mathematicisation of difference. This could be represented in a simple visual form once it was assumed that all qualities in the population varied according to a regular and predictable pattern, and that the characteristics of this pattern were those established by the statistical laws of large numbers.⁹⁴ Rose, p. 137.

We can see, therefore, how the technical device of the psychometric test was combined with the statistical concept of normal distribution: “the variability of the intellect had been reduced to order, made graspable through its normalisation into a stable, predictable, two-dimensional trace.”⁹⁵ Rose, p. 138. The total effect of this was to render the quality of intellect as quantity that it might thereby be brought within the ambit of centres of calculation; it is thus that the individual is rendered manipulable at a distance.

We must note, in particular, that the individual is not themselves manipulated by bureaucrats; it is the mediating inscription which is inspected and compared by faraway hands. The inscription stands in for the individual, or, rather, it stands as them. For the purpose of administration, they exist as an identity established by dossiers—as documents and files accumulated by way of various instruments of perception. From the perspective of the bureaucrat, in other words, objects exist only insofar as they have been rendered legible and can thus be taken as the basis for decisions. The bureaucratic Umwelt thus mirrors that which Uexküll describes of animals:

Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps, receptor and effector. With the one it invests the object with a receptor cue or perceptual meaning, with the other, an effector cue or operational meaning. But since all of the traits of an object are structurally interconnected, the traits given operational meaning must affect those bearing perceptual meaning through the object, and so change the object itself. This is best expressed briefly as: the effector cue or meaning extinguishes the receptor cue or meaning.⁹⁶ Uexküll, p. 10.

We may note, therefore, that the effector constitutes the meaning of a receptor: the output of an instrument of perception is realised only insofar as it is implicated in the activity of a mechanism of articulation. The results of a psychometric test of intelligence, for instance, are meaningfully realised only insofar as they are given an operational meaning within a network of power. This is to reiterate the point which we made at the outset of this chapter; namely, that inscriptions are only realised to the extent that they are acted upon.

As this chapter now draws to a close, we may pause a moment to consider where we have come from, what we have seen along the way, and where we are going next. The path thus far has been a treatment of inscription in the service of our interest in Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique—that is our next stop. Here we have run through a variety of sources woven together in order to explicate the technical universe as constituted by inscription and the structuring principles fundamental to this realm. The basic principle has been that this entails a self-conscious movement which renders explicit the implicit and, by inscription, renders this an immutable mobile; hence allowing for its displacement. We have further argued that this does not simply translate the form into an identical equivalent but rather entails an essential transformation corresponding to the recipient form. Simondon depicts the Encyclopédie as a watershed in this, whereas we have interpreted his concept of encyclopaedism as reflecting an undercurrent in the material history of inscriptions; it is simply that with the Encyclopédie this undercurrent emerged into the open. This is the technical universe, that which is bound not by the ordinary laws of existence but rather the particular metaphysics of inscription; it is in light of these that we will now turn to elucidate Ellul’s concept of Technique.

3. Technique#

The pencil has been called the most potent instrument in the world, for it gives most of man’s thoughts and aspirations their first visible form. … Drawings are like windows through which we see things. The draughtsman, who is a maker of these windows, appreciates the effort put into them much more so than others, who only see through drawings, as it were, to the things themselves depicted and so take drawing for granted.⁹⁷ Booker, The History of Engineering Drawing, p. xv.

The world seen through this windows, of course, is not the same as that which we encounter in the immediacy of presence before us. Our treatment of inscription thus far has sought to illuminate the metaphysical principles which are the ordering principles proper to this realm of paper. This has all been, we will recall, in the service of understanding the essence of Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique. Now we will turn to deal with Technique directly, as outlined in La Technique, interwoven with our treatment of inscriptions. The aim here is to show to that an understanding of the nature of inscription can help us to clarify the obviously significant and yet often confusing concept of Technique. We may at the outset distinguish our task from that of the historical and sociological study conducted by Ellul in La Technique. This is instead a philosophical study of the grounds which structure Technique and which justify its unity as a concept.

We will begin, therefore, with the question which Ellul asks (and answers in the affirmative): whether there is something peculiar about the technical mode in modernity. Ellul lists several features that characterise what might be called the traditional technics, against which it is Ellul’s intent—and our next task—to contrast the nature of Technique as a peculiarly modern technical phenomenon. The relationship between traditional technics and modern Technique which Ellul notes, we will argue, can be seen to map smoothly onto the divide which we have already noted between, for instance, practical and technical knowledge; hence inscription seems offer some insight into the concept of Technique. While this may not provide an exhaustive account, we will demonstrate in this chapter how the form of inscription can be found reflected in the peculiar nature of Technique.

To begin, however, we must start by looking at traditional technics as characterised by an obvious immediacy—as against Technique, which we will argue depends upon mediating inscriptions. One difficulty here is that ‘immediacy’ is itself defined only by the negation of any mediation; it is that which is not mediated. Immediacy as a state is thus salient only to the extent that our modern forms contradict this. Our understanding of the nature of traditional technics, therefore, can only be illuminated to the extent that we can draw some comparison with Technique, thus striking a spark at the edges where these conflict; it is in this light that our present inquiry must proceed.

Ellul lists in La Technique four characteristics of traditional technics. Firstly, that it was “applied only in certain narrow, limited areas.”⁹⁸ Ellul, p. 64. Secondly, “the limitation of the technical means employed in these fields.”⁹⁹ Ellul, p. 67. Thirdly, that traditional technics were spatially local.¹⁰⁰ Ellul, p. 68. Fourthly, that they were temporally-limited.¹⁰¹ Ellul, p. 70. These four limitations of traditional technics are, in Ellul’s view, the precise opposites of the situation encountered as regards modern Technique; indeed, it is the overcoming of these limitations which seems to best characterise the core of Technique as Ellul uses the term. We have noted already several features of inscription, and many of these mirror the difference found here; indeed, the distinction which Ellul outlines is in many ways identical to those outlined by Simondon in his treatment of encyclopaedism.

The difference from our treatment, however, is that we seek to examine the way in which these characteristics of Technique emerge with the onset, development, and proliferation of inscription, particularly in the age following the spread of the printing press. Our argument is that the analogy Simondon draws between the encyclopaedia and modern technics is more than mere coincidence; it is that the mode of material activity and culture corresponding to the prominent place of inscription in society gives birth to the technical universe. This is a particularity which by virtue of its open-ended nature promises at least the appearance or possibility of universality; it is a form into which the world can be poured. Yet this process, we have noted, requires that any entering thus accept the terms of this enfoldment. The specific line here, insofar as it bears on Ellul’s concept of Technique, is that this process and the metaphysics of inscriptions, as we have called it, can be seen to underlie many of the characteristic features of Technique.

We may consider, then, for instance, how Ellul describes traditional technics. One characteristic he notes is that they are spatiotemporally limited; that is, not only local but also slow to spread. The whole inheres in the particularity of a given context:

Just as one society is not interchangeable with another, so technique remained enclosed in its proper framework; no more would it become universal than the society in which it was embedded. … In the past, in other words, technique was not objective, but subjective in relation to its own culture.¹⁰² Ellul, p. 69.

Here Ellul’s language is particularly pertinent: “no more would it become universal than the society in which it was embedded.” We have argued, after all, that a movement akin to this is precisely that which gives the particularity of mediating inscriptions its appearance of universality. The virtual reality thereby constituted is an environment of paper, one which can be produced in like form anywhere on the planet—displaced, reproduced, disseminated, etc. This provides for an apparent universality in which the technical universe overcomes the spatial limitations of its traditional forms; now, assuming some shared basis in education or drill, there can be a continuous environment between even the most far-flung places.

Ellul notes, furthermore, that this limitation to locality was not only spatial but also temporal:

… technique was an intrinsic part of civilisation. … It was part of a whole, part of the determinate society, and it developed as a function of the whole and shared its fate.¹⁰³ Ellul, p. 69.

We can compare this to the technical universe in which is enfolded the furthest reaches in terms of time as much as space. Practical knowledge, as we have outlined it already, is that which is implicit only in behaviour and behavioural dispositions; hence it necessarily dies with the individual in whom it is embodied. Transfer here requires a continuity of apprenticeship, a living line in which the form of knowledge is passed by the mirroring of two bodies in practice of a given activity. Technical knowledge, in contrast, can be transmitted across distances in time and space and thus preserved so long as communication remains possible.

There is a further aspect to be noted of spatiality, and that is the particularity of traditional technics as embedded in a complex system co-constituted by the individual and their environment. These technics were those of practical knowledge, thus were not expressly verbalised but rather were forms passed down by way of apprenticeship and imitation. This context meant that the evolution of traditional technics proceeded very differently to that of modern Technique:

The improvement of tools, essentially the result of the practice of a personal art, came about in a completely pragmatic way.¹⁰⁴ Ellul, p. 68.

We can understand, in other words, that traditional technics proceeded by way of the mastering of a tool by an individual and then an improvement in line with this. Whatever improvements here proved successful were adopted not by way of disseminated doctrine but diffused softly by way of imitation outward from the individual that developed them. This tended to efface the individual notion of invention and rather gave rise to the appearance of organic growth, hence Ellul says:

These activities depended more on private initiative, short-lived manifestations or ephemeral traditions, than on a persevering technical will and rational improvements.¹⁰⁵ Ellul, p. 65.

We may more or less accept this statement, but with the proviso that we understand this particular perspective to be more apparent than actual; it is perhaps true that there was neither a “persevering technical will” nor “rational improvements”—and yet we cannot say there was no perseverance or improvement. Instead we can see that whatever improvements were lasting would have been adopted and thus melted into the total ensemble of a culture rather than being conceived of consciously as improvements. This meant that there was a more organic form of technical evolution as against the conscious progress which characterises modern Technique.

Closely related to this point, Ellul draws a specific contrast between two types of diversity. The first is that of the local and practical forms discussed here under the label of traditional technics: “diversity resulted not from various experimental attempts on the part of various peoples, but from the fact that technique was always embedded in a particular culture.”¹⁰⁶ Ellul, p. 70. Similarly, and here the essential part for our purposes:

The consequence was an extreme local diversity of techniques for attaining the same result. No comparison or competition existed yet between these different systems; the formulation: “The one best way in the world” had not yet been made. It was a question of the “best way” in a given locality.¹⁰⁷ Ellul, p. 70.

We may interpret this fruitfully in light of our study of inscriptions as enabling knowledge to be rendered explicit and then accumulated at a single point; one cannot speak of the “best way in the world” unless the various alternatives can be assembled at a single point and thus subjected to calculations to make this determination. Prior to that the limitation of locality reigned; it is here we see an essential aspect of modern Technique to which we will now turn.

3.1. Multiplicity and collapse#

Here we will begin with the example of a swordsmith, which Ellul raises early in La Technique and then returns to later in a slightly different form. Our aim here is to show how a specific aspect in the movement of Technique—that which we call ‘multiplicity and collapse’—is fundamentally dependent on the place of mediating inscriptions. We will begin with the first instance in which Ellul raises the example of the swordsmith:

When Andre Leroi-Gourhan tabulates the efficiency of Zulu swords and arrows in terms of the most up-to-date knowledge of weaponry, he is doing work that is obviously different from that of the swordsmith of Bechuanaland who created the form of the sword. The swordsmith’s choice of form was unconscious and spontaneous; although it can now be justified by numerical calculations, such calculations had no place whatever in the technical operation he performed.¹⁰⁸ Ellul, p. 20.

If we leave aside for the moment that Leroi-Gourhan is not a swordsmith but a scholar, we see the basic comparison between the creative process in traditional technics and that of Technique. The Bechuanaland swordsmith proceeded by way of an immediate creativity in which his craft was the result of a technical operation, yes, but one which applied directly to the sword itself taken in its full immediacy; it was, moreover, a process to which tabulation and concept of efficiency were foreign. We can better understand this as proceeding by way of the reflective application of taste and its refinement in the course of long practice by a single individual. The knowledge which is ultimately embedded in the sword—that which Leroi-Gourhan later catalogues, which he subjects to calculations—this knowledge is embodied in the Bechuanaland swordsmith and is expressed only in the practice of his craft: it moves directly from embodied to embedded, that is, from the craftsman to the sword.

While this relation may be mediated by the tools, these are taken as technics in-hand; the swordsmith’s intent flows through them into the object to which his attention is directed. The tools are viewed immediately only to the extent that these relate to the task at hand, that is, they are secondary elements of the ensemble. Throughout the object itself is the immediate centre of the process. This process is judged by the swordsmith’s own taste, which is shaped by the skill acquired over a lifetime—likely initiated by way apprenticeship, yet with long years of individual practice in the meantime. Those that master the swordsmith’s craft know the materials necessary, how these must be treated, the signs along the way, when the metal is ready, etc. These are known immediately by sight, by touch, perhaps even by taste; it is a process in which the craftsman is intimately familiar with the object of their creative efforts and reacts to its immediacy in the practice of their craft. The design of the object is thus filled out in the process of its creation, with the sword that emerges being a collaboration between the smith and their material. We find that the final object emerges thus from this relationship, can be found only as instantiated here; hence Ellul says that the “choice of form was unconscious and spontaneous.”¹⁰⁹ Ellul, p. 20.

Similarly, Ellul returns to the example of a sword later but now not that of Bechuanaland; yet the point made here remains much the same:

The great sword used by Swiss soldiers in the sixteenth century had at least nine different forms (hooked, racked, double-headed, hexagonal blades, blades shaped like a fleur-de-lis, grooved, etc.). This diversity was evidently due to various modes of fabrication peculiar to the smiths; it cannot be explained as a manifestation of the technical inquiry.¹¹⁰ Ellul, p. 72.

This is the line which we have detailed in the previous paragraph, that there was the specificity of a craftsman isolated in immediacy with the object and an ensemble directed towards this end; it was from this particular complex of material and individual that the form ultimately emerged. This gave rise to the diversity of form which Leroi-Gourhan tabulated and that one may see of Swiss great swords in a museum. The whole was the organic growth of varied particulars, not an intentional experimentation of form; these were not prototypes tending towards the creation of some single standard, each was a finished object in itself. Of course, this is not to say there was not variation in designs nor that improvements were not often enough capitalised upon more broadly.

Yet we find that the process by which this variation emerged fundamentally differs between traditional technics and Technique:

The modifications of a given type were not the outcome of calculation or of an exclusively technical will. They resulted from aesthetic considerations. It is important to emphasise that technical operations, like the instruments themselves, almost always depended on aesthetic preoccupations. It was impossible to conceive of a tool that was not beautiful.¹¹¹ Ellul, p. 72.

Of course, here we may be struck by the final sentence and wonder somewhat whether this is really necessarily so; surely such aesthetic considerations were not the most pressing interest for every ancient swordsmith—and what of those involved in even less glamorous trades? Yet we may take this reference to aesthetics to mean something similar yet subtly, albeit significantly, different: it was impossible to conceive of a tool that was not as it ought to be. We may thus read ‘beautiful’ as corresponding to the exercise of taste, and that this is a sense of properness or fitness of form. While there are various definitions of beauty, a topic we will here avoid, we may say that there operates something akin to this aesthetic sense in the practice of a craftsman. Each action they make entails a process of reflexive feedback in that each strike of the hammer, say, is done and then its effect registered; this continues, along the entire process of creative activity, until the object’s final form is that which is as it ought to be. This is the determining factor throughout its production.

Similarly, improvements were an organic offshoot of this process of immediacy:

The improvement of tools, essentially the result of the practice of a personal art, came about in a completely pragmatic way.¹¹² Ellul, p. 68.

Ellul describes a situation in which the primary emphasis was on the skill with which a tool was used, that improvements to the tool itself emerged out of this process of mastery; it was not a tool considered abstractly that was the subject of improvements but rather these developments were always conditioned by the concrete activity of individuals. Of course, he allows:

There is … no doubt that the two phenomena [i.e., the improvement of skill and of the tool] do interpenetrate. But traditionally the accent was on the human being who used the tool and not the tool he used.¹¹³ Ellul, p. 67.

This is part of a more general line which we will explore later, but for now it is sufficient to note that traditional technics were throughout concerned with the tools and technical operations in their human and social contexts; it was that these were always embedded in a particular scenario and evaluated in that context. There was no sense of an abstract technics standing outside of a specific point or person. The craft was in the craftsman, the tool an extension of its user, and so on; all of this was interwoven and separable only in the abstract. Thus, of the relation between traditional technics and Technique, Ellul notes: “The search is no longer personal, experimental, and workmanlike; it is abstract, mathematical, and industrial.”¹¹⁴ Ellul, p. 74. What does Ellul mean by this, and how does this historical difference arise?

We can sketch the outlines of an answer here by comparing the above process in its immediacy with that of Leroi-Gourhan, in which the efficiency of various sword forms was tabulated and analysed according to the best available information; it is thus that we have here first a multiplicity. There was, in the process of traditional technics, only the particular object at hand and the way in which it was worked on and through by the craftsman. Technique, in contrast, entails as an essential feature this multiplicity. Ellul describes this as resulting from the intervention of reason and consciousness into the process of traditional technics:

Man becomes aware that it is possible to find new and different means. Reason upsets pragmatic traditions and creates new operational methods and new tools; it examines rationally the possibilities of more extensive and less rigid experimentation. Reason in these ways multiplies technical operations to a high degree of diversity.¹¹⁵ Ellul, p. 20–21.

Consciousness shows clearly, and to everybody, the advantages of technique and what it can accomplish. The technician takes stock of alternative possibilities. The immediate result is that he seeks to apply the new methods in fields which traditionally had been left to chance, pragmatism, and instinct.¹¹⁶ Ellul, p. 21.

Of course, we might well ask here, as so often, what precisely is meant by reason? An essential point to note here is that made thus by Ellul: “Reason makes it possible to produce objects in terms of certain features, certain abstract requirements; and this in turn leads, not to the imitation of nature, but to the ways of technique.”¹¹⁷ Ellul, p. 20. We have noted already that inscription allows for the gathering of a variety of forms, and yet by way of imagination forms can also be generated “in terms of certain features, certain abstract requirements.” These alternatives, usually inspired by natural or traditional forms, are then refined and abstracted along the way. We can consider, for instance, the early ancestor of what would become the battery—the Voltaic pile, which Volta called an “artificial electric organ, … which being the bottom the same as the natural organ of the torpedo [i.e., the common electric eel], resembles it also in its form.”¹¹⁸ Volta in Otis, Networking, p. 19. Since then, however, we can note that the essential elements of the battery have become progressively abstracted from this initial source of inspiration.

This is an important point, that there is an interplay between the gathering of alternatives by way of inscription and the imaginative generation of the same. The essential point remains in either case the notion that there is always the possibility of another way which something may done, even a number of alternatives, and that this recognition of multiplicity demands some way of determining the best option. We can see the essential aspect, therefore, is that reason opens up traditional technics to a critical perspective which can incorporate, generate, consider, and refine alternatives:

The twofold intervention of reason and consciousness in the technical world, which produces the technical phenomenon, can be described as the quest of the one best means in every field. And this “one best means” is, in fact, the technical means. It is the aggregate of these means that produces technical civilisation.¹¹⁹ Ellul, p. 21.

If we take Ellul’s meaning here quite strictly, we might take up a thought experiment: suppose that a society dominated by traditional technics were to take up Technique; they take their extant technics and subject these to the intervention of reason and consciousness, per Ellul’s description above—and we might suppose that from this they determine that all technical methods are inferior, that is, are less efficient. What is this society now: technical or traditional? If we take Ellul’s argument at face value, then they have clearly by carrying out this process become a technical civilisation. This seems strange, however, in that it would seem nothing has changed between the two.

Let us further examine the process here—for instance, how exactly do they compare their extant technics to alternatives, and what are these alternatives? Ellul explains that traditional technics are isolated and embedded in their particular societies, that the way of doing things tends to remain unconscious and customary. If there is to be a comparison, therefore, this must be somehow brought into a form in which it can be compared. This would also require, moreover, that a variety of alternatives also be brought into a similar form; it is only thus that they could be compared. Of course, such technics are local and spatially distributed. We can here see how our treatment of inscriptions provides one way in which this might be possible, as precisely was the case in our earlier mentioned example of Leroi-Gourhan: he undertook a process of tabulating variation, rendering this in a form which can be subject to calculation and evaluation. This entails the presentation of a multiplicity, and this is the essential step in the movement of Technique wherein it differs from traditional technics. There is, in traditional technics, for each particular context, only the way of doing things; there is the way things are done, and it is altered or improved organically by a process of pragmatic evolution and imitation. If a development is sufficiently valuable, this may be copied and disseminated; yet the process of doing so will hardly be conscious or rational.

The process of development for Technique, in contrast, involves the generation of a multiplicity which is then collapsed into the “one best way.” Of course, the notion that there is, in fact, a “one best way” is itself something of a mystification. This can be seen instead as a rubberstamp which is placed upon the necessity of an eventual collapse if the multiplicity as potential is ever to be actualised. We may look at this the other way around from Ellul’s preferred perspective. Where Ellul places the emphasis on efficiency as a criterion of choice and the “one best way” as the aim, we may instead focus on the multiplicity which necessarily precedes this and, indeed, which requires the selection to be made according to some criterion. The fact of a “one best way” is created in its enactment on this basis. There could be no question of such a choice from the perspective of traditional technics—then how does this new circumstance come about and what does it mean?

A machine that has been drawn is like an ideal representation of it, but in a material that costs little and is easier to handle than iron or steel. … If everything is first well thought out, and the essential dimensions determined by calculations or experience, the plan of a machine or installation of machines can be quickly put on paper and the whole thing as well as the detail can then most conveniently be submitted to the severest criticism … If at first there is doubt as to which of various possible arrangements is the most desirable then they are all sketched, compared with one another and the most suitable can easily be chosen.¹²⁰ Booker, p. 187.

Here we see that the comparison entails the representation of a multiplicity as inscriptions, then these are subjected to calculation whereby the “one best way” is determined. This is then the form which is ultimately realised, whether in terms of production or enactment; in either case an inscription details the form which is imposed. We can see this as much in the casting of a mould as the enactment of a more abstract method—for instance, a type of medication or therapeutic treatment for depression.

If we take the earlier example of scientific management, this is particularly apparent: a multiplicity represented as inscriptions are tested as to their efficiency. This efficiency is then tabulated and the results of the time study provide the information upon which a decision is made as to the “one best way”—i.e., the most efficient of those catalogued in the study. The calculation of this singular way, however, is not self-executing; it still requires that this allocentric form then be somehow imposed.

3.2. Imposition and the allocentric mode#

The efficiency promised by this sorting of a multiplicity to select the “one best way” is, of course, only theoretical until it is imposed in actuality. Yet where this concerns individuals then it cannot occur as simply as pressing a mould; it requires the enlistment of their individual interests. The relevant control here, in other words, is self-control—only that this is mediated by technical means, for instance, as how the piece-rate system allows for the efficiency of an individual to be calculated and compared with their estimated output. They are thus compelled to impose the form upon themselves, taking themselves as seen from an external perspective and conforming to this perception. The form, moreover, is imposed similarly. We can see this as an inversion of the order associated with practical knowledge, as outlined by Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov in his treatment of the relation between thought and activity:

… strictly speaking [as concerns this imposition], it is not the individual who operates with the ideal image but the dogmatised image that acts in and through the individual. Here it is not the ideal image that is a real function of the individual but, on the contrary, the individual who is a function of the image, which dominates his mind and will as an externally given formal scheme, as an estranged image, as a fetish, as a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.¹²¹ Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, p. 164.

We might here return to the earlier example of a society that subject their traditional technics to the inquiry outlined by Ellul as characteristic of Technique— this group, we are supposing, determine that their extant forms are, as it turns out, the most efficient. What happens here? We may thus see that the form which emerges from this process is not the same as that which enters it, where the initial form was embodied in the particular individuals taken as a sample of the extant technics of this society; that which emerges is “an externally given formal scheme, as an estranged image, as a fetish, as a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.”¹²² Ilyenkov, p. 164.

Of our hypothetical society, therefore, we may see here a problem with the thought experiment as it has been conceived thus far. The traditional technics are the organic development of individuals that have grown by imitation and apprenticeship; it is thus that they have developed their crafts and conduct as a part of the natural evolution of a whole culture. Yet this is not a monolithic set, there is a necessary variation between individuals according to the source of their learning and even the specific character of each. The technics which operates here emerges immediate from the individual; it is an internal form in the sense of its embodied and organic origin as practical knowledge. The process which we have described, however, requires that these traditional technics be represented alike in the form of inscriptions; it is only thus that the multiplicity can be gathered at a single point and compared for the purpose of determining the “one best way.” Of course, what emerges here is precisely that: the one best way. This entails a universality and standardisation which was not present in the society prior to this process. Here one might complain that our thought experiment has been a red herring, that it was poorly formulated and so can claim nothing of the sort. This is perhaps so yet it does draw our attention to something important in the process which Ellul emphasises; something which from our perspective is otherwise obscure. The transformation effected by Technique emerges during this process of multiplicity and collapse by virtue of the very medium—that is, inscription—which makes this rationalisation possible. This process requires that a multiplicity be gathered for comparison and calculation, whereby the necessity of inscription transforms the nature of what results.

We may return here to the above excerpt, that these are “an externally given formal scheme, … an estranged image, … a fetish, … a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.¹²³ Ilyenkov, p. 164. ” This can be analysed in terms of our earlier treatment of inscription. The scheme is externally given, of course, because it is external; it arises not from within, as the traditional technics of the swordsmith in our earlier example, but rather from an inscription selected as the best out of a multiplicity of like representations. These are necessarily externalised in order to be subjected to this process, that only thus can they be gathered and compared. This is an estranged image, moreover, because it entails the rendering explicit of what was implicit—that is, the conversion of practical knowledge to technical knowledge; it requires this be lifted from its context, displaced from its origin, and reappropriated elsewhere. The final point of interest here is the last description: “a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.” Here two important pieces are interwoven. These are unarguable rules because they have been decided elsewhere, the individual is limited to enacting the “one best way” which has already been determined. We can likewise specify what is meant by “coming … from somewhere out of the blue”—for this structure emerges from a centre of calculation; it is there that the process we have described takes place, thus that they arrive from afar as an estranged image selected by some external authority.

This external authority, however, need not be some faraway figure; it is possible for the centre of calculation to be the individual themselves albeit operating in the allocentric mode. The point is that they view themselves from the external perspective, that there is a leap from allocentric to egocentric. Here we are not dealing with the blunt imposition of an external form, not the whip of slavedriver but the internalisation of an external schema to which the individual seeks conform. This is apparent, for example, even in clock time—which Ellul took as a paradigmatic instance of Technique. As Wilkinson says of Technique in the translator’s introduction to La Technique:

[It] forces all sociological phenomena to submit to the clock, for Ellul the most characteristic of all modern technical instruments. The substitution of the tempus mortuum of the mechanical clock for the biological and psychological time “natural” to man is in itself sufficient to suppress all the traditional rhythms of human life in favor of the mechanical.¹²⁴ Wilkinson in Ellul, p. xvi.

This is much the same as the relation between traditional technics and Technique that we have been discussing thus far, in which an external form is imposed which is foreign to the organic lifeworld. Of course, this will obviously occur by a process of entrainment to be more and more internalised until ultimately the individual becomes adapted to the external schema. The clock and schedule are foreign to those that have never known it in their material culture; yet for those of us that are born into a world in which this is present, it becomes as a second nature. We see here something much like that which Simondon notes for traditional technics: “In the farmer, the shepherd, the miner, and the sailor, human nature doubles as a second nature which is like an ancestral pact with an element or a region.”¹²⁵ Simondon, p. 107. We find, therefore, once again, that the initiation into the technical universe as constituted by scheduling and clock time is not truly universal but rather is an open-ended particular which promises, at least in appearance, a possible universality.

We can see, for instance, that the world of traditional technics may be rendered in clock time and arrayed in an allocentric temporal system; it may be then be moved about by any that would wish to and in this would be much more flexible than the practical knowledge which can only be acquired over a long process of initiation. Taking the time of day, for instance, we may note that Bedouin are capable of determining with a high degree of accuracy the time of day based merely on the angle of their shadows in the sun. They are familiar with this based on the course of their lifetime under such circumstances, during which time they also acquire the capacity to take into account not only the daily movement of the sun but also its seasonal variation. These capacities can be contrasted with individuals, perhaps like ourselves, that would struggle to determine the time based on the same information. The fact is, of course, that we do not have the same information; it is that the Umwelt of the Bedouin is expanded by their practical knowledge. Yet I can readily make up for this deficit so long as I have been initiated into the technical universe, that is, I can understand clock time and coordinate my movement within a schedule thus construed. The difference is that the Bedouin looks to their shadow, whereas I look to the clock—but, one may well ask, is there really any difference here? In either case time is mediated by way of a representation, either a shadow or an inscription; so does the latter case really differ?

One way of differentiating the two could be in terms of discontinuous as against continuous measurements of time, or that the Bedouin time-reckoning is less accurate; yet there is another fact here missing. The idea of ‘telling the time’ is very different between the two contexts. We may read into the Bedouin context the idea that one would give a numerical response as to what the time is, whereas we cannot suppose that this was at all the situation in terms of traditional time reckoning. Supposing that our Bedouin were Muslims, for instance, then perhaps their time reckoning was not in the service of an allocentric order of time—e.g., that it is 2

—but rather that it is time for, say, noon prayers as determined by the position of the sun. This is thus a matter not so much of abstract time as concrete timing; it is subjective and egocentric, where the other entails locating oneself within time as chronological order. The information contained in the latter is one step further removed, as we may read the time and then use this to situate ourselves within an allocentric order: it is 2, for example, and therefore I need to leave for such and such so as to be there in thirty minutes. Here we find the temporal relations are allocentric and, moreover, relations internal to the estranged image; it is only then that, having situated ourselves within this allocentric order, we can coordinate ourselves within the framework. The clock, or the shadow for the Bedouin operating within clock time, operates as a ‘you are here’ but for the temporal aspect of allocentric order. This allows us entry into the structure by which, to the extent we are induced or otherwise conform, “the individual … is a function of the image, [which] dominates his mind and will as an externally given formal scheme.”¹²⁶ Ilyenkov, p. 164.

3.3. Ellul’s characterology of Technique#

Having dealt with the basic differences between traditional technics and Technique, we will now continue by focussing on the further characteristics of Technique that Ellul outlines. Our interest here, however, is not in the historical characteristics of technical progress but in the concrete essence of Technique itself. We will therefore leave aside the characteristic which Ellul designates as ‘the necessary linking together of techniques’ which deals with “the historical, necessary linking up of all the different techniques.”¹²⁷ Ellul, p. 111. This concerns not so much the essential nature of Technique as the ways in which it has played out and thus comprises a task different to our own; it is a historical analysis where ours is philosophical. The basic line here, however, also runs throughout the other characteristics which Ellul details, that it is essentially the historical effectiveness of Technique which has wrought a wide variety of effects that have directly and indirectly served to strengthen and further its specific mode of intervention:

Machine technique first appeared after 1750. The technical state of mind was first manifested in the application of the principles of science. … The flying shuttle of 1733 made a greater production of yarn necessary. But production was impossible without a suitable machine. The response to this dilemma was the invention of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves. But then yarn was produced in much greater quantities than could possibly be used by weavers. To solve this new problem, Cartwright manufactured his celebrated loom. In this series of events we see in its simplest form the interaction that accelerates the development of machines. 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.¹²⁸ Ellul, p. 112.

While the example here given by Ellul is mechanical, we may see much the same dynamic elsewhere in more abstract fields—political, economic, human, etc. There is a sense that Technique progresses precisely by creating a disturbance, then this provides the impetus for further technical progress; that this in turn creates further disturbances and so on. The disruption itself provides the fuel for further movement which only increases the opportunities for technical solutions; it is by this dialectic that Technique has grown historically.

Nevertheless, this historical case is not an argument which we will seek to make here; our intent is not to recapitulate the historical argument Ellul makes in La Technique. Our specific interest is not in the accidental history of technical manifestations but in the essence of the technical phenomenon: Technique. With this historical element left aside, then, there remain four aspects with which we will here deal: automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, and technical universalism. For these we will in turn first address Ellul’s claim and then examine each in light of our treatment of inscriptions. The final characteristic described by Ellul is the autonomy of Technique, and this we will address on its own in the section which follows these four.

3.3.1. Automatism#

“The one best way”: so runs the formula to which our technique corresponds. When everything has been measured and calculated mathematically so that the method which has been decided upon is satisfactory from the rational point of view, and when, from the practical point of view, the method is manifestly the most efficient of all those hitherto employed or those in competition with it, then the technical movement becomes self-directing. I call the process automatism.¹²⁹ Ellul, p. 80.

The first characteristic of Technique with which Ellul deals is that of automatism, as described above it is the apparent tendency of the technical phenomenon to take on a life of its own. This has been criticised by those who see this perspective as neglecting the role played by humans in directing the path of technical progress. Ritzer, for instance, responds thus to the following excerpt in Ellul:

Technique itself, ipso factor and without indulgence or possible discussion, selects among the means to be employed. The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice.¹³⁰ Ellul, p. 80.

Ritzer says, in response, that this is “almost the definition, if not a caricature, of reification where a human creation—technique—is accorded a reality of its own, is endowed with the ability to act.”¹³¹ Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, Jacques Ellul and the technological society in the 21st century p. 42. He continues noting Ellul’s further claims that “the human agent who created and empowers the technique is reduced to insignificance” and the “absolute independence [of Technique] from, and refusal to tolerate, moral judgments.”¹³² Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, p. 42. These are fair criticisms and require of Ellul a response, and here Ritzer notes that in Ellul “humans are accorded some small degree of power and independence.”¹³³ Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, p. 42. This is hardly a response, of course, and rather operates more to soften the criticism. Indeed, we find that Ellul does have a tendency to overstate his claims at some points; then to soften these later. This is certainly the case for automatism, and we might here examine Ellul’s point in more detail; and more so, in light of our treatment of inscriptions.

An essential point is found immediately following Ellul’s description of technical automatism, which we have here quoted at the outset, and just before the paragraph which Ritzer draws from as a “caricature … of reification.” Here we find Ellul providing a particularly interesting analogy:

There is no personal choice, in respect to magnitude, between, say, 3 and 4; 4 is greater than 3; this is a fact which has no personal reference. No one can change it or assert the contrary or personally escape it. Similarly, there is no choice between two technical methods. One of them asserts itself inescapably: its results are calculated, measured, obvious, and indisputable.¹³⁴ Ellul, p. 80.

We have just, in the prior section on multiplicity and collapse, dealt with the process by which Technique selects between alternatives; it does so first by representing these as inscriptions. Here we are dealing now with the criteria by which this decision is made, and we find that inscriptions are also involved here to the extent that this comparison of alternatives is “calculated, measured, obvious, and indisputable.”¹³⁵ Ellul, p. 80 Yet Ellul specifically invokes the comparison of numbers, say, between three and four; it is this analogy which is again echoed in the emphasis on calculated, measured, etc. The solidity of a numerical comparison has been well emphasised by Burke in his discussion of aesthetic taste:

… the great difference between tastes [occurs] when men come to compare the excess or diminution of things which are judged by degree and not by measure. Nor is it easy, when such a difference arises, to settle the point, if the excess or diminution be not glaring. If we differ in opinion about two quantities, we can have recourse to a common measure, which may decide the question with the utmost exactness; and this, I take it, is what gives mathematical knowledge a greater certainty than any other.¹³⁶ Burke, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, p. 21.

There is, therefore, a sense in which a comparison calculated and presented as an inscription comes with the solidity of an objective fact. One cannot, Ellul correctly notes, “change or assert the contrary” when it comes to the relative magnitude of two numbers as concerns a common measure—say, the relative efficiency of two options.

We can see here, moreover, the role to which humans are relegated: “a device for recording the effects and results obtained by various techniques.”¹³⁷ Ellul, p. 80. Indeed, here we see a softening of Ellul’s initial line—that in which he states “let no one say that man is the agent of technical progress”—for he then specifies:

He does not make a choice of complex and, in some way, human motives. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives the maximum efficiency. But this is not a choice. A machine could effect the same operation.¹³⁸ Ellul, p. 80.

There is a sense here that Ellul has in mind a more subtle distinction than simply excluding humanity from the loop by which technical progress proceeds; it is rather that to the extent we are involved, that our participation is somehow less than human. Indeed, he says as much earlier on: “To obey a multiplicity of motives and not reason alone seems to be an important keynote of man.”¹³⁹ Ellul, p. 73. There is, therefore, a sense in which human beings are limited to a somehow mechanical role when it comes technical progress.

This is the case for the mathematical comparison with which we begun this slight digression. The faculty upon which such a comparison relies is the bluntest judgment of lesser or greater than; that is, it is a purely mechanical exercise. Ellul is quite correct to say that this could be done by a machine, there is nothing human in the pure function of evaluating relative magnitude. There is no need for imagination, and only the barest demand in terms of sensibility and judgment; it is still a human function, no doubt, but one which represents a diminishment of human possibility. Here we find that the judgment is reduced to a mechanical exercise—and how does this happen? For one, the relation which is to be judged is materially present—hence, ‘obvious’ and ‘indisputable’—it is found in the world, as between two boxes in a spreadsheet. This is, in other words, an allocentric relation; it need not touch the individual but for the necessity of interpretation. If this element interpretation could be somehow done away with, then Ellul is correct: a machine would suffice for this task.

The situation viewed at the point of decision, however, obscures the possibility of agency prior. This is a point emphasised by Latour, who focuses on the way in which inscriptions are mobilised in agonistic encounters so as to sway allies to one’s side.¹⁴⁰ Latour, p. 5. We can see, in other words, that one may well be unable to alter the numerical comparison between two measures; yet we may offer a third measure or otherwise table an alternative. Supposing, for instance, that a technical possibility is presented as the most efficient option according to some study which has been carried out by a consulting agency. We may not be able to deny the numbers themselves, but it is possible to either suggest another comparison or even present an alternative set of information. We might well conduct our own study and seek to present the relative efficiency of options in a different light. This places the possibility of human agency prior to the point with which Ellul is concerned. Of course, this requires certain things of any that would dispute the direction of technical progress:

Although in principle any interpretation can be opposed to any text and image,* in practice* this is far from being the case; the cost of dissenting increases with each new collection, each new labelling, cach new redrawing.¹⁴¹ Latour, p. 17.

This is a limit, in particular, given the immense cost of action at a technical scale. Today there are factors of efficiency which would intervene here, as the cost of a further study must itself be factored into the decision-making process. The larger the ship, in other words, the more difficult it will be to turn. There is thus an inertia to technical progress which resists hunches and prefers to rely on known-knowns. This is especially the case where there are incentives which tend against that, as noted by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”¹⁴² Sinclair in Ratcliffe, Oxford essential quotations.

3.3.2. Self-augmentation#

The printing press does not add anything to the mind, to the scientific method, to the brain. It simply conserves and spreads everything no matter how wrong, strange or wild. It makes everything mobile but this mobility is not offset by adulteration. The new scientists, the new clerics, the new merchants and the new princes, described by Eisenstein, are no different from the old ones, but they now look at new material that keeps track of numerous places and times. No matter how inaccurate these traces might be at first, they will all become accurate just as a consequence of more mobilization and more immutability. A mechanism is invented to irreversibly capture accuracy.¹⁴³ Latour, p. 11–12.

Here we find Latour, speaking of Eisenstein’s argument in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, describing the impact of cascading inscriptions in a way precisely like Ellul’s first aspect of the self-augmentation of Technique: “What is decisive is this anonymous accretion of conditions for the leap ahead.”¹⁴⁴ Ellul, p. 86. Similarly, Ellul speaks of the “accretion of manifold minute details, all tending to perfect the ensemble”—and here argues that this is more decisive than the intervention of any individual. We can recall here Eisenstein’s treatment of Tycho Brahe: though heralded as the last of the naked-eye astronomers, we may well call him among the first of those that saw further by virtue of the technical universe. This is not to take away from Brahe’s achievement, of course; we need not go as far as Ellul in saying that “at this stage of evolution, whoever attacked the problem would find a solution.”¹⁴⁵ Ellul, p. 86. Yet we may nonetheless see the way in which, as Ellul describes, the accumulation and refinement of the technical universe is an essential element in Technique; and moreover, that this reduces the importance of individualised contributions. Instead, the essential aspect is this “collective, anonymous research.”¹⁴⁶ Ellul, p. 86. This is the first aspect which Ellul deals with under the label of the self-augmentation of Technique.

Secondly, Ellul refers to the way in which “when a new technical form appears, it makes possible and conditions a number of others.” He continues:

In the same way, once a technical procedure has been discovered, it is applicable in many fields other than the one for which it was primarily invented. The techniques of “operational research,” for example, were devised to help make certain military decisions. But it was immediately noted that they could be applied wherever any decision had to be made. As Baraché, a specialist in these techniques, says: “The nature of the problems themselves was secondary … the methods of approach and the techniques employed proved to have a general scope.”¹⁴⁷ Ellul, p. 87–88.

We can see in this an aspect of the decontextualisation noted by Goody, that the set of rules which constitute a method may be represented as inscription; it is this that allows their displacement and that they might find themselves present and applied wherever a space fits their shape. This is, of course, entirely contrary to the closed world of traditional technics, that now the technical universe allows for a unity of influence between even the most far-flung places and fields.

Ellul further provides two laws for the self-augmentation of Technique:

1. In a given civilisation, technical progress is irreversible.

2. Technical progress tends to act … according to a geometric progression.¹⁴⁸ Ellul, p. 89.

These two can be traced, at least in part, to the aspects of inscription which we have already covered in this section. The use of inscriptions, essentially as aided by the printing press, can be seen to constitute a “mechanism … to irreversibly capture accuracy.”¹⁴⁹ Latour, p. 12. This allows for the irreversibility of technical progress, that it cannot be lost with the death of any individual or small set thereof. And the second, that the whole proceeds at a pace not according to a linear but a geometric progression; it is that, noted above, each step can not only be conserved but also echo throughout the technical universe and engender further advances. Ellul can be seen to specify in line with this understanding:

A technical discovery has repercussions and entails progress in several branches of technique and not merely in one. Moreover, techniques combine with one another, and the more given techniques there are to be combined, the more combinations are possible. Thus, almost without deliberate will, by a simple combination of new data, incessant discoveries take place everywhere; and whole fields are opened up to technique because of the meeting of several currents.¹⁵⁰ Ellul, p. 91.

The only point at which such a confluence can take place, of course, is the technical universe as constituted by inscriptions; it is this which binds Technique into a whole which can be fruitfully seen in line with Ellul’s characteristic of ‘self-augmentation.’

There needs to be a point at which various fields can meet somehow in a form akin and, moreover, one which is not bound to any specific locale. This cannot be within any single individual, and can only be constituted by the cascading inscriptions which constitute the technical universe; as Ellul notes:

The bond that unites the fragmentary actions and disjointedness of individuals, co-ordinating and systematising their work, is no longer a human one, but the internal laws of technique. The human hand no longer spans the complex of means, nor does the human brain synthesise man’s acts. Only the intrinsic monism of technique assures cohesion between human means and acts. Technique reigns alone, a blind force and more clear-sighted than the best human intelligence.¹⁵¹ Ellul, p. 93–94.

There is throughout La Technique an emphasis on this inversion of the proper relation between humanity and its creation, that there has been a role reversal in which human beings are now mere appendages to the machinic consciousness it has summoned. This is what Ellul means by self-augmentation, and by the ‘self’ here he means the ‘intrinsic monism’ of Technique—which is the next characteristic we will address.

Before doing so, however, Ellul’s final remarks in this section are well worth quoting in full and commenting on at some length. Indeed, we may take as a preface to our next section a paragraph which we have already quoted at the very outset:

This phenomenon of self-augmentation gives technique a strangely harsh aspect. It resembles nothing other than itself. Whatever the domain to which it is applied, man or God, technique simply is; it undergoes no modifications in the movement which is its being and essence. It is the only locus where form and being are identical. It is only form, but everything conforms to it. Here technique assumes the particular characteristics which make it a thing apart. A precise and well-defined boundary surrounds it: there is that which is technique, and there is everything else, which is not. Whoever passes this boundary and enters into technique is constrained to adopt its characteristics. Technique modifies whatever it touches, but is itself untouchable. Nothing in nature, or in social or human life, is comparable with it. The intelligence of art or war comes nowhere near that of technique, no more than does the industry of art or bees. A hybrid but sterile being, and capable of self-generation, technique traces its own limits and fashions its own image.¹⁵² Ellul, p. 94.

Standing as it is, this paragraph strikes one as impressive if a little vague. Yet there is a sense that Ellul’s comments are not entirely groundless, that in the cases which he outlines at length in La Technique there is something needing recognition which unites this apparent diversity. We have in this paper sought to address what this ‘something’ is by way of a study of inscriptions, and by noting the way in which this mediation gives rise to what we have called the technical universe. Here we find a candidate which fits well with the account of Technique that Ellul gives in the above paragraph. We have noted, for instance, that the technical universe is a particularity that pretends to universality by virtue of its being open-ended; yet that this universality requires that whatever would enter conform to the particular metaphysics of inscription. This is almost identical to what Ellul here describes, for instance: “Whoever passes this boundary and enters into technique is constrained to adopt its characteristics.”¹⁵³ Ellul, p. 94.

3.3.3. Monism#

The technical phenomenon, embracing all the separate techniques, forms a whole. This monism of technique was already obvious to us when we determined, on the basis of the evidence, that the technical phenomenon presents, everywhere and essentially, the same characteristics. It is useless to look for differentiations. They do exist, but only secondarily. The common features of the technical phenomenon are so sharply drawn that it is easy to discern that which is the technical phenomenon and that which is not. The difficulties experienced in the study of technique arise partly from the method to be used and partly from terminology. They do not arise from the phenomenon itself, which is eminently simple to fix.¹⁵⁴ Ellul, p. 94–95.

Here Ellul broaches a fundamental philosophical question, one which is well worth noting before we continue; namely, whether there are such things as ‘essences’ and, more importantly, how these are to be established. He notes correctly that this is an issue of method, yet is also significantly a matter concerning the fundamental philosophical position one takes on issues of language and its relation to reality, actuality, etc. This is not only a question of terminology, therefore, but of one’s understanding of the very possibilities of terminology—from which one will arrive at the method appropriate to this understanding, thereby the proper means of establishing any such essence. Of course, we must be careful here to remain within the bounds of our current topic; it is impossible for us to launch into too lengthy a digression on questions of fundamentals such as these. The task at hand is already large enough. Nevertheless, we must provide some sort of answer—and, indeed, our entire line in this paper already presupposes some implicit understanding as regards these fundamental questions.¹⁵⁵ After all, there is no such thing as an individual without a metaphysics, only relative degrees of self-consciousness as regarding these subtle structuring principles. We have proceeded here by way of a materialist treatment, though this is a word which is weighed down by many misinterpretations; ours is a materialism in the line of Latour and Ilyenkov—that is, an emphasis on material activity and culture. Hence we have sought the unity of Technique not in any idealist sense, not as a linguistic definition, but rather in the development of inscription and its place in social enterprise. We will cover this basic presupposition briefly in a moment.

We may note that Ellul, in his section on the characteristic of monism, seems to have an interest somewhat tangential to this basic question which he initially raises. His primary interest is to establish that there can be no separation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ when it comes to Technique—that the whole is inseparably intertwined, and that this is a fact concerning the essence of Technique:

In a sound evaluation of the problem, it ought never to be said: on the one side, technique; on the other, the abuse of it. There are different techniques which correspond to different necessities. But all techniques are inseparably united.¹⁵⁶ Ellul, p. 96.

Yet this is a different question, it seems, to that with which he begins his section on monism—that is, the question raised in the above quote with which we have begun ours. We wish, however, to see how the essence of Technique leads inevitably to the inseparability of positive and negative which Ellul outlines in the remainder of this section. He speaks, for instance, of the inability to foresee the remote repercussions of Technique—how, then, can we define Technique in such a way as to explain the phenomena which he here notes? Of course, that is precisely the purpose of this paper. We have here sought to investigate the basis of Technique in inscriptions and, in the present chapter, to examine the characteristics outlined by Ellul in light of this. Yet we may, before turning to the further claims made in this section on monism, briefly step back to consider the way in which we have sought here to define Technique—that is, in terms of inscription.

We may thus consider Ellul’s suggested method for communicating the essence of Technique: “To enable the reader to fully grasp the reality of this monism, it would be necessary to present every problem with all its implications and ramifications into other fields.”¹⁵⁷ Ellul, p. 111. Where Ellul suggests such an exhaustive method might be the only way of presenting the monistic unity of Technique, here we have sought to illuminate something much the same by another route; it is for this reason that we have pursued our treatment of inscriptions and then carried this into an examination of Technique. The idea throughout has been that inscriptions—and their corollary, the allocentric mode—constitute an essential aspect of the technical phenomenon. We have thus described how mediating inscriptions provide the basis for what we have called the technical universe, and that it is the fact of movement therein which constitutes the essential unity of Technique. This factor, moreover, is what differentiates traditional technics from modern Technique; it is this distinction which we have addressed most directly in the section on multiplicity and collapse. Since then we have continued by sketching, in line with our treatment of inscription, the various characteristics of Technique as given by Ellul in La Technique. This has brought us to the current aspect of monism.

Throughout we have ourselves presupposed something fundamental in taking this line with regard to Ellul’s work, for we have sought not a primarily mental explanation of Technique but instead one which emphasises the place of material culture. This is contrary to notions of Technique that would take it in an unreflective idealist sense, seeking in the concept itself some essence which operates like a phantom hand in human history. The paradigmatic case of that notion, of course, is that of Hegel’s Spirit—of which all human history was merely the unfolding en route to its final realisation. Another idea which can be treated similarly is that of Marx: Capital. Here, however, the method was not idealist but rather materialist, in Marx’s words, it was the “direct opposite” of Hegel:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.¹⁵⁸ Marx, Capital, p. 25.

And yet Marx’s method was nonetheless aimed at roughly the same end, for Spirit and Capital alike are taken as operating in human history—much the same as Ellul describes for Technique. These are world historical forces of which particular events are the result, that these three are each alike taken as a unity of movement in human affairs. They are, moreover, all taken as factors which in some way supersede individual agency and, indeed, create the context within which that agency can be exercised. As Marx put it, for instance: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”¹⁵⁹ Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, p. 10.

Of these two, Hegel and Marx, our treatment—and indeed, that of Ellul himself— is closer to Marx. The criticism of reification, as noted by Ritzer, gives us fair cause to avoid any plainly idealist definitions of Technique. We have instead sought the concrete essence of Technique in a material activity: namely, inscription. Here our fundamental method is indebted foremost to the Soviet theorist Evald Ilyenkov, for whom “we must not start from the ‘universal,’ but from the concept that expresses the real actual cause of a thing, its concrete essence.”¹⁶⁰ Ilyenkov, p. 161. This is an approach to definition that differs from, for instance, the rationalist which would seek to establish an equational response in which the aim is to define an equivalence between one term and a set: Technique is this plus that, etc. Instead, says Ilyenkov:

This definition describes the method of creation of a thing and thus gives the understanding of its immediate ‘cause’ and thus gives us the method for its mental reconstruction, gives us the opportunity to understand its remaining qualities.¹⁶¹ Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism, p. 161.

We have here sought a method along these lines, with the intention that by seeking the ontogenetic seed of Technique we might thereby be able to illuminate the qualities described by Ellul. The equational method, which we have contrasted here with that of Ilyenkov, can only move from term to term; it cannot find its way to the actuality whence practical knowledge proceeds and towards which activity thence tends:

The only bridge we can take from the term to the thing, from the abstract to the concrete and back, in order to establish a strict universal connection between these two elements, is described by Marx and Engels already in The German Ideology—it is the objective practical activity, objective being of things and people. Any purely theoretical act will not do here.¹⁶² Ilyenkov, p. 173.

This is the essence of our approach in this paper, that we may take inscriptions as a noun-form reflecting the ensemble of paper representations which constitute the technical universe; yet more importantly, and here the allocentric–egocentric relation is relevant, we may take inscription as the process whereby an embodied actuality is converted into an abstract reality—and moreover, the way in which this process is then reversed during the process of translation. These movements, more than anything else, constitute the unity of Technique; it is precisely these which we see as operating essentially in the procedure of multiplicity and collapse, for instance, which so characterises the technical phenomenon. Of course, in the present task, as Marx emphasises, “the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion.”¹⁶³ Marx, Capital, p. 24–25. Here we cannot claim to have completed this, nor that this paper will establish more than the conclusion that there is sufficient reason to investigate the peculiarity of inscriptions and the allocentric mode in their relation to Technique. This essay ought thus to be considered as providing a pointer and prolegomenon to future work on this particular topic.

We may at this point, before proceeding to the next characteristic, that of technical universalism, return to the topic of monism as Ellul himself has presented it in La Technique. Here, as we have noted, Ellul’s concern is foremost to establish the inseparability of positive and negative effects which follow the movement of Technique. He notes, for instance:

… man can never foresee the totality of consequences of a given technical action. History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of technique would have been. These effects exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and which represent something valuable and positive.¹⁶⁴ Ellul, p. 105.

Ellul offers as an example the now infamous insecticide, DDT—for which the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller had received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine:

It was announced originally that this insecticide was completely harmless for warm-blooded animals. Subsequently, D.D.T. was widely used. But it was noted in 1951 that D.D.T. in fatty solution (oily or otherwise) is actually a poison for warm-blooded animals and causes a whole complex of disturbances and diseases, in particular, rickets. This fatty solution may be produced entirely by accident, as when cows treated with this chemical produce milk containing D.D.T. Rickets has been detected in calves nourished with such milk. And several international medical congresses since 1956 have drawn attention to the grave danger to children.¹⁶⁵ Ellul, p. 106.

What is important here is that Technique somehow suffers a certain blindness, one which can be understood by examining the way in which it depends upon the technical universe and inscription. This will be dealt with more specifically and in detail later, but here we may illustrate how our line of argument provides a way of leading from the concrete essence of Technique through to its particular qualities.

We have noted already that the twofold movement upon which Technique depends is that of inscription and its translation, that this is the activity which mediate between the egocentric and allocentric modes; it is here that the peculiar blindness of Technique must be sought. The technical universe contains only that which has been placed there, and the limits of this enterprise are, from the perspective of one operating within this realm, the limits of existence; all that has not yet been enfolded into the allocentric representation does not exist from this point of view. Of course, there is always some awareness of further threads trailing off into the distance; yet the only solidity is that which has been translated from egocentric to allocentric and integrated into the technical universe. This is the basis upon which the decision to use DDT en masse was decided, whence we can see the ready possibility of error; the actuality of concrete interactions was not apparent beyond the bounds of this paper world. All that could be seen, the basis upon which this decision was made, was the technical information available at the time. This is particularly pertinent where, as with DDT, deployment occurs at a scale which far exceeds the capacity of immediate perception. What was known at the time the decision was made, or the basis upon which this decision was made, was that there was no harmful effect from DDT in warm-blooded animals.

The Nobel Prize, we have noted, was awarded to Müller “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”¹⁶⁶ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1948. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Sun. 24 Apr 2022. Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1948/summary/ This efficiency was known, had been proven; it was on the basis of this that the insecticide was widely deployed. While there were investigations as to the safety profile of this substance, the concrete interactions of action at a scale are always more complicated than the plainly intended effects. Ellul refers, for instance, to an analogous situation:

In another area, Professor Lemaire, in a study of narcotic drugs, shows that technique permits the manufacture of synthetic narcotics with greater and greater ease and in increasing quantities. But, according to Lemaire, the control of these drugs is thereby rendered more and more difficult because “we cannot predict whether they will or will not be dangerous. The only proof is their habitual use by addicts. But to obtain this proof requires years of experience.”¹⁶⁷ Ellul, p. 108–109.

Indeed, we may note that heroin—a word now synonymous with substance abuse—was initially thought to be a less addictive replacement for morphine; it was not until heroin addiction reached epidemic proportions that the immensity of this folly was obvious to all. Today with the fentanyl epidemic, we can see a similar process repeating itself precisely as Ellul quotes Lemaire as expecting. The point is that the technical universe is constituted by a set of fixed objects and can only abstractly represent the complex interactions that follow from real-world interventions; paper obscures all but for that which is written upon it—everything beyond is this is at best gestured to by some inscription as a known-unknown.

Ellul concludes by noting that even the rejection of one technique entails its replacement with another, hence Technique itself prevails irrespective of any evaluations of specific techniques:

Every rejection of a technique judged to be bad entails the application of a new technique, the value of which is estimated from the point of view of efficiency alone.¹⁶⁸ Ellul, p. 110.

If DDT is unsafe for use, say, then some other way of managing insects must be found: a technical problem calls for a technical solution; yet then the same potential for remote repercussions recurs. The problem is rarely taken by any involved to have implications for something more fundamental than the specific technique which has proven to be bad—that is, which has proven itself insufficient based on a cost-benefit analysis. There are always negative aspects in any technique, after all, and these are factored into the initial efficiency analysis which precedes its first deployment. When unexpected costs accrue, these do not render the technique invalid but rather alter the cost-benefit calculation. While this may result in variations at the level of specific techniques—that is, induce changes in the technical operation—it has no effect on Technique itself:

Whatever the adaptations nature or circumstances demand of it, technique remains self-identical in its characteristics and its course. Hindrances seem to compel it to become, not something else, but even more itself. Everything it assimilates strengthens it in its traits. There is no hope of seeing it change into a fine and gracious being: it is neither Caliban nor Ariel, but it has been able to take Ariel and Caliban into the unconditioned circles of its universal method.¹⁶⁹ Ellul, p. 94.

3.3.4. Universalism#

Technique is the same in all latitudes and hence acts to make different civilisations uniform. This tendency arises directly from technique itself.¹⁷⁰ Ellul, p. 117.

The first aspect of technical universalism as outlined by Ellul in La Technique is that it results in a particular uniformity. There is something in the essence of Technique, says Ellul, which implies this as a necessity. We may perhaps see this, for instance, in the architectural style which is today everywhere prevalent; an admixture of steel and glass reigns supreme all the world over. The dominance of this particular architectural aesthetic can be traced to the efficiency of these materials for construction projects, that they can be assembled in bulk units which are then slotted together on-site; it is a far cry from the ornate handiwork which once covered the exterior and interior detailing of buildings. Of course, the reasons for this are manifold and an entire history could perhaps be written on this question alone. Ellul notes, for instance, that initially the specific circumstances under which Technique emerged seemed necessary for its existence; yet now it “imposes itself, whatever the environment.”¹⁷¹ Ellul, p. 118. Indeed, now when Technique “penetrates a new milieu, it tends to reproduce in this milieu the circumstances which, in a fortuitous way, it found favorable to itself in the nineteenth century in France and England.”¹⁷² Ellul, p. 126. This means, in other words:

It dissociates the sociological forms, destroys the moral framework, desacralizes men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collection of individuals.¹⁷³ Ellul, p. 126.

This aspect is partly a matter of the power which Technique has amassed by virtue of its historical success, that France and England grew and spread their forms throughout the world; now the case is such that these forms can be imposed even upon the unwilling, as in the case of colonisation.

We can see, therefore, that there is an outward movement of Technique; it constitutes an enterprise with universal ambitions. This is as much in terms of the global exploitation of material resources as it is a matter of information:

Technique cannot be otherwise than totalitarian. It can be truly efficient and scientific only if it absorbs an enormous number of phenomena and brings into play the maximum of data. In order to co-ordinate and exploit synthetically, technique must be brought to bear on the great masses in every area.¹⁷⁴ Ellul, p. 125.

This enterprise of legibility and enfoldment constitutes the technical universe upon which Technique depends, thus the world is brought within its ambit: “Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilisation. Everything is its concern.”¹⁷⁵ Ellul, p. 125. There is, therefore, an expansive movement in which Technique absorbs and integrates more and more of the world. This tends to progress by a dialectic of problem–solution– problem; that some disruption will be rendered salient as a technical problem, then it will be addressed with a solution that causes further disruption. The whole process develops with this the basic growth principle of Technique. This movement protrudes beyond the technical civilisation and even absorbs non-technical civilisations. While this interaction varies depending on the peculiarity of the parties, there is a consistent experience:

Obviously, the effect of technique on these groups will not be the same everywhere. Detailed sociological studies have been made of the various phenomena of assimilation, regrouping, functioning, and marasmus or progressive dissolution. According to these studies, there has not been comparable and identical progression in every case. However, behind this diversity is to be noted an absolute incompatibility between the technical type of civilization and all the others.¹⁷⁶ Ellul, p. 124.

We can understand this absolute incompatibility, of course, as that between traditional technics and modern Technique; it is that the process—that which we have dealt with in the section on multiplicity and collapse—reconstitutes the whole in a form which now reflects the nature of the mediating inscriptions through which it was filtered. This further explains Ellul’s comment that this effect is neither desired nor intentional:

Technicians have not willed this outcome; no one seeks consciously to destroy a civilization. This is simply the proverbial collision between the earthenware pot and the iron pot. What happens, happens, despite the best possible intentions of the iron pot.¹⁷⁷ Ellul, p. 124.

We can see an echo of this in an anecdote, that the renowned poet Sir Walter Scott was collecting folk ballads from the Scottish reaches when he asked a certain Margaret Laidlaw whether the songs she told him had been written down ever before; she replied:

There war never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, and ye hae spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin’ an’ no for readin’; but ye hae broken them charm noo, and they’ll never [be] sung mair. An’ the worst thing of a’ they’re nouther richt spell’d nor richt setten down.’¹⁷⁸ Collinson, Traditional and National Music, p. 138.

The Scots dialect used here, though perhaps difficult to understand, only emphasises our point. Her argument, in short, is that the printing of her songs had spoilt them or broken the charm; more so, that they were not even set down correctly. We can see some of the difficulty in this simply by looking at the effort to transcribe Laidlaw’s Scots dialect and understand it as a speaker of modern English.

Indeed, this example touches on a prime example of the apparent universalisation—really the spreading of a single particularity—which we have earlier noted in our treatment of inscription. We may recall that Ellul said of traditional technics that “no more would it become universal than the society in which it was embedded.”¹⁷⁹ Ellul, p. 69. This is precisely the line which we have detailed, and something similar can be seen in the standardisation of dialects which Scott describes in his Seeing like a State. This is a major aspect of the enterprise of legibility and universal enfoldment:

As long as … documents remained in local vernaculars, they were daunting to an official sent from Paris and virtually impossible to bring into conformity with central schemes of legal and administrative standardization. The campaign of linguistic centralization was assured of some success since it went hand in hand with an expansion of state power. By the late nineteenth century, dealing with the state was unavoidable for all but a small minority of the population. Petitions, court cases, school documents, applications, and correspondence with officials were all of necessity written in French. … Those at the periphery who lacked competence in French were rendered mute and marginal. They were now in need of a local guide to the new state culture, which appeared in the form of lawyers, notaires, schoolteachers, clerks, and soldiers.¹⁸⁰ Scott, p. 72.

The technical universe, in other words, demands that all conforms to its form; as Ellul puts it: “It is only form, but everything conforms to it.”¹⁸¹ Ellul, p. 94. We find, therefore, that there is a broad standardisation and resulting uniformity which corresponds not only to the necessity of enfoldment but also the rationalisation of information within the technical universe. Technique, therefore, strives towards a degree of uniformity insofar as this is necessary and efficient for its own movement.

The universalism of Technique, moreover, corresponds to the allocentric mode as a ‘view from nowhere’—that there is an intrinsic relation between the displacement of inscriptions as immutable mobiles and technical universalism. The “one best way in the world” can only be determined to the extent that the world can be gathered at a single point so as to be subjected to such an analysis. We can see an essential aspect of this immediately in the notion of the “one best way in the world.” This necessarily leads to one way, which is then imposed uniformly on the entire world; it is thus that the basic structure of Technique entails a universality which corresponds to Ellul’s observations, hence he can say that this “arises directly from technique itself.”¹⁸² Ellul, p. 117. And yet there remains a degree of diversity, Ellul admits dialectically—how can this be explained?

Technique does not lead to general uniformity. In fact, it creates a certain diversity. Its objectives are always the same, and so is its influence on man. But though it is axiomatic that the one best way will prevail, this one best way will vary with climate, country, and population. The more technique is refined, the more it varies its means of action. Therefore, we shall continue to have the appearance of different civilisations in India and Greenland.¹⁸³ Ellul, p. 94.

This line recalls our initial treatment of multiplicity and collapse, and there we can see the reason for this universality which seems yet to preserve particularity: “what differences there are will result from the cold calculation of some technician, instead of being the result of the profound spiritual and material effort of generations of human beings.”¹⁸⁴ Ellul, p. 94–95. The distinction, therefore, is that this diversity is not that of a traditional technics; it is not an embedded particularity but the opposite movement— that the universal descends to a particular only insofar as it caters to circumstances which it has incorporated. Overall, however, in spite of this, everywhere the same essence of Technique operates in either case.

3.4. Paper and the remainder#

The Soviet modernist El Lissitzky attacked Le Corbusier’s [design for] Moscow as a “city of nowhere, … [a city] that is neither capitalist, nor proletarian, nor socialists, … a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style).” As if to confirm El Lissitzky’s charge that he had designed a “city of nowhere,” Le Corbusier recycled his design virtually intact—aside from removing all references to Moscow— and presented it as La ville radieuse, suitable for central Paris.¹⁸⁵ Scott, p. 114.

Here we lead through from the universalism of Technique to the metaphysics of inscription, in particular, the relation between the plan on paper and the actuality to which it points as referent or possibility; it is this which aligns with the characteristic that Ellul calls the autonomy of Technique. We have noted earlier that a characteristic feature of inscriptions is that we find there ever only that which has been placed, hence this entails the exclusion of all which might contradict a plan as it has been drawn up. If we consider Le Corbusier’s design of Moscow, for instance, we see that the lines of his draftsmanship sit in a void of blank paper; it is not, as the final city might have been, that this sits in a particular location. This point is closely related to the characteristic of universality which we have just dealt with, here intersecting however at a slightly different angle; yet in either case we can draw a line between Technique and the nature of inscription. The central advantage of inscriptions is that they are immutable mobiles, and we have noted that this immutability is what enables their displacement; it is that a particular point is enfolded in the inscription and can thereafter be moved and reproduced at will while maintaining the optical consistency of this representation. Of course, this entails an act of translation in which the referent is uprooted and reconstituted as inscription; thus, as Goody notes, there is a decontextualisation which occurs when the particular is reformulated as inscription. This can be seen as a process of abstraction, to take the root: ab + -trahere, to draw from.

We can consider this by examining the metaphor further. Suppose that we were to take a sample of water from a stream, there we might draw off an amount of water in a vial; so long as our sampling procedure is sufficiently suited to the source we may then take this smaller amount of water to be a representative sample of the whole from which it was drawn. This is akin to the metaphor entailed by the etymological root of abstraction. Yet we may then take a further step, for we might send the water sample to a laboratory where tests can be run on the sample to determine its various qualities. These tests are procedures which can be run on the sample, from which we will produce results in the form of inscriptions. The difficulty here is that we can only test for a finite set of qualities in the water, that we cannot select for qualities which we are not aware exist. We may subject the water to a total battery of tests and thus produce what seems quite an exhaustive set of results; yet this cannot be guaranteed to exhaust the total qualities of the water. A testing laboratory, for instance, may lack a certain piece of equipment or their equipment may be less precise than that of another facility. Similarly, there may simply be qualities which nobody even thinks to test nor has even thought to but which are undeniably qualities of the sample and source from which it was drawn. Yet for the individual who encounters the source only via inscriptions produced in a laboratory, none of this can possibly be apparent to them.

With our turning from inscriptions to Technique, however, we have come to be more concerned not with science as entailing instruments of perception; instead our interest here is more in inscriptions as a technical imagination whereby possibilities may be represented. Le Corbusier’s design for Moscow, for instance, is an inscription and shares in the features we have addressed; but it represents not so much the past or present state of a referent as a possible future. Nevertheless, the basic characteristic is largely continuous between these two instances of inscription. The features we have just noted, for example, concerning the blindness of testing to that beyond its conscious ambit, are thus found in Le Corbusier:

The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.¹⁸⁶ Le Corbusier in Scott, p. 112.

The difference here, of course, is that it is the same movement in reverse; yet in either case it is the blank paper which effaces whatever is not consciously recapitulated. We find here the metaphysics of inscription leads to the view with which we began this section: “a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style).”¹⁸⁷ Scott, p. 114.

We see here, therefore, that the essential elements of the plan as inscription is that its truth is entirely a matter of internal relations and excludes all that falls beyond this. The void of blank paper in which its form sits entails a suspension of disbelief which makes psychologically possible the implicit negation of anything which is not accounted for in its design. This is a feature which Ellul notes repeatedly of Technique, and here in terms which plainly echo that of Le Corbusier:

It is not a question of causing the human being to disappear, but of making him capitulate, of inducing him to accomodate himself to techniques and not experience personal feelings and reactions.¹⁸⁸ Ellul, p. 137–138.

Thus we find the plan, as described by Le Corbusier, is imposed upon the substance with which it treats. Of course, this cannot always be done bluntly nor need it be:

… technique cannot assert its autonomy in respect to physical or biological laws. Instead, it puts them to work; it seeks to dominate them.¹⁸⁹ Ellul, p. 134.

This line is necessary insofar as the plan cannot provide its own substance; it is always dependent upon the substance of actuality. Whether the plan is human or material, it cannot blindly impose itself upon the substance that fills out its form. There is necessarily a compromise, but within this the plan is thus despotic:

The individual must be fashioned by techniques either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organisation.¹⁹⁰ Ellul, p. 138.

The language Ellul here uses is telling: that he speaks of “the blots” introduced by variability in the substance upon which a plan is imposed. These are imperfections that intrude upon the tidy design which has been drawn up on paper.

Indeed, Ellul also uses this language when he speaks of Technique as a means of “apprehending reality” and “acting on the world.”¹⁹¹ Ellul, p. 131. Here he echoes our earlier treatment of inscriptions as objective by virtue of the allocentric mode:

… [Technique] allows us to neglect all individual differences, all subjectivity. Technique alone is rigorously objective. It blots out all personal opinions. It effaces all individual, and even all collective, modes of expression.¹⁹² Ellul, p. 131.

We may here consider the process of paper-making itself, for we find that even the blankness of paper is not truly a void. Inscriptions themselves are necessarily forms imposed upon a substance, with the defining characteristic being that this is a ‘tabula rasa’—that is, it has been somehow rendered homogenous so as to allow whatever is inscribed to stand out stark in contrast to the blank background. We can see here a similar metaphor to the nature of binary code, in which 0 stands opposed to 1 as if being and nothingness; and yet the 0 is never truly a nothingness but rather only a relative absence compared to the 1. This is a particularly interesting example if we consider the origin of binary with Leibniz, who attributed to this relation metaphysical and theological importance:

It is a long-standing view of his [i.e., Leibniz] that the generation of an arithmetical progression from 0 and 1 alone constitutes an image of creation ex nihilo. For example, in 1697, he tries to induce Duke Rudolf Augustus of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel to have a medal struck, on which the numbers 0 and 1, as well as the words “Imago Creationis” and “Omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum.” The graphic dimension features rays of light shining on an abyss, with light representing the “almighty One,” and the abyss or void representing zero.¹⁹³ Lai, ‘Leibniz and Chinese Thought,’ p. 150–151.

Of course, the zero within a binary system is not actually nothingness itself; it is impossible to have any true ‘nihilo’ within creation. The closest approximation possible is the relative nothing of, for instance, a blank sheet of paper. This is a form in which the background becomes a nothingness imaginatively, insofar as it is only the inscription which stands out when we are inspecting the plan. There is a scene in American Psycho, for instance, in which the protagonist and his colleagues are comparing business cards and pay particular attention to the aesthetic variations in the paper used. This is hardly the ordinary situation, as mostly variations in paper tend to disappear with our attention being focused entirely on the content depicted therein. The paper is usually taken only as a necessity rather than a specific feature in itself.

Considering the process of paper-making, then, we find that this ‘nothing’ is created by the pulping of a tree and its reduction to a state which can then be reconstituted in a homogenous form suitable for retaining inscriptions. This is the same process which we can see in the imposition of form following the plan entailed by an inscription. There is ever the necessity of a suitable substance for this form to be imposed upon, and this suitability entails at once a positive and negative aspect. All that contradicts the form to be imposed must be excluded, and the substance must be rendered so as to readily receive the form which is to be imparted. This can be compared to, for instance, the provision of metal for a press: it must be a homogenous piece of metal and the metal itself must be sufficiently strong to hold the form which is imposed upon it during the pressing process. The same rules apply more or less across the board here, and can be thus seen to parallel the metaphysics of inscription. There is never truly an act of creation ex nihilo, rather is ever only the production of a homogeneity which is a relative nothingness insofar as no element of it contradicts the form to be imposed. There is, in other words, no absolute nothingness from which creation proceeds but rather a nothingness of contrary tendencies—yet this within the context of a creation that must be tamed, cannot be denied; it is not that man usurps the divine in thus aping creation but rather that we force a yoke upon creation so as to turn it to our purposes.

Throughout this process, the most important aspect has been the internal relations of inscription which constitute the form to be imposed. The void of blank paper entails the exclusion of all external relations, as if the inscription itself sits outside existence entirely; it is only reintroduced to the extent that it is imposed by way of an imaginative leap. We can understand this as akin to a mathematical or geometric form, or as aspiring to that end, even if ever imperfectly and only in appearance—that is, that the mathematical relation is entirely internal to its own structure and is not at all dependent on anything external. Indeed, we find that this characteristic has here been apparent throughout; it is an essential feature of the allocentric mode—that the information is encoded, at least apparently, in the internal relation between its elements. This can be seen in a wide variety of cases which depend on inscriptions. The dictionary definition, for instance, operates similarly: it presents itself as an equation which can be solved to provide the meaning of the term. Yet this is everywhere a mystification, for the equation’s answer depends on our understanding of the terms which constitute its elements. If we define ice as frozen water, for instance, then the meaning of this is contingent upon our understanding what ‘frozen’ and ‘water’ themselves mean—and here there is no clear end-point, for everywhere an infinite regress of equational definitions seems to await us. The answer, of course, is that ultimately these definitions derive their meaning not from the internal relations themselves but rather from the way in which these relations allow the recipient to triangulate their prior knowledge. We find thus that the fruit of this form throughout depends upon a basis which it implicitly denies; it has none of the solidity it pretends to, is better considered akin to sturdy flotsam upon which one might yet stand.

This flotsam, however, is ever dependent for its floating upon the sea in which it sits; and this is not the void of blank paper but the actuality of existence itself—in particular for inscriptions, that of the individual initiated into a technical universe. The internal relations found therein are, as we have stated earlier, what allow us to co-constitute the technical universe by way of an imaginative leap; it is thus that there can be no technical universe in books alone. All that is contained therein, the totality that is thus enfolded, none of this exists in itself but for as translated—once more, as first in its enfolding—by an existing human being. This is particularly so for the plan, which might as well be meaningless but for the dual substances that constitute it as possibility and then, perhaps, as actuality. The first is the mind of the recipient, they who have within them the capacity to fill out the otherwise empty form of its internal relation; second, the substance of actuality upon which this may be imposed. This secondary substance, of course, includes as much the embodiment which enacts as the object of this enactment. The embodiment is necessary to its articulation, and this is not necessarily a solitary embodiment but may span a whole complex of actors assembled in vast networks. Indeed, it is precisely these networks that render the implications of Technique so necessary to understand; and inscriptions have scaffolded the creation of these at a scale unheard of in human history. These networks, comprising instruments of perception and mechanisms of articulation, controlled from centres of calculation, characterise the true meaning of action at a technical scale; it is by virtue of this immense power that Technique has reshaped the world in its image.

4. Conclusion#

Property is protected a thousand ways. The oldest, simplest kind of protection was by a man armed with a club. In spite of the State and the police and ideologies, this sort of elementary defence still survives against the most elementary enemy of property, the thief. But until recently, in a vestigial form only: the faithful servant of the firm, ageing or handicapped, drowsing the night away beside his fire. Solitude, estrangement from daylight living, and a kid of half-organized vacancy were the essence of his task. Nowadays, this figure is being thrust aside along with so many archaisms, by the growth in the scale of property and a corresponding growth in the scale of criminal operations. Loss by theft or fire would be a small item in the books of the great corporations. But the insurance companies meeting the loss force business to protect itself more efficiently.¹⁹⁴ Nairn in Fraser, Work, p. 34.

We see here how developments in one line lead to demands in another, that the whole entails a continuous growth due to the interdependency of institutional forms. This is the same pattern of Technique as we noted earlier: the flying shuttle led to the spinning jenny which led to the loom and so on. Here the traditional form is subjected to similar pressures following from the growth of industry, of crime, etc. This brings about a situation in which the older forms are outmoded; something more advanced is then required:

This new protection is complex. A rationalized surveillance invades the night, organizing nothingness into a quasi-military discipline of uniforms and signals, making sleep at noon a permanent way of life for thousands.¹⁹⁵ Nairn, p. 34.

We will take the rationalisation of surveillance, particularly the report of a nightwatchman working in a tobacco warehouse, as an example with which we may conclude. Here we will return to the topic of Umwelts which we considered at the outset, seeing in this example the experience of an individual employed within this rationalised surveillance apparatus—that is, the Umwelt of a person living in a world fashioned by Technique.

At this point, we might return to Uexküll briefly, since the question here considered is analogous to a case that he addresses: “Any tract of land, if the territories were drawn into it, would resemble a political map for each species, their borderlines determined by attack and defense.”¹⁹⁶ Uexküll, p. 56. The difference, of course, is that the map with its boundaries is determined by the emergent patterns of activity; it is a living border which is constantly negotiated by the animals whose existence constitutes this world. This differs from the abstract conceptualisation of a boundary, whereby it is imposed consciously by the understanding. The ‘borders’ of the stickleback’s territory, for instance, are neither conscious nor rational but are rather grounded in behavioural dispositions and bounded according to the limits of immediacy. They will respond with offensive and defensive behaviours insofar as others intrude, but they will not seek to rationally extend their perception beyond this reactive aspect. The rationalised surveillance with which we will now deal, however, entails something entirely different.

The peculiarity of this work is already apparent in the excerpt immediately prior, that they sleep at noon and wake in the evening; it is an inversion of the ordinary day. This is no organic cycle, rather requires clock-time for its ordering; it is entirely contrary to the natural day-night cycle:

The worst point in this rhythm was always the return to work. Every 8 p.m. it summed up everything. One was going in the wrong direction …¹⁹⁷ Nairn, p. 36.

And where was he going? Each evening he went to work at “the largest tobacco warehouse in Britain”—a six-storey building in which “an ever-changing sea of heavy cardboard cartons … moved in tides incomprehensible to us.”¹⁹⁸ Nairn, p. 36. This was a world which was illegible to him, that the complexity of this required a division of labour which operated here to render this task beyond his ken, with “a whole team of clerks … employed merely to chronicle the daily inflow and outflow on calculators”¹⁹⁹ Nairn, p. 39. The scale of this operation exceeded the possibility of any individual in immediacy, that the only way to keep tabs on such a large warehouse was by seeing it through simplifying inscriptions: “so many cartons discharged, number of storage-room, so many more re-loaded, serial numbers, destinations, time of leaving.”²⁰⁰ Nairn, p. 39.

We find something similar, moreover, when we turn to the nightwatchman’s own activities as a part of this vast operation:

… we looked at a large plan of the building, giving both vertical and horizontal sections, too complex to be meaningful. A red line ran out from the recreation-room and back into it again, traversing the whole labyrinth of rectangles on both sections. This was the route of the patrols, the Sergeant explained. It would take over an hour to do one, at the prescribed pace, and normally three Guards would be out on patrol at any one time, at different points along the line. This continuous circulation along a fixed path was the main part of the work, and went on for twelve hours, from eight every night till eight next morning.²⁰¹ Nairn, p. 37.

The building itself is foreign to him, hence he is directed here on his first day to a map; and yet even the plan of the building is “too complex to be meaningful.” The inscription is simplified one stage further, whereby the entirety of his task—the route of his patrols—is reduced to a “red line [which] ran out from the recreation-room and back into it again, traversing the whole labyrinth of rectangles on both sections.” This is the spatial order to which our nightwatchman must conform himself; yet this was further supplemented by a temporal order also:

I noticed that at various places along the red line there were crosses, and beside each cross a number. … ‘These are the keys,’ said the Sergeant. He turned round and picked up a curious object from the table. It was a fairly large, heavy-looking leather case on a shoulder-strap, circular in shape and closed by a padlock. There was a clock inside it. The dial showed through an aperture, and beneath this there was what looked like a key-hole. ‘The keys are fixed to the wall where you see those crosses’, he went on, ‘and you put them in here’—he pointed—‘and turn once to the right.’ This stamped the time, and the number of the key, on a paper tape rolled up inside the case and connected to the clock. I picked up the instrument and hung it from my shoulder. With one’s hand on the strap holding it securely there, it felt curiously comforting, recalling obscurely weights carried in childhood.²⁰² Nairn, p. 39.

This temporal order, of course, is tied to the spatial order; it is arranged according to the crosses dotted along the red line indicating his patrol route: “Six minutes is the maximum.”²⁰³ Nairn, p. 39. We thus find that for the nightwatchman, the spatiotemporal order of their working life confronts them precisely as described by Ilyenkov: “as an estranged image, as a fetish, as a system of unarguable rules coming inevitably from somewhere out of the blue.”²⁰⁴ Ilyenkov, p. 164. Yet the nightwatchman himself notes that this schema is further internalised:

I got up, took over the clock, and went out of the room again. Subjectively, it was as if there was a spring planted inside oneself, a foreign force pushing all the natural energies of the body. At the moment, one yield to the growing pressure of this coiled-up spring, the inertia of muscles and consciousness gave way and was carried along. The entire cage of social relations, the walls of expectation surrounding one, all crystallized in this moment of surrender. Possession is our normal condition, work depends on demons we take for granted. The orders of the Sergeant were secondary, however much he snapped at us.²⁰⁵ Nairn, p. 48.

We see here reference to the “cage of social relations” and “the walls of expectation”—but of what material are these made? They can be seen in the clock-device which each nightwatchman carried with them, into which they inserted the specified keys at the indicated locations and times:

Every principal work-action—that is, every transference of oneself to the next point on the patrol-route—was dictated and registered by it. So whoever opened the case and unwound the tape would see a complete and measured record of one’s labour, the continuous, night-long skeleton of one’s experience. A better work instrument would have to be actually embedded in the skull, and seize the workings of one’s brain.²⁰⁶ Nairn, p. 38.

Of course, as indicated in the excerpt prior to this, there is a sense in which this method of control at a distance via inscription operates in a way which is “embedded in the skull” and does “seize the workings of one’s brain”—namely, “it was as if there was a spring planted inside oneself, a foreign force pushing all the natural energies of the body.” This is accomplished by way of the enlistment of the nightwatchman’s interests, that they are not controlled by immediate force but are rather coerced:

We have been liberated from slavery, on the condition that we carry round its compulsions inside us and make sure that the world’s work gets done all the same. Our slavery is rewarded, internalized, cushioned, disguised within a colossal web of complicity.²⁰⁷ Nairn, p. 49.

The compulsions are not only carried around inside them, however, but are also essentially carried with them in the form of the clock-device which records “the continuous, night-long skeleton of one’s experience.”²⁰⁸ Nairn, p. 38. This is the image which is internalised by the nightwatchman, for they know that this is their appearance from the perspective of the institution in which they are enlisted:

The first thing the Manager does when he gets in in the morning is get these tapes out and read right through them. Takes him hours. He nearly lost his job after a big robbery there was here, and since then he’s scared stiff. He doesn’t miss a thing. One wrong time, one number missing, and he’s on that bloody phone to headquarters, and we have Inspectors round here for a week checking on us. Poor fucker, I think he lies awake all night worrying about us.²⁰⁹ Nairn, p. 38–39.

We see here that the nightwatchman internalises the perspective of themselves as seen thus by management, that from this perspective they are reduced to the skeletal transcript of their nightly existence. Yet obscured by this inscription there remains the subjectivity of the nightwatchman:

… imagine an exceptionally lazy Sunday-afternoon stroll, a saunter taking one nowhere in particular. This is the pace of the watchman. It is comparable to the policeman’s on his beat, but does not carry one through a varying scene of streets and people that keeps one’s attention taut. Also, it is more strictly governed by the need to turn a key in the clock at fixed, brief intervals. Thus, an endlessly repeated inanimate nature passes round one at an invariable slow speed, a never-changing procession of images whose recurrence deadens one’s attention a little more each time. The series of physical movements, identical with an easy promenade, assume a totally different sense inside this routine. A forced stroll whose can never be altered is exhausting beyond belief. The very ease of the actions—so misleading viewed from without— rapidly transforms itself into the most utter nausea, the lead-like feeling of a half-activity from which no escape is possible. This nausea builds up in one’s muscles until one feels packed with staleness, a fatigue coming not of exertion but from the systematized rationing of exertion, the planned truncation of energy in this perpetual caricature of a stroll.

Essentially, the watchman is a slowly-moving eye. But the nature of this movement itself paralyzes his travelling gaze. Some sort of inner retreat has to go with all mechanical labour, the daydream is like evening, a condition of the working world without which it would crack into fragments. The night-patrolman’s mode of action immerses him absolutely in this condition. The endless half-tension of his promenade forces him to crave for escape, either towards real tension—a run, a fight, any violent movement—or into oblivion. After a few hours, he is a somnambulist, his faculties are wrapped tight into a protective daydream shielding him from the vacuum through which he moves.²¹⁰ Nairn, p. 40–41.

Here a vast chasm between the skeletal transcript and its subjective experience is made apparent, that there is in the very emptiness of this employment a presence which overwhelms the individual. The most interesting aspect of our author’s narrative, however, is perhaps when they speculate more broadly:

I know there is nothing unusual about this sensation. It is just what we all are. It is the sensation of being turned into an object, a labouring material thing, the feeling on which civilization has been built. But where else has civilization distilled its roots in quite this refined fashion, to give such an undiluted taste of its underlying secret?

In this job, there was no skill, no part of oneself, no set of dispositions developed as the valuable ‘thing’ sold in the transaction with the employer. The very vacancy of the task had this as its corollary. But in turn, paradoxically, this lack swallowed one up completely. Demanding no part of one’s self, the job in fact demanded everything, on the lowest possible level. It consisted in doing nothing. It was like an endless vortex, into which one was compelled to fall headlong, touching nothing, towards nothing, an invading silence more deafening than the loudest machine.²¹¹ Nairn, p. 42–43.

This is the back-end of paper and the remainder, that here we find the individual obscured by the Plan; it is the experience of a subjectivity in a time which has no room for them. They are forced through paper, so to speak, and find themselves falling through the void beyond. All individuality is an impediment to the Plan, hence is excluded. The nightwatchman’s narrative is the subjective experience of such an exclusion.

At this point it is important that we step back a moment. The focus of this paper has been the relation between inscription and Technique, that this constitutes the technical universe—and hence, the metaphysics of inscription is that within with Technique operates. Yet we have here dealt with technical inscription, could there be something else? This paper itself, after all, is an inscription; as is the account of the nightwatchman which we have just detailed. We would struggle to find any other way that the information in these two accounts could be communicated. Inscription itself is clearly more complicated than an emphasis on it from the perspective of Technique would indicate. Ellul chose inscription, after all, as his means of addressing Technique. Hence he stated, as we have quoted at the outset:

… this book is an appeal to the individual’s sense of responsibility. The first step in the quest, the first act of freedom, is to become aware of the necessity. … by grasping the real nature of the technological phenomenon, and the extent to which it is robbing him of freedom, he confronts the blind mechanisms as a conscious being.²¹² Ellul, p. xxxiii.

Our journey thus far has proceeded by way of an initial treatment of inscription, then a study of Technique as outlined by Ellul in La Technique; it has all proceeded, moreover, by way of inscription. There certainly seems to be something to the development of linguistic and visual inscriptions which corresponds to the particular characteristics of Technique—and yet at the same time, the method of inquiry which preceded this paper and the method of presentation which constitute the paper itself; each of these was a movement within the world of inscription.

Of course, from the very outset this paper has promised nothing more than a prolegomenon; it is thus that we may here conclude by summarising our findings and providing a report for any that may wish to follow this line of inquiry further.

4.1. Technique and the metaphysics of inscription#

We have here conducted a study on inscription and sought in this some seed whereby we might better understand Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique. This has taken us first through a treatment of inscription, in which light Ellul’s La Technique has then been read. Our first major chapter, that on inscription, took us from a brief history of scientific management through to a detailed study of the technical universe as constituted by inscription. We found this exemplified by Simondon’s concept of encyclopaedism, which we have defined as a particularistic initiation—much like those prior, as the miner or farmer—but one which offered the possibility of something approaching universality by way of its open-ended nature. This aspiration to universality provides the initiate with a freedom of movement which exceeds the spatially and temporally bound practical knowledge which reigned everywhere prior. Of course, this possibility was dependent on a number of material technologies for its widespread realisation: the printing press, moveable type, etc. These developments enhanced both the immutability and mobility of inscriptions; it was this that allowed refinements to cascade and accumulate—as well as to be more easily disseminated outwards. The total effect was to create a technical universe which by the sum of human efforts involved was capable of enfolding and refining itself without the need for any singular conscious intervention. What is meant by the technical universe, then, is not only the inscriptions which constitute this but the networks of activity and individuals which weave this together into a living whole.

The peculiar nature of this technical universe was our second interest in this chapter, that we have sought the ‘metaphysics of inscription’—those ordering principles corresponding to the realm of paper which increasingly mediated the relationship with actuality for scientists, bureaucrats, and so on. This involved seeing inscriptions not as a form of retention equivalent to any other but as a technology of the intellect which as much constituted as reflected the world inscribed therein. This led us to consider the way in which inscription in its possibility of displacement implies also a decontextualisation; an aspect is uprooted and severed from its stalk, so to speak, that it might be rendered mobile. Similarly, the immutability of inscriptions implies that they must be rendered as static images of an actuality which is otherwise everywhere characterised by mobility. Furthermore, we have characterised the particular nature of inscription as a ‘view from nowhere’ which we have described as reflecting an allocentric mode—in stark contrast to the egocentric, which we saw at the outset in Uexküll. The egocentric mode is situated and embodied, whereas the allocentric mode is a view from nowhere in that the essence of an inscription is determined solely by the internal relations of its features. We have sought to explain this further by reference to the difference between a familiar path and the use of a map; that the former is egocentric and the latter allocentric. The essential aspect is that the allocentric always requires an act of translation so as to be integrated into the egocentric; as, for instance, is accomplished by the indicator on a map which says ‘you are here.’

This treatment has led through to our examining Jacques Ellul’s concept of Technique as outlined in his 1954 book, La Technique. The aim in this chapter was to present inscription alongside Technique and note the extent to which these can be seen to align. Thus we opened by considering the difference Ellul outlines between traditional technics and modern Technique; that there is a contrast between these two which parallels the developments we have noted with the spread of inscription. Traditional technics, for instance, were spatiotemporally limited and particularistic; here we see that Ellul’s account of Technique precisely aligns with Simondon’s encyclopaedism. These lines are both, we have argued, traceable to the unheard of diffusion of inscriptions subsequent to the development of the printing press in Europe, as outlined by Eisenstein. Similar parallels have been noted throughout this chapter, as between the process of multiplicity and collapse; that this then gives rise to the imposition of the allocentric mode. The nature of this imposition corresponds closely to the translation detailed between allocentric and egocentric. Subsequently we have detailed four of the major characteristics outlined by Ellul in La Technique: automatism, self-augmentation, monism, universalism. Throughout a coherence has been noted between these and the metaphysics of inscription as detailed in the first chapter. This section has ultimately concluded with a more direct treatment of this metaphysical aspect, that the realm constituted by inscription acts as if it somehow sits outside of the existence from which it is drawn; and that this feature corresponds to the potentiality of paper: the view from nowhere is more so a view of nowhere, a void of blank paper.

The line thus taken can be seen to have established several points of contact between the metaphysics of inscription and the characteristics of Technique’s movement in the world. The work here, of course, is insufficient to demonstrate an identity—but the coherence indicated supports the thesis that our understanding of Technique can be greatly enhanced by attending to its relationship with inscription. This suggests a number of fruitful lines of research that may allow for more detail in explicating this relationship as well as to explore related areas that were here opened up. The current work, for instance, has confined itself to drawing on La Technique which was published in 1954. A further study may seek to understand the relationship between inscription and the digital revolution, particularly advances in terms of data science, predictive simulation, and even augmented realities. Another important line would be a study of channels which carry and enact inscriptions, perhaps drawing on Latour’s actor-network theory as advanced most directly in his Reassembling the Social.²¹³ Latour, Reassembling the social. Similarly, one might look at the relationship between inscription and advances in communications technology. Kai Eriksson’s Communication in Modern Social Ordering would be an excellent point of departure for any such a work.²¹⁴ Eriksson, Communication in modern social ordering. Of course, beyond any of these tangential inquiries the central line here indicated seems to merit further discussion even on its own terms. A prolegomenon, after all, is merely a survey whereby the territory might be mapped for future expeditions.

At this point we may step back and consider the point which we have raised just before: that this paper is itself an inscription, as are La Technique and the nightwatchman’s narrative. The focus in this paper, however, has directed our attention in particular to scientific and technical inscriptions; yet it is clear that these alone do not exhaust the possibilities of inscription. Any further work would do well to address the peculiarity of technical inscription and its relationship with the allocentric mode. The relationship between quality and quantity, moreover, seems important to this; in particular, the place of mathematics and geometry. We may, however, for now consider that the inscriptions which are implicated in Technique seem to correspond to a particular aesthetic. Scott identifies something similar in his Seeing like a State, which he calls a ‘high modernist’ aesthetic—as exemplified by that of Le Corbusier. This aesthetic, moreover, seems closely related to the characteristics of inscription; it tends toward a geometrical and mathematical perfection which entails the exclusion of anything which might contradict this form:

Aesthetic considerations frequently won out over the existing social structure and the mundane functioning of the city. “Long before the invention of bulldozers,” Mumford adds, “the Italian military engineer developed, through his professional specialization in destruction, a bulldozing habit of mind: one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances, so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines.”²¹⁵ Scott, p. 56.

There is here also a sense of the particular which becomes universal: any existing aesthetic was dismissed in the name of a rational order which was itself, in fact, merely an aesthetic. The point which Scott makes throughout Seeing like a State is that the aesthetic here indicated was too thin and tended to simply obfuscate the complexity which it overlay. This almost inevitably resulted in unforeseen consequences, that such a flat aesthetic neglected the depth which it ostensibly sought to describe—a dynamic, in other words, which corresponds precisely to that outlined by Ellul.

The notion, put simply, is that a prevailing aesthetic of inscription might delimit the possibilities for representation; it is not necessarily inscription itself nor this process of abstraction that need be inherently problematic. This can be seen in the difference, for instance, between a statistical report on the bombing of Hiroshima and John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima.²¹⁶ Hersey, Hiroshima. We have in this paper left aside the peculiar technical morality which Ellul notes, though it can be sensed everywhere at the edges; yet it may be that this aesthetic impairment contributes most of all to the peculiar amorality demonstrated by Robert McNamara when he spoke to Errol Morris of the firebombing of Tokyo:

McNamara: I was on the island of Guam, in his command, in March of 1945; in that single night we burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo— men, women, and children.

Morris: Were you aware this was going to happen?

McNamara: Well, I was—I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.²¹⁷ Morris, Fog of War.

Of course, we may note that the purpose of the inscriptions used in these calculations differs; that were a military technician to table anything like Hersey’s text then they would likely be accused of sedition. We may, nevertheless, here conclude with a word from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture, in which he heralds the displacement of immutable mobiles as a miracle in pursuit of human purposes:

They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man’s detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.²¹⁸ Solzhenitsyn, ‘Nobel lecture,’ p. 57.

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Footnotes#

1. Uexküll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, p. 5. ↩

2. Uexküll, p. 7. ↩

3. Uexküll, p. 11. ↩

4. Uexküll, p. 11. ↩

5. Uexküll, p. 4. ↩

6. See Miller et al., p. 241: “Our results suggest that the human nervous system contains finely tuned mechanisms for decoding vibratory motifs, including sensorimotor internal models that can anticipate structural dynamics of rods. Object localization with a rod therefore represents an important human model of extending sensing, in which somatosensory processing is distributed across the mechanical response of the tool, the biomechanics of the extremities, and the neural circuits of the sensorimotor system.” ↩

7. An essential point here, however, is that these entail a secondary mediation; it is no longer an immediate stimulus–receptor relation but rather the stimuli are mediated by way of some instrument—whiskers, webs, sticks, etc. ↩

8. Mumford, The Lewis Mumford Reader, p. 308. ↩

9. Maistre, An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon, p. 46–47. ↩

10. Japyassú & Laland, ‘Extended spider cognition,’ p. 384. ↩

11. Japyassú & Laland, p. 377. ↩

12. Hui, The question concerning technology in China, p. 215. ↩

13. Japyassú & Laland, 384. ↩

14. Hui, p. 215. ↩

15. Ellul, The Technological Society, p. xxxiii. ↩

16. Ellul, p. xxix. ↩

17. Early on, however, Technique was not yet capitalised by Ellul; hence it will not be in the excerpts drawn from La Technique. ↩

18. Ellul, p. 4. ↩

19. Ellul, p. 4. ↩

20. DeMeulemeester, ‘Understanding Technique,’ p. 22. ↩

21. Ellul, p. 43. ↩

22. Butler, Erewhon, p. 196. ↩

23. Latour, ‘Visualisation and Cognition.’ ↩

24. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

25. Latour, p. 7. ↩

26. Oakeshott, Rationalism in politics and other essays, p. 12. ↩

27. Nagel, The View from Nowhere. ↩

28. Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 14. ↩

29. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, p. 1. ↩

30. Latour, p, 18. ↩

31. Latour, p. 19. ↩

32. Latour, p. 20. ↩

33. Ellul, p. xxv. ↩

34. Ellul, p. 133. ↩

35. Taylor in Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of scientific management, p. 195. ↩

36. Taylor in Copley, p. 197-198. ↩

37. Copley, p. 205. ↩

38. Gantt in Copley, p. 201. ↩

39. Taylor in Copley, p. 205. ↩

40. Copley, p. 206. ↩

41. Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects, p. 29. ↩

42. Copley, p. 217. ↩

43. Copley, p. 217. ↩

44. Stork in Copley, p. 232-233. ↩

45. James, The Figure in the Carpet, p. 20. ↩

46. Scott, Seeing like a State, p. 336. ↩

47. Latour, p. 9. ↩

48. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 209. ↩

49. Simondon, p. 113. ↩

50. Simondon, p. 111. ↩

51. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment. ↩

52. D’Alembert in Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 195. ↩

53. Anderson, Imagined Communities. ↩

54. Simondon, p. 110. ↩

55. Oakeshott, p. 12. ↩

56. Simondon, p. 106. ↩

57. Simondon, p. 110. ↩

58. Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, p. 17. ↩

59. Piaget, p. 17. ↩

60. This is a possibility which Simondon (p. 109) leaves open: “It is possible that every technics must to a certain extent contain a coefficient of intuition and instinct necessary for establishing the appropriate communication between man and the technical being.” ↩

61. Simondon, p. 107. ↩

62. Simondon, p. 108. ↩

63. Simondon, p. 107. ↩

64. Anderson, Imagined Communities. ↩

65. Westman in Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change, p. 193. ↩

66. Eisenstein, p. 193. ↩

67. Eisenstein, p. 193. ↩

68. Eisenstein, p. 206. ↩

69. Eisenstein, p. 215. ↩

70. Simondon, p. 111. ↩

71. Boulding in Eisenstein, p. 200. ↩

72. Mark, Marion, and Hoffman, ‘Natural selection and veridical perceptions,’ p. 513. ↩

73. Borges, On exactitude in science. ↩

74. Goody, Domestication of the savage mind, p. 150. ↩

75. Oakeshott, p. 10. ↩

76. Goody, The logic of writing and the organisation of society, p. 13 ↩

77. Kierkegaard, A Kierkegaard Reader, p. 196. ↩

78. Kierkegaard, p. 202. ↩

79. Kierkegaard, p. 206. ↩

80. Mark, Marion, and Hoffman, ‘Natural selection and veridical perceptions,’ p. 513. ↩

81. Uexküll, p. 50. ↩

82. Ilyenkov, p. 164. ↩

83. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. ↩

84. Nagel, The View from Nowhere. ↩

85. Latour, p. 7. ↩

86. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 68. ↩

87. Rose, Governing the Soul, p. 146. ↩

88. Rose, p. 139. ↩

89. Rose, p. 139. ↩

90. Rose, p. 140. ↩

91. Rose, p. 149. ↩

92. Rose, p. 140. ↩

93. Rose, p. 140. ↩

94. Rose, p. 137. ↩

95. Rose, p. 138. ↩

96. Uexküll, p. 10. ↩

97. Booker, The History of Engineering Drawing, p. xv. ↩

98. Ellul, p. 64. ↩

99. Ellul, p. 67. ↩

100. Ellul, p. 68. ↩

101. Ellul, p. 70. ↩

102. Ellul, p. 69. ↩

103. Ellul, p. 69. ↩

104. Ellul, p. 68. ↩

105. Ellul, p. 65. ↩

106. Ellul, p. 70. ↩

107. Ellul, p. 70. ↩

108. Ellul, p. 20. ↩

109. Ellul, p. 20. ↩

110. Ellul, p. 72. ↩

111. Ellul, p. 72. ↩

112. Ellul, p. 68. ↩

113. Ellul, p. 67. ↩

114. Ellul, p. 74. ↩

115. Ellul, p. 20–21. ↩

116. Ellul, p. 21. ↩

117. Ellul, p. 20. ↩

118. Volta in Otis, Networking, p. 19. ↩

119. Ellul, p. 21. ↩

120. Booker, p. 187. ↩

121. Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, p. 164. ↩

122. Ilyenkov, p. 164. ↩

123. Ilyenkov, p. 164. ↩

124. Wilkinson in Ellul, p. xvi. ↩

125. Simondon, p. 107. ↩

126. Ilyenkov, p. 164. ↩

127. Ellul, p. 111. ↩

128. Ellul, p. 112. ↩

129. Ellul, p. 80. ↩

130. Ellul, p. 80. ↩

131. Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, Jacques Ellul and the technological society in the 21st century p. 42. ↩

132. Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, p. 42. ↩

133. Ritzer in Jerónimo, Garcia, and Mitcham, p. 42. ↩

134. Ellul, p. 80. ↩

135. Ellul, p. 80 ↩

136. Burke, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, p. 21. ↩

137. Ellul, p. 80. ↩

138. Ellul, p. 80. ↩

139. Ellul, p. 73. ↩

140. Latour, p. 5. ↩

141. Latour, p. 17. ↩

142. Sinclair in Ratcliffe, Oxford essential quotations. ↩

143. Latour, p. 11–12. ↩

144. Ellul, p. 86. ↩

145. Ellul, p. 86. ↩

146. Ellul, p. 86. ↩

147. Ellul, p. 87–88. ↩

148. Ellul, p. 89. ↩

149. Latour, p. 12. ↩

150. Ellul, p. 91. ↩

151. Ellul, p. 93–94. ↩

152. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

153. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

154. Ellul, p. 94–95. ↩

155. After all, there is no such thing as an individual without a metaphysics, only relative degrees of self-consciousness as regarding these subtle structuring principles. We have proceeded here by way of a materialist treatment, though this is a word which is weighed down by many misinterpretations; ours is a materialism in the line of Latour and Ilyenkov—that is, an emphasis on material activity and culture. Hence we have sought the unity of Technique not in any idealist sense, not as a linguistic definition, but rather in the development of inscription and its place in social enterprise. ↩

156. Ellul, p. 96. ↩

157. Ellul, p. 111. ↩

158. Marx, Capital, p. 25. ↩

159. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, p. 10. ↩

160. Ilyenkov, p. 161. ↩

161. Ilyenkov, Intelligent Materialism, p. 161. ↩

162. Ilyenkov, p. 173. ↩

163. Marx, Capital, p. 24–25. ↩

164. Ellul, p. 105. ↩

165. Ellul, p. 106. ↩

166. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1948. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Sun. 24 Apr 2022. Retrieved from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1948/summary/ ↩

167. Ellul, p. 108–109. ↩

168. Ellul, p. 110. ↩

169. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

170. Ellul, p. 117. ↩

171. Ellul, p. 118. ↩

172. Ellul, p. 126. ↩

173. Ellul, p. 126. ↩

174. Ellul, p. 125. ↩

175. Ellul, p. 125. ↩

176. Ellul, p. 124. ↩

177. Ellul, p. 124. ↩

178. Collinson, Traditional and National Music, p. 138. ↩

179. Ellul, p. 69. ↩

180. Scott, p. 72. ↩

181. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

182. Ellul, p. 117. ↩

183. Ellul, p. 94. ↩

184. Ellul, p. 94–95. ↩

185. Scott, p. 114. ↩

186. Le Corbusier in Scott, p. 112. ↩

187. Scott, p. 114. ↩

188. Ellul, p. 137–138. ↩

189. Ellul, p. 134. ↩

190. Ellul, p. 138. ↩

191. Ellul, p. 131. ↩

192. Ellul, p. 131. ↩

193. Lai, ‘Leibniz and Chinese Thought,’ p. 150–151. ↩

194. Nairn in Fraser, Work, p. 34. ↩

195. Nairn, p. 34. ↩

196. Uexküll, p. 56. ↩

197. Nairn, p. 36. ↩

198. Nairn, p. 36. ↩

199. Nairn, p. 39. ↩

200. Nairn, p. 39. ↩

201. Nairn, p. 37. ↩

202. Nairn, p. 39. ↩

203. Nairn, p. 39. ↩

204. Ilyenkov, p. 164. ↩

205. Nairn, p. 48. ↩

206. Nairn, p. 38. ↩

207. Nairn, p. 49. ↩

208. Nairn, p. 38. ↩

209. Nairn, p. 38–39. ↩

210. Nairn, p. 40–41. ↩

211. Nairn, p. 42–43. ↩

212. Ellul, p. xxxiii. ↩

213. Latour, Reassembling the social. ↩

214. Eriksson, Communication in modern social ordering. ↩

215. Scott, p. 56. ↩

216. Hersey, Hiroshima. ↩

217. Morris, Fog of War. ↩

218. Solzhenitsyn, ‘Nobel lecture,’ p. 57. ↩