WE LIVE IN A (Technological) SOCIETY
The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul
What do a seed drill, a computer, an office seating plan, a bus time-table, a machine-learning algorithm, a standardised test, and a five-year economic plan all have in common? They are all ways to rationalise a process, be it growing crops, learning a subject, or optimising a mathematical function. Each connects means to ends in a controlled manner so we can predict, with some certainty, what the outcome of our activity will be. Each is a technique.
While new inventions let us move faster, grow more food, and blow up bigger cities, the mindset accommodating them—growing out of the need to develop, deploy, and operate technology—is the far more significant fact, for it compels us to reorganise and consolidate our lives to accompany new technical circumstances.
Take the car. It allows you to travel over long distances by burning fuel. But it is more significant that our lives are now adapted to the fact of the car. We travel further from home. We plan our cities around the car. We create roads, regulations, law enforcement agencies, administrative bodies. We live in one town, but commute to work in another—perhaps, at the time this book was written (1954), in a factory set up to produce the cars. And this factory is, of course, organised around the time measured by the clock, so as to operate with maximum efficiency. The car was not the only significant thing here, but all the ways in which we adjusted our lives to it.
This general phenomenon is what Ellul calls technique. It is a simple idea, though one often lost behind his sprawling, elliptical writing. Being a French sociologist, he doesn’t like to give straightforward definitions. The closest he gets is in his Note to the Reader: “Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency.” (xxv)
By tracing the contours of these individual technical methods (which are somewhat confusingly also called techniques) across a broad range of domains, Ellul argues that technique itself had, by 1954, attained an objective being in its own right, with a direction and fate determining that of man’s.
Ellul describes 4 characteristics of technique: automatism, monism, universalism, and totalization.
Totalization means that no area of life is off-limits to technique. Once it grabs hold of a particular area, it reorders everything within along rational lines.
Let’s go back to the car. Thar car doesn’t just exist in isolation. Once we have it, it becomes necessary to develop roads and traffic regulations to safely facilitate it. This also entails a transformation in law enforcement, urban planning, and so on. And to realise all of this we need certain sorts—pilots, scientists, technicians, mechanics, oil drillers, drivers—people who can produce, maintain, and operate cars, as well as the educational institutions and job markets to direct them into their respective professions. In this manner we regulate the car and legitimate its existence, even if we never explicitly agreed to the changes it wrought.
The growth of technique is indifferent to human choice: “There is never any question of an arrest of the process, and even less of a backwards movement. Arrest and retreat only occur when an entire society collapses.” (89) Technique is therefore automatic. It progresses without human oversight or deliberation.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud glibly remarks: “If there were no railway to overcome distances, my child would never have left his hometown, and I should not need the telephone in order to hear his voice.” No one forced Freud to get a telephone. But what’s the alternative? That he never speaks to his son again?
Technique has no will. Nor is it conducted by any one individual having their hands on all the levers. But the needs of technique force us to live in a way that only increases the need for technical solutions. The result is a “monopoly on action” to the effect that “no human activity is possible except as it is mediated and censored by the technical medium” (602 b).1
Monism means that technical procedures cannot be isolated or separated. Each is situated with respect to all the others. The entire ensemble—technique itself—constitutes a real, singular phenomenon with its own objective reality that determines the evolution of society. We cannot pick and choose technical innovations, because each one implies all the others. And once one technical procedure takes hold of some part of our life, it spreads into the others, subjecting all of our spontaneous and unthinking activities to rational calculation.
Even something as basic as eating can become a technical decision. By our choice of what we buy in the supermarket, we often imagine that we are sending economic or political signals about what we approve or disapprove of—meat? Unethically-sourced cocoa? Maybe I decide to eat chips. But because chips aren’t good for me, I need to ensure they are part of an overall balanced diet (one health technique among others, such as exercise regimes). My enjoyment is therefore accompanied by a good deal of anxiety—and in the case of people like my missus, a nutritional offset, such as a compensatory carrot or two. Whatever the case, the food only ends up in my gob becacuse of an unseen technical orchestra of farms, factories, supermarkets, and distribution fleets.
Perhaps, setting the chips aside, I opt instead to watch a movie. Not so fast, says Ellul: a movie is not the spontaneous irruption of creative impulses, like the cave-painting was for our stone-age ancestors. It is something carefully contrived to produce a certain effect in its viewer. Thanks to techniques of art and psychology (how to shoot a scene, structure a story, cast an actor, tug at the heartstrings), the movie achieves this with ever-finer precision, assuming the character of a rational procedure having as its end the manipulation of human emotion.
Because technique is monistic, the implications of how I buy and eat Doritos are inseparable from how the farmer works his field, how the engineer makes the atom bomb, how the smart-phone slices up my attention among a million tasks. However remote these examples seem, they are inseparably linked by the singular technical phenomenon.
Technique’s fourth property is universalism. This means that the same technical considerations occur in different countries, regardless of their distinct histories and cultures: “Technique is the same in all latitudes and hence acts to make different civilizations uniform.” (117)
When a civilisation adopts technical procedures (just about all of them at this stage of global history) it undergoes a painful mutation of culture and religion. The old metaphysical order is toppled. The taboos are destroyed. All holy objects are desacralized.
Morality gives way to an ethics of technical managerialism; if we have obligations, they are simply about contributing towards and refining the technical procedures of society, so their effects are distributed more equitably; no need to cultivate a moral personality; giving a homeless man some money or food is less important than designing a welfare system that will theoretically solve his problems.
So the bonds between us dissolve. Our community is finally broken into its constituent individuals, all the better to assimilate us to the new technical unity—each according to society’s technical needs.
It is sometimes said that technology is not inherently good or bad, but that it depends on the person using it. According to Ellul, this is true only in the sense that technique is fundamentally amoral. Because it escapes all such considerations, technique is free to develop in its chosen direction, unimpeded by moral prohibitions.
And what is that direction, exactly? According to Ellul, technique dominates and enframes (a word chosen rather carefully with respect to Heidegger, I should think) our life to the point where an authentic choice becomes impossible. Human freedom is always caged and circumscribed by the human techniques—though one might wonder if human freedom was not always circumscribed by something or other, be it technique, nature, or other humans.
The observation that technique restricts our freedom leads to one of the most interesting discussions in the book, that of human techniques. All techniques operate on raw material and function in some way to produce a tangible output: a factory makes cars from workers, steel, and machines; a school makes educated adults out of teachers, children, books, and laptops; so too do some techniques synthesize a “hitherto unknown being” from humans (567 b).
Chief among the human techniques is propaganda.2 Mass broadcasts, made with an ever more exact knowledge of the human mind, are now capable of producing a more certain result: “It is known in advance that the projected image will almost infallibly produce the desired reflex.” (529 b). And in the age of the internet and mass media, anyone can be a propagandist.
So the troll trolls because he knows he will rile people up. The terrorist goes after innocents, making their lives feel unstable to the point where they feel drawn into choosing sides on some existential question, usually to the terrorist’s advantage. Meanwhile, the politician still refuses to give a direct answer or commitment on any subject—unless his comms team has already shown that it will make his polling numbers go up.
Because propaganda operates on human beings, it requires some idea of what the average human being looks like. In slowly refining this image of the average human being, it gives “psychic buoyance” to the idea of “mass man”: no longer a monstrosity sewn together from aristocratic nightmares or statistical averages, he is the real, disembodied figure whom we discover in ourselves, even as we project him onto other people. The finer distinctions of our human persons are erased. We are become the mob.
While in a simple machine, “a sticking gear or an overheated rod calls the existence of the machine to the notice of its vexed user,” (597 b), at a certain point, human techniques become so seamlessly integrated into man’s life that he hardly notices them. He is another cog in the technological society, situated with respect to all the other technical procedures and resources around him. These may be conditions “in which [he] can indeed continue to exist,” but only with “the loss of everything that makes [him] peculiarly human” (576 b).
The Technological Society makes for gloomy reading. Technical procedures are redefining what it means to be human in a way that erases our freedom and there’s nothing you can do about it. Every attempt to resist only plays into the hands of technique. Politics? That’s a technique, says Ellul. So is revolutionary struggle. So is religion, art, science, philosophy, therapy, your mum, all your friends, and your childhood pet.
We are left asking: which things are not technique? Ellul convincingly describes the process by which domains of life become rationalised and technicised, but it seems like we could retroactively apply this way of looking to just about anything. Is it technique when I scratch an itch to satisfy an urge? What about when I pick up a stick to scratch with more horsepower? Ellul’s argument implies yes, but I’m not totally convinced; it seems like we were doomed the minute the ape even thought about picking up the rock.
Ellul himself downplays this absurdity. He claims that technique only began to exert itself sometime in the past, around the time of the industrial revolution. Is it just an historical development then, like nationalism or colonisation? Apparently not, because while we can decolonise our nations and dissolve their borders, there is no way we can stop ourselves being wired into the Matrix. Technique is the final stop for all societies.
Some of the new forms of living and industry which Ellul describes (newish, anyway—we are talking 1958 here) don’t always seem qualitatively different from the older forms. Yes, there is hardly any room for small landholders in modern industrial agriculture, but wasn’t the same process of efficiency and calculation already long at work in primitive farms, even if their methods of crop rotation, seed distribution, and harvesting were based less on science and more on tradition and magic (the latter of which Ellul calls a technique)? How was this not already technique?
For that matter, what even is technique? The best comparison seems to be with an evolving or growing creature. Ellul suggests as much with phrases like “The Technical Organism.” But he doesn’t always write as though it were. Sometimes he speaks in a different mode, describing the ordinary workings of technique as a matter of historical fact, before suddenly shifting into a normative voice which declares that technique will come to strip man of his humanity. Yet even while he writes about technique in the active voice, Ellul back-pedals by saying it has no will or agency.
This book is sorely lacking an ontology of technique. Confusing matters even more, Ellul refuses to give proper historical examples of technique. He claims this is located inside other books, some written by him. If only we knew what these other books were! Ellul barely cites anything. Sometimes he’ll discuss an idea or passage without ever naming the work or author!
“Books are meant to be read, not consulted,” he says, explaining why he doesn’t use footnotes. Maybe. But given that The Technological Society is 68 years old and translated from French, this decision seriously impacts its readability. It even leads to the farcical situation where the translator, John Wilkinson, unable to locate particular quotes from English works, has had to re-translate certain passages back into English!
The Technological Society is also let down by more than a few cases of intellectual ego. Ellul often makes assertions with absolutely zero evidence, as when he baldly declares about the ideal factory worker that: “Worker productivity markedly decreases after only four years, and in general, becomes marked at age twenty-two.” (513 b) He also tends towards unhelpful hyperbole: “It would be useless to multiply such references,” he says, after giving two, for “they are literally infinite in number.” (349 b). And where he contradicts another writer, he can be bellicose to the point where I suspect his fundamental argument is uncharitable; when Ellul scorns Pierre Naville’s idea that vocational training could be integrated into a socialist economy, he writes: “Such nonsense is only a way of refusing to consider facts or to look reality in the face. The facts are clear enough.” (527 b) If you have to write a big book about them, they probably aren’t.
If you can overlook these shortcomings—and you should—there’s a good deal to discover in The Technological Society. Ellul traces the instrumental rationalism of modernity to the most diverse areas of life in an impressive way. And even if he leans on his erudition and force of argument too much, even if the translation gets a bit stilted here-and-there, and sometimes very old-fashioned, one gets the sense that Ellul is a genuinely good stylist:
…the conditions of war eventually become very nearly [man’s] daily state; for the “abnormal” and the “exceptional”, with a somewhat lesser intensity, are reproduced regularly during the course of each day. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on streets. (471 b)
The urgency of such passages lifts up the long, dry, dull bits of The Technological Society. For every difficulty Ellul presents, he has many more observations and graces to be worth your while—they are “literally infinite in number.”
Halfway through reading this book, I switched from a hard copy to an .epub from Library Genesis. I quote from both hroughout this article. Current logistic difficulties leave me unable to correlate page numbers between the two, but where I am quoting something from the hard copy, I do so normally, and where I quote something from the .epub, I do so with a ‘b’.
Ellul uses the word propaganda in a rather idiosyncratic way. He defines it (in this book) as the marriage of modern communication techniques (radio, press, movies, newspapers) with psychological techniques (guilt, manipulation, persuasion, addiction, therapy, psychiatry). This is much broader than what comes to mind when we usually hear the word. I tend to think only of the narrow methods of Orwellian states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: censorship, book burnings, fake news, repressive laws, forced apologies, and public denouncements.