Technics
Adrián Almazán
The manner in which western societies have envisaged technics and technology in the past has been restrained by a series of prejudices that make up the “technological neutrality paradigm”. These are, fundamentally, four: (i) we can do as we please with technical know-how, its use is free; (ii) if the content of (i) is true, it follows that we cannot make moral or ethical judgements of technics, but only on the user (agent) who decides what use to give it; (iii) technical know-how is an autonomous reality, independent from society and history, that is important only as a means to understand users; and (iv) any changes in technical know-how are always positive and follow a linear process of improvement over time. Therefore, there is no sense in criticising or opposing it.
We seldom come across explicit defence of this paradigm. The preconceptions it is compounded of are a sort of implicit common sense that is, nonetheless, present in many current political proposals. For example, ecomodernism is based on the need for technical expansion with purely positive effects and, in addition, offers the possibility of using contemporary technologies in a radically different way to today’s uses (the idea of ‘free use’). This is also found in classical Marxism, which advocated the “re-appropriation” of capitalist technology to “decouple” it from said system’s economic relations, for use as a tool by socialist society. This idea has been revisited by authors such as Bastani (2020).
This paradigm has a key role in considering the ecological justice issue, given that, to a large extent, this is synonymous to techno-optimism and the manner in which capitalist societies aspire to giving “technical” and efficient solutions to all problems (Alexander & Rutherford, 2019). One clear example is the climate crisis and geo-engineering. To address an ecological, social and political problem, a technological solution is offered that, as per (iv), is presented as the logical and positive result of historical progress. Such an offer conceals that geo-engineering favours the interests of business stakeholders (who continue to burn fossil fuels today with the excuse of tomorrow’s hypothetical solution) and relieves from liability those responsible for this crisis: companies and states (iii). Lastly, it blurs the need for ecological, social and political responses to the climate crisis, focusing attention solely on an allegedly neutral tool (i), which societies may choose to use well or ill. The importance of the use given becomes especially clear when we take into account that, in many cases, geo-engineering is nothing but a “different” use of technologies that already exist, some of which are already fossil.
This example clearly illustrates the need to understand technics and technology beyond this collection of preconceptions. Indeed, the philosophy of technology, STS [Science, Technology and Society] studies or the anthropology of technical know-how involve practical exercises in overcoming the paradigm of neutrality. To name a few of the perspectives and authors developing these, we may mention: the critical theory of technology (Feenberg, 2017), the actor-network theory (Latour, 2019), post-phenomenology (Ihde, 2009), the social construction of technology (Bijker et al., 2012) or the new feminist materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010).
How can we reinterpret technics from an alternative “non-neutrality paradigm”? According to Tim Ingold (1987, p. 47), we can define technics as objects that can be used by an animal to carry out a project of their own. Animal in general, rather than only human, because ethology has shown clearly that birds, fish and non-human primates are perfectly capable of making and using tools (Shumaker et al., 2011). And one aspect of such projects, therefore, involves technics as something more than a mere goal. As pointed out by Marcel Mauss (Mauss et al., 2012, pp. 412-13) –among others–, technical goals are inseparable from the manner in which we use them, or from the procedures and practices associated with their use. A bow is not a bow if we do not know how to shoot an arrow. A stone is a technique only when we use it for knapping or pounding, etc.
It follows, therefore, that technics is the sum of an object (technical), an animal user and the use it is given. Nonetheless, none of these three elements can be can be defined in isolation from a given society. Although technical capacity may be understood as a transcultural attribute, any technique is always from and occurs within a particular society or culture. The metabolic, economic, political, symbolic and imaginary relationships (Castoriadis, 1989) within a social order, in turn, are key to shaping technics. Only a fossil society, impregnated with a modern and progressive imaginary, will contemplate the possibility and the desirability of a spaceship. To understand the implications of carrying a bow in a given society we need to know their political, religious and economic system, since carrying a bow and holding power may be two sides of the same coin. Therefore, along with the goal, the animal and the uses, our description of a technique should include a technical sphere encompassing the set of relationships outlined above. A sphere that, very often, contains most of society.
In brief, technics is the material expression of forms of understanding, interpreting and finding one’s bearing in the world. Far from being a simple material object, inert and neutral, technics is a piece of matter in which are intertwined movements, actions and practices, but also wishes, beliefs, judgements, institutions, power relations and struggles, as well as social and individual imaginaries.
This way of looking at things unpicks the four preconceptions in the neutrality paradigm. As a contingent social creation, technical change cannot be understood as the result of a permanently positive continuous evolution, but rather as a succession of different social creations occurring in time with different societies and in resonance with their objectives, ends and imaginaries (Lo, 2020). Hence, a radical and ahistorically positive assessment a priori of all technical change is impossible. We are obliged at all times to consider every technique in its socio-historical context, as a creation open to ambiguity and political reflection. This statement also allows us to distinguish between technics and technology. The latter is nothing but a specific case of the former. In particular, technologies are the technics of capitalist, modern and industrial societies; and consequently, they share the characteristic structural features of those societies.
Moreover, since technics is a constituent, inherent and inseparable part of society, it cannot be isolated and oriented toward an objective that is radically different from mainstream social ends and values (Castoriadis, 1998, p. 306). This holds for each and every technique studied individually, but most especially for a society’s technics considered as an interconnected whole.
Lastly, neither (ii) nor (iii) are sustainable. Society imbues technics with a set of ends and objectives that can only be understood from that society’s viewpoint as a single package. What society, other than that of industrial capitalism, obsessed with control and growth, would have any interest in building a weapon capable of wiping out our entire species, such as the atom bomb? The reverse is also true: the massive irruption of fossil fuels in industrial societies has rendered economic growth (and motorised leisure, etc.) an unrenounceable imperative, even when we acknowledge that the price of such growth implies ‘civilising’ suicide.
It is therefore an illusion, as posited in (i), that the creator (the scientist, engineer or politician) is able to decide once and for all the potential ends and uses of a technique. To begin with, because, as soon as a technique emerges, its creator unknowingly imbues it with the values and ends “implanted” by society. This is one of the basic elements of feminist critiques of science, which reproduces patriarchal values unconsciously but very effectively (a mechanism that, by contrast, is essential to understanding the reproduction of society through institutions, culture, etc.).
And secondly, because, once a technique has been established in a society, it will always have unforeseen impacts (Ellul, 2003) or may be used in a manner not envisaged in its initial design (Ellul, 1964). A paradigmatic example of the first case might be the set of technologies comprised in the green revolution that, paradoxically, in its effort to increase the production of food and sustenance for the human species, has ended up destroying biodiversity and producing severe soil erosion. An example of the second scenario is the use of medicines for recreational uses, in some cases entailing the risk of addiction, a secondary effect that is sometimes impossible to predict a priori.
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