Contents

Szymon Wróbel, Krzysztof Skonieczny, Introduction 7

Part One. Theorizing the Technological Present 13

Szymon Wróbel, Dismantling the Concept of Technology 15

Ivan Dimitrijević, Judgement upon Work 35

Michael Stemerowicz, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” – A Rehearsal of Consumerism and the Aesthetic Consequences of the Dissolution of Tradition 57

Mümtaz Murat Kök, Optimism as Attachment to Capitalism 77

Adam Lipszyc, Affect Unchained: Violence, Voyeurism, and Affection in the Art of Quentin Tarantino 91

Part Two. Experiencing the Technological Present 109

Michaela Fišerová, Touching and Retouching. Question of Authenticity in Social Networking 111

Agata Szepe, Israeli Tourism to Poland in Social Media. Perspectives of Social Science of the Internet and the Actor-Network Theory Approach 127

James W. Besse, Designing Emotional Styles 141

Joanna Łapińska, Posthuman and Post-Cinematic Affect in ASMR “Fixing You” Videos 153

Julia Krzesicka, Emotional Capitalism, Sociability, and Orality. Speculative Imagination Exercise on the Future of Work for Voice Assistants 169

Karin-Ulrike Nennstiel, A Social Robot in Your Living(room)? Recent Developments and Shifting Appraisals 185

Part Three. Exploring Technological Futures 203

Krzysztof Skonieczny, Deleuze’s Remarks on Control Societies. Consequences for Work and Education 205

Denis Petrina, Affect Trapped: Algorithms, Control, Biopolitical Security 219

Ewa Mazierska, Representation of Postdigital Encounters in Recent Science Fiction Films 235

Adam Cichoń, Dr. Strange(love) or: From Affection-Images to Inter-Faces 253

Mitchell Atkinson III, Substrate Independence, Migration, and the Naturalistic Attitude 273

About the authors 293

Contents

Szymon Wróbel, Krzysztof Skonieczny

Introduction

This book is the result of a series of conferences held in the last few years at the Collegium Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw, organized by the Techno-Humanities Lab as a part of the project called “Technology and Socialization”. From its inception, the project’s aim was to interrogate the different ways in which technology – especially digital technology – shapes today’s social and political landscape in a theoretical and practical way.

We started from a set of simple intuitions, which nevertheless gave a very concrete shape to our thinking. We refused to think in ways that would propose a strict caesura between the human and the technological, between the artificial and the social; rather, we tried to open our reflection to ways in which those dimensions intertwine, creating various impure forms and hybrids. We also rejected the technophobic vision of technology as a threat to the human condition; instead, we sought out proofs that it enables new forms of socialization and enhances those that already exist.

The term “socialization” itself is borrowed from the sociology of Georg Simmel, following his suggestion not to talk about society (Gesellschaft) but about the forms of socialization (Vergesellschaftung). This manner of thinking can also be found in the work of Bruno Latour, who uses the term “associology” to question the obviousness of so-called social facts and postulates tracking connections or associations between subjects, objects and devices that, acting together, in alignment, produce “the social”. The term “socialization” means the attempt to redefine the very notion of “the social” by going back to its original meaning and enabling it to retrace connections. Sociology of “the social” becomes here “the sociology of associations” or – in Latour’s sense – “associology”, “sociology of translation”, “actant-rhizome ontology”, or “sociology of innovation”.

Based on these preliminary findings, the three conferences that stemmed from the projects were devoted to areas where the technological and the social intertwine in today’s world, namely, selfhood, work, and the affective dimension of our life. In each case, we asked what do the various interconnections introduced by digital technologies mean for the given problem and how the social and the technological will continue to shape each other in the future.

In particular, during the first conference, The Self and Digital Identity in the Era of “Networked Society”, which was held in October 2018, we asked about the changes to our selfhood and subjectivity brought about by new technologies. The starting point of the conference was once again a simple intuition: there is a justified analogy between the emergence of the era of alphabetical writing discretising speech flows and the advent of the age of digital media discretising audiovisual time objects (pictures). A networked society is – in this perspective – a society in which individuals (people) are permanently connected with everyone, forming a two-way network allowing each person to take up the position both of the sender and the receiver. In such a network one “receives” in proportion to what one “transmits”, that is, one publicizes one’s reception, which – in turn – becomes one’s creation. Wishing to rethink the effects of such networking on subjectivity, we gathered a number of scholars who worked in various perspectives and disciplines – from Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin to Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Stiegler; from philosophy and sociology to film, animal, and game studies. James W. Besse’s, Michael Stemerowicz’s, and Agata Szepe’s chapters stem from this event.

During the second installment of our series, The Future of Work in the Postdigital Age, held in May 2019, we asked about how work and leisure have changed along with the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution. The starting point of the conference was a widely acknowledged fact that work has undergone profound changes since the introduction of digital technologies, which coincided with the hegemony of neoliberalism. This is expressed by terms such as “digital labor”, “immaterial labor”, “biotechnologies”, “gift economy”, and “precariat”. However, the effect of the development of digital technologies, its influence on the analogue spheres of human life, and their relation to neoliberalism have received relatively little attention. For example, do the successes of companies such as Amazon and Uber rely mostly on their technological advancement or do they instead take advantage of deregulation and globalization of economy, which allows capitalists to return to the 19th-century models of workers’ exploitation? Given the high level of accumulation of capital and the perspective of most jobs being taken by robots, can we say that the current model of capitalism is exhausted and if so, what system will replace it? We hoped to find answers to this and similar questions or at least clarify them during this event, and our hopes were not in vain. Once again, we were privileged to host a number of excellent scholars, with Gregg Lambert, Ewa Mazierska, Adam Nocek, and Bernard Stiegler providing keynote lectures. A number of the papers became full-length chapters in this volume, including Ivan Dimitrijević’s analysis of the metaphysics of work and Julia Krzesicka’s predictions about the future of voice assistant devices.

The third event of the project – the conference Affects and Their Vicissitudes in the Postdigital Age – was held in October 2019. Following the title of Sigmund Freud’s famous paper Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), and some of the most interesting insights from the previous events, the conference was an attempt to rethink the categories of affects and emotions in the age of technology. We already knew that the concept of affect gained much currency in recent decades, as demonstrated by the work of authors such as Lauren Berlant, Eva Illouz, Brian Massumi, Dominic Pettman, Colette Soler, and Sherry Turkle. Authors concerned with affect draw attention to its connection to both nature (body) and culture (politics, economy, and technology). For example, Illouz claims that the development of capitalism goes hand in hand with the emergence of a highly specialized emotional culture: emotional capitalism. Did we want to interrogate the manifestations of this phenomenon and the relationship between emotions and technology (and especially digital technologies)? We wished to find out if it is true that the Internet and social media thwart human capacity for affect or, on the contrary, if they encourage its proliferation and mutation. This third conference was a particularly multifaceted event with presentations ranging from film studies, game studies, and analyses of social media, to philosophy, transhumanism, and various approaches to post-truth.

Overall, the multitude of answers we received to the tentative questions we posed confirmed some of our initial – if very general – intuitions. The speed at which the digital world is changing is unprecedented. Whether this speed is a by-product of technology or, for example – as Shoshana Zuboff shows in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – an intentional ruse by the technologically-savvy used to maximize profit by outpacing democratic institutions, it demands an equally unprecedented theoretical effort just to tally and describe our new experiences, not to mention understanding them or framing them theoretically. Perhaps even more importantly, we need our theories to give us keen foresight of the consequences of those changes.

Understanding the challenges thusly, we decided to divide this book into three parts. The first part concentrates on theoretical elaborations of our current situation; testing if theories of technology that we have inherited from earlier technological ages – from Plato and Aristotle to Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and beyond – are suited to our current historical moment; trying to understand the political consequences of this moment. This part is opened by Szymon Wróbel’s chapter, in which the author, following Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler, asks why technology has been shaping our utopian imagination and tries to frame the question of technocracy as a form of government to come. In the second chapter, Ivan Dimitrijević – closely and polemically discussing Agamben’s notion of the sabbath – meticulously analyzes the historical changes undergone by work, the activity that is at once essentially human and technological, and increasingly intertwined with our idea of a good life in the political, Aristotelian sense of the term. In the third chapter, Michael Stemerowicz introduces two more luminaries of 20th-century philosophical reflection of technology, namely, Benjamin and Heidegger, whom he puts in conversation to stress the importance of the connection between the technological and the political. This thread is continued in Mümtaz Murat Kök’s piece, where the author focuses on different technologies of optimism that reinforce our commitment to neoliberal capitalism and ways to counter them. In the final chapter, Adam Lipszyc takes a closer look at the affective techniques made possible by the different technologies employed in moviemaking – both on- and offscreen – taking as an example the films of Quentin Tarantino.

The second part of the book is devoted to describing novel experiences allowed by digital technologies and the intertwinement between our “online” and “offline” lives, often showing that this very distinction is highly problematic. In her chapter, Michaela Fišerová shows how the meaning of the practice of retouching changed from analogue to digital photography, leading to the standardization of our experience, especially concerning social media. Agata Szepe, in turn, uses the analysis of online discourse and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to describe how social media shape tourism, taking as an example Israeli tourists in Poland. James W. Besse starts from the example of the habit-shaping app Habitica to show the possibilities of gamification for influencing real-life emotional styles. Joanna Łapińska’s chapter also focuses on the digital shaping of emotions but this time in the context of popular “therapeutic” ASMR YouTube videos. Julia Krzesicka speculates about the emotional futures of our relationships with voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Echo. Finally, Karin-Ulrike Nennstiel describes the reality of more and more popular social companion robots in Japan.

The chapters gathered in the final part of the book endeavor a look into the future, either problematizing the consequences of currently observable trends – or the theoretical frameworks that can be used to describe them – or more generally trying to understand the workings behind any notion of utopia (or dystopia) as a project for a desired (or undesired) vision of what is to come. In the first two chapters, Krzysztof Skonieczny and Denis Petrina take cues from Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on Control Societies to take a look into the future of work and education (Skonieczny), and algorithms (Petrina), offering some pointers towards possible strategies of resistance. Ewa Mazierska analyzes postdigital encounters in three films – Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina, and Her – to shed some light on visions of a future where the lives of digital and analogue beings are even more closely intertwined than now, and to present a challenging reversal of popularly held beliefs about the affective possibilities offered by both these modes of being. Adam Cichoń also includes Her and Blade Runner 2049 in his analyses, focussing on the affective capabilities of interfaces and – drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critique of Emmanuel Levinas – asks about the possibilities they give us to escape the face. Finally, Mitchell Atkinson III ventures into the world of transhumanist dreams and uses Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to show some unexpected problems that might arise if we do find a way to upload our consciousness onto a hard drive.

It is perhaps a trivial observation that an edited volume is a collective endeavor, but – in this case much more than in others – the help we have received and the gratitude we owe are anything but trivial. First of all, we would like to thank the members of the Techno-Humanities Lab – Katarzyna Szafranowska for the handling of the project’s website and the typesetting and editing of the conference programs and other printed materials; Sebastian Szymański for handling our Facebook page; and Adam Cichoń for taking care of all the essential practical matters during the events. On the administrative side, Joanna Romanowicz’s help was substantial. We also thank Anna Olechowski for proofreading the book.

The program of each conference – available on our web page, technologyandsocialization.al.uw.edu.pl – is as much a list of everyone who participated in the events as it is a list of people to whom we owe thanks. Special mentions are certainly due to the distinguished keynote speakers: Bernard Stiegler, Gregg Lambert, Ewa Mazierska, Krzysztof Ziarek, Adam Nocek, Tom Tyler, Eli Kramer, Yael Vishnizki-Levi, and Badrinath Rao.

Neither the conferences nor this volume would have been possible without the generous help and support from the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” and its dean prof. Robert Sucharski as well as from the Collegium Artes Liberales and its founder and director prof. Jerzy Axer. Essential financial support was given to us by the “Artes Liberales Institute” Foundation, and we would, therefore, like to thank its president, prof. Jan Kieniewicz.

We hope that this book captures at least some of the vibrant and intellectually exhilarating atmosphere that we had the privilege to share during the “Technology and Socialization” conferences. Writing these words during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can only hope that the three events were the first of many more to come.

Part One.

Theorizing the Technological Present

Szymon Wróbel

Dismantling the Concept of Technology

Abstract

The author, in this chapter, asks the question, why is technology the key concept in shaping the utopian imagination. In previous times, starting from Thomas More, the foundation of utopian thinking was rather the state and social organization, not the means of production. Surprisingly, it appears that, without technological support, both social and political utopias are nothing. Technology gives credibility to the utopian project. Jules Verne or Edward Bellamy only give credibility to what is otherwise incredible. What, then, is the utopian feature of utopia as regards to technology? The author claims that utopia reverses the methodological maxim, whereby conclusions about possibilities can be drawn only from the real. Utopia does the opposite: Everything that exists operates within the technological organization and its capabilities. After all, Herbert George Wells’ time machine does not bring us to a politically-thought-out organization, benefiting everyone, but to a sluggish race living in small groups and feeding on fruits. It is humanity liberated from both work and thinking, humanity at its end, unemployed humanity. In the paper, the author, following the path laid by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Bernard Stiegler, is trying to rethink the problematic “utopian perfection of technology” seeking universal automatism and generating a new organization of work.

Keywords:

automatization, technology, techno-utopia, the future of work

Opening Question

Technological utopias appearing in literature and cinema are by no means uncommon. The tenet, however, is not to get fascinated with technical inventions that anticipated reality both in literature and on the screen, nor to talk about utopian literature as a vehicle for all human invention. Rather, the point is to determine in what connections these prophetic inventions remain with the social relations illustrated in the very same works and whether these social relations keep up with technological changes, or whether they constitute “conservative variables” or “conservative power” in the evolution of social forms.

Therefore, I ask why is it that technology provides the abundance of material for reflection on utopia and why technology is the key concept in shaping the utopian imagination. In previous times, starting from Thomas More, the foundation of utopian thinking was rather the state and social organization, not the means of production (More 1516/1967). Surprisingly, it appears that, without technological support, both social and political utopias are nothing. Technology gives credibility to the utopian project. The utopist is neither a prophet nor a bard. Jules Verne or Edward Bellamy only give credibility to what is otherwise incredible. What, then, is the utopian feature of utopia as regards to technology? Does technological utopia set upon the world in such a way that it appears as a visible system of powers? Does the utopian experiment summon and discover nature? Perhaps utopia reverses the methodological maxim, whereby conclusions about possibilities can be drawn only from the real. Utopia does the opposite: Everything that exists operates within the technological organization and its capabilities.

This text will attempt to start a normative reflection, i.e., ask why, in futuristic thinking, technology is often perceived as a threat, not as an opportunity. Why do robots, machines, thinking machines, androids, or cyborgs – upon reaching a certain level of complexity – alienate themselves from humanity and eventually take over the human world by establishing a new non-human form of power? I will talk here about technological anxiety, which results in a kind of poverty of technological imagination. I am compelled to claim that in solving this problem, we first need to address our erroneous conception of technology and the erroneous way of understanding the relationship between the means of production and relations of production, technology and socialization, technical resources and communication resources, “engineers’ technology” understood as the domain of “machine” and “social technics” understood as the “art of composition” of the “social”. Perhaps the main tension in our thinking about what is “social” and what is “technical” results from the fact that from the very beginning we contrast the machine with life, what is technical with what is organic, the principle of mechanical repetition with the principle of spontaneity and creativity of life, just as if technology, at its source, remained at the service of the death drive, and social life and communication relations remained at the services of free action carried out beyond any limitations. Similarly, we oppose automatism and autonomy; as if automatism was the main threat to our autonomy, and as if autonomy could not rely upon automaticity and could only be annihilated by automation.

I argue that we need a new concept of “technology”, such that would not be conflicted with the concept of “life” and, likewise, a concept of “life” that would not be detached from the concept of “technology”. We must see the “technical” elements within life itself, and see the “organic” and “socialization” within the technical. I also argue that we should seriously consider the hypothesis, according to which the prime area of expression of human inventiveness is not the production of external tools, but above all the reorganization of the functions of the body organs. It was Lewis Mumford who in the first volume of The Myth of the Machine suggested that the primary task of man is to create tools for “self-control” and the control of “internal excess”, “explosive nature of the brain”, or “internal anxiety” (Mumford 1967). Socialization tools, such as customs, rituals, words, commands, organization, overtook tools understood as instruments of work and giving effect on the world’s matter. If “mechanization of people” was a phenomenon earlier than “mechanization of working tools”, we should rethink the category of “socialization” and the category of “machine”. We should also revise our thinking about autonomy and automatism, perhaps returning to the Hegelian definition of the machine as an “independent (automated) tool”.

The ultimate purpose of this text, though only outlined here, is to think about the enigmatic concept of “techno-utopia”, i.e., to look for its new, more awaited, and less obvious meaning. The term “techno-utopia” is a strange fusion of utopia and technology. We do not know whether the dominant side is utopia or technology. We would like the meaning of this term to be determined not by a “struggle” but by the kind of “reconciliation”, amalgam, i.e., the creation of a “third meaning” in which “technology” would be socialized from the very beginning, and that which is “social” would be already technicalized at the time of conception of the so-called “social fact”. Techno-utopia is a “new place” for a utopia; it is a “different place”, or the “real place” of utopia, but also a “different technology” of producing the social. As part of the techno-utopia, what is social would not brutally eliminate what is non-social, what is not living, or that what is only material. This is the hope permeating this text. That is also why one of the titles of this text could be a paraphrasing of the famous Martin Heidegger’s text and the ensuing question concerning techno-utopia.

The Concept of Technology

Let us start with the concept of technology. We usually think of technology as a set of devices used to implement and optimize a certain goal. That is why we distinguish different technologies and never see technology itself; we recognize military technics, communication technics, construction technics, educational technics, locomotion technics, or information technology. When, in the spirit of the Frankfurt School, we criticize instrumental reason, we also acknowledge that technology is nothing but instrumental reason. This instrumental reason is most often contrasted with communication or aesthetic reason. Remaining a prisoner of this rhetoric, Jürgen Habermas posits, for example, that technics stands for, on the one hand, a set of measures that enable effective implementation of goals, but on the other hand, a system of rules defining purposeful-rational action (Habermas 1974). Technics are, therefore, tools, machines, and devices that optimize and rationalize the work process, but also strategies and technologies, i.e., the rules of rational choice, instrumental rules, which set out the procedures for reaching specific goals. Habermas finds technology at the level of management, as well as at the level of executing the action. Technology governs by technical regulations. Technics is only in regard to purely technical questions. The key threshold in this narrative is the moment when technical means become “technologies”, i.e., the moment when “tools” are no longer vainly mobilized to a single case but remain available for repetitive use.

One important consequence of this way of thinking is in the explicit suggestion that since political domination has taken the form of technical regulation, it cannot be abolished without removing technics itself. “Freedom from technology” becomes here a synonym of “freedom in general” and “all freedom”. In this approach, “pre-technological man” is untamed and unspoiled, a man not reduced to the role of a servant (subject) merely servicing the instruments of work. I argue that this fantasy about the existence of a pre-technological or post-technological man is a fantasy that has dominated the literary, philosophical, and cinematographic imagination of the West. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment; from The Original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley or The War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells to Summa Technologiae and The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick; from All Around the Moon by Jules Verne to Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy; and from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Ridley Scott’s Alien Series (1979/2017), humanity lives in growing fear of technology and with a declining hope for freedom from technology (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944/2002; Bellamy 1888/1960; Dick 1968; Lem 1964/2013; Lem 1965/1975; Rousseau 1761/1997; Shelley 1818/2008; Verne 1870/2014; Wells 1897/1993). Social utopia becomes an island not yet infected with high technologies resulting in permanent supervision, universal mobilization, and destructive conformism.

There is also another utopian narrative. There is a happy story about technology that mastered nature for human purposes. Charles Fourier, one of the authors of this narrative, deeply believed that if his ideas were implemented, seawater would turn into lemonade and whales would be happily hauling ships. According to Fourier, owing to well-organized social work, four moons would light up the earth’s night, polar ice caps would melt, seawater would get desalinated, and predatory animals would commit to the service for humans (Fourier 1816/1971). All this illustrates the type of work that, far from exploiting nature, would release from its womb a dormant opportunity. Is the naïvety of such ideas not the result of dissolving utopia in technology? After all, Herbert George Wells’ time machine does not bring us to a politically-thought-out organization, benefiting everyone, but to a sluggish race living in small groups and feeding on fruits. It is humanity liberated from both work and thinking, humanity at its end, humanity unemployed.

If technology expropriates man from “work” as the only sensible human activity, does the same work define “humanity”? If technology evicts man “from memory” and if it drives man “into oblivion” and “the tyranny of newness”, does memory constitute “of humanity”? If technology automates, i.e., allows to go from autonomy to automation, from the epoch of tools to the era of machines, does it deprive man of the autonomy, leading from autonomy to automation, or does it redeem and redefine it – finding autonomy in automatics? If technology offers time to man, filling man’s time with its work, does it allow man to be “out of time” or that man can forget about the finiteness of man’s time? Does technology serve as a tool for expanding or cancelling time, or does it give us only the illusion of “time management”, no more the time of work but of its finite life? Is utopia, in searching for a place for a man without work, without time, or without memory, a utopia constantly subject to technological fear or rather the anticipation of the present future?

I argue that, despite many intellectual efforts, we constantly think of “technology” as if we belonged to the age of the “innocence of technology” and as if the “age of innocence of technology” ever existed. The problematic nature of the term “innocence” lies in the fact that the reproduction of the human race is subject to the requirements of instrumental action or deliberate, rational action. Therefore, as long as humankind retains its biological characteristics, only the reach of the power of technical regulation is subject to historical changes, but not its structure or essence. This is an important observation. In fact, what may prove to be essential is cloning technology and entering the post-sexual era in which people no longer reproduce by engaging in more or less accidental sexual relations, but follow a “rational decision” on procreation, realized, legitimized, and controlled by biotechnological engineering.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that one should question “innocence”, i.e., the “neutrality of technology” and ask if it is indeed just a means to achieve the set goal, including procreation, namely, is technology a device or an instrument remaining on human services? One should also ask if technology is a human act. Reproduction technics making man only a reproductive material in the process of the evolution of humanity perhaps relieves man from one important function, e.g., sexual function, but it entails dismissal of such a disburdened man from his original position. One should also ask: Does the whole of technical devices constitute technology at all?

Martin Heidegger replies in negative to all of the above questions, and in doing so, Heidegger occupies a privileged position in thinking about technology. For Heidegger, technology is not merely a means. Technology is a way of discovering. Heidegger, despite his explicit declaration that “[t]here is no demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of its essence”, is equally vocal about technology being “the destiny of our era” and about “technical madness” meaning that technics “will eventually manage everything” and will disburden “man” (Heidegger 1953/1977). How is it that technics become a way to manage everything and to disburden “man”?

For Heidegger, technology is a domain of unconcealment, i.e., truth (Wahrheit), and not simple causality nor a matter of control over it. Heidegger asks a straightforward question: What does technology demand from nature? Does it demand that nature constantly discovers new resources of energy and matter concealed in its entrails? Is the earth, from the point of view of technology, something other than a resource of matter and energy, intended for further use? What does technology do to the world? Well, it “sets” nature, though it does not run its “setup”. Having said that, what does it mean to “set someone or something”? What does it mean to “set nature”? How can nature be “set” at all?

What this “setting” means is, above all, that technology “calls” nature in a manner that a superior calls on the subordinate to provide the report. Technology is just about this “calling and reporting”. It is, in a sense, the rhetoric of evocation. Technology “sets the air” so that it releases nitrogen; it “sets the earth” to release ore, uranium from ore, and, in the end, to release atomic energy from uranium. “Nature set” and “nature called” by technics becomes a “standing reserve” (Bestand). This “reserve” conveys the meaning of a “setting” as well as an “enframing” and thus signifies a way of discovering nature. However, Heidegger surprisingly and mysteriously adds that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. What, therefore, is “enframing” if it is “anything technological”? Is technology a concealed, hushed up, and obscure politics? Is technology rhetoric understood as politics?

To put it bluntly, the message Heidegger conveys is that technology is never an instrument or a mere tool. Does that mean that technologies mediate action? No, because we have ourselves become instruments for no other end than instrumentality itself. Man is possessed by technology, and it is a complete illusion to believe that we can master it (Heidegger 1953/1977). We are framed by Gestell – the only way in which the Being is unveiled. Is technology inferior to science and pure knowledge? No, because, for Heidegger, far from serving as applied science, technology dominates all, even the purely theoretical sciences. By rationalizing and stockpiling nature, science plays into the hands of technology, whose sole end is to rationalize and stockpile nature without end. Our modem destiny – technology – appears to Heidegger radically different from poesis, the kind of “making” that ancient craftsmen knew how to achieve. Technology is a unique, insuperable, omnipresent, and superior Force.

For a change, let us now try to trivialize Heidegger’s thought a little and disenchant it. Bruno Latour, with his plebeian reading of Heidegger, gives us succor in this regard when he comes to an interesting conclusion that technology is simply “solidified work”. Technology – says Latour – is properly referred to not with a noun, but with an adjective (Latour 1999, 191). For Latour, “technologies” do not exist as such; moreover, there is nothing we can define as a “technological object” or “technological gadget”. There is only the adjective “technological” that we can use in many different situations. So what does the word “technological” mean in the absence of the “technology” itself?

The word “technological” can mean primarily the “program of action”, but also a certain “necessary skill” to carry out this program. Finally, the word can signify “organization of the action”, as well as “a set organized around a chain of command”. This is why Mumford in The Myth of the Machine boldly says that the machine takes shape when language and communication – that is, intangible work and cooperation – become the dominant production force. Latour only draws conclusions from this, when he makes a surprising point: “Boeing-747s do not fly, airlines fly” (Latour 1999, 193). The airlines are super-machines organizing action programs. Airlines are “technologies” if we are still willing to use this flimsy term. So what are we to deduce from the withdrawal of thought from the great dichotomy between society and technology? In what sense that what is social is the result of the action of a technical element, and in what is technical only solidified work?

Perhaps for all these reasons, Sherry Turkle (2011) claimed that technology is seductive and proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies. From the perspective of the “inner history of technology”, the computer is an evocative object that fostered new reflection about the self (Turkle 2011). The intimate ethnography traced the subjective side of personal computers – not what computers do for us but what they do to us, to our ways of thinking about ourselves, our sense of being human. In the digital age, computers no longer wait for humans to project meaning onto them. Now, sociable robots meet our gaze, speak to us, and learn to recognize us. This is what we sometimes call a “robotic moment” (Kurzweil 2005). However, Turkle wrote from the perspective of fear of technology.

Technology presents itself as a one-way street; we are likely to dismiss discontents about its direction because we read them as growing out of nostalgia or a Luddite impulse or as simply in vain. But when we ask what we “miss,” we may discover what we care about, what we believe to be worth protecting. We prepare ourselves not necessarily to reject technology but to shape it in ways that honor what we hold dear. (Turkle 2011, 19)

Turkle reminds us that in The Republic Plato says: “(…) everything that deceives seems to bewitch” (Plato 1991, 92). Sociable technology will always disappoint, because it promises what it cannot deliver. It promises friendship but can only deliver performances. From the very beginning, networked technologies designed to share practical information were taken up as technologies of relationship (Turkle 2011, 157). Turkle drew a political conclusion out of her full of distrust to the social technology story. She is arguing that technology and its growth will threaten democracy, because

In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, one that must be protected no matter what our techno-enthusiasms. (…) It seems like part of democracy defining its sacred spaces. (Turkle 2011, 264)

Turkle asks the question: Could we build a net that reweights privacy concerns, acknowledging that these, as much as information, are central to democratic life? I would like to treat this question now seriously.

The Concept of Technocracy

In this situation, it might be necessary to rethink the very concept of technocracy. Perhaps it should not be concerned with the growth of information nor even the fears of technology, nor should it condemn nor worship it by engaging in its total criticism or its unconditional apology. Above all, it should perhaps address the question of what political form is ushered in the time of bio-techno-capitalism. Or, better yet, it should address the very consequence of merging the three terms, namely, that of “time”, “technique”, and “democracy” (“politics”). Given the above concerns, it might be worthwhile to rethink the very concept of “technocracy” for it might render the term “technocracy” competitive towards the term “techno-utopia”.

What is “technocracy”? Is it a form of government? Is it a political system? Is technocracy a political organization at all? Should technocracy be included in some other forms of government, such as democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, a republic, or despotia? Is technocracy, in Max Weber’s terminology, the “pure form” of the legal power opposing charismatic or traditional power? What is the mandate of technocracy to power? Are we living today not so much in camps, oligarchies, or democracies, as we are living in technocracies, and the modern form of digital capitalism has taken the form of imperious techno-capitalism? What is techno-capitalism doing to us? And would the fact of life in the digital age explain the key position of technology in our modern thinking?

In Book III of the Laws Plato devotes himself to a systematic inventory of the qualifications – axiomata – for ruling, along with certain correlative qualifications for being ruled. Out of the seven he retains, four are traditional qualifications of authority based on a natural difference; that is, the difference in birth. Those qualified to rule are those “born before” or “born otherwise”. This grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the principal principle that summarizes all of the natural differences. It is the power of those with a superior nature, of the strong over the weak – a power that has the unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only difference that counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know, over those who do not. There are thus four couplings of traditional qualifications to be had, along with two theoretical couplings that claim priority over them, namely, natural superiority and the rule of science qua knowledge (Plato 1988).

The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh qualification: “the choice of God”, otherwise referring to a drawing of lots that designates the one who exercises “arche”. Plato does not expand upon this. But clearly, this kind of “choice” points ironically to the designation by God of a regime previously referred to as one only God could save: democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is pure chance or the complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is the state of exception where no oppositions can function, where is no pre-determined principle of role allocation. Democracy is the specific situation in which there is an absence of qualifications that, in turn, becomes the qualification for the exercise of a democratic arche. What is destroyed in this logic, is the particular quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that it always precedes itself within a circle of its own disposition and exercise. But this exceptional state is identical with the very condition for the specificity of politics more generally.

Laws is Plato’s late dialogue, in which Socrates is absent. However, Socrates is present in the dialogue entitled Republic. What does the title really mean? The Greek form used in this title is politeia, and this word is ordinarily translated as “constitution”. This means, not only structure as we may understand it, but also a whole way of life. We would translate politeia literally, however, as “regime” or “polity”. When you speak of democracy or aristocracy as a way of life and not as a mere procedure for having a government, then democracy would be a regime in this sense. In Republic, according to Socrates, there are five kinds of regime: (1) kingdom or aristocracy, the rule of the best man or the best men, that is directed toward goodness or virtue, the regime of the just city; (2) timocracy, the rule of the lovers of honor or of the ambitious men which is directed toward superiority or victory; (3) oligarchy or the rule of the rich in which wealth is most highly esteemed; (4) democracy, the rule of free men in which freedom is most highly esteemed; and (5) tyranny, the rule of the completely unjust man in which unqualified and unashamed injustice holds sway (Plato 1993).

After this digression referring to the classical political philosophy and reminding us of known and possible political systems and forms, let me return to the problem of technocracy. Technocracy – understood as a political form, but also a certain form of life – is obviously not accounted for in any enumeration of the elders, neither in Plato’s Laws nor in the Socrates’ enumeration found in Republic. One could argue that the ancient philosophers did not deal with technocracy, because they lived in the repression of technology. One might argue that technocracy is a modern invention. One could argue that mass democracy is born with technology. If that were the case, it would render yet the more important question: What form of constitution, what form of life is technocracy? What form of qualifications, competences (axiomata) does technocracy represent?

Well, the provisional answer to this question is: Technocracy, just as theocracy, both unaccounted for in the Socrates’ enumeration, is an inhuman form of government. Technocracy is the rule neither of best nor the most ambitious, the richest nor free people. Technocracy is not “the rule of the elderly”, “parents”, “teachers”, “noble people”, or even “preachers”. While it may be tempting to associate technocracy with governments of “educated people”, “people who know better”, i.e., who know what means to use for given purposes, it would naïvely identify technocracy with meritocracy, and it would constrain the concept of technology to that of a tool that I have warned against.

Technocracy is not epistemocracy; it is not the rule of educated people. It cannot be that way, because technocracy is not at all the rule of people. Nor is it a government of “gods”. Perhaps these are the governments of cyborgs, i.e., the governments of automated and autonomous technology itself, which becomes a kind of unbearable tyranny of inhuman rationality. Technocracy – from this point of view – is the fundamental opposite of democracy, because it eliminates the notion of fortune, fate, or chance, but it also eliminates freedom understood as the madness of choice. In a word, technocracy is something between theocracy and tyranny. Here, power comes from the heavens, but not as a miracle, but as a call to a report. Technocracy, after theocracy, would inherit the apology of the inhuman order, and after tyranny – indifference to the issues of justice, a whim of infantile philosophers, like Socrates. God’s law of European powers was spoken through the words of Saint Paul, who famously proclaimed that “there is no authority except from God”. Not only every power comes from God, but also every God and every rule on the earth must find its justification in the power of technology or the power of ensuring order on earth. Thereby, the “automat”, “apparatus”, dispositif, or “installation” is what God has become. The installation brings indifference to justice and invalidates all revolution except the technical revolution.

The Concept of Apparatus

Giorgio Agamben, in his famous commentary on the writing of Michel Foucault titled What Is an Apparatus?, convinces us that the central yet enigmatic concept for the author of The History of Sexuality was that of “dispositive”. Agamben (2009, 1-25) claimed that dispositif, or “apparatus” (in English), is a decisive technical term in the strategy of Foucault’s thought. Foucault (1998) introduced this concept in the first volume of The History of Sexuality when he described what he calls the “deployment of sexuality”. Foucault wrote:

The deployment of alliance has as one of its chief objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality, on the other hand, engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control. (Foucault 1998, 75)

Foucault adds: The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

Without going into a polemic with Agamben whether or not he is accurate in his diagnoses of a political and intellectual stake in Foucault’s philosophy, I would like to take a moment of reflection on the key concept of dispositif (apparatus) in the context of our previous analyses of the term “technology”. In what sense “dispositif” (“apparatus”) differs from the concept of “technology”, especially in the Heideggerian sense of the term?

What Heidegger called Gestell is at first glance similar, from an etymological point of view, to dispositio, disponere, just as the German stelen corresponds to the Latin ponere. When comparing “technology” with “dispositif”, one should ask: What does it mean to be at someone’s disposal? In what sense does the word “dispositif” constantly contain in itself memory in dispositional meaning? Finally, one should ask if freedom available here on earth is only about being not “disposed by” or not “at the disposal” of any device or master. Nature – in Heidegger’s – constantly evoked by technology, remains “at the disposal” or is even placed “to the disposition” of unknown powers. Hence, it is in the status of a setting, enframing, or stock. Who is at whose disposal here? Who disposes of whom?

In answering these questions, let us start by saying that Agamben’s analyses circulate around the concept of dispositif following three directions. Reading Foucault’s statements from various years, Agamben concludes that the term “apparatus” in the work of the author of A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason essentially means three things: (1) a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and non-linguistic units, discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on; (2) a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge; and (3) the specific historical relationship between individuals as living beings and the set of institutions, of processes of subjectification and of rules in which power relations become concrete.

After further etymological investigation, Agamben comes to a final semantic conclusion and claims that if we try to examine the definition of “apparatus” that can be found in common French dictionaries, we see that these books distinguish between three meanings of the term. What are those three meanings? Well, first what we find and what we understand in a strictly juridical sense: Apparatus is the part of a judgment that contains the decision separate from the opinion; that is, the section of a sentence that decides or the enacting clause of a law. Second, a technological meaning: how the parts of a machine or a mechanism are arranged. Finally, third, we encounter a military use: the set of means arranged in conformity with a plan. Agamben, in a somewhat less conclusive tone, adds that to some extent, the three definitions are all present in Foucault’s.

After this semantic differentiation, let us ask the question: What is this original meaning for the term “apparatus”? How do meanings of the term “apparatus” – that of a judgment, mobilization of resources, and strategy of action – intertwine with each other? As a working hypothesis, let us try this answer: The term certainly refers to a set of practices and mechanisms – both linguistic and non-linguistic, juridical, technical, and military – that aim to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate. But what does it mean to use all the above means in a situation of imminent need? Well, it seems to me that the term dispositif means nothing else but a kind of “crisis management” or a series of answers to the “crisis situation”. The term “dispositive” means simply a certain composition of forces, the mobilization of all available material and immaterial resources, all available powers of action, in order to create a “setting” capable of working together and capable of dealing with the crisis. But what is the crisis that will give rise to the announcement of a permanent state of emergency which is probably never-ending? In what sense does the crisis allow us to announce the state of mobilization in which humanity must remain at its disposal, just as nature, waiting for the verdict in its case?

Closing Concepts

Well, the answer to this last question is quite twisted. I am saying that the state of emergency is announced when humanity is concerned about the disappearance of “humanity”. Nothing concerns humanity more than the fact and the possibility of its disappearing. Technics, automation, cybernetics, and simulated intelligence disturb humanity not only by their invasiveness, but also by the fact that they create the possibility of another intelligence, another policy, another organization, a different composition, and another democracy. Humanity wishes to ensure its purity and the purity of its key concepts. Technology creates a threat of an “unclean species” and non-human elements. Technology evokes the fantasy of subjecting and capturing in humanity, and it is not surprising since that same humanity, from the beginning, from Prometheus, must find in technology the source of its strength and the moment of its birth, i.e., the technology of subjectification and subjectivization power. What does this last ambivalence mean?

It means that a techno-logical being is permanently and irreversibly pharmacological (Stiegler 2015). The pharmacy sells medicines and poisons at the same time. Pharmacy is ambivalent by definition (Derrida 1981). Mnemotechnics is certainly a condition and the possibility of all reason, but also the possibility and condition of all fooling. Socialization of technology has been achieved through a communication shift, because all communication and all socialization are done today “through” and “within” the socialized technology. On the other hand, the desocialization of the world of politics has also taken place through a “communication shift” in new media, because all politics is going “through the media” today and is “in the media”, which is still “unsocialized technology”. Every technology implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as a technology of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence. Technology then, is, first of all, a machine that produces subjectification, and only as such it is also a machine of governance. Technology that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that it no longer acts as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification.

The foundation of the age of the machine is not the industrial revolution but the creation of a machine made of people. Primitive people have very rudimentary technology and at the same time very sophisticated rites. These were not the first automatons but the pyramids which transformed the organic into the mechanical. The machines for tuning humanity are older than the machines used to expropriate humanity from the work process. The machine is primal with respect to the technical element. The technical element of the machine retains an abstract, indeterminate character unless it refers to a certain setting, labor relations, and social relations. These, however, are determined by the composition, “dispositif”, Gestell, or collective. In this sense, “technology is society made durable” (Latour 1991).

Finally, allow me to make one strictly political remark. If by “technics” – following the model devised by Habermas – we continue to understand “scientifically rationalized disposal” and control over objectified processes of cognition, knowledge, experiencing the world, communication, and action, that is, a system in which scientific research, coupled with economy and management, create a new form of techno-scientific domination; and by “democracy” we understand the institutional safeguards of universal and public communication about redistribution and recognition, then we will certainly have to conclude that the “liberating power of reflection” cannot be replaced by the development of “technologically useful knowledge” and that technology is a bad poison for democracy. However, there is another way to think about technology and democracy.

We can assume – following Bernard Stiegler’s formula – that the duplication of audiovisual objects alongside the access to production tools will allow the emergence of new forms of knowledge and new forms of power (Stiegler 2009). The alphabetical record of speech, just like the audiovisual registration of lifestyles, is associated with the process of grammatization. Grammatization enables the discretization and reproduction of flows through which individuals and groups of individuals individualize, i.e., become who they are. If audiovisual media shortens communication circuits and invalidates diacritism, they become a threat to democracy, and if they strengthen diacritism and allow for an extension of communication circuits, they give an opportunity for new techno-cultural isonomy. Perhaps one can think of an analogy between the advent of an era of alphabetical writing discretizing speech flows, and the advent of the age of digital media discretizing audiovisual objects. Discretization, or the process of transforming continuous models into their discrete counterparts, must be associated with the process of literalization and literatureization of societies. The death of grammar would be the death of democracy.

Central to this text, though not fully disclosed, the notion of techno-utopia would thus gain rather surprising meaning. It would not at all praise technology nor praise the power of productive means as a progressive force of humanity. On the contrary, the term “techno-utopia” would mean not so much a “utopia of technology” or even a “technology of utopia”, i.e., a technology to create a better place, a place for another community, and another democracy, possibly tele-democracy and techno-democracy, which would be effected “on-screen” and “through the screen” in order to go “beyond the screen”. It should be added, however, that the “screen” is gains here, as it is in Jacques Derrida’s spectral character (Derrida 1994). We may guess that “democracy of the future”, “the coming community”, just as it is the case with “television of the future” or “internet of the future”, or “technology of the future”, will not be based on a “screen” and that it will display images, sometimes synthetic, directly on the surface of the eye – analogous to the sound of the phone, detected deep in the ear. Karl Marx is one of the few thinkers of the past who seriously considered the sourcing inseparability of technology and language, technology and politics, i.e., tele-technology, tele-politics, tele-democracy, and tele-utopia, bearing in mind that every language is in fact a tele-technology.

Perhaps the term of “techno-utopia” is not a holistic fusion of utopia and technology, but rather radical transversal relations that generate new modes of subjectivity. The merger of the human with the technological results in a new transversal compound, a new kind of techno-utopia pact or covenant not unlike the relationship between the animal and its planetary habitat.

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