Gernot Böhme: Techno-Philosophy, Techno-Criticism - Sample No. 1

Invasive Technification - Introduction (from the German by CS)

1. Deep within the Brain

Not long ago, a book about an illness achieved the notable feat of making it onto German best-seller lists. Could it have been something to do with the way the account managed to move the reader to participate in the story? There are, after all, a plethora of medical narratives that aim to mobilise or strengthen our affective powers. Could it have been simply that this account was well written - that it displayed an authorial frankness placing it squarely in the tradition of European confessional literature? My suspicion is that the breadth and depth of public response has to do more with the content of the account - a content that triggers a sort of metaphysical terror in the reader.

The book is Deep within the Brain and in it sociology professor Helmut Dubiel tells the story of his experiences with Parkinson's Disease. The decisive point of his account - what makes it stand out from many a biographical account of illness - is when the progress of Dubiel's malady can no longer be kept in check with medication and he is having to come to terms with public humiliations because of ever more noticeable symptoms - at which stage he has a technically state-of-the-art implant inserted into his brain. The implant creates an electrical stimulus that regulates the interaction of brain hormones. (The latter gets out of balance in the absence of dopamine - the root cause of Parkinson's Disease.) Yet although artificial regulation does indeed result in a notable improvement of typical Parkinson's symptoms such as shaking and reduced motor functions, in some cases, like Dubiel's, it has extremely severe side-effects. The stimulus to the interior of the brain interferes seriously with the speech capacity of the patient - a catastrophic impairment for an academic with a lecturing position at a university.

Dubiel could thus not but view the medical intervention subjectively as a mistake and objectively as a failure. In his case the medical world had hit on a form of treatment that in a certain sense seems macabre - Dubiel reported in a newspaper interview, for example, that to other people he sometimes comes across as a sort of zombie: he can switch off the implanted pacemaker which stimulates the relevant region deep in the brain using a hand-held remote-control. This allows him to speak again without any trouble, however his Parkinson's symptoms recur, meaning for example that he can no longer walk. When he switches the device on again, he can walk and carry out deliberate bodily movements, however his speech capacity is again impaired - so much so for example that he can no longer give a lecture.

Dubiel's case gives dramatic proof of where society stands today vis-a'-vis new possibilities of highly technified medicine. When Dubiel talks about being able to switch himself on and off, what is fundamentally at issue is the meaning of this selfhood. Is he the human being who can move about in well co-ordinated fashion or the human being who can form proper sentences? Or is he perhaps the human being who has the subjective experience of switching on and off? The implant seems to have brought about a deep-seated dissociation of Dubiel's psycho-physical unity. The medical technology, viewed already by medical practitioners as invasive - that is, as intruding deeply and permanently into the body rather than merely supporting or supplementing bodily functions - can also be called invasive in a wider sense: in cases like Dubiel's it has failed to restore a human life damaged by illness or to allow such a life to be lived half-way normally again, and instead changed what life fundamentally is for the patient - changed, one could even say, what he or she is as a human being.

Today especially, developments are afoot in medicine that give good reason to critically apply the medical concept of the invasive to the technification of human relationships and of social relations across the board. It is true that the concept has military connotations - an invasion is of course a violent act of intrusion. Yet much medical technology has to be viewed as such too; it is viewed as such by the patients affected by it, it seems indeed to be sensed bodily as such - in the depths of our organic being.

The decisive question though is whether technification merely improves or extends an already existing form of human action or already existing human relations, or whether it fundamentally alters them. Clearly it is possible to object that technologies have always brought about fundamental changes to human life. Thus with the invention of writing - a communication technology - human society, and indeed what it was to be human, was fundamentally changed. Yet obviously up till now we have had little reason to see technological change in the problematic light we do today. Technology has instead been viewed almost totally from the point of view of means and ends - a way of looking at things that takes the ends wholly for granted. The result is that the ethics of technology - including medical ethics - have been almost exclusively utilitarian; problematic situations have been thought to demand a weighing up costs vs. benefits or expectations vs. risks. What has been overlooked is that the application of a new technology can change the pre-conditions of application, and that means also the very purposes and ends of application. The utilitarian approach to technology no longer suffices in light of the experiences medical technology confronts us with today. The question has to be asked: what does technology mean when it takes the form of invasive technification of the conditions of human life?

2. The Iron Cage

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sociologist Max Weber asserted famously that modern man was in the process of confining himself to an iron cage. What he had in mind were the constraints human beings have to impose on themselves to make the rationalisation of social life possible - at work and on the street in traffic, in business and in private life. A characteristic example is punctuality - a virtue without which the worlds of modern transport and work would simply be unthinkable. According to Weber, the detachment vis-a'-vis one's own feelings and moods necessary to operate technical equipment is radical. Human behaviour necessarily becomes cooler, more matter-of-fact.

By technology or technique (Technik) Weber understands the thorough-going rational organisation of activity for the purposes of increased efficiency. In this sense we speak not only of power generation technology, but of techniques of playing the piano as well. The concept of technology/technique involved here marks the rationalisation of the conditions of human life as a kind of technification. For Weber, feats of individual moral self-control form the background to the rational arrangement of social life with a view to efficiency, above all feats of inner discipline, worldly asceticism - industriousness, reliability, punctuality, matter-of-factness, in short the prime values associated with the puritan ethic that made the modern world possible. So for Weber the problem of the iron cage is the social problem of technical efficiency on the one hand and its ethical preconditions on the other. In 1954 Jacques Ellul drew together both sides of Weber's analysis under the rubric of technological society.

Today the Weberian metaphor of the iron cage makes a curious impression. For Weber is not thinking here of any physical structure, say the rail network that in his day was imprinting a new spatial order on the landscape; nor is he thinking of the steel and reinforced concrete structures that became the physical home of working and business life and in the form of warehouses helped to transform luxury consumption into mass consumption. Quite the opposite - the iron cage is for Weber precisely a metaphor for an inner state, for inner ethical or at most abstract social constraints.

A generation after Weber the growth of such constraints since early modern times was to be described by another sociologist, Norbert Elias, as the civilising process in a work with precisely that title. The notable point about Elias' study however is that in the very period of its inception, viz. the 1930's, the process itself was veering round 180 degrees - something that is easy to guage in the sole passage where Elias addresses the issue of modern technology. It is worth citing in full:

"Man denke an die holprigen, ungepflasterten, von Regen und Wind verwüstbaren Landstraßen einer einfachen, natural wirtschaftenden Krieger-Gesellschaft. Der Verkehr ist, von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen, ganz gering; die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen darstellt, hat die Form des kriegerischen oder räuberischen Überfalls. Wenn die Menschen um sich blicken, wenn sie mit dem Auge Bäume and Hügel absuchen oder auf der Straße selbst entlang sehen, dann geschiegt es in erster Linie, weil sie immer gewärtig sein müssen, mit der Waffe in der Hand angegriffen zu warden, und erst in zweiter oder dritter Linie, weil sie irgend jemandem auszuweichen haben. Das Leben auf den großen Straßen dieser Gesellschaft verlangt eine ständige Bereitschaft zu kämpfen und die Leidenschaften in Verteidigung seines Lebens oder seines Besitzes gegen einen körperlichen Angriff spielen zu lassen. Der Verkehr auf den Hauptstraßen einer großen Stadt in der differenzierteren Gesellschaft unserer Zeit verlangt eine ganz andere Modellierung des psychischen Apparats. Hier ist die Gefahr eines räuberischen oder kriegerischen Überfalls auf ein Minimum beschränkt. Automobile fahren in Eile hierhin and dorthin; Fußgänger und Radfahrer suchen sich durch das Gewühl der Wagen hindurchzuwinden; Schutzleute stehen an den großen Straßenkreuzungen, um es mit mehr oder weniger Glück zu regulieren. Aber die äußere Regulierung ist von Grund auf darauf abgestimmt, daß jeder Einzelne sein Verhalten entsprechend den Notwendigkeiten dieser Verflechtung aufs genaueste selbst reguliert. Die Hauptgefahr, die hier der Mensch für den Menschen bedeutet, entsteht dadurch, daß irgend jemand inmitten dieses Getriebes seine Selbstknotrolle verliert. Eine beständige Selbstüberwachung, eine höchst differenzierte Selbstregelung des Verhaltens ist notwendig, damit der Einzelne sich durch dieses Gewühl hindurchzusteuern vermag. Es genügt, daß die Anspannung, die diese stete Selbstregulierung erfordert, für einen Einzelnen zu groß wird, um ihn selbst und Andere in Todesgefahr zu bringen." [English forthcoming]

Elias of course makes the comparison between the street in a traditional warrior society and the street of a modern metropolis in order to illustrate his thesis that the move from external constraint to self-constraint plays a key role in shaping the behaviour of individuals in transit and the sort of attention they pay to potential dangers. However because he describes a scene involving technologically regulated traffic, it becomes clear that in twentieth century modernity a shift back to external constraints has already taken place: the behaviour of modern human beings dealing with street traffic may indeed be disciplined, however it doesn't rest on self-constraint, at least not in the moral sense, but on technical constraints and technified methods of regulating traffic. The penalties for deviating from regulations are again external and are factored into one's expectations as such: deviations from appropriate matter-of-fact behaviour lead to accidents.

The external pre-conditions of everyday life, transformed over time into technical pre-conditions, have such a powerful effect on behaviour that individuals can progressively feel themselves absolved of ethical constraints. This leads subsequently - in tandem with a growing luxury economy - to a waning of the puritan ethic and a substitution of technical norms for moral norms. Cases in point are the replacement of traditional handicraft ethics and business ethics by quality control and obligatory declarations on the one hand and by government supervision on the other. A further case in point is the obsolescence of virtues such as thrift on the part of consumers. The standard example of technical norms taking the place of their ethical forerunners is the redundance of traditional sexual morality as a result of industrialised provision of effective means of birth-control.

3. Material Substitution

In the course of recent history, technology has come to have a civilisation-defining significance, not only in Weber's sense (viz. as a system of rules geared towards efficiency), but as a system of material means. In everything from our society's technical infrastructure (e.g. railways and more recently the internet) through to the pharmacological means for regulating the way we function physically and mentally, it is the technical conditions of life that determine how life is lived. In the process the metaphor of the iron cage is now taking on a different hue of ambivalence. Taken at face value, the metaphor of the cage implies that technology is something external to our actions and social relations. Yet the technology that governs human life today is no longer external. On the contrary, modern technology has penetrated deeply into social activity; technological systems are bringing about the technical regulation of human life in the very depths of our organic being. In the contemporary world, technology, in short, is not a cage in which human life can carry on protected and unchanged; it has instead become something like the skeleton of human life, abstractly put - a sort of infrastructure of life. The human all-too-human side of existence has thereby been reduced to a phenotype - what appears to wear all the bright colours of human individuality is little more than the game permitted by technical pre-conditions and their associated structures. In principle, everyone is in the same position. Individuality becomes a surface phenomenon.



This situation demands a completely new conception of technology. Far from being understood as a set of rules for increasing the efficiency of human action, technology was traditionally always thought of as a system of material objects we made instrumental use of to attain our ends. Human action and the ends themselves were taken as given.

That of course does not mean that technology, considered as mere means, was of secondary anthropological importance. On the contrary, since the time of the earliest philosophical anthropology - attributed to the sophist Protagoras - human beings were seen as animals that have primary need of technology because they would be unfit for survival on the basis of natural endowments alone. In Plato's dialogue Protagoras, the eponymous sophist relates the myth of Epimetheus' creation of the human race: Epimetheus, so the story goes, had overtaxed himself creating other living beings, so this new creature, the human being, turned out a botch-job - it was practically incapable of life. Epimetheus' brother, Prometheus, came to his aid by making human beings a gift of fire and hence all the handicrafts, or, as we would put it - a gift of technology. Last of all, the god endowed these late-born creatures with the art of politics too - only thus enabling them to survive. Politics here is the last in a series of technical acquisitions that make good plentiful natural deficiencies. (Nor is this rough view of the situation confined to the ancient world. In his anthropology of 1940, Arnold Gehlen extends the myth, bolstering it with ideas deriving from modern embryology. Gehlen speaks of humans as defective beings, as physiologically premature. Yet, as necessary as technology is for them, on Gehlen's conceptual picture it remains external, an extension or reinforcement of organic endowments, at most a substitute for organic endowments. Similarly, in 1877 the first philosopher of technology proper, Ernst Kapp, had interpreted technological structures as externalisations of organic structures and functions. Thus for example Kapp thought of the construction of bridges as a sort of recurrence of the lamella-structure of the human femur and transport infrastructure quasi-literally as the nervous system of society.)

Today all these interpretations of the nature and meaning of technology are insufficient, if not downright misleading. Technical forms of organisation do not make human action more efficient, they simply transform it. Mobile phones have brought about profound changes to social relations - above all among young people: fixed appointments are practically a thing of the past in a world in which it is always possible to make new arrangements up to the last minute. The internet has likewise re-defined the sense in which society coheres as a society: we belong to society in the form of an email address; a homepage is increasingly the definitional mode of social self-presentation. Biotechnology has displaced the genetic boundaries between species - a trend that human beings could be caught up in as well in the long run.

Likewise we can no longer comprehend the social effects of contemporary technology in terms of causal relations, as Marx originally attempted to do. In Marx, the development of productive forces determines the relations of production. Productive forces (e.g. the machinery in use in a factory) and the relations of production (i.e. the relation between entrepreneurs and workers) - two different types of parameter - stand in a relationship of causal dependence: industrial methods of production give rise to an opposition between capital and labour. Invasive forms of technology, on the other hand, have structural rather than causal effects, a type of influence best understood using Foucault's concept of a dispositif - a conditioning factor that makes something else possible but also limits it, thereby giving shape to what it makes possible. Today we can speak of technology as a social dispositif, of technology as a communicative dispositif and indeed of technology as a perceptual dispositif. What this means is that:
(a) our society's existing technical infrastructure determines what is socially possible today. Traditionally this would have meant technified means of transportation, thus for example the physical movement made possible by railway networks. Today, however, it also means movement of the personal data used to conduct so much social business.
(b) the possibilities of human communication are structurally shaped today by communication technology. A characteristic example here is the crowd dynamics of young people connected via mobile phones gathering, dispersing and intermittently re-gathering in different places on the streets of cities at night.
(c) the possibilities of perception itself are moulded by a vast range of technical media. Just as the categories of visual perception have long been moulded by photography (seeing something well has come to mean seeing it sharply), so what people are conditioned to hear has in recent times been increasingly moulded by acoustic technology as well.

In a technological civilisation, in short, technology is no longer something that stands over and against human beings; it structures human life and social relations from within. Technical forms of organisation, technical networks and equipment, the entire material aspect of technology, have penetrated into the depths of who we are, into our bodies, our communicative relations, in the process bringing about deep changes to the way our societies hang together. We are on the highroad to defining ourselves in technical terms as human beings - to conceiving of the identity of a human being as a genetic fingerprint, to thinking of the biography of a human being as his or her electronic medical record, to thinking of learning as interaction with data-bases and of society itself as an integrated network of PCs.

4. Critical Resources

Is this what we want? To be sure, there are people who greet the way invasive technification transforms human relations with euphoria. They have found their spokesman in Bruno Latour - a figure who glorifies the increasing obsolescence of the distinction between nature and technology - and in Donna Haraway, who greets cyborgs emphatically as a new form of human life. Yet is it possible that they too feel a lurking unease? The developments they rush to praise were unintended - after all, in the past technology was understood as the amelioration of the conditions of human life, not as their transformation beyond recognition.The belief - which I have elsewhere called a Baconian faith - was that technological progress was by its very nature human progress. Yet is there any denying that technological development is in the final analysis largely the result of economic and military competition? When such development requires ideological justification, its advocates have recourse to the utilitarian argument that technology must be useful - naturally for human beings and society as they are. The result of technological development though is that human life on the whole is not made better, but merely different.

Yet how is one to criticise the development of technology? Criticism always presupposes critical distinctions and a guiding idea of what rational conditions would look like, as Max Horkheimer might have said. Where today might the potential for making critical distinctions within our concept of technology lie and how might we bring into view alternatives to our present way of dealing with technology? Technological utopias - what we find in science fiction - almost invariably present horror scenarios, scenarios in other words that describe a path leading away from a world populated by human beings towards a world of cyborgs; William Gibson's novels, which have practically triggered a social movement of their own and in turn had a real effect on technological development, are typical here.

What alternatives to the dominant trend of technological development have already emerged? "Small is beautiful" was once a popular catch-phrase that put centralised large-scale technology in the critical spotlight. There was the notion of embedded technology (Andrew Feenberg). And there were the twin notions of the environmental and social compatibility of technology (K.M. Meyer-Abich) which sought to make technology developed purely for the sake of economic efficiency into a valid object of criticism. To disabuse oneself of the nonsense surrounding so much technological development, it is also worthwhile trying to breathe new life into the far from whimsical old distinction between useful and amusing forms of technology formulated by the Renaissance technologist Samuel de Caus. And of course the age-old distinction between technology and nature is still an effective one in some parts of the world - in practice, if not always in theory. In the way we eat, in the way we relate to our own bodies, in insisting on face-to-face communication - this is where the potential lies - not just to criticise invasive technology, but also to resist it. Practicalities are what it comes down to - for every purely theoretical or moral criticism is likely to be ineffectual if it is not supported by living habits and what we take to be a matter of course in our daily lives, in a word if it is not supported by culture.

Taking nature as a point of orientation and insisting on "the natural" are still a valid basis for resisting the total technification of human life and relations. However this is not the concept of nature pure and simple; nature in many parts of the world is actually also a cultural resource. Nature, we might say, is not an abstract concept, but an idea that is deeply bound up with our images of landscapes, with agricultural practice, with the work of innumerable conservation groups, bound up too with the way human beings relate to one another. Yet we would do well to ask whether these resources for coping with technology will remain at our disposal for long. Is invasive technification not precisely the sort of process that eats away at nature as a cultural resource? Our doubt arises because technology, in its invasive form, changes what our own nature is, what the natural world external to us is and what our fellow creatures in the animal world are. It does so moreover from the inside. In our embarrassment we fall back - reasonable people fall back - on prohibitions: we ban cloning, we stipulate that individuals' identity cannot be equated with their genetic make-up, we frame laws to protect embryos, laws to protect wildlife. And these are not bad things, though there are also always lobby groups that would be glad to see such legal dam walls torn down.