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.