Technique - the totality of methods that achieve maximum efficiency in a field.
Magic is the first form of technique - you follow rituals to assert control over nature.
In my head this progress is something natural, and the pervasiveness of technique seemed like something logical in the history of man. At times somehow I felt a bit defensive “So, are you saying this development is not positive? What should’ve been the alternative?”, though this is not the point.
The way he writes is very clear. I appreciated the chapter explaining his definition of technique against existing ones.
Every time i interact with any philosophical/anthropological/sociological text i realize how small we are, how recent all out “objective ideas” about the world are and how limited our thinking is. We have such set in stone views and take everything for granted like we’re told and how it should be, when it’s all so recent. I’m reading know about technique and more specifically, the relation between man, tool, skill. Our views on what comfort, progress, craft and use of instruments now is so different from the middle ages, and seeing this rundown through history makes me feel so constrained by my opinions. I like this book, super insightful, and i’m only 20% in.
Same feeling when I watched the Century of the self documentary
Characteristics of Technique
Before
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Geographical and social locality
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Choice
Now
- Automatism
No human decides what technique to incorporate - the most efficient one always wins and is preferred.
Recently I was taking to friends who were saying “I don’t know why I’m stressing so much about my career if AI will advance so much. Even if I think about these things or not, they’re still going to happen.”
Need to dive more into the communism vs capitalism here and the critiques.
After I got to a part of the modern characteristics of technique, the first one being mentioned regarding the automation trait, and how technique permeates in our society and is focused on efficiency and in a way not including the human decision when it comes to selection of technique because it assumes the most efficient one always wins, like this is essentially the automatized trait. All of this got me thinking about the Burnout Society by Byung-Chun Hal, which is something that I listened about a lot on the Philosophize This podcast, but it’s not something I’ve read personally myself. The similarities are regarding the constant optimization and this force to evaluate everything based on metrics, and these metrics are inherently technical if we consider the definition of technique that Ellul proposes of all this set of methods that ensure efficiency in a certain domain, and when we apply that not only to, I don’t know, science, technology, forms of organization, of politics and economics, when we apply that to the human life, to a human essence or activity in the current form of, I don’t know, neoliberal economy, we get to the state of the Burnout Society, I still have yet to see any other connections, but…
- Self-augmentation
Self-augmentation by and mixing with other techniques.
Somewhere in here he negates the moral value of technique, when people play it can be used for ‘good’ or for ‘bad’. Check the atomic engine and the atomic bomb. For the technique of the atomic engine to have apperead, the step in the creation of the bomb was “necessary”, since it is simpler, granted money for the research was poured into building the bomb.
- Monism