(this English version was produced at the annual conference of the NALS on July 29th 2021)
How could we avoid that people use technics as a pretext to standardize the education of humankind? Maybe have you read Hariri’s recent book Homo deus, which presents technical innovations for now and in the future as an unavoidable destiny, and in my point of view it is a nightmare.
Let us regress a little in the past. Important books by their influence have used work and technics as a big propaganda against humanism, morality and democracy. Technics in its perfection, “polytechnics” as Gilbert Simondon would say, is a convergency of the struggles against the individual in its singularity, and against free and responsible work. Only what he calls the pure technician would be an exception, but as an imposed mediator between nature and men whose decisions would have to be followed blindly.
But neither Ernst Jünger with his book of propaganda in 1932 Der Arbeiter, nor Simondon with his book, so close in its “symbols”, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, in the 50s, which influenced the French philosophers, can make us forget the fight against the “soft allusions” of the extreme-right which demoralize and corrupt the link to human work and future.
The workers’ resistance in politics led vast personal empires to destroy little by little work for the so-called sake of technics, and moral preoccupation in the name of the aesthetics of a natural-technical world, well ordered, considered as “living” but less messy than natural living world.
Extreme centralization of “electronics” in the public services has just in France provoked two gigantic national blackouts, one of Orange and telephonic numbers of emergency, even in the DOM-TOM, the other one less remarked of the Post Office during a short moment on June 17th. The necessary decentralization that everyone wanted has largely disappeared. Are we to use again messengers, as we see in the streets of Paris, and pigeons, for our messages?
Large amounts of humans, already, are devoted to “human computing”, micro-tasks which are repetitive and condemn them to remain alone in front of the computer, without defense, without rights, with bad wages, and no film like “Modern times” to stop it. Those jobs contribute for instance to tricks and frauds like “liking” again and again one page of an enterprise on the web.
There is a big dispersion of the social link, due to this loneliness in front of the computer, and also because we no longer know, due to the anonymousness and the pseudonymous and the avatars, who is speaking nor who is listening to us. We not even know if our intimateness will survive, especially due to the use of the phone with its pictures and videos which are so difficult to destroy, and due to the generalization of teleworking from our home.
Can we see with Stiegler a possible revolution and hope a contributive social model for work? But how can contributions be useful if we do not have enough money to buy things, so that Google and others can live as motors of searching? And power of buying is linked, as Stiegler says, with global carelessness about the way objects are produced and packed and sent.
With regard to the whole totalitarian propaganda of “work” that we find especially in the book of Ernst Jünger Der Arbeiter, cannot we oppose the author of Totality and Infinity, which is such a remedy against totalitarian thought? One difficulty is very well shown by Levinas. P. 171 of this last book (Livre de Poche, 1st edition 1971), Levinas writes: “The grasp on the undefined by work does not look like the idea of infinite. Work “defines” matter, without having to use the idea of infinite.” He says that the work of the hand suspends the unforeseeable and the undetermined (p. 173). Well then, what we should have to succeed to preserve, in our history of technics and work, will especially be the uncertainty and the undetermined. We are going to try to read authors fascinated by the totalitarian, thanks to the landmarks in our life that gives us the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
Gilbert Simondon thinks that the aspect of “tool” of the objects is not important for technical progress, because what really matters is the tension towards technical perfection, the perfection which leaves nothing to chance, and which preaches as an education the formatting of man as a servant of technics. But instead of that, human beings are meant to be served by it. For Levinas, thinking of the aspect of “tool” of the object is essential to distinguish human from things, and to avoid the reduction to a thing, the ideological “chosification” of humanity. It was already in Kant’s doctrine, but in a less radical way, when Kant asks to think to human being as an end in itself, and not only as a means.
In his considerations about technics, Levinas notes that the possession supposes a sojourn belonging to us, so that we can stock the things we possess (p. 174). Without a house, without an “at home”, what do we possess of the things? But the house, for Levinas, needs a woman, guard of the hearth. Before our time women could hardly say what they want from technics as a satisfaction of their needs. So, today, can we ask them what they will want? And let us stop thinking that technics is immortal and for that reason is more important that the human mortal. The preoccupation for work cannot stand for Levinas without the preoccupation of the future death. Work obtains delay for this death, and “the enjoyment as a body that works, is in that primary delay” (p. 178). No work is possible if we do not have “the time”, no work neither if we give us too much time, too much delay, forgetting the possible death. No work without the effort of the man and the woman to postpone death and without the concern for the other’s death.
The human being is not a thing precisely because he works, which means that he “gathers” himself and gives delay to himself (p. 178). Work is reserved to a being that is “threatened, but that has the benefit of time to fight the threat”. Then we cannot admit that a robot works, as “to work is to postpone the decay” (p. 180). This is a kind of negentropy. We see that there is nothing to link to the determinism of the well-done machine in the context of totalitarian thought, this thought that talks about the so-called “perfect” technical necessity that would be the “vital” goal, with its various “final solutions”, of the Nazism which, let us remember it, has squatted the organizations of workers or pretending to be for workers, in the 1920-1930 in Germany. Helping us to break with this enslaving propaganda that we find in Der Arbeiter, The Worker, published in 1932, and republished in France in 1963, Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, p. 181: “Going forward warily is not a technical imperfect action, but the condition of all technics. The goal does not appear as a goal in a disincarnated inspiration of which it would fix the destiny as a fixed cause, as the destiny of the effect.” We must escape the idolatrous cult of a supposed destiny of technics and life, we have, as people say, to lend a hand, to live this chance or this unfortune of eventually “miss our shot”. In France, the popular belief says that a woman in certain periods has all the chances to turn sour the mayonnaise if she tries to make it with her own hands… We are humans with a body of humans, it is like that that we move ourselves and that we move the world.
We need to oppose to Simondon, who thinks that the worker must serve technics, a previously obvious idea that technics must serve the worker. And not only him. In his book of 1932 that I call nazi propaganda Der Arbeiter, translated in French by Julien Hervier who also made a preface, in 1963, which is quite strange, to say so (Paris, Christian Bourgois,
reedited in 1989, p. 198), Ernst Jünger writes that technics is at the worker’s disposal if, and only if “the type (Gestalt) of the worker mobilizes the world.” But “every representative of links out of the space of work – as the “bourgeois”, the Christian, the naturalist -will be excluded from this relation.” And what does Jünger means by exclusion? An exclusion by violence: technics should, for him, normally lodge open or secret aggressivity against those links” (p. 218). And p. 219 he says that the ultimate task of technics is to prepare an “imperial unity”, and that “its ultimate task is to realize a domination, wherever one wants, whenever one wants, and as one wants”. Who is this “one”, in 1932-1933, if not Hitler himself?
Jünger’s book, reedited in French in 1963, after the war and the Shoah, due to the pression of Heidegger, attacks the individual and his rights: p. 284 “the renouncement to the individuality constitutes the key that opens the spaces of which science was lost long ago”, and technics, for Jünger, will serve to suppress its disorder and confusion, especially (p. 273) “the messy crowding of urban masses”, seen as a “leprosy” invading the globe. After dreaming of the hexagons of the hive, as a model before talking about urbanism in a way that should be agreed by Le Corbusier, Jünger says (p.289) that “the more the type will recognize neatly that he constitutes a race, the more he will be unerring as a creator of types (Gestalt)”. Just the same as Simondon dreams of a “pure technician” as a superior being in his book The psychological and collective Individuation, which is the second part of his thesis, the first part being The Way of existing of technical Objects, and witch was edited in 1989 by Aubier), Jünger hopes that by a certain technical superiority will advent a superior “race”.
Evoking the so-called “powers of decomposition” p. 297, Jünger speaks of “self-dissolution of the traditional representations of legality”, and (p. 324) “the type considers public opinion as an affair of technics”. People no longer need to respect the right nor the morality. The goal of the use of “type” is the uniformization, total and totalitarian: for example (p. 328) “The press ceases to be an organ of liberty of opinion, to become the organ of a world of univocal and rigorous work.” Freedom, and especially freedom of opinion, is decried in his book in the texts dedicated to the so called “making in order” of culture. Obsessed by the big boats and the big engines for which there is to find an adequate palace and that we should visit instead of museums, he also proposes a change of the language (p. 344): the “language of the agitators” must “leave the place to a language of commandment similar to the language that sounds on the deck of the boats.” The big engines go with the oblivion of morality, by the means of a kind of admiration of the insensitiveness that is given by the service, rather than the usage, of advanced technique: “there is a big difference between the ancient iconoclasts and incendiaries of churches, and the high degree of abstraction which permits an artilleryman of the world war to look at a gothic cathedral as just a guide mark in his zone of fire” (p. 203). Is it his conception of the spots? The gestion of space in these phantasmagorias of propaganda is an obsession: “Where the symbols surge space clears itself from all the strengths of alien nature.” Space and its so-called high spots must for the realization of perfection be managed and filled, just at the time when is fulfilled the destruction, the extermination as we should say, of the “strengths of alien nature” by a planetary order of objects and people well shaped by a so called superior race.
The “democracy of work”, as Jünger calls it, in fact a very strange democracy, is going to banish cars, radios and phones, because “it is a kind of luxury that will less and less be authorized inside the democracy of work” (p. 350): we know that some groups admired by ecologists, but clearly situated in the extreme-right, as people who turn around The Rabhi family and the film Demain (“tomorrow”), and maybe the film of the same producer which will be projected this year, make projects of micro-societies isolated from one another, and the means of communication are banned from the pictures in that celebrated film as a project for the future.
Paradoxically that is part of the “technician will” according to Jünger: “We at once see how much the technician will can show itself as the specialized expression of the will of a superior race.” He looks at the future as radiant thanks to the States which have “those 100 000 men who are the lords and masters of technical means, and who incarnate the highest pugnacious strength that the earth has ever known.” We clearly see how the so called “worker” of Jünger is identical to the militia sure of its destructive strength.
Then Jünger uses of symbols, and the symbol he chooses of the reign of technics are… the asphyxiating gas, and the research about them (p. 354-356). The organization will have to “command all the phases of the warrior or pacific work” (p. 359) and this organization will make the workers-tools of this gigantic planetarian polytechnical machine: if he speaks of a “superior race”, it is as an infinite reproduction of the type of the “worker” who will “pretend to the totality by conceiving himself as the representative of a superior type (Gestalt)” (p.363). In the education of this “worker” there is this, in a note of the author p. 364: “People possess a concrete relation to man when they react with more emotion to the death of their friend or enemy Mister so and so than to the news that 10000 persons were drowned in a flood of the Huang-Ho.” There is a strong use by Jünger as by Simondon of the opposition abstract/concrete, the abstract having to vanish (or being erased?) in front of the concrete. Answering in fact to Heidegger, who pretends to discover again nature with or against technics, Simondon thinks that technics in its progress towards perfection will rediscover as an ideal environment for its pretended life the “high spots” of the original magic.
In front of all that mess that could disgust us forever from the technical progress, the solidness of a learned moral conscience finds again its marks in the charming text of Levinas which was published again in Difficile liberté, Difficult Freedom (Livre de Poche p. 323-327), in 1963, the year of the republication by the will of Heidegger of the Worker of Jünger. We speak of the chapter “Heidegger, Gagarine and us”, which helps us to stay far from the attitude of Heidegger who seems to rebuke technics, after the war and the defeat of the nazi project, and we also will avoid the promotion of a cult of the “pure” technician of Simondon, who would dictate his decisions to politicians and to the societies of the planet.
Simondon is very obsessed with spots, especially the so called natural high spots: “Every singular spot concentrates in itself the ability to command to a part of the world” (p. 165 of Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, The Way of existing of technical Objects, Aubier, ed. Montaigne, 1958). He dreams about the heart of the forest, the summit of mountains, the promontories, spots which he thinks concentrate natural powers. For example, Mountains would have been tensed toward the summit when they rised. At the end, p. 168, the “key-points” are supposed to concretize themselves, objectify themselves as tools and technical instruments. He tries to link it to the idea of “totality” which comes again and again to his pencil from p. 172, with an aesthetical fascination for the totalitarian: he writes: “The aesthetical character of an act or a thing is its function of totality” (p. 181). And p. 184 he adds that the spots are to be “filled”, whereas Levinas insists on the action of emptying the spots and then be able to receive, give access to the nudeness-emptiness of the face of the other human being.
Levinas fights against the totalitarian space and the “magical high spots” and hopes that technics will unsettle sedentary civilizations, and far from the obsessional want of filling of Simondon, or of Jünger with his big engines and his methodical lodging of the masses, Levinas makes efforts towards the void, the draining, the catharsis, which makes us think of Master Eckhart for whom the soul cannot receive the divine if it does not empty itself. Levinas writes: “The development of technics is not the cause – it is already the effect of this lightening of human substance, emptying itself […]” (Difficult Freedom p. 324).
We also should empty the places, but not in a forced exodus: Gagarine is a witness of this enterprise. “The implantation in a landscape, the link to a place”, this is what leads us to partake humankind between “people of here” and “strangers” (or migrants…) (p. 325). To unroot oneself leads to humanize oneself while living oneself as a stranger, stranger in every place in particular because otherwise the opposition between the same and the other would be very hard. Well oriented, “technics pulls us out of the Heideggerian world and out of the superstitions of the Spot”. What gives enthusiasm to Levinas, and to humankind, in the Russian exploit of Gagarine, is “most of all, to have left the Spot”. Of course, influenced by people who have an aesthetics of well-ordered space, Levinas in a little obsolete way says that space has become “homogenic space”, an “absolute” which seems to ignore Einstein, and is far from the mathematical and physical theories which are posterior to the text. But here, we break the superstitions of a belief in future technics, perfect in the sense that it would find again nature because of it so called vital impulse, and because of its “high spots”. Levinas speaks about the Christianism as integrating small idols of stone or wood or mud, and the small gods, Lares and Penates, of the roman “idolatrous” villa, and he speaks of Judaism as getting all that out of the way, and getting every human being closer to the other human being, “in the nakedness of his face”. He does not want to worry about the so called “common goal” that was supposed to animate work, because in fact this “common goal” was used to immolate work for the sake of a standardizing technics that deprives of humanity.
Simondon looks at technics as having to eat nature, integrating it, so that in a machine nature “would be part of the system of causes and effects” (The Way of existing of technical Objects, op. cit. p. 46). He notes that sometimes the improvement of a technical object “prescribes” an adaptation of the environment to this new object, then he generalizes it as an imperative. For example the planes of his time need a very large landing strip, in 1958, compared to the first planes, but we know that helicopters and other planes can use a very short place to land and quit the soil. Simondon pretend that the technical object was a living creature and created its environment as “individualized”. At the same time in his thought the worker has no right to the uncontrollable human individuality, at least in his book and in the second part of his thesis (Ibid. p. 56-57). He dreams of a convergence of technical structures that would eliminate indetermination and uncertainty.
Like Jünger who plays with the opposition of concrete and abstract, Simondon says (p. 72) that “technicity is the degree of concretization of the object”. He has a cult of the “elementary” which is supposed to survive when we dismantle an object, and to transport itself (as a kind of virus we should think) in another object and another spot. His dream of order is linked with the submission to technical progress so far as to suppress morality. “The highest technicity is in an element, the lowest is the margin of indetermination of this power” (ibid. p. 74). The technician would be the one that is concentrated on the task itself, rather than on a goal (p. 126). And the “technologue”, as he says, would have to be “a representative of the technical beings”. This makes us think of these scammers who present themselves as representatives and mouthpieces of the living creatures which, mute, cannot protest and contradict them.
Simondon crowns the totalitarian use of technics in this way (p. 151): “The integration of a representation of technical realities to culture, thanks to an elevation and an enlargement of the domain of technics, must put in their right place, as technical, the problems of finality, wrongly considered as ethical and sometimes as religious.” It is “the incompletion of technics [that] sacralizes the finality problems and ties the man as a slave to the respect of ends that he represents to himself as absolutes.” In a word, we have to put an end to morals, which is a collateral damage, for Simondon, due to the incompletion of technics and to the grasp of power by religious people.
I wonder if in 1958 Simondon suffered of amnesia about history, and especially about the conference of Wannsee, which in 1942 presented as a technical problem the extermination of the Jews, and invented the technical expression “final solution” …
Without any scruple, Simondon describes gently the nazi thought p. 223: “The national-socialist thought is attached to a certain conception which links the destiny of a people to a technical expansion, even considering the role of close peoples in function of this dominating expansion.”
Pursuing in the same way as the project of technicization of the nazi expansionist dictature he describes, he talks about the totalitarian education of peoples: “The culture, considered as a lived totality, has to incorporate the technical lots, and to learn their nature, so as to regulate the human life in conformity with these technical lots” (p.227).
This “regulation” according to technical lots takes the place of every moral rule, every juridical right, and takes precedence of everything, morals but also work, which is destroyed nowadays by the devotees of the slavery to future perfect technics. There is a real idolatry as the Bible presents it: people build, sharpen a piece of wood that they will adore (look p. 235), but will also serve thanks to the slave worker, integrating it to a machine, itself integrated at the right place.
The technical object must no longer be a tool, according to Simondon, but it has to be an “apparition”, independent finally from the relation of work (p.241, in the conclusion). Work has to be a simple part submitted to technicity (p. 241), and technicity makes it a new “natural being” (p. 245). Just the word “race” is not told in his book like in the book of Jünger…
At the end of his book, he tells his hope of the reign of technics, we have to forget the tool, the usefulness, what matters is that “it” operates. He concludes that it is the operation and not the work that characterizes the technical object (p. 246), so we just have to run, let us forget work and let us be ruled by the program of transindividual talks that Simondon proposes instead of a dialogue: “We can call pure information the information that is not incidental [événementielle], it can be understood only if the subject who receives it excites in him a type analogous to the types brought by the support of information.” I expect that the French word “forme” stands for “Gestalt” in the mind of Simondon. We are like the trip from one computer to the printer by the way of the Wifi. It is not really what we hope from human communication.
Then there is no longer a place for humankind, the individuals are made to spouse the machine and promise to maintain it. Those humans must be all identical: “The relation to the technical object cannot be adequate individual by individual, except in very rare and isolated cases; it can be established only in that measure that it will succeed to make this collective interindividual reality exist, that we name “transindividual”, because it obtain the connection [couplage] between the inventive and organizing capacities of several subjects” (p. 253). After the regulation instead of the moral rule, the connection instead of the couple…
We could consider technics in another way, in relation with life, so as we cultivate the singular, the unpreviewed, the harmony and the disharmony in the cooperation, think for example of those African drums, the particularity of each of them is preserved, their singularity, and they will be together without being, as we say in music, tuned up, because it would lead to a death-dealing uniformity for the soul.
Levinas loved this text of the Talmud that he cites in Hors sujet (Out of subject, Fata Morgana, 1987, p. 177): “Greatness of the Saint blessed be He: here is the man who strikes coins with the same seal and obtains coins that are all similar one to the other; but here is the King of kings, the Saint blessed be He, who strikes all human beings with the seal of Adam, and no one is like the other” (Talmud Babli, Treatise Sanhedrin, 37a). The example, as a technical object, of coins, leads to the value: every non-standard coin will be rejected, as an error or as false money, except for the collectors of rare things. Let us be more often rare beings, as the angular stone, thanks to the singular gesture of our living singular bodies.
Preoccupied of the inhumanity of theories witch preach that technics must be the real object of the cult, and witch pretend that it is living and evolving, and tell us that man has the vocation to be its slave, Emmanuel Levinas in Out of Subject p. 165 writes that “technics itself may admit inhuman requirements” and that we are wrong if we see technical progress as a fatality, a “determinism” which we would be silly not to submit to. Technics has to be at the service of mankind, and work has to be glorified and not despised, neither submitted to a so called “pure technician” freed from morals. Work has the role of remediating to misery and hunger, in the respect of the human rights.
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