Ghost in the Wire

So let's say that construed broadly, technics can include anything from particular technologies and the interaction with those technologies to the more esoteric idea of an “essence” of technology, and it can include very particular and stylized techniques or more abstract and undefined notions of artistry. Construed abstractly, technics defines and is defined by exteriority. One can call this exteriority the distal, the material, the real or what have you (a choice already indebted to certain ways of schematizing technics), but regardless, “technics” describes how one negotiates interaction with that “out there,” whatever that “out” and that “there” entail. This process is continuous since, as Heidegger noted as early as Being and Time, one is thrown out into an already extant world, structured by history, language, and possibility. This negotiation with the world in turn produces what we think of as the “human.” Technics, as Australian philosopher Simon Critchley explains, “is that process of exteriorization, the use of means, of media and mediation whereby the human takes shape. Hominization is technicization.” In other words, no matter how common the instrumental conception of technology as something out there available and waiting for our use, the exteriority that technics make possible goes hand in hand with the morphogenesis of the human. Or, to strategically deploy a rather problematic binary, we might say that the subject is always already defined by its objects; rather than thinking the subject as the privileged half of the standard metaphysical binary, technics means that the subject only comes to mean anything because of the pretense and deployment of the binary itself.

Technics includes mediation but is not reducible to it. Mediation implies a going-between, a between that may no longer make much sense given the pervasiveness and ubiquity of today's media. By contrast, technics describes even the possibility of the going-between, since it describes the means by which something like mediation is thinkable (in other words or for example, the notion of a between). As such, technics includes a number of disparate technologies and discursive strategies (examples: language and video recording, telephones and master tropes, bifocals and digital photography), and different ways of thematizing technics will consequently produce different ways of thematizing what is meant by the human, the subject, the world, and other related concepts. Different "technics" will also produce different delimitations of "technology." Technics, in other words, is as rhetorical as it is material – assuming that this split can be maintained – in that it conditions the possibility of thought and simultaneously influences, terministically, how one perceives those conditions of possibility.

The advent of what McLuhan calls the Gutenberg Galaxy provides a case-in-point: the change in the dominant media, from script to print, led inexorably to a focus on fixed repetition, a passion for exact measurement, and a purification of grammar and language. In addition, as Jurgen Habermas notes, the mass production of particular texts took individual readers, who could now be united by shared reading material, and transformed them into a public. The changes charted by McLuhan and Habermas were material and cultural consequences of print technology, but their particular formations were governed in large part by how print was put to use in the thinking of that new medium. Benedict Anderson, for example, has written a complex history of how this “public” was transformed into a “nation” through the printed work of particular populist movements.iv The nationalism at work in these movements came about by theorizing (and writing) that the “public” was not so much a generic product of the mechanics of printing, but rather the specific consequence of the mechanics of the particular language that printing helped to purify. It is a technical decision, and if not strictly a question of intent or influence, it is also not strictly a question of technological determinism. The point: appreciating technics requires careful attention both to particular technological apparatuses and to particular rhetorical strategies. Appreciating technics means taking seriously both the conditions of emergence and the conditions of possibility of any particular discourse.

Such an endeavor remains problematic. If technics define the exteriority that constitutes human thought, then even the specific thinking of technics is already determined, at least in part, by those technics coterminous with that thought's exteriority. The paradox that Friedrich Kittler identifies in trying to understand media (that we are constructed by the media circuits we then attempt to describe) applies equally well here in trying to understand technics. As a result, any effort to “really and truly” understand technics confronts a certain methodological and teleological impossibility. One could, and many have, confront this impossibility anew, again, and strive to divine the truth of technics. This strategy has not been particularly successful; two millennia of philosophy and countless decades of thought have been poured into this problem, and no definitive account of technics has yet been written.

Which is probably a necessary lack, since I doubt such a thing would even be possible in any strict sense. Anyway, enough on this for now; I'll return to it later. Suggestions?