Technique and government
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 2, 2023
Some of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century agreed in identifying the political challenge of our time with the ability to govern technological development. “The decisive question today”, it has been written, “is how a political system, whatever it may be, can be adapted to the age of technique. I don’t know the answer to this problem. I’m not sure it is democracy”. Some others compared the control of technology to the feat of a new Hercules: “those who will succeed in subduing the technique which escaped all control and to include it in a concrete order will have responded to the problems of present far more than those who with by means of technique try to land on the Moon or Mars”.
The fact is that the powers which appear to guide and use technological development to their own ends are actually more or less unconsciously guided by it. Both the most totalitarian regimes, such as fascism and Bolshevism, and the so-called democratic ones share this inability to govern technique to such an extent that they end up transforming themselves almost inadvertently into the sense required by the very technologies they thought they were using for their own ends. Lodewijk Bolk, a scientist who gave a new formulation to the theory of evolution, thus saw in the hypertrophy of technological development a mortal danger for the survival of human specie. The growing development of both scientific and social technologies produce, in fact, a well and true inhibition of vitality, so that “the more humanity advances on the path of technique, the more it gets closer to that fatal point where progress means destruction. And certainly it is not in the nature of man to stop in the face of this”. An instructive example is provided by weapons technology, which has produced devices whose use implies the destruction of life on earth — therefore also of those who have them at their disposal and who, as we see today, nonetheless continue to threaten to use them.
It is possible, then, that the incapacity to govern technique is inscribed in the very concept of “government”, that is, in the idea that politics is in its very nature cybernetic, i.e. the art of “governing” (kybernes is in Greek the pilot of the ship) the life of human beings and their goods. Technique cannot be governed because it is the very form of governmentality. What has traditionally been interpreted — from scholasticism to Spengler — as the essentially instrumental nature of technique betrays the inherency of an instrumentality to our conception of politics. Decisive here is the idea that the technological tool is something which, operating according to its own end, can be used for the purposes of an external agent. As it is shown by the example of the ax, which cuts by virtue of its sharpness, but is used by the carpenter to make a table, the technical tool alike can serve another’s end only to the extent that it achieves its own. That means, ultimately — as it is evident in the most advanced technological devices — that technique achieves its own end by apparently making use of another’s end. In the same sense, politics, meant as oikonomia and government, is that operation that achieves an end which seems to transcend it, but which is in reality immanent to it. Politics and technique are identified in each other, i.e., without residues, and a political control of technique will not be possible until we have abandoned our instrumental, i.e. governmental, conception of politics.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 2, 2023
Some of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century agreed in identifying the political challenge of our time with the ability to govern technological development. “The decisive question today”, it has been written, “is how a political system, whatever it may be, can be adapted to the age of technique. I don’t know the answer to this problem. I’m not sure it is democracy”. Some others compared the control of technology to the feat of a new Hercules: “those who will succeed in subduing the technique which escaped all control and to include it in a concrete order will have responded to the problems of present far more than those who with by means of technique try to land on the Moon or Mars”.
The fact is that the powers which appear to guide and use technological development to their own ends are actually more or less unconsciously guided by it. Both the most totalitarian regimes, such as fascism and Bolshevism, and the so-called democratic ones share this inability to govern technique to such an extent that they end up transforming themselves almost inadvertently into the sense required by the very technologies they thought they were using for their own ends. Lodewijk Bolk, a scientist who gave a new formulation to the theory of evolution, thus saw in the hypertrophy of technological development a mortal danger for the survival of human specie. The growing development of both scientific and social technologies produce, in fact, a well and true inhibition of vitality, so that “the more humanity advances on the path of technique, the more it gets closer to that fatal point where progress means destruction. And certainly it is not in the nature of man to stop in the face of this”. An instructive example is provided by weapons technology, which has produced devices whose use implies the destruction of life on earth — therefore also of those who have them at their disposal and who, as we see today, nonetheless continue to threaten to use them.
It is possible, then, that the incapacity to govern technique is inscribed in the very concept of “government”, that is, in the idea that politics is in its very nature cybernetic, i.e. the art of “governing” (kybernes is in Greek the pilot of the ship) the life of human beings and their goods. Technique cannot be governed because it is the very form of governmentality. What has traditionally been interpreted — from scholasticism to Spengler — as the essentially instrumental nature of technique betrays the inherency of an instrumentality to our conception of politics. Decisive here is the idea that the technological tool is something which, operating according to its own end, can be used for the purposes of an external agent. As it is shown by the example of the ax, which cuts by virtue of its sharpness, but is used by the carpenter to make a table, the technical tool alike can serve another’s end only to the extent that it achieves its own. That means, ultimately — as it is evident in the most advanced technological devices — that technique achieves its own end by apparently making use of another’s end. In the same sense, politics, meant as oikonomia and government, is that operation that achieves an end which seems to transcend it, but which is in reality immanent to it. Politics and technique are identified in each other, i.e., without residues, and a political control of technique will not be possible until we have abandoned our instrumental, i.e. governmental, conception of politics.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Not merely a matter of technique. Photo: Blutgruppe/Blutgruppe/Corbis.
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