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Title: Technology and its mediated use.
Author: Raoul Vaneigem
Date: 1967
Description: Chapter nine of the _Revolution of Everyday
Life_,by Raoul Vaneigem. First published as
_Traite de savoir-faire a l'usage des jeunes
generations_, Paris: Gallimand, 1967.
Translated by John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking,
London: Rising Free Collective, 1979, and Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books/Rebel Press,
1983. No copyright claims will be made against
publishers of nonprofit editions.
Keywords: Situationist International, technology, Vaneigem
Related Material:
Technology and its mediated use
by Raoul Vaneigem
Contrary to the interest of those who control its use,
technology tends to demystify the world. The democratic reign of
consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. At the
same time, organization -- the technology of new technologies --
deprives modern productive forces of their subversive and
seductive qualities. Such organization is simply the
organization of authority (1). Alienated mediations weaken
people by making themselves indispensable. A social mask
conceals people and things, transforming them, in the present
stage of privative appropriation, into dead things -- into
commodities. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will
be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social
relationships. The shell of the old hierarchical society will be
burst open from within by the growth of material equipment (2).
1
The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial
civilizations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in
automated civilizations, where people are already dying of
boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a Trobriand
islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a
smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite
of his comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival
sickness.
Rousseauism and pastoral idylls accompany the first
throbbings of the industrial machine. The ideology of progress,
found in Condorcet or Adam Smith, emerged from the old myth of
the four ages. Just as the age of iron preceded the golden age,
it seemed 'natural' that progress should fulfil itself as a
return: a return to the state of innocence before the Fall.
Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand
with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration. The machine
is the model of the intelligible. There is no mystery, nothing
obscure in its drive-belts, cogs, and gear; it can all be
explained perfectly. But the machine is also the miracle that is
to transport us into the realms of happiness and freedom.
Besides, this ambiguity is useful to the masters: the old con
about happy tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates
at various levels to justify the rational exploitation of people
today. Thus it is not the logic of desanctification that shakes
people's faith in progress so much as the inhuman use of
technical potential, the way that the cheap mystique surrounding
it begins to grate. So long as the labouring classes and
underdeveloped peoples were still offered the spectacle of their
slowly decreasing material poverty, the enthusiasm for progress
still drew ample nourishment from the troughs of liberal ideology
and its extension, socialism. But, a century after the
spontaneous demystification of the Lyons workers, when they
smashed the looms, a general crisis broke out, springing this
time from the crisis of big industry; fascist regression, sickly
dreams of a return to artisanry and corporatism, the Ubuesque
master race of blond beasts.
Today the promises of the old society of production are
raining down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that
nobody is likely to call manna from heaven. You can hardly
believe in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people
used to believe in productive forces. There is a certain
hagiographic literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine
much on the electric toothbrush. The mass production of
instruments of comfort -- all equally revolutionary, according to
the publicity handouts -- has given the most unsophisticated of
people the right to express an opinion on the marvels of
technological innovation in a tone as blase as the hand they
stick in their pants. The first landing on Mars will pass
unnoticed at Disneyland.
Admittedly the yoke and harness, the steam engine,
electricity and the rise of nuclear energy, all disturbed and
altered the infrastructure of society (even if they were
discovered, when all is said and done, almost by chance). But
today it would be foolish to expect new productive forces to
upset modes of production. The blossoming of technology has
given rise to a supertechnology of synthesis, one which could
prove as important as the social community -- that first
technical synthesis of all, founded at the dawn of time. Perhaps
more important still; for if cybernetics was taken from its
masters, it might be able to free human groups from labour and
from social alienation. This was precisely the point of Charles
Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.
But the distance between Fourier and the cyberneticians who
control the operational organization of technology is the
distance between freedom and slavery. Of course, the cybernetic
project claims that it is already sufficiently developed to be
able to solve all the problems raised by the appearance of any
new technique. But don't you believe it.
1 The constant development of productive forces, the
exploding mass production of consumer goods, promise nothing.
Musical air-conditioners and solar ovens stand unheralded and
unsung. We see a weariness coming, one that is already so
striking that sooner or later it is bound to develop into a
critique of organization itself.
2 For all its flexibility, the cybernetic synthesis will
never be able to conceal the fact that it is only the
transcending synthesis of the different forms of government that
have ruled over people, and their final stage. How could it hope
to disguise the inherent alienation that no power has ever yet
managed to shield from the weapons of arms and the criticism of
arms?
By laying the basis for a perfect power structure, the
cybernetician will only stimulate the perfection of its refusal.
Their programming of new techniques will be shattered by the same
techniques turned to its own use by another kind of organization.
A revolutionary organization.
2
Technocratic organization raises technical mediation to its
highest point of coherence. It has been known for ages that the
master uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective
world, that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it
belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it
is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the
conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the
ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and
the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of
the fraud: they are the mediations which move people as producers
and people as consumers to the illusion of action in a real
passivity and transform them into essentially dependent beings.
Controlled mediations separate individuals from themselves, their
desires, their dreams, and their will to live; and so people come
to believe in the legend that you can't do without them, or the
power that governs them. Where Power fails to paralyse with
constraints, it paralyses by suggestion, by forcing everyone to
use crutches of which it is the sole owner and purveyor. Power
as the sum of alienating mediations awaits only the holy water of
cybernetics to baptise it into the state of Totality. But total
power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. And
cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of
organization will be laughed off the stage.
Because the objective world (or nature, if you prefer) has
been grasped by means of alienated mediations (tools, thoughts,
false needs), it ends up surrounded by a sort of screen so that,
paradoxically, the more humanity transforms itself and the world,
the more the world becomes alienated. The veil of social
relations envelops the natural world inextricably. What we call
'natural' today is about as natural as Nature Girl lipstick. The
instruments of praxis do not belong to the agents of praxis, the
workers: and it is obvious because of this that the opaque zone
that separates human beings from themselves and from nature has
become a part of humanity and a part of nature. Our task is not
to rediscover nature but to remake it.
The search for the real nature, for a natural life that has
nothing to do with the lie of social ideology, is one of the most
touching naiveties of a good part of the revolutionary
proletariat, not to mention the anarchists and such notable
figures as the young Wilhelm Reich.
In the realm of the exploitation of humans by humans, the
real transformation of nature takes place only through the real
transformation of nature takes place only through the real
transformation of the social fraud. At no point in their
struggle have humanity and nature ever been really face to face.
They have been united yet kept apart by what mediates this
struggle: hierarchical social power and its organization of
appearances. The transformation of nature is its socialization,
and it has been socialized badly. If all nature is social, this
is because history has never known a society without power.
Is an earthquake a natural phenomenon? It affects people,
but it affects them only as alienated social beings. What is an
earthquake-in-itself? Suppose that at this moment there was an
earthquake disaster on Alpha Centauri. Who would bother apart
from the old farts in the universities and other centers of pure
thought?
And death: death also strikes people socially. Not only
because the energy and resources poured down the drain of
militarism and wasted in the lawlessness of capitalism and
bureaucracy could make a vital contribution to the scientific
struggle against death. But also, and above all, because it is
in the vast laboratory of society (and under the benevolent eye
of science) that the foul brew of culture in which the germs of
death are spawned is kept on the boil (stress, nervous tension,
conditioning, pollution, cures worse than the disease, etc.)
Only animals are still allowed to die a natural death -- some of
them.
Could it be that, after disengaging themselves from the
higher animal world by means of their history, human beings might
come to envy the animal's contact with nature? This is, I think,
the implicit meaning of the current puerile cult of the
'natural'. The desire which this cult mobilizes, however, is one
which in its mature and untwisted form makes the quite reasonable
demand that 30,000 years of history should be transcended.
What we have to do now is to create a new nature that will
be a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialize it by
liberating the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation,
by snatching it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only
at the end of a process of social disalienation will nature
become a worthwhile opponent, in a society in which people's
creativity will not come up against human nature itself as the
first obstacle to its expansion.
* * *
Technological organization cannot be destroyed from without.
Its collapse will result from internal decay. Far from being
punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it
never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if
the cybernauts did come to power they would have a hard time
staying there. Their complacent vision of their own rosy future
calls for a retort along the lines of these words from a black
worker to a white boss (Presence Africaine, 1956): "When we
first saw your trucks and your planes we thought you were gods.
Then, after a few years, we learned how to drive your trucks, and
fly your planes, and we understood that what interested you most
was manufacturing trucks and planes and making money. For our
part, what we are interested in is using them. Now, you are just
our blacksmiths".
Chapter Nine of The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul
Vaneigem. First published as Traite de savoir-faire a l'usage
des jeunes generations, Paris: Gallimand, 1967. Translated by
John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking, London: Rising Free
Collective, 1979, and Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank
Books/Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright claims will be made against
publishers of nonprofit editions.