Concept
Technology
Post-ritual governance: the perfection of the imperative and the dominant form of power
Ask AI about Technology“Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology presents itself to us as an enormous system of interlocking imperatives which provides a very precise slot for us to insert our own imperatives, who or what is at the center? What ostensive sign generates the system of imperatives? Technology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in the wake of the desacralization of power.”
From the Archive
“From this initial technology, predicated upon total command, we can derive the axiom that all technology is governance. Within any technological order, the machines will be modeled on and complement the activities of human collectives, while human collectives will be modeled on actual or possible machinic articulations.”
“Technology is a vast command structure that generates more and more implicit commands as it replaces what was once a ritual system of imperative exchanges: you don’t have to be told to drive a car—it’s just a condition of living under certain technological conditions, and since there are better and worse cars, and cars are indicative of status, you want to drive a car.”
“But technology precedes the relation between “man and nature”: the first technology is ritual, in which words—prayers, imprecations, blessings, etc.—make things happen on a scene, assuming the participants on that scene are aligned with the materials arranged (props, furniture, scenery) to create the conditions for the happening.”
“Technology is scenic design and the design of the scene is part of governance and hence part of the tributary order—technology situates everyone within some centered ordinality and creates the pedagogical platforms necessary for succession.”
“Governance always concerns countering some real or anticipated resentment by bringing the governed into closer accord with imperatives from the center—making the governed more visible, as James Scott contended, but also making the center more legible and intelligible.”
“In that case, the problem of technology is the way the problems of centrality more generally are posed today. Money, media and technology are all real, of course (money is itself media and technology), but we can learn to “read” them as signs indicating (dis)order of the center.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.GA refuses the commonplace that technology is a neutral instrument whose ethics lie only in our "uses." Derived from the imperative — "the axiom that all technology is governance" — it is theorized as the dominant form of power, "completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in the wake of the desacralization of power." Where ritual once managed the community's relation to the center, technology now does: it is "a vast command structure that generates more and more implicit commands as it replaces what was once a ritual system of imperative exchanges." The continuity with ritual is not metaphorical but genealogical, since "the first technology is ritual, in which words—prayers, imprecations, blessings, etc.—make things happen on a scene." Technology is thus an "exo-skeleton that replaces the more human scaled skeleton of ritual: it still manages our relation to the center, it still accounts for distribution."
Because it inherits ritual's governing function, technology is inseparable from scenic design and succession: it "situates everyone within some centered ordinality and creates the pedagogical platforms necessary for succession." Its governing work is the deferral of resentment — "countering some real or anticipated resentment by bringing the governed into closer accord with imperatives from the center" while making both the governed more legible and the center more intelligible. Read this way, technology is one of the signs (with money and media) by which the (dis)order of the center can be read; it is the form that the problem of centrality takes today.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“The disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another technology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling the “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be dependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm…”
“As to why any center is necessary, and why an autonomous system of engineering can’t gradually and imperceptibly replace the existing system of liberal capitalism, the simplest answer is that engineering does not produce practices that defend the engineer against exploitation and sabotage, and there will always be agents who consider the latter to be in…”
“Let’s return to the ritual scene. Ritual makes things happen—in that sense, we could already speak of it as a kind of technology. What it makes happen is the coordination of the community around practices of production and distribution: it is assumed that none of this could be possible without the “mechanisms” through which the aid of the center is…”
“Technology, as scenic design, is already a mode of governance insofar as it generates new forms of surveillance, record-keeping and constraints on and constitutive infiltrations into social interaction, while more literal innovations in governance always become expanded intelligence operations drawing upon and calling for the creation of new technological…”
“There’s not much thinking of technology within GA, so I can’t attribute the prosthesis metaphor to GA in particular, but I can associate it with the consumerism made foundational by Gans and take this moment to insist that the allergy within GA circles to thinking in terms of governmentality requires a very strong dose of antihistamine, and thinking through…”
“I have written about technology in scenic terms along various lines, as the constitution of the scene itself or scenic design, as governance, as the perfection of the imperative and as the establishment of pedagogical platforms. These are all complementary descriptions, but still don’t yet ground technology in political antagonisms, specific to the modern,…”
“We have technology as soon as an imperative is extended past the immediate relation between imperator and imperatee, and therefore requires some kind of inscription, cooperation and enforcement. When an imperative puts people to work, makes them “part” of a “whole,” it has become technological. And I continue to insist on my assertion, derived from Lewis…”
“But this is also to say that the space of prayer is also the space of desire, insofar as desire is the unfulfilled imperative, which we could say is deferred rather than insisted upon through prayer. Perfecting the imperative, then, is building bridges over desire. Ritual is the first technology, as it involves each instrumentalizing all the others so as…”
“Those who design technology are quite literally, if indirectly, telling others what to do: you must go from one place to another, and you must do it in one of these several ways. There is always a tendency to reduce the options so as to optimize the system imperatives. The most perfect technology, in that case, would be one in which the designers at various…”
“The disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another technology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling the “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be dependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm…”
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