Centered Technology
By Adam Katz
In large part this book is a critique of (strategy for entering and transforming) the secular disciplines. The project, or imperative, implicit here is to roll back the power circulation that takes the form of equalizing abstractions (whether of money or votes) into abstractions conducted by formalized and explicit power hierarchies. I’ve been suggesting that rolling back money and votes is conceivable—if one considers, for example, how much of market activity is mediated by informal networks among agents who have been authorized by some form of power, it is easy to imagine minimizing the effects of market signals on economic activity—indeed, it’s possible to imagine abolishing economic activity in itself, and “incorporating” corporations as one kind of institution among many others within a well governed social order. The same is not true of the most thoroughgoing form of desacralizing social practice, and the most socially central: technology. To review: insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually hostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same time, power is never genuinely desacralized, because as soon as the sacred center is punctured, mythicized centers like “the common good,” “the voice of the people,” “Constitution,” “rule of law,” and, eventually, “GDP” are set up as masks of what everyone must assume is there—an unquestioned authority rooted in a singular origin. These mythicized centers are intrinsically arbitrary and divisive, though, which means they must eventually escalate hostilities into some “total” form.
Desacralization of power, though, is possible because there is a difference between the ritual center and activities engaged in outside the center. In the earliest human communities, we can assume that in activities apart from the ritual center nothing at all changed after the originary event, while the ritual center was made to reproduce as precisely as possible the originary event. But the sign deployed on the originary scene, along with the constraining structure of ritual, would be extended to other activities; at the same time, linguistic development towards the declarative would involve the attribution of actions to (“mythical”) occupants of the center. The mythical interpretations of ritual would be drawn from the far less interesting but nevertheless determinative actions outside the central aura and be converted, ritually and mythically, into actions modeling behaviors for the community. Out in the field, hunters battle their prey; on the narrativized ritual scene, the sacred beast/ancestor battles with its family and enemies, takes pity on humans and gives life to the group.
As social cooperation increases, stories of the origin of each new mode of cooperation would be “heard” or derived from the center—no member of the community could do or create something new without attributing the discovery to a mythical agent. You would in turn be obliged to that mythical agent, and would give to it some part of the fruits of your labor, which in turn would be part of the individual’s contribution to the center for the entire community. (The center remains the center insofar as it distributes.) The gift the god has given you comes with an imperative: in one form or another, that imperative would be to use it in such a way as to honor the donor. In return, the individual issues an imperative to the mythical being: a prayer, requesting aid in successfully using the skill or implement. All the implements of work and war would be created within this frame of what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”
The implements themselves, their parts, and the implements used to produce the implements, are themselves all part of this imperative exchange. This is to say there is a “magical” component to the process: ritual words and gestures must be applied to all acts involving production and use, and instances of successful or failed use would implicate the implements themselves, which don’t simply break, and aren’t simply poorly used, but refuse, for reasons that may be more or less formulated, to follow the commands given them. In a certain sense we could say that, of course, an early human smoothing out his spear knows that this has to be done so that it can fly straight and fast when thrown, but his way of thinking about it will be framed completely in terms of being in harmony with all the agencies of the surrounding world mediating its production. Such processes become institutionalized, and to craft some item in a way that is not traditionally prescribed and monitored by the upholders of that tradition would also be unthinkable.
So, the question is, how did it become possible for “technology” to emerge—that is, production conducted outside of these forms, in accord with the logic of continually reducing the elements of one process to another set of elements produced by another process? I think that the answer must be: when it becomes possible to see other human beings as implements. The divine kings, commanding hundreds of thousands, even millions, in their slave war and labor armies, made up of the socially dead, would first get a view of all these individuals as “parts” of a whole that
might be more than the sum of its parts. Some could be added; some subtracted; some moved over here; some over there. If some worked harder, the possibility of combining all the better workers would come to mind; if workers or soldiers improvised and found some new way of cooperating with each other, that could be remembered and reproduced. This is already a kind of technology.
The Axial Age acquisitions of metaphysics and scripture made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World, then in conquered regions abroad and, finally, those at home flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process, with those tasks eventually being transferred to technology. If automation has now itself become an autonomous process, it is because men were first automated. Eventually, of course, technology came to alleviate and eliminate human labor, but in the process the disciplines, focused on both technological and human resources, became the main drivers of social development. The human sciences, which took over from theology and philosophy, treat humans in technological terms, as composed of parts that work together in ways that can be studied and modified. Even attempts to “humanize” disciplines like psychology reduce people to set of interchangeable and predictable clichés.
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 driven, all-intrusive social media which more and more people simply can’t live without is a logical extension of this process, as is the elimination of millions of jobs through new modes of automation. But desacralized technology, like desacralized power, provides a frame within which ultimately unlimited struggles ensue. 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. It is part of the same furious whirlpool of decentralization, as old forms of power, predicated upon earlier forms of technology, are broken up, and then recentralization, as new forms of power exploit the new technologies to remove mediating power centers in zeroing in on each individual. In that case, the commands of the center are mediated technologically, which is to say through our self-centerings as both objects of technological manipulations and imaginings and subjects becoming signs of the algorithmic paradoxes: our choice here is to become either predictable and unreliable, or unpredictable and
reliable; that is, either try and fit the categories comprehending us and become as defective as those categories; or, extract and improve upon the imperative embedded in those categories. In the latter case, we situate ourselves at the origin of the technological event, and model forms of power that will advance participation in the reinscription of technological markings upon us.
The telos of technology, then, is to make technologically produced human interactions into models for further analysis of practices into networks of sub-practices, out of which new practices are synthesized. In the process, the cultural work of deferral becomes increasingly technological—this means that we will think more in terms of deferring possible conflicts in advance, in making them unthinkable and impossible, rather than intervening crudely after the fact. We would work on turning binaries into aggregated probabilities, and making those aggregated probabilities capable of expression in language—this would be a source of important artistic and pedagogical projects: finding ways to express aggregated probabilities in language would mean populating the future by hypothetically placing centrally ordered teams at various posts where new practices will be required. It would be as if we were producing futurity by continuing to work on the originary scene itself—in, say, settling “in advance” some dispute between friends, a particular wrinkle in the fluctuations of aborted gestures on the scene is revealed—the scene, one can now see, would only have cohered if one member had shaped his sign of deferral while positioning himself just so in relation to his neighbor and the center.
What about all the moral and ethical questions bound up with technology—gene manipulation, increasingly destructive weapons, pharmaceutical interventions into behaviors, deficiencies and capabilities that were once within the normal range but now; at a higher resolution, seem to call for remediation, etc.? Behind all these anxieties is the fading away of a sense of the human that was formed logocentrically, which is to say through the assimilation of the literate subject to the scene of speech, in which all are present to each other, and intentions are inseparable from signs. Humanism is a degenerate form of the Axial Age acquisitions. But this is not to say that our telos as technological beings is simply to go full speed ahead on all counts. We need a new way to think about these things, one that doesn’t rely on what are ultimately historically bound feelings of defilement. There is a human origin, and origins that iterate that origin, but no human nature (unless one once to call “orientation to the center” a “nature”). The event of technology, in which we become, collectively, models of further interventions that will in-form us, is itself anthropocentric.
Some of those moral and ethical questions are not real questions, relying on dumbed down or falsified versions of actual or possible scientific developments. The answers to those of them that are real questions will depend upon the state of the disciplines. Only within disciplinary spaces will it be possible to ask whether a proposed innovation or line of inquiry, i.e., some proposed new power, will have commensurate responsibilities assigned to it. Only in properly composed disciplines can these questions be raised free of scapegoating pressures demanding remediation to enjoy new “freedoms” or to avoid some form of ostracism. Anthropomorphically grounded disciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic terms of social coherence, while using new possibilities to continue studying those terms; and
then we would have to assume open channels between the disciplines and central authority. There is even a place for “letting the market decide,” as long as we keep in mind what the “market” is: what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. Supervision can be relaxed and tightened for various purposes, and one of the purposes for relaxation is certainly to see what intelligent and talented people can do when encouraged to engage in skunkworks. In this case, as in all cases, the ultimate test for the reception of any novelty would be whether it helps sustain the pyramid of command starting from the central authority, and even contributes to ensuring the continuity of that authority from ruler to ruler. Will a particular innovation make imperatives from the center both more unified, coherent and simple in proportion to the scope it provides for authorities at lower posts to enhance and complete those commands in obeying them? And the disciplines will accordingly, make themselves over into articulations of practices refined by the latest divisions in labor that study the diverse forms of human interaction for models of technological transformation—in the process establishing meta-practices for representing this dialectic in a way intelligible to central authority. Each individual could think of himself as both an operator of technological forms and a model for future ones, but the latter only in proportion to the former.
Capital and technology come to represent independent forms of power because they are levied by the occupant of central authority against other potential contenders for central authority and thereby become independent sources of power. This has to be addressed on a geo-political scale, because capital and technology are exported and imported and this process involves competition between sovereigns regarding the control of what we would have to call vassal states. It might seem to follow from the claim that all human activity derives and answers to a singular center that the entire world eventually needs to be brought under a single government. I think the more coherent assumption is that the world needs a formalized hierarchy of powers. This keeps us close to actual global structures, which are comprised of states of various levels of independence and sovereignty. Insofar as the international order is organized in terms of independent, nominally equal, states, the maintenance of hegemonies in the form of asymmetrical alliances and spheres of influence must be conducted largely indirectly. If a more powerful state wants to prevent a less powerful state from breaking a chain of vassal states required to maintain regular economic or political relationships, it can refuse it loans, stop buying its exports, accuse it of human rights abuses calling for cutting off aid, and so on. This requires the cooperation institutionalized in banks, trade agreements, international courts, human rights organizations, the media (to propagate the required narrative), and so on. This disorder, in turn, encourages rival powers to play the same games, or different games reflecting different power positions, economic, cultural and military means of projecting power. These conflicts generate ideologies which feed back into the system. Short of world government, rivalries between major powers will always be possible (since I’m not going to explore the possibility of world government here, I’m not going to address the issues of what kinds of rivalries the attempt to establish it might promote). The purpose of formalized power is to concentrate relationships in responsible institutional heads; what this implies for world order is government to government communications, with no support for oppositional or subversive movements within another
country—at the very least, this means that disagreements between major powers will result from genuine, substantive conflicts of interest which are in principle negotiable, rather than from proxy conflicts and reciprocal projections spiraling out of control. Since it seems highly unlikely that the two or three major powers will be identical in power, we can assume a single world hegemon, whose power in relation to subordinate power centers we could think of by analogy to a national sovereign governing an array of local institutions: the more unhindered and explicit the exercise of power, the less intrusive it needs to be. Only under such conditions could the flows of capital be brought under political control, and reduced to the relation between the central authority and the world of the disciplines, in which conditional grants of authority matched with commensurate access to resources are monitored by skunkworking and potential skunkworking teams reporting to the central authority.
Centered Technology — https://center.study/post/book-anthropomorphics-centered-technology