Channels, Fall 2016
Alford • Choosing to Choose Page 48 ages. At the beginning, technique assisted work. The worker could get better tools and therefore produce more quickly. Technique did not define the worker’s existence. Work was seen as an unfortunate necessity rather than an activity virtuous for its own sake (p. 65). Ellul (1964) explained that, “The time given to the use of techniques was short, compared with the leisure time devoted to sleep, conversation, games, or, best of all, to meditation. As a corollary, technical activities had little place in these societies” (p. 66). Human work was an effort in building a better dwelling rather than an effort unto itself. This use of technique shifted with the invention of steam-powered production in the nineteenth century. Steam-powered machinery changed the nature of tools and the worker’s relation with them. Flusser (1999) described the change saying, “The industrial machine differs from the pre-industrial one, in that it is based on scientific theory. . . pre- industrial machines are empirical; industrial ones are produced by technology” (p. 51). The modern machine has reversed the relationship between the tool and the human. Humans were once the constant; their tools the variable. But in the work environment of technique, the opposite is true. Machines are the constant, and the human is the variable (Flusser, 1999, p. 45). This changes how humans exist in the world. Ellul (1964) described the modern impact, saying: Technical progress today is no longer conditioned by anything other than its own calculus of efficiency. The search is no longer personal, experimental, workmanlike; it is abstract, mathematical, and industrial. This does not mean that the individual no longer participates. On the contrary, progress is made only after innumerable individual experiments. But the individual participates only to the degree that he is subordinate to the search for efficiency, to the degree that he resists all the currents today considered secondary, such as aesthetics, ethics, fantasy. (p. 74) Human expression in their work does not exist in the same way. People don't own their labor and are not encouraged to find pride in what they produce. This may seem like a rash generalization, but a 2014 study conducted by Stuart Elliot found that machines could replace nearly eighty percent of jobs in the next few decades. This is an ontological shift for humans being-in-the-world. The workman does not own their work. Instead, s/he is replaceable completely by a machine. If an economy is not growing, it is seen as failing, even if its production is healthy. Art and design are produced at a mass scale to fuel the wheels of capitalism. Technique brings human minds into line with its own end goal of mechanization and efficiency. This logic is not limited to mass production either. Election cycles are driven not by principles but instead on the perception of polls conducted by the media through quantitative analysis. The academy has transformed from a place of intellectual inquiry into a place of efficiently educating the masses, a movement that started with urbanization in the nineteenth century. Some of those results have been good. At least in America, literacy has increased by a significant margin. But the larger issue is the psychological situation. Societies’ qualifiable attributes are increasingly quantified. This is the orientation toward technology that Heidegger feared, as
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