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The Technological System Jacques Ellul 1980 The Continuum Publishing Corporation 815 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017 Originally published as Le Sytème technicien by Calmann-Lévy Copyright Calmann-Lévy 1977 The English translation copyright © 1980 by The Continuum Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, Technological electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Continuum Publishing Corporation. Printed in the United States of America System Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ellul, Jacques. The technological system. Translation of Le système technicien. Bibliography. 1. Technology and civilization. 1. Title. Translated from the French HM221.E4313 303.4'83 80-15344 by Joachim Neugroschel ISBN 0-8264-9007-4 CONTENTS Introduction Introduction 1 Part One: WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY 21 TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 1 Technology TECHNOLOGY is not content with being, or in our world, with being the As a Concept 23 principal or determining factor. Technology has become a system. This 2 Technology is what I will try to show in this analysis. But we have to be clear about As an Environment 34 the object of my research. Twenty-five years ago, I arrived at the notion 3 Technology As a of the "technological society"; but now, that stage is passed. Determining Factor 51 Nevertheless, we are faced with the major problem of what makes up the 4 Technology specific nature of our society, its chief characteristic. Indeed, we have to As a System 76 track down the key to interpreting the modern age. But if we go through General Idea 76 the field of definitions that are generally accepted today, we will see that Defining the System 82 every so-called specific trait is actually secondary and points ultimately to Features of the System 108 technology. Let us investigate.1 The Absence of Feedback 117 The best-known definition today is by Raymond Aron: the "industrial society.” This term is very widespread, but I find it inadequate. Let us Part Two: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL ignore the knotty question whether Raymond Aron is designating a model PHENOMENON 123 or the reality of our society. For a model, an ideal type, his description is rigorously exact, useful, and interesting. But it obviously does not 5 Autonomy 125 correspond to present-day reality. In the nineteenth century, Western 6 Unity 156 7 Universality 169 society was certainly an industrial one, and Aron is right in showing that 8 Totalization 199 once the industrial factor began to develop, it affected all societal relations. He is right in showing that the industrial factor led to a social Part Three: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF model that was similar everywhere, no matter what the national traits, the TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS 205 political system, or the original differences. Now the industrial factor is characterized by the multiplication of machines and a certain organization 9 Self-Augmentation 209 of production. Both factors are technological. Today, however, the 10 Automatism 232 industrial factor may still be huge, but it does not have much in common 11 Causal Progression and Absence of Finality 256 with what it was in the nineteenth century. 13 The Problem of Acceleration 283 Conclusion: Man in the Technological System 310 Postscript 326 Notes 327 Bibliography 361 THE TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM 2 TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 3 Above all, it is drowned in a mass of other phenomena that are equally burdensome or too fragile. An ideal structure is imposed: One single important. Although these phenomena are partially determined by the machine performs each stage of the process, and there has to be a industrial factor, they have broken away from it, taking on a tremendous continuous flow of raw material along the production line of the machines. volume and a force of transformation which goes beyond industry in the Hence: no more separate workshops, no more stocks, no more strict sense of the word. Present-day society is still industrial; but that is interconnections. As a result, the earlier analogy to the anthill is passé, not its essence.2 "the ants have disappeared.” (Which shows how simply backward China We need not dwell too long on this contrast between the industrial actually is.) A factory now creates a vertical integration of successive system and the technological system. Let us focus on two examples of machines, each having a different function. There is a "body"–enormous analysis: Seurat's and Richta's. and complex, but it is one body. This in turn necessitates a greater The influence of technological systematics contrasting the industrial circulation of information. world with the new conception was very well analyzed by Georges And that is the fourth characteristic: Information has to be automated Seurat, Réalités du transfert technologigue (1976). And his example is and decentralized. Otherwise, nothing can function. Hence, the highly significant: What is the difference between the old factory and the inevitable presence of the computer. Information circuits innervate the new? In the former, the goal is to add value to raw material in a series of entire process at each stage, and all of them frequently wind up in a operations performed by a family of machines, each machine having its single control room. In biological terms, this structure could be likened to own function. If a problem crops up in one "family," it has no a cerebralization. We must bear in mind, however, that this is nothing but repercussions on any other. The machines are installed in partitioned a simile and that this gigantic structure is not alive in any way. The whole workshops; the families of machines are kept independent of one another thing cannot function without a human being who is properly trained, by stocks and interconnections. Human error has little weight. Seurat aware of his responsibility, capable of attention and solidarity, and proof compares the structure of that factory to a beehive or anthill: an against sabotage or striking. The damage done to all would be too individual's mistake is unimportant. immense. The past fifty years have completed a metamorphosis in four ways: Still, the most rigorous demonstration of the passage from industrial The power of unitary machines has been growing incessantly. A new to technological society, of the radical difference between the two, is machine costs less to buy, produce, and run than two old machines, but furnished by Radovan Richta's fundamental opus Civilisation at the its output is twice that of one old machine. "Along the path of giantism, Crossroads (1969). Richta even sees that difference as the key to one can reasonably go to the limits of the possible, concentrating interpreting the failure of socialism in the USSR. He maintains that the businesses in order to put them on the scale of the biggest machines Soviets are clinging to the industrial model, unwilling to take the step that imaginable.” This assertion by a distinguished expert on technology would bring them into the technological system. A system totally different rightly sweeps away the ideological conjectures about smaller sizes of from the earlier one. companies, the dispersal of small factories in nature, etc. Such consoling At one time, technology and machine industry were connected; but ideologies came from Maoist ideas or from the unwarranted assumption for more than half a century now, a gap has widened between them. that everything would shrink because certain devices are now so tiny. In Industrialism developed a centralized, hierarchical system, with a linear the industrial reality, all we can expect is a theoretically indefinite growth growth, a division of labor, and a separation between the means and the of subsystems. ends. Mechanization created additional jobs and made human work more The second line of development emphasized by Seurat is draining. It operated by means of steady reproduction, developing complexification: "The problems raised by giantism require solutions that masses of men and integrating them in the industrialization. are often at the frontier of the universe explored by technology.” Modern technology, however, contradicts each of those different However, this complexification includes an apparent simplification. The points. If allowed to act, it leads to decentralization and flexibility; it does giant and complex machines can no longer be trivialized within a family of away with the hierarchy and the division of labor; it particularly has to machines. The hookups are too bridge the gap between implementation and THE TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM 4 TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 5 management; it presupposes a polyvalent and nonlinear growth; it such a type and to change that type. Teaching should be oriented reintegrates the ends into the means; it cuts down on labor and thus on towards the structure of the object and be based . on generalizing the the costs of labor. The value factor is no longer human work but scientific creative faculties." invention and technological innovation. Consequently, we can no longer We fully agree about the desirable goals. But according to these apply Marx's analysis, which states that the economic totality is based on lines–and I could quote a hundred examples–Richta assumes that what is the surplus value produced by the salaried labor of the worker. desirable from a humanist viewpoint has been virtually realized by The industrial system is a closed, repetitive world, with a linear technology. Such is his idealism, preventing him from bringing up the evolution. The technological system is inevitably open, nonrepetitive, with issue of power. He never once stops to think that technology is power, a polyvalent evolution. It can proceed only by the universal development made up of instruments of power, hence producing phenomena and of mankind, and that development is absolutely necessary for the structures of power, i.e., of domination.
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