Abstract
In the wake of the crisis of representation failure became the defining moment in many theories of science and Bildung. This section will, in an essayistic style, anticipate the argument that will be developed in more detail in the following sections. It will be shown to what extent many of the theories of science and Bildung were unable to investigate the conditions of failure in the absence of a logic capable of paradox, and had to repress the decisive role of technology in the processes of world disclosure, and thus, finally, remained trapped in the positivism they sought to distance themselves from. It is here that the discovery of the cunning nature of technology opens up a new understanding of world disclosure.
Don’t know what I want,but I know how to get it.
—Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK
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Notes
- 1.
It is at this point crucial not to discuss social and physical technologies separate from one another. Firstly, this is not, as should be shown in the following, persuasive for analytical reasons—the materialisation of social technologies is only one and not necessarily the decisive step in a chain of translational steps (see Sect. 3.8 ). Secondly, the political important shift associated with this would otherwise be missed if something gains a more assertive facticity in the form of physical technology.
- 2.
Conversely, that the qualitative condition of technology has quantitative consequences would be a claim that is much too generally formulated for one to meaningfully investigate it. One would have to firstly sufficiently narrow down this claim, to e.g. technologies of production on the one hand, and economic growth on the other hand, in order to be able to make intelligible statements about the quantitative meaning of qualitative changes in technology. Here, Solow’s thesis, its significance still not adequately reflected, that no other factor apart from technological progress has had a positive influence on economic growth in the long term. Solow first put this forward in 1956 in the article A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a year later, 1957, empirically proved this using the example of the U.S.A. in the first half of the twentieth century in the article Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function in the Review of Economics and Statistics. For a critique of Solow cf. Mankiw et al. 1992.
- 3.
On situating the transformative concept of Bildung in the Humboldtian tradition cf. Koller’s discussion of Humboldt’s philosophy of language in Koller 1999, pp. 51–94.
- 4.
Here too, it is assumed that they are not identical; which should neither mean that the processes of scientific knowledge cannot occur together with the processes of Bildung, or cannot stand in a conditional or other kind of relationship to one another, or generally have analogous structures at their disposal that would render a discussion of scientific processes interesting for a theory of Bildung. It is much more an indication that the depiction of these processes has to suffice their respectively different claims and necessarily emphasises different aspects—without these different focuses being necessarily identical with defining differences. For an expansion on this, cf. Sect. 2.1 as well as 4.1 .
- 5.
Analogous to this from an anthropological view cf. Meyer-Drawes shifting of the Gehlen’s determination of human being as a flawed being: “Considered more closely the human is not undetermined, but rather determined many times. It is in this sense not a flawed being that must compensate an instinctual deficit, but rather a being of excess, because it can deviate from its determination.” (Meyer-Drawe 1995, p. 369).
- 6.
This is more or less Luhmann’s view in the article The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society from 1976.
- 7.
On this cf. Hölscher 1999 or also Berghoff 2000.
- 8.
Here too, even if with clearly another accentuation with reference to Hölscher. I thank the participants in the Philosophy of Bildung forum for pointing out this article from Dörpinghaus.
- 9.
No firm has better perfected this principle of the permanent imperfect as a business model than Google, and hardly any business model is so passionately praised as being ground breaking (e.g. from Jarvis 1999) as was earlier Toyota’s monozukuri (on this cf. Liker 2003).
- 10.
On the other hand, technology and the technologisation of social contexts is that which can render them at all communicable in the first place—one only has to think of the political importance of statistics and data gathering technologies. So technology in no way spares consensus unconditionally—seen absolutely. This is missed by Luhmann just as it is in Habermas’s confrontation between means-ends rational action and interaction (cf. Habermas 1969, p. 84).
- 11.
On techné and above all the indications of a concept of techné cf. Sect. 2.6 .
- 12.
It is in this sense that Ortega y Gasset describes technology in his “Thoughts on Technology” as “an effort to save effort” (1983, p. 296).
- 13.
For an empirical proof of this cf. Kaufmann 1998. On conflicts achieving autonomy cf. Luhmann 1984, ch. 9 and Luhmann 1997a, p. 466 f.
- 14.
On the concept of translation in relation to technology see Sect. 3.13 .
- 15.
This is carried out by Bruno Latour and Jim Johnson using the example of an automatic door-closer, in Johnson 1988.
- 16.
The tendency to suppress technologically conditioned shifts in the problem/solution relationship almost inevitably leads to filling these contingent gaps with motive. One insinuates planning behind the use of technology, or even believes that one is able, on the basis of the effects of a technology, to recognise the true, non-communicated motive.
- 17.
On this cf. above all the article: A Heuristic for Judgement Frequency and Probability from 1973. This is not to be confused with—despite its proximity—the concept of “misplaced concreteness” from Whitehead.
- 18.
This is graphically described by Mary Hegarty in: Mechanical Reasoning by Mental Simulation from 2004.
- 19.
Although Gamm’s suggestion to define technology in this sense as a medium cannot for this reason be taken on board, what is here of concern—one can in anticipation hint at this—is the thought of technology’s own techné—and that in dealing with technology itself. Otherwise only a dialectic remains between a technology thought of as medium, “because it has become embodied and sedimented in the social-historical context of action” (Gamm 2000, p. 286) and is thus a medium “on the basis of the sociality of technology and the technologisation of society” (ibid., emphasised in the original) on the one hand and its indeterminacy, whether it be its “immanent” or its “transcendental” (ibid. p. 280) on the other hand. The only thing that thus differentiates Gramm’s understanding of technology as medium from the “technologisation fears” of an Ernst Jünger or a Martin Heidegger is its analytically abstractly added indeterminacy, not the thought of itself as trickery. It is precisely this indeterminacy which undermines Gramm’s attempt to critically think technology as something that “normalises” at the same time as him justifying his decision to think technology as a medium in that “because of its indeterminacy it has become a universal medium of exchange.” (Ibid. p. 283) And further: “technology has become a medium, that is, it has transformed itself into something into which (almost) everything can be translated or in which the other can circulate.” (Ibid., my emphasis) This is in the interpretation being followed here nothing other than that which will here be described as the qualitative (psychological) consequence of a quantative increase in technological things: raised to a theoretical level and in nuce.
- 20.
To be precise: no matter how persuasive the factual presentation might be, it has nothing to with Gresham’s Law of Planning. Sir Thomas Gresham, who Thomas Hobbes also meant when he contemptuously speaks of “Those fellows of Gresham” (cf. Sect. 2.4 ), pointed out that from two currencies in circulation it is always the worst that will prevail because the better one (that is, the stronger one) will be hoarded and thereby loses liquidity. The expressly free transmission to decision making processes appears to have in the meantime so established itself that Gresham’s Law of Planning appears regularly to be identified with this phenomenon.
- 21.
The manual with the title: Effective Decision Making is published by the College of Defense Management in Secunderabad and does not carry a year.
- 22.
Cf. the case study from Herbert A. Simon: Birth of an Organisation: The Economic Cooperation Administration from 1953.
- 23.
The study Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 by Martin van Creveld (1982) does not only belong to the classics of military history but is also an early example of the sociology of a decentred organisational structure which would today be dealt with under the title “governability”.
- 24.
Creveld’s attempt at cleansing this value of factors such as terrain or informational imbalances, is aimed at the isolation of these sociologically interesting factors, which he described as a whole as “fighting power”.
- 25.
This all falls under the problem of rational decision making under conditions of uncertainty. The best overview of this is still given by the anthology published by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky: Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases from 1982. An updated and popularised overview is offered by Taleb 2007.
- 26.
On this cf. Goldberg 1968 and the experiment described by Griffin and Tversky in The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence from 1992.
- 27.
Anyone who makes a decision in which s/he actively does something as a result demonstrates a pronounced form of engagement in pursuing this decision as opposed to those who make a decision as a result of the omission of an act: on this cf. Cioffi and Garner 1988 and Allison and Messick 1988.
- 28.
As soon as a decision has fallen, its motives are added to it in the most natural manner—this is also valid to a limited extent even when a decision is concerned which one erroneously believes to have made: how decisions are thus in a certain way belatedly motivated is cleverly shown by Johansson et al. (2005) in that they convinced volunteers that decisions they had not made were their own.
- 29.
Keynes’ thought referred to the once popular thesis that moderate inflation leads to a drop in unemployment (a thesis which in Germany became popular above all through Helmut Schmidt). However, Keynes thought this was nonsense as it assumed that people were too stupid to include future price increases in their wage negotiations; inflation could thus at the most only have a short term effect on the labour market.
- 30.
Of which that for Robert C. Merton deserves special mention. He received it for the development with Myron Scholes of the Black-Scholes-Model for the pricing of derivative investment instruments. This is because Merton (and to a lesser extent, Scholes too) demonstrated, with the aid of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, what happens when one also believes what one claims with the aid of fictive assumptions: namely, a (near) catastrophe. On this in detail, cf. Lowenstein 2001.
- 31.
The view that they thereby oriented themselves according to the natural scientific ideal could well be presented as a one sided judgement: “Whenever I even hear that word: structured securities. Really, as a scientist I understand under structured something completely different.” (Jürgen Hambrecht in an interview with the Wirtschaftswoche from 22.8.09).
- 32.
The ideas for combining dithering with the challenge of technology originate from a collaboration with Anne Brüninghaus and were first sketched out in a lecture in Hamburg University (2009) bearing the title Technisch bedingte Entscheidungsprozesse aus bildungstheoretischer Sicht am Beispiel Gendiagnostik (Technologically Conditioned Decision Making Processes from the theoretical perspective of Bildung using the Example of Genetic Testing) at the department for Technologiefolgenabschätzung der modernen Biotechnologie in Medizin und Neurowissenschaften (Assessment of the Consequences of Technology in modern Biotechnology in Medicine and Neuroscience).
- 33.
Trans. translated by Helmut Müller-Sievers as tarrying (Vogl 2011). I prefer the word dithering because it better contains the sense of indecisiveness carried by Zaudern.
- 34.
And that in Clavigo, SCENE I. Clavigo’s abode. Carlos, alone.
- 35.
The only appropriately detailed and complex depiction of the present as one which is characterised by the absence of a central controlling instance known to me—with the exception of Luhmann—can, by the way, be bought as a DVD; I mean the series The Wire. David Simon, who developed the series, explicitly says that he based the writing of the script on Sophocles and not, as had been normal until then in HBO, on Shakespeare—the situation of people today resembles much more the peoples of ancient times, subjected to the will of the unpredictable moods of the gods (Simon 2006, 2007). The reflection of the present in the film is here too obviously bound to state of the art technology. For the depiction of a subsuming complexity in which the significance of people individually acting is, against all the habits of watching, reduced to a minimum, so that they can be presented as being expendable, requires firstly time, which is not available in a cinema, and a density that is unachievable with a weekly broadcast television series. (Cf. Ahrens 2011).
- 36.
An overview of the changes that war brings, especially, but not exclusively, focussed on the technological as well as the infrastructural side of the military can be currently found in Creveld 2008. It is thereby noticeable that Creveld in these more recent publications about the history of the war assigns technology a pronounced role in the change in carrying out wars, while in the comparative study concentrating only on the 2nd World War Fighting Power from 1982 everything arose from organisational factors.
- 37.
To remind once again, whether the concept of technology is legitimate is here not to made dependent upon the state of that which is here concerned, but rather from the way in which it is deployed. Thus, in this case, it is not the advertisement in its aesthetic or dramatic or, more plainly, its communicative aspects, that is here crucial, but rather only the actual technological aspects; that means, insofar as it represents a functioning means to draw attention to itself or at least to provoke. From this point of view it is better compared with the blinking and bleeping oil warning indicator in a car or a siren, than with a film or a radio play. The word “advertising” is on the contrary a euphemism, with which advertising advertises itself; it is a term that lays claim to interaction where none takes place, and suggests cleverness where there is none, by using the semantic of the gallant.
- 38.
Stiegler appears to implicitly orient himself according to the Lacanian difference between desire and enjoyment. Insofar as need accords more with desire then this would anyway be in principle inexhaustible or unfulfillable. Advertising promises, as Stiegler describes them, in contrast aim more at enjoyment than at desire (Stiegler 2008, p. 22 ff.; Lacan 1991).
- 39.
Cf. this approach also with Georg Franck: Mentaler Kapitalismus. Eine politische Ökonomie des Geistes [Mental Capitalism. A political economy of the spirit] from 2005 as well as his introductory work to this book, which appeared in 1998 under the title Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Ein Entwurf [Economy of Attention. An Outline]. A more general connection between the development of need and technology is to be found in Gamm, who sees the development of technology itself as an object of want: “Technology has integrated itself into the structure of our drives just as the order of language has in our perception of self and world. Nowhere is it as easy to recognise as in the wishes immanent in, for example, the finitude and mortality defying technologies, the medicine of reproduction and artificial intelligence, desires which motivate the development of technology just as they are themselves conditioned by progress in technology which just as equally lastingly reforms them as newly created.” (Gamm 2000, p. 299).
- 40.
In a certain way one could here name the novels from Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lern as exceptions.
- 41.
The “multi-option society”, against which Gross takes a critical stance, is indeed his own construction.
- 42.
One sees this half hearted analysis in the vulgar interpretation of “post modernism” in which it is equivocated with relativism.
- 43.
“The whole traditional instrumentalism, the limited view of which grasps technology sometimes as an extension, sometimes as a replacement, sometimes as a mere projection of the human, is distilled from a picture of thought in which the reference to the world of existence and the existing among themselves stand under the law of lack. The dogmatic image of technology that is still circulating in the long ago technologised sciences, is nothing other than the concretion of the ontology of lack. This, however, covers over the real problem of technology, technicity and machines: that we, without cease, and without us lacking in anything, create formations with technological objects, animals and other people.” (Hörl in Stiegler 2009a, p. 19 f.).
- 44.
Of course, this is not just a problem with a personal other: “this other can be another, a thing, which is to be understandably answered, yes, even oneself is, because of one’s bodily-linguistic existence, another” (Dörpinghaus 2003, p. 28).
- 45.
On Heisenberg’s career cf. Lindley 2008.
- 46.
If one did not listen to what Heisenberg said about his work in the evening, but instead looked at how he worked then one would see that it was not the “bottomless ignorance” of experimental physics that lead him to his breakthrough in quantum physics, but rather the crucial focus upon that which showed itself in the experiment. That Heisenberg made the relationship between experimental and theoretical physics to his problem is already shown in the first sentence of the article about Quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen (1925) [Quantum Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relationships], which marks the beginning of quantum physics:“it is well known that the formal rules which are used in quantum theory for calculating observable quantities such as the energy of the hydrogen atom may be seriously criticized on the grounds that they contain, as basic elements, relationships between quantities that are apparently unobservable in principle, e.g., position and period of revolution of the electron. Thus these rules lack an evident physical foundation, unless one still wants to retain the hope that the hitherto unobservable quantities may later come within the realm of experimental determination.” (Heisenberg 1967, p. 261).
- 47.
The word techné serves in the following to signal the tricky/cunning in the use or handling of technology. The trick here depends on technology—not on the subject. For, since the subject is not, like an engineer, able to construct a trick, but can rather only exploit the potential of a given situation (in the sense of an orientation according to efficacy, as described by Jullien 2004), it finds itself in the effective area of the trick, over which it has no sovereign control.
- 48.
- 49.
On the concept of the thought system see Sect. 3.23 .
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Ahrens, S. (2014). The Subversion of Technology. In: Experiment and Exploration: Forms of World-Disclosure. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8709-3_1
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