Chapter 9
TECHNOLOGY AND ITS MEDIATED USE
Contrary to the interest of those who control its use, technology tends to demystify the world. The democratic reign of consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. At the same time, organization -- the technology of new technologies -- deprives modern productive forces of their subversive and seductive qualities. Such organization is simply the organization of authority. Alienated mediations weaken people by making themselves indispensable. A social mask conceals people and things, transforming them, in the present stage of privative appropriation, into dead things -- into commodities. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social relationships. The shell of the old hierarchical society will be burst open from within by the growth of material equipment.
1 The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilizations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in automated civilizations, where people are already dying of boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival sickness.
Rousseauism and pastoral idylls accompany the first throbbings of the industrial machine. The ideology of progress, found in Condorcet or Adam Smith, emerged from the old myth of the four ages. Just as the age of iron preceded the golden age, it seemed 'natural' that progress should fulfil itself as a return: a return to the state of innocence before the Fall.
Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration. The machine is the model of the intelligible. There is no mystery, nothing obscure in its drive-belts, cogs, and gear; it can all be explained perfectly. But the machine is also the miracle that is to transport us into the realms of happiness and freedom. Besides, this ambiguity is useful to the masters: the old con about happy tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to justify the rational exploitation of people today. Thus it is not the logic of desanctification that shakes people's faith in progress so much as the inhuman use of technical potential, the way that the cheap mystique surrounding it begins to grate. So long as the labouring classes and underdeveloped peoples were still offered the spectacle of their slowly decreasing material poverty, the enthusiasm for progress still drew ample nourishment from the troughs of liberal ideology and its extension, socialism. But, a century after the spontaneous demystification of the Lyons workers, when they smashed the looms, a general crisis broke out, springing this time from the crisis of big industry; fascist regression, sickly dreams of a return to artisanry and corporatism, the Ubuesque master race of blond beasts.
Today the promises of the old society of production are raining down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody is likely to call manna from heaven. You can hardly believe in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people used to believe in productive forces. There is a certain hagiographic literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine much on the electric toothbrush. The mass production of instruments of comfort -- all equally revolutionary, according to the publicity handouts -- has given the most unsophisticated of people the right to express an opinion on the marvels of technological innovation in a tone as blase as the hand they stick in their pants. The first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed at Disneyland.
Admittedly the yoke and harness, the steam engine, electricity and the rise of nuclear energy, all disturbed and altered the infrastructure of society (even if they were discovered, when all is said and done, almost by chance). But today it would be foolish to expect new productive forces to upset modes of production. The blossoming of technology has given rise to a supertechnology of synthesis, one which could prove as important as the social community -- that first technical synthesis of all, founded at the dawn of time. Perhaps more important still; for if cybernetics was taken from its masters, it might be able to free human groups from labour and from social alienation. This was precisely the point of Charles Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.
But the distance between Fourier and the cyberneticians who control the operational organization of technology is the distance between freedom and slavery. Of course, the cybernetic project claims that it is already sufficiently developed to be able to solve all the problems raised by the appearance of any new technique. But don't you believe it.
1) The constant development of productive forces, the exploding mass production of consumer goods, promise nothing. Musical air-conditioners and solar ovens stand unheralded and unsung. We see a weariness coming, one that is already so striking that sooner or later it is bound to develop into a critique of organization itself.
2) For all its flexibility, the cybernetic synthesis will never be able to conceal the fact that it is only the transcending synthesis of the different forms of government that have ruled over people, and their final stage. How could it hope to disguise the inherent alienation that no power has ever yet managed to shield from the weapons of arms and the criticism of arms? The paddler need only create a more intelligent crocodile. By laying the basis for a perfect power structure, the cybernetician will only stimulate the perfection of its refusal. Their programming of new techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned to its own use by another kind of organization. A revolutionary organization.
-- 2 -- Technocratic organization raises technical mediation to its highest point of coherence. It has been known for ages that the master uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective world, that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations which move people as producers and people as consumers to the illusion of action in a real passivity and transform them into essentially dependent beings. Controlled mediations separate individuals from themselves, their desires, their dreams, and their will to live; and so people come to believe in the legend that you can't do without them, or the power that governs them. Where Power fails to paralyse with constraints, it paralyses by suggestion, by forcing everyone to use crutches of which it is the sole owner and purveyor. Power as the sum of alienating mediations awaits only the holy water of cybernetics to baptise it into the state of Totality. But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. And cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of organization will be laughed off the stage.
Because the objective world (or nature, if you prefer) has been grasped by means of alienated mediations (tools, thoughts, false needs), it ends up surrounded by a sort of screen so that, paradoxically, the more humanity transforms itself and the world, the more the world becomes alienated. The veil of social relations envelops the natural world inextricably. What we call 'natural' today is about as natural as Nature Girl lipstick. The instruments of praxis do not belong to the agents of praxis, the workers: and it is obvious because of this that the opaque zone that separates human beings from themselves and from nature has become a part of humanity and a part of nature. Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.
The search for the real nature, for a natural life that has nothing to do with the lie of social ideology, is one of the most touching naiveties of a good part of the revolutionary proletariat, not to mention the anarchists and such notable figures as the young Wilhelm Reich.
In the realm of the exploitation of humans by humans, the real transformation of nature takes place only through social fraud. At no point in their struggle have humanity and nature ever been really face to face. They have been united yet kept apart by what mediates this struggle: hierarchical social power and its organization of appearances. The transformation of nature is its socialization, and it has been socialized badly. If all nature is social, this is because history has never known a society without power.
Is an earthquake a natural phenomenon? It affects people, but it affects them only as alienated social beings. What is an earthquake-in-itself? Suppose that at this moment there was an earthquake disaster on Alpha Centauri. Who would bother apart from the old farts in the universities and other centers of pure thought?
And death: death also strikes people socially. Not only because the energy and resources poured down the drain of militarism and wasted in the lawlessness of capitalism and bureaucracy could make a vital contribution to the scientific struggle against death. But also, and above all, because it is in the vast laboratory of society (and under the benevolent eye of science) that the foul brew of culture in which the germs of death are spawned is kept on the boil (stress, nervous tension, conditioning, pollution, cures worse than the disease, etc.) Only animals are still allowed to die a natural death -- some of them.
Could it be that, after disengaging themselves from the higher animal world by means of their history, human beings might come to envy the animal's contact with nature? This is, I think, the implicit meaning of the current puerile cult of the 'natural'. The desire which this cult mobilizes, however, is one which in its mature and untwisted form makes the quite reasonable demand that 30,000 years of history should be transcended.
What we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialize it by liberating the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation, by snatching it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only at the end of a process of social disalienation will nature become a worthwhile opponent, in a society in which people's creativity will not come up against human nature itself as the first obstacle to its expansion.
* * * Technological organization cannot be destroyed from without. Its collapse will result from internal decay. Far from being punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power they would have a hard time staying there. Their complacent vision of their own rosy future calls for a retort along the lines of these words from a black worker to a white boss (Présence Africaine, 1956): "When we first saw your trucks and your planes we thought you were gods. Then, after a few years, we learned how to drive your trucks, and fly your planes, and we understood that what interested you most was manufacturing trucks and planes and making money. For our part, what we are interested in is using them. Now, you are just our blacksmiths".
Chapter Nine of The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem. First published as Traité de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes générations, Paris: Gallimand, 1967. Translated by John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking, London: Rising Free Collective, 1979, and Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983. Translation first published in AJODA: Anarchy a journal of desire armed. No copyright claims will be made against publishers of nonprofit editions.
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