Streamlining & the Technique of Death
My previous post tried to brainstorm a link between streamlining and what John Paul II called a “culture of death”. In that article I referred to our contemporary tendency to jettison paradox as a mode of thinking, and veer towards more compact, much cleaner, linear paths of argumentation. Through Catherine Pickstock’s genealogy between what she calls internal consistency and what she calls a cultural “necrophilia”, I made just a faint suggestion that a push towards streamlining - in thought, cultural processes and even religious praxis - gradually edges us towards the death of things.
In that post, I admitted that there were some gaping holes that needed filling, and it took me a long while to realise that, almost a decade ago, I had come across a valuable resource that could aid in the filling of these gaps.
It happened during my research into my article linking abortion with consumer culture, where I came across the work of the French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul, in particular his 1964 masterpiece The Technological Society. Ellul’s book became an indispensable foregrounding to my argument in that article, because that book made reference to what he termed “technique” (and what became translated into English as “technology”). The reference to “technique” mean that Ellul was not so much interested in technological artifacts, but rather a framework of processes that bring with them a particular mode of thought to be normalised and inculcated. This is hinted in Ellul’s definition of technique, which he calls a
totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency [...] in every field of human activity
So entrenched had technique become, argued Ellul, that overtime societies, to which technique was subservient, had become disengaged from and subservient to technique. In other words, technique had now become the dominant organising principle of societies, rather than the other way round. In Ellul’s words:
Technique itself, ipso facto and without indulgence or possible discussion, selects among the means to be employed [for social organisation].
You might be forgiven to ask at this point: what does all this have to do with death? At this point, my article turned to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. In the article, I argued - via Taylor - that as soon as technique and efficiency become the dominant organising principles of society, it is only a hop, skip and jump away from turning a society into an economy, organised by the seemingly rational distribution of material goods by the market. I argued that such a conversion of a society to an economy is a reduction of a complex lifeworld to a streamlined material paradise wherein the only things a society needs to worry about are material ones. The words I used in the article were:
Under such conditions, notions of organisational efficiency, productivity and economic dis/advantage become the sole legitimate means to demarcate the boundaries of civilisational development.
In the drive towards efficiency and productivity across all facets of society, what ends up getting killed off are the various energies and forms of life within that society which do not - and probably could not - organise themselves along these economic lines. For instance, art becomes useless unless a dollar value can be attached to it at an auction house. Education is only valuable if it is able to lead to employment outcomes at the service of “the economy”. In the family, reproduction is seen as an interruption in the production cycle, requiring interventions to put children under supervision by third parties in the drive to have both parents become productive economic units.
What gets killed off in these drives towards economic streamlining are creative and educative processes that often require long periods of contemplation, or the capacity for nurturing in contexts that of their nature require the consumption of inputs over an elongated period, all of which contribute to the generation of cultural lifeworlds.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
