Writing About Jacques Ellul
I am by no means an expert on Ellul, I have merely read three of his books (Presence in The Modern World, The Technological Society, and The Meaning of the City) But in trying to communicate his influence on my thinking, I have inadvertently written many times about him, albeit at an all too basic level. There are many theories claiming to explain all of human history, or at least the structure of our current society, but Ellul’s technique works because of its simplicity and deliberate vagueness. It is however this quality that makes explaining Ellul to others so challenging. Here is one example of an attempt made by me to quickly summarise the central ideas of Ellul’s technique.
The technical concept can be briefly summarized as a conglomerate of thoughts, methods, and approaches considered to be objectively the best for achieving a purpose. It is important to distinguish this concept from technology, such as computers, engines, weaving machines, and so on. Technology is merely a consequence of technique, not the cause. People in modern society can no longer imagine life in the way that prehistoric and medieval populations lived. Almost all problems are expected to have technical solutions; if the solution to a problem requires something to be done, then the problem is technical. This seems almost tautological — if nothing needs to be done, is there really a problem? However, problems often arise from attempts to improve the situation, and technique always demands solutions to increasingly complex problems.
This is by no means a short summary, it is longer than the introductory paragraph. But to compress it inevitably means allowing for serious misinterpretation, and readers are not often familiar with an obscure post-war anarchist christian sociologist. This is made even more difficult owing to the fact that technique is applicable to such a wide number of disparate fields. It is for this reason that explaining Ellul has become dreadfully boring, despite the fact that I recognise Ellul as a figure that would bring enormous comfort — I almost dare to say enlightenment — to a great number of people. But I feel compelled to do so, again and again, because I too am a member of our technical society. Just like Kaczynski1 I feel compelled to utilize technique against itself despite being fully aware of the fruitlessness of doing so.
Ellul naturally takes inspiration from Marx’ historical materialism as well as Hegel’s idea of Geist. The main difference is that where Marx and Hegel both see an end point, a perfect communist society and Absolute knowledge respectively, Ellul instead sees technique as an ever-expanding being driven only be a need to encompass every facet of human society. Technique per definition can have no limit because when it reaches absolute mastery over any one idea it will simply move on to greater and greater scales. Only something like the paperclip maximizer converting all of the mass-energy in the universe would ever reach a hard limited; technical society however still hopes for a continued advancement after that.
Since technique dominates every area of society, it has become relevant for an untold number of discussion I have come across. For example, in an article about the possibly planned use of TikTok by the CCP to destroy western civilization, Gurwinder effectively makes clear how Wang Huning describes America’s crisis of technology, and how it shares similarities with Nick Land’s view of accelerationism (all in attempt to expose a CCP accelerationist plot). While I see Gurwinder’s thesis as fundamentally incorrect, the moral decline of western civilisation is not to be solved through any return to “traditional moral values”, technique only moves forward, though it very well might be marketed as such2. Gurwinder quotes Land’s A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:
The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.
Land is entirely correct in his description of the symptom, but misattributes the cause. Capitalism is not a driving force of anything, it is simply a state of affairs itself caused by technique. As I write in my essay on the philosophy of nuclear weapons, technique is inherently alienating and a cause for nihilism, as Land has realized. But capitalism is not the cause of this; Soviet socialism is an even purer form of technique3. The planned economy requires a constant need for things to be done, for organisational meetings and for statistics to be collected so that more accurate and better choices can be made, even at exorbitant costs. Why socialism ceased in the USSR and China was because of a technical choice that free-market capitalism was more efficient, and it was this decision that Fukuyama described as his end of history; the triumph of free market liberal democracy as the most efficient mode of societal organisation. This does not mean that it will remain so forever of course, but that it is simply meaningless to discuss the issue, for when something more efficient comes along, it will simply be done.
Footnotes:
Kaczynski was also a reader of Ellul, and found that his experience of reading La Technique hugely influential.
Things like the Glorious Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, and the Treaty of Versailles were all seen as a return to the normalcy of things and to the romanticised idea of the times that came before, but they were all of a fundamentally progressive nature in their consequences.
In fact, the soviet establishment discusses the concept of Taylorism to a great extent, pursuing an ideal of industrial management that disregards the indiviudal organic connections and methods practiced throughout most of human history. Taylorism in its goal is a clear example of large-scale technique.