The Question of Technology
Early on in his description of the Enlightenment, Kant evokes the curious image of domes-
ticated animals made dumb by their guardians who ‚have made sure that these placid
creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are
tethered.‛43 In his second lecture on Kant’s essay, Foucault comments on Kant’s use of the
word ‚Gängelwagen‛ for what is translated in the English version of the essay as ‚cart.‛44
Foucault points out that the German word refers to a kind of walking rack that was used in the
eighteenth century to both help infants to walk and to prevent them from walking wherever
they liked. The cart is thus a technical object that both enables freedom and enforces a degree
of obedience. One can understand why Foucault would have been interested in this word: he
considers it to be emblematic of Kant’s answer to the question of the Enlightenment. The cart
evokes, specifically, the second motto that Kant gives in response: ‚Argue, but obey!‛ The cu-
rious fact, however, is that Kant, in his text, rejects the cart as what prevents people from using
their own reason. To have the courage to use your own reason means precisely to learn to
walk without the help of the cart. Foucault’s analysis will show, however, that Kant’s en-
lightened subject nevertheless remains tied to the cart.
Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment thus appears to coincide with a rejection of a
technical object. To become enlightened means to become independent from technical supple-
ments. It means for the human being to ‚finally learn to walk alone.‛45 Even though the En-
lightenment is usually associated with the exponential increase of technological developments,
Kant’s definition of Enlightenment appears to install a separation between human beings and
technology. It is a definition of Enlightenment that is suspicious of the relation of techno-
logical development to freedom.46 This suspicion is echoed in Foucault’s essay, which partly
aims to show that ‚the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autono-
my are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed‛:
And we have been able to see [Foucault writes] what forms of power relation were
conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with
economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of
communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of norma-
lization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of
population zones, are examples. What is at stake then, is this: How can the growth
of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?47
In this passage, Enlightenment technology is closely associated with power. It operates in the
service of collective and individual discipline. In this sense, it prevents the autonomy (that the
Enlightenment so prides itself on) from coming about.
43
Kant, 29-30.
44
Foucault, Gouvernement, 28.
45
Kant, 30.
46
Many have commented on Kant’s suspicion of technology. See, for example: R.L. Rutsky, ‚The Spirit of
Utopia and the Birth of the Cinematic Machine,‛ in R.L. Rutsky, High Technè: Art and Technology from the
Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 23-47.
47
Foucault, "Enlightenment,‛ 116.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
17
One should note, however, that the key question to which this insight leads is not a
rejection of technology. Foucault asks, rather, how the growth of Enlightenment technologies
could be disconnected from the intensification of power relations. One could read this as a
version of the genealogical question, formulated elsewhere in the essay, about ‚the possibility
of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think‛: how could Enlightenment
technologies be used otherwise?
In this, Foucault’s engagement with the particular problem of Enlightenment techno-
logies appears to differ fundamentally from that of one of his students, Giorgio Agamben.
Although they are not the obvious inter-texts for Agamben’s essay, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛
clearly refers to both Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment. Foucault is, as always,
one of the main interlocutors in Agamben’s text; but Agamben focuses on the dark side of
Foucault’s analyses rather than on his late work on the aesthetico-ethical techniques of the self.
When Agamben speaks towards the very end of his essay of how ‚the harmless citizen of
postindustrial democracies< readily does everything that he is asked to, inasmuch as he
leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and
his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses,‛48 it is not
only Foucault and his discussion of governmentality and biopolitics that resonates here. One
is also reminded of the second paragraph of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, where Kant
criticizes human beings who do not have the courage ‚to be of age‛: ‚If I have a book which
understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet,
and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay—others will readily
undertake the irksome work for me.‛49 The echoes of Kant in Agamben’s essay allow one to
understand that Agamben is also engaging with the Enlightenment in ‚What is an Appara-
tus?‛ Like Kant, he is calling for an emancipation; even more explicitly than in Kant, the
emancipation that Agamben has in mind is an emancipation from apparatuses—from the
apparatuses that command and control ‚in the smallest detail‛ the lives of human beings.
In this loaded context, Agamben proposes a distinction between two major classes:
‚living beings‛ on the one hand, and ‚apparatuses‛ on the other. In addition, he distinguishes
a third class, which is produced in the power struggle between living beings and apparatuses:
‚subjects.‛50 Agamben’s vision of life’s relation to technology is one of a perpetual war be-
tween living beings and apparatuses. Foucault’s question: ‚how can the growth of capabilities
be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?‛ thus appears to become tainted
in Agamben by the specter of blind rejection.51
48
Giorgio Agamben, ‚What is an Apparatus?‛ in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. by David
Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 22-23.
49
Kant, 29.
50
Agamben, ‚Apparatus,‛ 14.
51
Of course, one might argue that Agamben’s distinction is ultimately merely analytical, and does not reflect
the nuances of his thought on technology. As Anne Sauvagnargues remarked in response to a conference
presentation I gave on Agamben and Simondon, Agamben’s ultimate interest might simply be modes of
subjectivation. Although this point is well taken, it does not adduce the tone of Agamben’s essay, which is
one of struggle and conflict between human beings and machines. For my text on Agamben and Simondon,
see Arne De Boever, ‚Agamben et Simondon: Ontologie, technologie, et politique,‛ trans. Jean-Hugues Bar-
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
18
However, although Agamben explicitly says that he is not interested in ‚another use‛
of technology,52 ‚blind rejection‛ does not appear to describe his position correctly either.
Somewhat enigmatically, the closing pages of the essay reveal him to be calling for a ‚pro-
fanation‛ of apparatuses, meaning a restoration of apparatuses to their ‚common use.‛53 In
this sense, profanation would function as a ‚counter-apparatus‛54; a technique or technology
against technologies that would halt the destructive progression of modern Enlightenment
technologies. It would end the ‚telecracy‛ that Stiegler also warns against. Whereas appara-
tuses have become part and parcel of what Agamben calls the theological economy of
government—a division of power that intends to saturate the entire field of life with the
violence of the law—our task is to liberate apparatuses from this arrangement and restore
them to their common use. As to what this might mean, exactly, with respect to an apparatus
such as the cell phone, which Agamben comes close to rejecting in his essay, remains vague.
And it precisely on this account that Stiegler attempts to push Agamben further. But what are
the realms included in Agamben’s work in which the counter-apparatus of profanation might
be witnessed in action? What might be the link that is included (and lies occluded) in Agam-
ben’s work between the profanation that Agamben is calling for and what Foucault in his late
work calls the ‚art of the self‛?
This question might ultimately not be all that hard to answer. One realm of technical
production in which such profanation becomes possible is art. In the opening chapter of his
first book titled The Man Without Content, Agamben calls for a notion of the aesthetic that
would do justice to the human being’s technical capacities, specifically the human being’s
uncanny ‚ability to pro-duce, to bring a thing from nonbeing into being.‛55 Such an under-
standing of the aesthetic would reconsider art from the position of the creator (rather than
from the position of the spectator from where Kant considers it in his Critique of Judgment) and
return it to its Ancient, political vocation: to pose a danger to the polis, to the city-state. In its
technical dimension, art is something profoundly dangerous. The tragedy of our time is that
art has lost this dimension, and has turned into something that is ‚merely interesting‛; it is
‚*o+nly because art has left the sphere of interest to become merely interesting‛ that ‚we
welcome it so warmly.‛56 Aware of the danger that art poses to the city, Plato instead bans it
from his ideal republic. A terrifying judgment, at first sight; but at least Plato took art serious-
ly. Agamben theorizes art in the opening chapter of his book as ‚the most uncanny thing,‛ as
a capacity that inspires ‚divine terror‛ because it reveals human beings’ essential capacities for
production, for ‚divine‛ creation and destruction.57
In his work on the care of the self, Foucault as well appears to maintain a positive
connection between art (‚technè‛) and life (‚bios‛) as a way for the subject to become the
thélémy, Cahiers Simondon, no. 2 (2010), 117-128.
52
Ibid., 15.
53
Ibid., 17.
54
Ibid., 19.
55
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. by Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), 4.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
19
author of her or his own life, to cultivate her or his own existence. It is here that the con-
nection between biological and psychic life and technics and technology can begin to move
from the horrific nightmare of biopolitics and biotechnology (instantiated in the imagination
of film directors such as David Cronenberg, for example), to the more positive promise of
biopower and biotechnics. The latter can be found not just in Foucault’s work on the care of
the self but also in the visionary volume titled Incorporations edited by Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter, in more recent publications such as William Connolly or Catherine
Malabou’s books on the brain (titled Neuropolitics and What Should We Do With Our Brain?), or
even in cinematic explorations of the figure of the samurai in films by Akira Kurosawa (Seven
Samurai), Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog), or Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill).58 Today, and in line with
both Foucault and Agamben’s suggestions, it is the new interest in bioart that appears to be
one of the most promising realms for such a new discussion of techniques of life. It would
seem appropriate, then, to explore in the final section of this essay, the ways in which a work
of art contributes to the theoretical debates with which I have engaged, specifically with the
dramatic relations between Kant, Foucault, and Agamben that this essay has uncovered.
Elena:
This is a delicate paragraph because the author separates the technical from the artistic without realizing that the layer of reality that is numbed to the individual of our times is as equally numbed in the sphere of the "technocrats" as in the sphere of the artists. The issue is not replacing technology with art but giving to both the vividness of "conscious" action.
What is interesting about technology today is that it does submit the individual more fully into repetitive action without will enforcing the tendency in individuals to reproduce the status quo in an increasingly descending process but art is equally void of meaning in that it has increasingly separated from the people and established itself in a niche of the privileged few. It has become a tool of the status quo as powerful as technology and ironically, it is technology what is freeing the individual and society because it is being used to communicate with each other. The Egyptian uprising is an example of that.
What needs to be understood is that beyond the technology of technology is the human element that it is used for. In the realm of communications, the technology frees the possibility of reconnecting and expressing our will. What then becomes interesting is "technology" as an art form.
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