MODERNITY AND TECHNOLOGY:

HARNESSING THE EARTH TO THE

SLAVERY OF MAN

BY: WADE SIKORSKI

Box 202

Willard, MT 59354

(406) 775-6378

wds@midrivers.com

Copyright 1993, the University of Alabama Press.

Used by permission.

The version of my book presented here does not reflect the benefits of being edited by the staff of the University of Alabama Press. A hard copy of this book, as it was published by the University of Alabama Press, can be obtained from the University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346. Ask for # 2052750.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Thinking About my Place

Chapter 2: Thinking About Technology

Chapter 3: Science and Technology

Chapter 4: Technoarchy

Chapter 5: The Flight of the Gods

Chapter 6: A Prison of Freedom

Chapter 7: The Collapse of the Household

Chapter 8: Harnessing the Earth to the Slavery of Man

Chapter 9: The Vulnerable Machine

Chapter 10: The Monster

Chapter 11: The Turning

Chapter 12: Building Wilderness

PREFACE

In many ways this book is indebted to the help of other people. My mother, to whom this book is dedicated, was always been there in kindness for me in ways too numerous to list. My father, Edward Sikorski, and my uncles Jerry and Tim Sikorski, taught me much that helped me think the thoughts in this book.

My Grandmother, Rose Griffith, generously gave me money and household appliances. My sister, Sandy Sikorski, tirelessly ran off multiple copies of anything I needed and did many small favors for me that only she could do. Many of my friends from U Mass, especially Jane Bennett, gave me encouragement, sent books and papers, and hope when I didn't have much. Bill Chaloupka generously advised me on portions of the manuscript.

While I was at New Mexico State University, Darian Goldsmith and Diana Kovar worked hard and patiently to help me prepare this manuscript. Bonnie Bright helped me work with publishers. Russ Winn generously helped me set up my computer. Discussions with Victor Aikhionbare, Nancy Baker, Ann Beck, Bonnie Bright, Sam Combs, Gloria Friedman, Leonard Gambrell, Ed Hall, Y.K. Hui, Lisa Johnson, Sadie Leach, Alynna Lyon, Pat Michaels, Valerie Miller, Helen Quintana, JoAn Rittenhouse, Jim Seewald, Dimitri Stevis, Mary Wolf, as well as many students of mine, too numerous to mention, helped me rethink the ideas in this book.

As the author-ities whose reading this writing first awaited, anticipated, and dreaded, the skills of Bill Connolly, Jerry King, and Mike Best are re-presented in this work. I hope that it is worthy of their efforts as teachers and thinkers.

And finally, my thanks to Malcolm MacDonald, the staff at the University of Alabama Press, and all the anonymous readers who gave my work such a careful and thoughtful reading. This book has greatly benefitted from their craftsmanship.

Back to Contents

CHAPTER 1

THINKING ABOUT MY PLACE

my reader . . .

Lost in dreams of you

Thinking of you

Reading me

your sky, your goddess

builds me

your thinking, your earth

hoping your hopes

fearing your fears

caring for your love

for what am I

but your reader

and your dream?

. . . the author

In the pasture behind my home there are still traces of how people used to live on my place. Just a ways down a creek full of cattails and reeds, an old farmhouse, faded grey and falling down, stands near a small pond and a dying tree. Beside it, barely visible through the growing grass, are the foundations of other buildings, a granary, a blacksmith's shed, a woodshed, and perhaps a barn. Further away, a line of rhubarb plants still struggles against the prairie grass, probably near what used to be a garden. Further away still there is a shelter belt of aged and slowly dying cottonwood trees, maybe 60 feet tall.

A family used to live here, now the cattle have pushed into their old home, seeking shelter from the winter storms. They have stomped the floor boards into the ground, rubbed against the supporting braces, knocking down walls and leaving strands of their hair on the nails that stick out. The brick chimney has collapsed, leaving a hole in the roof for the rain, the snow, and the wind to come in. Soon, the entire building will fall to the ground, leaving the cattle without a shelter.

The soil around this old farm is sandy. In the 30's, when the drought and the grasshoppers came, it blew. Badly. Where there was once wild and lush prairie, a home to buffalo, prairie dogs, coyotes, and Indians, shifting sand dunes grew, rolling and crashing like a storm tossed sea behind the plow. Now, the grass grows only in clumps almost a foot apart, so fragile that you can reach down and pull them up by the roots with one easy jerk. The thick rich sod of the prairie has been replaced by scattered desert plants, cactus and yucca. Only a few years ago have some of the worst blowouts grassed over enough to stop the blowing. Now, depleted, exhausted, this old farm is a winter pasture for our cattle; the people who lived here have left, probably for the city.

There are many old farms like this on my family's ranch in southeastern Montana. We remember them by the names we call places--the Chapman place, the Morton place, the Pepper place, the Blazer place, the Sawyer place, the Harris place, the Jones place, the Hough place, the Frankie place, and the home place. And perhaps there are a few places whose names we have forgotten. All them were farms and homes that my family took over when the land would no longer support them. When I was a little boy, we had one of the largest ranches in Fallon County. Now, though we have sold none of our land and have even bought some, most of our neighbors are bigger than we are.

Perhaps one day, following this "natural" progression, it all will simply become the Sikorski place, and the names of all the places my family remembers will be forgotten, like the names of all the places the Indians remembered.⁽¹⁾

The Reagan administration, and now the Bush administration, following the truth of our time, calls this progress. The inefficient and nonproductive are swallowed up and dis-placed by the more efficient and more productive, and the whole economy is made more rational as a result. Resources--human as well as nature's--are recentered, redistributed, and used in a way that maximizes their utility for a global economy. Large scale is more efficient and more productive, more capable of rendering up nature as a resource for the economy, and so it is more rational. Who but a poet can be so sentimental to doubt this truth?

Disciplined by the harsh realities of the free market, American farmers are very productive, and becoming more so every year. According to the USDA, one farm worker now supplies enough food and fiber for 76 people, where 10 years ago she was only producing enough for 50.⁽²⁾ One hour, we are told breathlessly, of farm labor today produces 16 times as much food as it did in 1920.⁽³⁾ Where once, and not so long ago, the vast majority of Americans were engaged in farming, now only 2.5% are.⁽⁴⁾ The rapid expansion of farm productivity freed people for other things--working in the factories that made tractors for the farmer, the transportation system that hauled the farmer's product to market and distributed it, the financial system that loaned the farmer the money to buy the new technology, and the chemical industry the supplied the farmer with the means of controlling pests.

Fertilizer use grew 15 times from its 1930 level to now, tractor horsepower 11 times, tractor numbers 5 times, and chemical use from nothing to its present levels of saturation.⁽⁵⁾ As a result of all of this, according to the USDA's "fact" book, farming now uses more petroleum products than any other single industry in America--and that does not include the energy necessary for the distribution, preservation, and consumption of farm products.⁽⁶⁾

To get from the farm to the consumer's table, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year assembling the food, inspecting it, grading it, storing it, processing it, packaging it, wholesaling it, and retailing it. It travels across 177,400 miles of railroads, 3.2 million miles of intercity highways, and 26,000 miles of improved waterways.⁽⁷⁾ Besides the farmer, the American food system directly employs 20 million people to transport, process, and sell the farmer's products--approximately one out of every five jobs in private enterprise.⁽⁸⁾ This, however, still only reflects a part of America's food system. It does not include the people whose work indirectly supports it. It does not include, to mention but a few, the people employed supplying the entire food system with energy--oil, electricity, coal, nuclear power--nor does it include the people employed building and servicing the transportation system--the railroads, trucks, waterways, ships, tires, highways--nor does it include the people employed building and maintaining the refrigeration systems necessary for stores, shipping, and home use, nor does it include insurance and financial costs for these subsystems, and it certainly does not include all of the external costs of all these operations--the pollution of the land, air, and water, the extinction of various species, the destruction of buildings and monuments, poor health stemming from pollution, chemical additives to food, and so on.

That modern farming is more productive than earlier ways, a great triumph for humankind, is a truth that is only possible for analytic reason. Describing farming as only the simple production of food, measuring productivity as only the relationship between input and output, and knowing progress as the continual expansion of human control over this relationship, analytic reason assumes that farming is nothing more than simply growing food for as many people as efficiently as possible. Traditionally, the farm household not only grew food, but processed it, stored it, and transported it to where it was used. Drawing near to itself everything that the modern economy spreads over entire continents, the traditional farm household was almost entirely self-sufficient.

Some idea of the true extent and interdependence of America's food system is contained in the fact that a typical household, now in no way a farm household, spends close to a third of its income directly on food.⁽⁹⁾ If we can generalize from this cost, then, we could say that America spends almost a third of its working effort supporting the food system. This, however, is still an inadequate measure of its interdependence. Not only is it dependent on a global food system, the modern household must be linked up to a variety of systems to participate in the general food economy, among them the water system, the sewage system, the transportation system, and the electrical power system. It is necessary to own a car in order to get food from the distant shopping mall, it is necessary to be hooked up to the electric grid to preserve the food brought home with refrigeration and to cook it, and it is necessary to be hooked up to the municipal water and sewage systems to get rid of the resulting waste.⁽¹⁰⁾

Since the modern household must be hooked up to these systems, the costs of participating in the modern food system go far beyond what the modern household directly spends on food. If we include the unpaid work of the housekeeper with all the direct and indirect costs of participating in the modern food system, we can only conclude that the modern household devotes a very considerable effort to feeding itself, way over half its time.⁽¹¹⁾

Perhaps it is time we asked if the modern food system, as a whole, is really that efficient and productive, if the reason that has built the modern food system is that thoughtful? It is one thing to employ sophisticated and complex technology, it is an entirely different thing to bring it close to where we live. Displaced, vast, and unconnected, it is almost as if our entire food system was built without any purpose at all in mind. Of course it feeds us, but does it do it well? Does it enhance our lives by cultivating a sense of beauty, awe, mystery, community, and health? Does it connect us with each other, the earth, the sacred, our own life possibilities? Or does it just feed us, leaving us alone, afraid, and apathetic, indifferent to each other and the earth?

A rhetorical question. But think, dear reader, of what would happen if instead of using this vast food system, if instead of all of this huffing, puffing, and pollution, we grew our food in a garden near our house, carried it by hand to a root cellar for storage, then carried it to our kitchen when we needed it, and recycled the wastes to our garden?⁽¹²⁾ We couldn't possibly spend more of our time feeding ourselves than we do now, and we wouldn't have to deal with all the results of the modern food system--the pollution, the health risks, the security risks, and the degrading work of the factory.

And perhaps this way of living could give us quite a bit more than just food. Gathering near at hand what modern technology has dis-placed and made distant, a situated way of living could replace the dis-placed and purposeless rationality of our economy with the governing care of friendship, community, health, and wholeness. Instead of being imprisoned by the pointless and distant logic of the marketplace, the industrial economy, and government regulation, we might respond with care to the earth, the changing seasons, and the needs of those near to us. Maybe.

The dis-placement of the family farm, a largely accomplished fact, embodies the dis-placement of our thinking, for drawing near to the cares at hand in our lives.⁽¹³⁾ Forgetting its place and, so, its purpose, the necessity and truth of technical efficiency draws us up into vast systems of specialization, rationality, and control, imprisoning us within the logic and rationality of an economy that dispossesses up of our land and our homes. Then, lost to the cares of life, modern technology makes us into rational, unthinking, robots indifferent to each other, the earth, and the sky above. It destroys our homes, forgets our memories, and makes the whole world desolate with its indifference.

Am I too angry and accusing? Too soon to judgment? Perhaps. But wait, my reader, there is a place for anger . . .

The reasoning that denies us our anger, does it out of an imperative to be universal, out of a requirement to level out every local or temporal difference and possible moment of incommensurability and assert unbroken control over it, fixing it within a timeless, impersonal, and placeless organization of objective truth.⁽¹⁴⁾ Something that is never angry or lost to love--that is the stipulation of what truth is for modern reason, something that is not situated by bodies or cultures, times or places. It must be beyond all of that. Posited by Man, the discursive formation that governs this age, for his utility, it projects a crystalline pure conceptual grid over all places, locking them tightly in its logic, re-presenting them as Man's own utility. Because it derives itself from no place, just Man abstractly imposing his will on the world, mathematics, and especially geometry, are the purest expression of modern reason. In geometry, formal and exactingly precise definitions or representations are first posited--a point, a line, the meaning of parallel lines--and then these simple and entirely unambiguous definitions and representations are used to fabricate proofs, building up a complex grid of truth through which the world can be interpreted.⁽¹⁵⁾ Through these representations, reason seizes hold of the world and makes it into Man's utility.

Unlike reason, which derives its logic from a universal human utility, thinking is a handcraft, a handcraft because the truth it knows is situated, a temporal and a local response to the things that are near at hand. Coming forth in poetry, dance, art, and song, thinking is not any mere human instrument, governed by the utility of Man's dominion over things; it does not seek control over things, nor does it require universality. It erupts as the joy of life, a calling seeking meaning and beauty. Opening itself up to the eruption of truth amid the mystery of life, thinking reveals only itself. Unconcerned with principles, laws of logic, or universal applications, thinking is a gentle response, a meditative awareness that reveals the mystery of being situated, of having a place. The poetry and song of here and now, this language, this body, this culture. It is an openness to this place, the world that worlds here, the thing that things here, not an aggressive universal and eternal positing that indifferently imposes itself on all places.

Building its world with what is near to it, it is a handcraft because it responds to the particular thing at hand as a temporal and local event, letting it guide it on its way toward an unconcealment of Being. As thinking goes its way, step by step drawing nearer to the temporality of the thing rising up out of nothingness, it reveals its mystery. The mystery that a thing things here, and the mystery that it could also, because presence always brings absence, not thing here. Gently letting Being be, thinking does not build large systems, freezing words in a formal and eternal structure that tolerates no imprecision, ambiguity, or play. Governed by the poetry of its place, responding to the song that is close to it, thinking forever starts anew as the thing at hand changes, using words anew as their context changes.

As all poets, artists, and dancers know, there are no eternal rules that guide the craft of thinking to its truth, but rather there are the ways that the great masters of the craft--each according to their time and place--have cleared. As each new generation of thinkers follows these paths, they learn they must eventually make their own. Drawing near to their own life, their own place and time, the craft knowledge they have gained will call on them to depart from the ways of the master craftsman because the thing at hand, rising up before them in all its mystery, calls them to its own time. Because thinking comes from dwelling, and dwelling places, being local, temporal, and near at hand, are never the same, the craft of thinking is never practiced the same way when it is done as it should be done, not even in our time when the same presses upon us with such monotonous regularity.

The great danger of our age is the flight of Man, the master of reason, from thinking, from responding with poetry and song to the eruption of the thing, and his great doom, his failure to recognize his loss.⁽¹⁶⁾ The failures of reason are as dangerous and blinding as its triumphs are powerful and revealing. Never before has any culture been as ambitious or had so many plans as ours, launched so many scientific inquiries into the design of nature, or attained such great mastery over it. No one can deny that the physical sciences that made our nuclear power plants, our computers, our space shuttles, and our communications satellites possible are great, unprecedented, and of awesome power. And it seems likely that our life sciences, now that they are unraveling the possibilities of recombinant technology, promise even greater triumphs. Nor is it necessary to repudiate all this knowledge and power, just throw it away. Return to an earlier, simpler, time.

But more important is the calling of poetry, the calling to think about what all this knowledge and power is useful for. What use it is to the place we live at. What truths it serves. Friendship? Community? Art? Beauty? The Gods? Or is power just serving itself, aimless, pointless, wandering, and lost? As awesome as all of this power is, all of it is but calculation and counting, mere reason that does not meditate deeply on the meaning of everything that is or draw it near to the dwelling place. Indifferent to distance, pain, isolation, or the love it sacrifices, reason computes, and it computes even if it doesn't use numbers, a calculator, or a main frame computer. Never stopping, never collecting itself, never asking why, reason jumps from one solution to the next, forever seeking more efficient or economical equations, just because they are more "efficient" or "economical." It is the exclusive mark of our age, the source of its progress and its mastery over everything.

But if mere reason is justified and needed in its own way, if it is useful and handy, it has not found its place or its time. Not permitting meditation or thinking to guide it on its way, it recklessly and carelessly spreads its force over all the earth, callously reducing anything that had escaped it to the black on white monotony of its equations. For it, meditation and thinking are but colorful voyages in fantasy, utopian day-dreaming, floating off in a realm only useful for poets and perhaps the entertainment industry.⁽¹⁷⁾ For it, poetry, song, and dance may be pretty, it may describe a wonderful world, but it is useless in this vale of tears--worthless for the current business of production and out of touch with practical affairs. And furthermore, demanding such excellence, it elevates itself so far beyond common understanding to be available to none but a tiny and effeminate elite of poets, mystics, hermits, artists, and nuts that do nothing but meditate all day long. It is utopian, in other words, hopelessly so.

In fact, reason, by raising up placeless truth, objective and universal, is far more utopian than thinking. Utopia was the name Sir Thomas More gave in 1516 to a fantasy island, supposedly perfect in all moral, social, and political matters. "utopia" means in New Latin, no place, a place that does not exist, a placeless place, or, more generally, an abstract fabrication made for the purpose of edification.⁽¹⁸⁾ Such is in fact the true character of reason, building as it does fantasy islands made of numbers and logic in order to control the world, not of thinking which is always firmly rooted in the earth. In the feelings of the body, in the soul stirring callings of love, enchantment, mystery and beauty. When reason denounces thinking for being utopian it is only projecting its shadow onto its other, thereby denying itself its own reality.

And so, this dismissal calculative reason makes of meditation, poetry, art, and thinking reveals more about itself than it does of the alternatives it dismisses. It does not acknowledge that meditative thinking is a handcraft, an art that responds only to what is near to its time and place. It is not irrelevant, a luxury, or a hobby, but the most relevant practice of all. To any time. To anyone. It draws life near, makes it meaningful and beautiful, and, as such, it is as available, or unavailable, to common understanding as it is to highly practiced understanding. So long as they live, no mortal can escape the calling that thinks in poetry, art, dance, and song. While it is true that they require great effort, much practice, delicate care, and occasionally great courage they always call upon common people as much as any elite. Though it can be ignored, the calling to poetry, dance, art, and song is simply life.⁽¹⁹⁾

Unlike calculative reason which requires specialized technical education, meditative thinking is done--and must be done--by anyone living their life. This is because, as dwellers on the earth, responding to that which brings them forth and keeps them safe, human beings are thinking beings, even if in our time they so often neglect to do it. Thinking is the way we dwell, the way we let the world world. To think, it is always enough to dwell on what lies near and to meditate on what lies nearest, enough to think about whatever concerns us in our neighborhood, in our time.⁽²⁰⁾

But thinking is discouraged in this age, repressed, denied, and even persecuted.⁽²¹⁾ Reason has built our world and it has done it in a totally thoughtless way, a way heedless of poetry, dance, art, and song. It has built our economies, our weapons, our houses; it governs the way we grow our food, raise our children, even create our art--everything. And now everything is trapped in the utopia that reason has built. Projecting itself over everything, drawing everything into the domain of its placeless truth, reason has fabricated its own fantasy and made us live it. Fearing any challenge to its perfection, it must extend itself continually, mastering everything that escapes its necessities--irrationality, unplanned behavior, local dissent of any kind.

Because of their placeless rationality, their unending quest for impersonal standards, objective judgment, and logical procedure, the modern bureaucracy, the modern state, and the modern economy cannot function if people think about what they are doing, respond to the cares of their lives, things like friendship or beauty. As parts of an industrial machine with a global reach, people must do their narrow function within the system, orders must be followed unquestioned, and the rationality of the huge and farflung system must prevail over any local difference, any calling from poetry or song.

The modern age has, thus, given rise to a new experience of evil, an evil that is so terrifying because it is so possible, so near to us all. Adolf Eichmann, like all us conscientious workers, was just doing his job, fulfilling his function within the system--only his was herding Jews into ovens.⁽²²⁾ An efficient technocrat, he might have been disposing of day old newspapers, baby's diapers, or toxic wastes, but he was disposing of Jews. It made no difference to him; there was no personal hatred in his intentions. Why, he even had Jewish friends!

If Eichmann were truly an exception, a shadow that was not our own reality, his life could not be a warning to us. But perhaps Eichmann was not an exception. Perhaps he is our collective shadow, our own truth repressed into the unconscious then projected safely onto another. All over this country, and all over the world, there are missile silos armed with weapons so deadly that they can do in a moment what it took Eichmann years to do. They are manned by men and women carefully selected, as the logic of deterrence theory dictates, to obey their orders and push a button that will kill millions of people the moment they receive a code word.⁽²³⁾ No doubt these men and women are better than most of us. They are more intelligent, better disciplined, have no vices, love their children, and never cheat on their taxes. But yet, with just a few code words, they may one day become the instruments of global destruction. And we participate with them in this possibility with at least our silence, our taxes, and sometimes our votes.

In this age that reason has built it is not easy or safe to think about what we are doing, to respond to the cares near to our lives. Fearing the identity given to those others that reason excludes, it is much easier to be reasonable and go with the flow, to work inside the system, to do your duty. The penalties for the courage to think our thoughts to their end, to integrate reason's shadow and draw our thoughts near to the life that sustains them, are so great--ignominy, loss of career, home, and family, perhaps even jail and death--that few of us have the strength necessary for thinking them. The shadow rules.

Fearing the passionate dangers of poetry, many flee into such things as Fundamentalist religion, positivism, and rational choice theory. Reducing everything to fundamentals, a simple distribution of the world into black and white, quantity and quality, logic and irrationality, method and error, right and wrong, it eliminates the greatest of all modern demons, the uncertainty of whether God, objectivity, and reason are real, and leaves people secure in their utopian islands. Everything is OK. In a time when people have been cut off from their roots, their homeland, the earth that sustains them and they wander about the world in trailerhouses, they are haunted by the most horrible of fears. Unconsciously they know everything is not OK. Isolated by their utility, dependent on the world that reason has built, afraid of what would be released by any real questioning, they seek security from their unconscious doubts in absolute and eternal certainty. The utopia of reason is a place haunted a horrible shadow.

Our fear, as we live amid the institutions that reason has built, is a fear of reason's shadow, uncontrollable chaos, ambiguous uncertainty, monstrous unreason, erupting contingency. Pursued by its shadow, everything that it is not, but nevertheless is, reason calls us to ever expanding conquests in the cause of reason.⁽²⁴⁾ For the security of all that we have built, and then become dependent on, we must repress the shadow of our age, make everything rational, available for human control. It is that or mere anarchy is set loose.

In Jungian psychology, the encounter with the shadow is often experienced as a confrontation with a dangerous beast, some horrible monster that seeks the self's destruction. The self feels like a helpless victim before the onslaught of the unconscious, even though this monster is only made possible and constituted by its own ego ideal. Often the self protects itself from the judgment and hostility of the ideal by projecting its faults onto others, rejecting its own power. This other assumes the ego ideal's own aggressive, predatory, and evil character, and then the other sets about persecuting the self. Healing comes when the self withdraws its projections, recognizing that all are one, hunter and hunted, judge and accused, executioner and condemned, jailor and prisoner, that it is its own ideal that is persecuting it, and not the other's.⁽²⁵⁾

Insisting on the purity of its analytic categories, reason is singularly unable to face its own demons and recognize them as its own. It's faults are always projected onto others, whatever is different from itself, be they communists, capitalists, terrorists, feminists, environmental activists, drug dealers, or whatever. The rules and methods of reason are what they are, fixed, resolute, unchangeable. Anyone who ceases to follow them ceases to be reasonable, and becomes the enemy. Consequently, while thinking, paying attention to the erupting earth, actively seeks out alterity, its others, and only knows its identity in the play of difference between world and earth, reason is unable to overcome its projections of difference and heal itself. Whenever it is threatened, fearing for its identity, it simply renews its efforts to protect itself from its projections. Ultimately, everything that reason knows is known only because of its fear, hatred, and insecurity. If reason insists on its dispassionate objectivity, its calm logic, and its peaceable ways, it is only able to do so because it has given so much of itself over to its enemy. Concealing and repressing its fear and hostility, lost in fantasies of persecution, frantically needing always more power to protect itself, reason is, despite its endless protests to the contrary, a profoundly war-like and hostile way of building worlds.

It is no accident that reason has built the nuclear bomb. And described it as a way to keep the peace. Deterrence theory it is called. But even with it and tens of thousands of nuclear bombs we are not safe. Even now when we in America have had the comfort of seeing our enemy, the Soviet Union, fall into disarray there are those who counsel continuing vigilance, caution, and deterrence. And above all, small cuts in the defense budget, even when our schools are an international disgrace, when black infant mortality rates rival that of third world countries, when the homeless crowd our streets, when the ozone layer is being depleted faster than anyone expected, when the greenhouse effect is building up, when toxic waste dumps are seeping into the nation's water supply, when species after species are becoming extinct, when farmland is being eroded much faster than it is being rebuilt, and so on. Even with all these problems, still we have enemies to fear, to deter, to spend huge amounts of money on. And no one is even sure who they are anymore.

Even when everything has changed, nothing has changed because our enemy never was the Soviet Union. Not really. The unrelenting hatred for democracy, life, and freedom, the unqualified quest for world domination, that would cause our enemy, the Soviet Union, to launch nuclear war against us, was mostly our projection. Who could be that monstrous? Not a few nations, especially in the Third World, have seen in American foreign policy everything it has denounced in the Soviet Union. When they think the unthinkable, the actual strategy and execution of a nuclear war, our generals should not be reprimanded for the insane courage of thinking thoughts too horrible to bear, but for the cowardice of not thinking at all. Deterrence theory is a masterpiece of rationality, calculation, and logic, but it is also a failure of thought and courage.⁽²⁶⁾And it is so distant from our daily cares and concerns that it hovers over us like an alien space craft. It posits an artificial and utopian world of "exchange rates," "intense interactions," "of counter forces," "counter values," and requires the fear that its fabrications conceal govern the real world.⁽²⁷⁾

The enemy our generals seek to protect us from lives only in the Pentagon. But this dwelling place of the enemy does not make it unreal. On the contrary, the enemy that must be subdued is all too real. The truth of his presence is attested to by the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and delivery systems we have built and, more ominously, by the war bureaucracy whose decision procedures would use them on a moment's notice.

Our generals assure us, in our moments when our resolve to face the nuclear age weakens and crumbles, that they have made war impossible because they have made it too horrible. The enemy is contained, subdued, and made rational by the terror they, the masters of an insane terror, inspire. But this promise of safety ignores the fact that large numbers of nuclear weapons still exist, also, that the decision procedures and control centers for using them exist. And will continue to exist as long as reason feels threatened by its others. Only such power as this is capable of protecting reason from its fear, and it will endure as long as reason is lost to its enemy.

There is, perhaps, another way to do things, to know things, a way that is not lost in a world far removed from itself. Believing there was another way than the way of reason, I tried to find it by focusing on my place. Just my place. Up the hill from the old abandoned farm, set deep in a hill that overlooks a valley a dozen miles wide, I built an earth-sheltered house and greenhouse. Not needing much energy, none for heating even in Montana's worst winters, growing my own food, I can live here for a year quite comfortably on only a couple of thousand dollars. I am therefore, blessedly free from the demands and sacrifices of continuous employment. (For years now, I have not made enough money to pay any income taxes. I console myself in my poverty by thinking of how little I have contributed to the nuclear arms race.) Though I get lonely sometimes, and though there are sometimes plagues of grasshoppers that sweep down off the prairie and eat my garden to the ground like a horde of lawyers on a medical malpractice suit, I can live my life here near to what sustains it. It is a life sometimes full of petty frustrations, I must admit, and it is not always a happy life, but it is my own. And I have learned a lot here on my place, things that I could never have learned elsewhere.

Sometimes late at night I wake from my sleep, afraid for some reason I cannot really describe. I put on my clothes and wander about the hills that surround my house. One of them is the highest for many miles around. On moonlit nights when I stand on top of it, I can just see in the distance some hills that conceal a number of Minuteman missile silos. I remember driving past them. They are not much really, just a woven wire fence around some concrete slabs. But their presence is never far from my mind on these nights. Sometimes I take my binoculars along and I try to make them out in the moonlight. Is it that hill that hides one, or is it the next? I'm never sure.

I give up and look up at the night stars, see them sharp and cold against the blackness. And I think again how wonderfully indifferent they are to our hopes and fears, and how much they are like death, cold and certain. Strangely, thinking of death like this on a starry night, alone and shivering on a hill top, is comforting. Perhaps because it seems so small against the stars. I think of the Indians who have stood where I stand, looking at the same stars. Surely they must have done so. And I think about how they are gone now. Their whole world of buffalo, medicine, and grass. And I know then that nothing lasts as long as the stars. Not the buffalo, not the Indians, not my family's ranch, not me, not even the Minuteman missiles. I go home and get back into bed, no longer afraid.

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CHAPTER 2

THINKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

The white man, through his insensitivity to the way of Nature, has desecrated the face of Mother Earth. The white man's advanced technological capacity has occurred as a result of his lack of regard for the spiritual path and for the way of all living things. The white man's desire for material possessions and power has blinded him to the pain he has caused Mother Earth by his quest for what he calls natural resources. And the path of the Great Spirit has become difficult to see by almost all men, even by many Indians who have chosen instead to follow the path of the white man.⁽²⁸⁾

From a letter by the Hopi leaders to President Nixon

In his thinking about technology, the Thinker seeks to prepare the way to it and make it possible for humanity to have a free relationship to it and to itself.⁽²⁹⁾ The first step along this way is to distinguish, to think of the nonidentity, between technical activity and the true character of technology. They are not the same. Just as the identity of a tree, as tree, is something that pervades, precedes, and makes possible all trees but is not itself a tree, the identity of technology has nothing at all to do with technical activity.⁽³⁰⁾ That which makes technology possible, which brings it forth and gives it its distinctive identity, cannot be known by pushing forward the domain of mechanics and calculation or by attempting to conclude, as the popular debate over it does endlessly, that it is either good or bad, to be extended or contracted, or, much worse, that it is something neutral, merely a tool depending on humanity's virtues or failings for its good or bad effects. Such a way of proceeding would not enable us to think its truth or reveal what brings it forth but only deliver us over to its rationality more completely.

To seek the truth of a thing, that by which the thing things, is to ask what it is, to think about the way in which it is present. And absent. In our time, two answers are commonly made by rational discourse on what technology is. The first says that technology is but a means to an end, a way of asserting power over things, and the second says that technology is a human activity, a way of asserting human control over things. According to the Thinker, these two common definitions supplied by reason belong together, for to name ends and seek the means adequate to them is a human activity, exclusively so in our time.⁽³¹⁾ Not only are machines, tools, and factories part of what modern technology is according to modern reason, but so too is the end, the human will they serve.

Modern humanity gains its power, its mastery over things, and accomplishes its will through its technology. Thus, the Thinker calls this rationalist conception of technology the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.⁽³²⁾ But there is nothing incorrect about this identification of technology as a bringing about and as human power as far as mere correctness goes. In fact nothing is more true of it than in what is absent from it, concealed within it. It is an understanding entirely appropriate to this age of reason.

This concept of technology as a bringing about and as human power defines it as something universal and is able to interpret not only ancient and premodern technology, but also modern technology, including not only the tilling sticks, the water and wind mills, and the horse drawn implements that the ancients used, but also the nuclear power plants, the four wheel drive tractors, the jet aircraft, and the big factories that we use. All of these techniques, reason knows, are means to ends, ways of bringing things about and asserting human control over them, even if they differ greatly in power and complexity.

But again as reason knows, if modernity has only expanded the power of technology and extended Man's mastery over the earth, it has also thereby greatly increased the need to get technology itself under control, to master it just as Man masters the earth through it. The great fear of reason is that the means by which it imposes its will upon the earth and all that is in it will escape human control, as Frankenstein's monster did, and subject the new Prometheans to a cruel fate, perhaps nuclear war, perhaps ecological disaster. The will to technical mastery becomes more urgent and insecure just as it becomes more powerful and sure of its domain. Reason's shadow rules it unconsciously, making it endlessly more fearful of the world it might loose control of, provoking it into ever expanding conquests.

The modern will to mastery must find in itself only itself, pure will willing itself. No shadows allowed. Anything that is not reason itself, escaping its control, must be isolated, contained by knowledge, and made into a yet greater means of control. Technical Man must find in his will, the cause to all the effects his technology brings about. Anything else is an enemy to be opposed, overcome, subordinated, mastered. Wherever reason and the instrumentality of technology reigns, there reigns causality, power, domination, and human subjectivity.

But, the Thinker inquires, what if in its truth technology were no mere means, not simply a human way of bringing things about, universally neutral as long as Man had control of them, simply more power to make the world submit to Man's choice?⁽³³⁾ What if Man never did have control over the technology he deploys, and could not bring things about by willing them about, but rather was in his willing always preceded, appropriated, and possessed by something other than his will, something before it, more primal than it? What if Man's will could not be a cause, and technology a mere means to human ends, and Man could not choose, but was in fact chosen? What if the shadow that Man had long opposed, repressed, sought to master, was in fact not defeated but his master? The Thinker responds by probing the nature of causality and human willing, finding that it is quite other than reason has long maintained.

Before the age of reason, philosophy had long maintained that there are four different kinds of causes to anything that occurs and becomes present: (1) a material cause, the physical substance out of which a thing is made; (2) a formal cause, the form or shape into which the material enters; (3) the final cause, the end for which the matter is pressed into its form; (4) and the efficient cause, the actual force that brings about the effect.⁽³⁴⁾ For example, the material cause of a silver chalice would be the silver that went into it; the formal cause would be the cup-like form it became, smooth, gilded, or whatever; the final cause would be the sacrificial rite to the Gods that it was made to participate in; and the efficient cause, in this case, would be the craftsman who made it.

In the age of reason we have become accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. Efficient causality, only but one of the four causes philosophy has known since Aristotle, has set the standard for all causality. So far has modernity carried this that the final cause is no longer even considered a cause, but often dismissed by reason as myth or delusion. Telic finality, or the holy, has disappeared from our thought, been repressed into the shadow.

Moreover, despite the fact that the theory of causality traces itself back to Aristotle, Greek thought, according to the Thinker, had nothing to do with bringing about and affecting.⁽³⁵⁾ Instead of the linear movement of atomic billiard balls clicking against each other, a causality modeled on the pure mechanics of motion, the Greeks thought causality as responsibility, indebtedness, mutual interdependence, a responsibility that, responding to the presence of a calling, draws the thing out of nothingness into being. Causality is not bringing something about, but bringing something forth. Like giving birth to it, revealing it. The difference is decisive. As big as the difference between fathering and mothering.

For example, the silver that comes from the earth and goes into the chalice as its matter is co-responsible for the chalice.⁽³⁶⁾ Responding to the worlding of sacred chalices, the meaning of a cup in a holy context, it is the silveriness of silver that helps bring forth the sacred nature of the chalice, making it special, rare, holy. At the same time, and equally responsible, the chalice is indebted to, and brought forth by, the aspect of a chalice, the cup-like form that marks its difference from a brooch or a ring and makes it useful as a sacred container.

The third and most important part of the chalice is its sacred character, the part that in advance confines and circumscribes the chalice as a sacrificial vessel, the telos of the chalice. But we must not misunderstand telos simply as aim or purpose, as modernity is apt to do, but rather as that which bounds and completes the thing, the world that surrounds it, provides an interpretation and place for it, and makes it whole, holy. The telos of the chalice, its character as a sacred tool, brings forth the silver from the earth and makes it into the shape of the chalice, calling on the craftsman to bring it into the world that worlds it.

The fourth and final participant in the play of co-responsibility that grants the chalice its nature, is the silversmith, the one who brings about the sacred chalice. The silversmith is granted her place in the four-fold play of responsibility, not just because she brings about, giving mechanical cause to the effect that ends in the chalice, but because she considers carefully, with the reverence appropriate to her task, interpreting her responsibility to the world that worlds around her, and draws together the silver and the shape of the chalice into its completed whole as sacrificial vessel. It is her handcraft, responding to the worlding of the sacred chalice, interpreting the nature of the earthen silver, and functional form that it must enter into, that makes her co-responsible for the chalice. As the dwelling artisan, a mortal drawing near to her time and place and interpreting her responsibilities, she brings the chalice forth from nothingness, making it present in the world. Revealing it.

Though the four modes of responsibility are each different from the others, they are all united in the play that brings a thing forth out of nothingness. They set the thing free, gathering it into its place in the world, starting it on to its way of arrival. Every tool that fits the hand of mortals, every tree, rock, flower, everything that appears amidst the dwelling place of the mortals, they, in their four-fold unity, are responsible for calling everything forth from the world they world. The four modes of responsibility bring things forth, revealing that the happening of the thing is indebted to many things beyond itself. It is no mere bring about, but a happening of world.

What, then, is a thing? The Thinker poses the question with child-like simpleness, asking in innocence what reason overlooks because it is too near and obvious. But nothing is murkier than the thinging of things, especially in modern times.

The Old High German word, "ding" and the Old English "thing" both mean a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a publicly contested matter.⁽³⁷⁾"Thing" refers to anything that bears upon humanity, that concerns it as a social gathering, that is a matter for discourse and discussion. The Romans, deriving their usage from the Greek "eiro" (rhetos, rhetra, rhema), called a matter for discourse "res." Contrary to common knowledge, "res publica" refers not to the state, but to that which, concerning everyone, is known by everyone, and is debated in public. Often, the Romans being great legalists, the word "res" designated a case at law.⁽³⁸⁾ The Romans called this thing a "causa," or, translated into English, a cause.

We must not however understand "causa" in a mechanical sense, but rather as pursuing a cause for justice, a charitable cause, a political cause, and so on. A cause is a thing that is before us, gathers us into its care, and calls on us to be responsible toward it. It rises up of itself out of nothingness, the unknown void, making its presence felt, demanding a response. In such a cause, the world worlds, is revealed. But, it is only because "causa," almost synonymously with "res," means the case, can the word "causa" later come to mean cause as the causality of an effect. The point of pursuing a cause, of responding to the thing at hand, was to produce, shall we say, an effect, a result, in things. Gradually the Roman "causa" became the Romances "la cosa" and the French "la chose," or, as we say in English, "the thing."

But, back to the world that pursuing a cause invokes. A thing reveals a cause, a whole world's worlding. Gathering the world together, revealing it, the cause calls its thing forth out of non-being, giving birth to it. In the thing's happening, and in the absence that preceded it, that made the cause a calling, the world worlds. The summons that gathers a thing into being, that causes it to be, is, as we saw, composed of four different moments, each one responding to the others.

As a thing, the silver chalice is a gathering together of all that makes it a chalice. The earth because its dark obscurity is the fertile source of its silver; the sky because the chalice's aspect and function is revealed by the sky's openness; the gods because they are the whole, the beckoning messengers calling for the gift of the sacrificial offering; the mortal who makes it because through her life of living her death, her caring concern for the earth, the sky, and the gods, the gathering of the chalice is drawn forth from unconcealment. Thinging, the thing stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals, bringing the four in their remoteness near to one another, uniting them in the simple onefold of their self-unified four fold. Gathered together, situated in the thing, the world worlds.⁽³⁹⁾

The Thinker uses strange phrases, the world worlding, the thing thinging, in order to draw attention to the situating of things, the be-ing that makes them be. The thinging of the thing, the identification of its presence before the eyes of dwellers, cannot be reduced to reason's causality, a mechanics of stimulus and effect. Instead, it is revealed, drawn forth according to its own mystery from unconcealment, made present and given its identity by the world's worlding. A world has to be dwelled in, a maker has to be situated in body and dress and desire, and the identities of things must be at hand, available for interpretation, before the things revealed in it become present. Otherwise, they are not. There is no independent reality, no truth beyond the world, no way for any-thing to be known without being situated.

The world's worlding cannot be explained by anything outside of it, underlying it, or determining it--by a theory of metaperception, for example. This impossibility is due not to failings of human science or the inadequacies of our reason, but to the simple being of the world, the incalculable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding. Modernity's will to explain, to reduce to separate parts, an underlying truth, and then to capture the structure of cause and effect in a law-governed beyond, strangles the basic nature of the united four. Earth and sky, gods and mortals, cannot be understood by separating them and explaining one by another. They are together. Mortals dwell on the earth, under the sky, in the presence and absence of the gods. Dwelling necessarily brings the four modes of occasioning together and presents it as the thing.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Technology is the way this happens, the thing things, the world worlds. It can happen in many different ways, depending on the gods that mortals attend to. The thing can happen amid awe and reverence, or amid erotic joy and bliss, or amid mystery and wonder, or amid otherness and difference, or amid power and fear. The chalice that we handle can alternately be a holy grail, a metaphor for the earth's womb, a symbol of the abyss of being, or a trinket for the tourist industry. Whatever it is, it has little to do with the mechanics of stimulus and response, even if our age thinks quite otherwise. And so technology is not merely a means for man's power, a way of controlling things, bringing them about. That is only how the thing happens in the modern age, as an object of utility and domination. It need not happen that way at all, and, in fact, often hasn't. Technology is a whole world, a way of revealing what things are.

The etymology of the word technology is quite revealing. Technology derives from the Greek word "techne." Techne does not mean simply an art or handcraft, as the dictionaries commonly have it, but rather, to let something appear, to bring a thing forth from unconcealment.⁽⁴¹⁾ To reveal it. Techne is a mode of aletheuein, of unconcealing, of revealing whatever does not bring itself forth and does not lie before us. Techne refers to the things that humans alone makes, the truths that people alone bring forth. As a mode of aletheuein, techne is contrasted to those things that come forth of themselves, physis.⁽⁴²⁾ Physis is commonly, but inadequately, translated as nature. Prior to the modern distinction between things human-made and things that are natural, prior to Aristotle's imposition of a difference between techne and physis, physis revealed that which bloomed forth of itself, as a rose does. In the time of the Presocratics, strangely enough, physis was identical with logos, the language of Being, because then language was not a human instrument, but something that came forth of itself from the chaos, the void that was the origin of all things. Physis was the origin of all things natural and human-made because it was the name of that which, always concealing itself, mysteriously brings things forth. This time did not know a difference between physis and techne.

And it did not yet think archy, either. Archy, which seems to have come into its own only with Aristotle and Plato, refers to two things, command and origin. Archy is a commanding origin, a cause which calls things into being.⁽⁴³⁾ As a result of its claim, things happen, but only according to its rule or logic. It is that which governs appearing, appearances. As an underlying and general truth of things, it makes knowledge of things possible by establishing their origins in rule, law, principle, reason, form, and so on.

Once the distinction between techne and physis is made, between humanity and nature, it becomes possible (and only in the modern age is this fully accomplished) to think of Man as an archy-tect, the one in whose command is the origin that builds things, brings them forth.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Since the time of Aristotle, whoever builds--constructs a house, a ship, or a sacrificial chalice, or cultivates a vine, or whatever--reveals things as they are brought forth by an archy of some sort, a ruling command that gathers together in advance the underlying principle of the ship or the house with a view of the finished thing, and from this gathering rules and governs the manner of its building or construction. The archy is the origin--be it logos, the gods, reason, the laws of nature, or Man himself--of this making of things, not physis, the erupting earth. Things can be unnatural now because they are man made. And things can be dominated, used as a means, because there is now a difference between humanity and nature. Before, when logos was physis, and everything was one with the earth, such a technical hierarchy between man and nature was unthinkable.

Though the Thinker is silent on gender and sex, man, I think, should be also taken to mean male, strictly male. As Riane Eisler has argued, the character of technology cannot be separated from the relations of the sexes. Before the patriarchal Olympian Gods defeated the Goddess in myth and in culture, technology was entirely different. In ancient Minoan Crete, a surprisingly sophisticated civilization where this difference is best reflected, the whole way of life was pervaded by the worship of the Goddess. Descent was matrilineal, women were the true equals with men, if not even their betters. In art women are presented in positions of power, as the leaders of religious rituals, as the ones making decisions of state, and as the ones conducting the affairs of civilization.

Beginning around 6000 B.C.E. and continuing up to the fifteenth century B.C.E., when the culture came under Achaean domination, Minoan culture reached astonishing heights of sophistication, in many ways more impressive than the Greek culture that followed it, if only because of its egalitarian, nonviolent, and nonexploitive character.⁽⁴⁵⁾ But it had more than that. For much of its history, all of the urban areas had excellent drainage systems, sanitary installations, and indoor plumbing. There is evidence of viaducts, paved roads, water pipes, and large scale irrigation works of such quality that few civilizations have ever equaled them. Even the poor segments of society had a quality of life that surpasses that of many in the Third World today.⁽⁴⁶⁾

Archaeologists are uniformly impressed, if not amazed, with the quality of their art, architecture, and social organization, using words like "sensitive," "grace of life," and "love of beauty and nature" to describe it.⁽⁴⁷⁾ There is no evidence of warfare on the island, no public expenditures on walls and fortifications, and no glorification of violence, war, or conquest in its art. There is no celebration of authority, no monuments with the names of rulers on them, no identification of power with the ability to humiliate and slaughter the enemy or to oppress and silence dissent.⁽⁴⁸⁾Instead, power in Crete was "primarily equated with the responsibility of motherhood rather than with the exaction of obedience to a male-dominant elite through force or the fear of force."⁽⁴⁹⁾Rather than a means of dominating others, power was an ability to enable, nurture, and cultivate. Expressed in care and mutuality, it was a power with, a power to, instead of a power over.

Technology, instead of a being a tool for man's domination, war, and hierarchy, was a way of revealing the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature, from which humanity was indistinguishable. Rather than focusing on the technologies of war, the power to destroy things, the Minoans developed the technologies of nurture and cultivation.⁽⁵⁰⁾ In fact it was Goddess worshiping cultures that first invented agriculture, as well as the art of making pottery, weaving and spinning cloth, the phonetic alphabet, not to mention the art of government. (In fact the credit we give the Greeks for discovering democracy probably belongs to the more egalitarian Goddess worshiping cultures.)⁽⁵¹⁾ Tending toward union, harmony, peace, equality, and the renewal of the cycles, this way of life never revealed itself as techne, as the power to control nature, or to stand in opposition to it. Unconcerned with its origins or the security of its power to command, it was an an-archy-ical culture, without the need to subsume things under the authority of an overarching claims.

Building technological archytecture is perhaps a need originating in men's insecurity about their relation to their progeny. About how things are revealed. Women have an immediate, sensual, internal, and unproblematic relation to their children, Dorothy Dinnerstein observes.⁽⁵²⁾ Men's relations to their children are much more problematic, and must be mediated by culture and suprasensual reality because it is external to their bodies. How can they know the child is theirs? Only by controlling the revealing of things, by establishing rules for women's sexuality, by defending culture against their passion, and in general dominating the sensual with the suprasensual.

Men's insecurity, envy, and fear, then, about the revealing of things is the origin of the hier-archys that subordinate the sensible to the intelligible, form to meaning, the visible to the invisible, the maternal bond to the paternal principle.⁽⁵³⁾ In order to secure their claims on the future, to establish their claim on their progeny, men become the authors of creation, and women are reduced to mere vessels of flesh carrying their seed. Seeking to preserve male author-ity over creation, they establish themselves as the readers of legitimacy and illegitimacy, the unequivocality of meaning, and the certainty of origin.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Phallocentrism is, thus, intimately bound up with patriarchal authority, a technology of domination, and a religion of suprasenuality. While motherhood is like physis, something that blooms forth of itself, like a rose, patriarchy is something that, like techne, has to be brought about, claimed, established, asserted. Patriarchy must create a difference between itself and nature, an archytecture, in order to subject whatever is revealed in it to its reign. Motherhood has no need for such a distinction to claim its truth, and has no need for archytecture.

The usual conception of truth, the patriarchal conception of truth that abides in our age of reason that the Thinker calls on us to deconstruct, starts with things and ends by establishing their correspondence with a proposition, a universal and eternal archy, such as the will of God (or Man), the laws of nature, the logic of reason, or the mathematics of probability.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Truth, as it is commonly thought, is that which correctly corresponds to its referent.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Meta-physis-cal in truth, this conception of truth moves beyond the motherly physis the Presocratics knew to the patriarchal archies that we know. Just as the original thought revealed in physis was concealed by the distinction Aristotle made between physis and techne, things that come forth by themselves and things that come forth by the hand of man, metaphysics rests on a sharp distinction between subject and object, knower and known, appearance and reality. As such, it has a decidedly masculine and war-like character to it, bringing a sharp analytic sword to bear on world, cutting things apart, ignoring the unities that make different things a whole, then subjecting one term to another as its truth.

This metaphysical (and patriarchal) summons for distinction and dominance finds its origin not in Kant or in the modern age with the rise of positivism, but in age old Christianity (Aristotle only opened the way toward it), with the positing of the creator, God the Father, over against the created.⁽⁵⁷⁾ The created is true--and humanity is free of sin--when it measures up to, accords with, the eternal and universal idea that God has of it. Man can know the truth of any creation because, created in the image of God the Father, he fits into the unity of the divine plan of creation. His words and thoughts can be brought into perfect accord with God the Father's universal and eternal will because they are wholly adequate to the task.

In our time, despite the absence of the divine in our discourse, and a popular revolt against traditional metaphysics, the notion of truth as the correspondence between universal and eternal words and contingent things is still retained. Patriarchy still rules. Just as contemporary positivists maintain that scientific theories can be tested and brought into accordance with the facts, Rawls' worldly reason, supplying the law for itself, is able to immediately know the world, to accord the representation with the represented. Empiricists, rationalists, and any theory that mediates between the two poles, remain Christian and united in their notion of truth as correspondence, and, despite themselves, metaphysical and patriarchal.

Rupert Sheldrake, who is advancing an an-archy-ical study of nature that is as persuasive as it is subversive, puts this into sharp perspective. He believes that there are no "Laws of Nature," only habits of nature, morphic resonances, fields that connect like with like and make them the same. There are no Laws of Nature because there is no Law-Giver of Nature; the whole conception is a metaphor "based on an analogy with human laws, which are binding rules of conduct prescribed by authority and extending throughout the realm of the sovereign power."⁽⁵⁸⁾ According to him, the metaphor in the 17th century was quite conscious and explicit. The laws of Nature were legislated by God, the Father of the universe, and his laws were immutable, his writ universal. And if scientists no longer believe in God as lawgiver, they still believe in lawgiving. And that is the problem. These great advocates truth only with evidence, themselves depend on a method that accepts as given a reality that needs to be proved.

Laws, scientific or otherwise, imply lawgivers, and they imply the authority needed to maintain them. If there is no law giver, as most scientists believe there is none of nature, then where is the authority that maintains such laws? Only in the scientific profession. Nature obeys no "laws," speaks with no author-ity, only scientists do. And when they do, they insist upon the most mysterious things. Even though laws have no matter and no motion, they govern everything material and moving. They cannot be seen, weighed, or touched, and yet they are the most important things to be known of nature. They have no physical source or origin that gives birth to any sort of presence, and yet they are present everywhere and always.⁽⁵⁹⁾

The Laws of Nature are, in short, metaphysical entities, much like spirits, far removed into a transcendental realm that is universal and eternal, there before the universe came into being and there long after it has passed away. If science has killed God, the Lawgiver, scientists remain the most devout theologians. Of course the more sophisticated of them would unhesitatingly acknowledge now that the Laws of Nature have no real or objective existence; they are just theories and hypotheses in human minds. But, dear reader, can you imagine the confusion and the shock in their audience if any scientist ever described their work as discovering the Laws of Man, or, perhaps, the Laws of Science? Where would their authority be if they could not appeal to their patriarchal metaphysic? Modern science, lest we forget, is sustained only by the patriarchal power of its metaphors. The claim scientists make on authoritative status is exactly the same as the one theologians have long maintained, the power to make correspondences between the physis and the metaphysis. Only by invoking the holy, a realm they themselves now admit is unreal, do they get the authority to subject the earth to their reading of the beyond.

When truth is understood as correctness, as a correspondence with an eternal and universal principle or archy, untruth or error becomes merely incorrect and can be dismissed without hesitation.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Falling outside the truth of truth, a shadow that has no reality, untruth is not a part of being and therefore, has no importance once it is understood as untruth. Once metaphysics excludes physis, once the patriarch asserts his claim on revealing, errors are something to be overcome; reflecting no correspondence with the beyond, they have no significance, no presence. In spite of the fact that the world has worlded them, given birth to them. Science, modern scientists will tell us, progresses when we reveal untruth as untruth, and then discard it. The illegitimate has no place in their ordering of the world.

But the shadow cannot be denied, repressed like this. It does exist, the world has worlded it. It has happened, been revealed. Though denied and dismissed, discarded as illegitimate, it still belongs with truth. It is what truth is not, and so it gives its identity to truth. The other of truth, beckoning, doubting, it reveals truth as something questionable, as something uncertain, something at risk. Untruth is the happening of truth. They are doubles that necessarily complete, support, sustain, and produce each other.

The particular character of the untruth that metaphysics in particular denies, attacks, and represses as shadow determines the whole archytecture of the truth affirmed. Where would modern science be without astrology, New Age mystics, and religion in general? They are superstitious, scientists are not. They believe in the supernatural, which cannot be known, scientists would never make the mistake of basing any claim to truth on something that cannot be experimented with. They are subjective, emotional, dishonest, and manipulative; scientists are objective, detached, rigorous, and bound by the highest professional ethics. They are out for power, to manipulate the gullible, to get money; scientists seek only truth and the welfare of humanity.

Scientists have constituted the others of their truth like this since the Enlightenment, and however much they might deny it, the claim of their illegitimate offspring has secretly shaped the knowledge that they have sought. Scientists who experiment with parapsychology or who offer theories explaining it are automatically cast as suspect, underfunded, and dismissed as loony mystics, even though their science meets the same standards as any of their peers. The same goes for scientists doing work in psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how mental imagery affects bodily health. Subverting the Enlightenment understanding of the body as machine, both of these projects are dismissed and marginalized, not because they are not doing good science, but just because of their proximity to what science is not. That is to say to metaphysical beliefs, to religious dogma, and to subjective philosophy.

Instead of rejecting truth's shadow the way metaphysics has long done, the Thinker not only acknowledges it, but affirms it and celebrates it. The world has worlded it; it belongs, and is true to the earth. The otherness of truth, its difference from itself, needs to be accepted as it is, as neither illegitimate nor useless error. Truth depends upon its shadow, is sustained by it, and requires its support. The way to truth is the way to untruth, the concealed, the mysterious. This is unavoidable because, as the world worlds, one thing necessarily conceals another, stands in front of it, and perhaps limitless others, obscuring them in unknowable mystery.⁽⁶¹⁾ Truth happens in aworld, a situation and a place, and because it does, it necessarily throws all other worlds into the shadow, makes them into untruth. Because much more is concealed than is revealed when the world worlds, because the darkness that obscures is limitless, while the light that reveals is limited to the clearing where the thing things, the concealment of things as a whole is more primal than any temporal revealing of them. At the edges of the clearing where the world worlds, surrounding it in an endless night extending without limit, time, or direction, lies the mystery, a pure expanse of nothingness. Not a particular mystery, regarding this or that thing, but a mystery that is one because it cannot be divided.

In dwelling, in drawing things forth from unconcealment into a time and place, as the world's worlding calls on them to, mortals also conserve the mystery, preserving the shadow that gives birth to the truth. To dwell, and to think, is to call upon the shadow, to preserve the mystery while revealing time and place. Interestingly enough, according to the Oxford English dictionary, the word "dwelling," besides meaning to stay in one place and preserve it, also means to lead into error, to retard and delay.

By letting the shadow be, by dwelling amid untruth and mystery, mortals free themselves of patriarchy's archytecture of exclusion and gain their possibility for truth. For the Thinker, freedom, which he describes as the preserving and sparing of the thing as it rises up of itself out of the void, is the happening of truth, the revealing of all knowledge.⁽⁶²⁾ Truth happens only because freedom has already happened. Placing the happening of truth in freedom, in letting the mystery be, does not plunge it into the arbitrariness of human caprice, the wandering subjectivity of an autonomous human will, because freedom is not something humans possess. Freedom is a way the world worlds; it has nothing to do with human choice, or will, or consent, either individually or collectively. Freedom has nothing to do with human choice because the mystery that calls truth into the world is the shadow cast by the world's worlding, and that cannot have anything to do with will or choice because it precedes them.

The patriarch's metaphysic of truth, seeking to establish its claim on revealing, celebrates the true and dismisses untruth.⁽⁶³⁾ The Thinker, letting the world world, is grateful to both, acknowledges both because they reveal earth, the happening of things. A dark concealing mystery, the earth is the abyss on which the world is, the calling that reveals truth, setting the world free. The earth, as the Thinker knows it in his latter thought, is identical with what the Presocratics knew as physis. It is the concealing mystery, the abyss that gives birth to the world, the shadow from which things are revealed. From its dark obscurity things are always coming forward, being revealed, suddenly and mysteriously appearing as truth.⁽⁶⁴⁾

Something much more primal than it, humanity is not at all in possession of the earth. Our reason, whatever our patriarchs insist upon, does not posit or form the things that appear from the earth, but rather it itself is formed within the earth's dark mystery. As the Presocratics knew, logos is physis. Contrary to reason, untruth, error, is not founded in the finitude of Man, but in the earth itself. It is the earth breaking forward, revealing the world that it bore within itself, that grants Man the truth he knows and the errors he does not. And so it is not Man that interprets, that thinks, that speaks, that acts, but the earth itself.⁽⁶⁵⁾ Our thoughts think us, not we them.

Far from being located in a human will, freedom is the world's happening, a way of being that lets things be the things they are, all according to their time and place. However, this is not a justification for fatalism, for accepting injustice, exploitation, violence, and destruction. On the contrary.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Far from being a passive response to the world, a justification of the negligence and indifference toward things that finds its conclusion in the destruction of the earth and the depravity of modern work, freedom is the call to spare and preserve, to nurture and cultivate. To let friendship and well-being happen; because only then does truth happen. Being in the world is a call to not only be with others, to care for them, but to nurture the whole world.

As Fred Dallmayr has argued, "the genuine or unperverted exercise of freedom is shown to be a persistent tendency or inclination toward the good life, that is, toward human reconciliation and peace . . ."⁽⁶⁷⁾ By living in solidarity with other people (and, Dallmayr neglects to mention this, the whole earth), by being friendly toward the world, truth happens, and the earth is set free. This good life cannot happen alone, but only with others, because it is only with their cooperation and help that truth, as friendship, can happen. Friendship needs a place to be expressed, felt, realized. Only when such a place is opened up, are we free.

A public space, as Hannah Arendt, has argued too, is essential, because it is there that we become aware of freedom--and its opposite. Freedom happens in a public space not through the expression, development, and realization of choice or sovereignty, but through the happening of truth. In fact, freedom and sovereignty are not identical, but opposites, cannot even exist simultaneously. "Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the 'general will' of an organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce."⁽⁶⁸⁾ Freedom is not the possibility of choice, the exercise of sovereignty, the assertion of the will, it is the way people are with each other and the whole universe, it is the way they let it happen. They can either let it happen in a free way, that is in friendship, poetry, and song, or they can try to control it. Truth can happen in friendship, it is impossible with control.

In order to dwell free, humanity must come to know how the archytecture that its patriarchs have built with will and domination conceal and seal off the an-archy of the earth.⁽⁶⁹⁾ It must recognize that patriarchal metaphysics cuts it off from the physis, the earth on which it dwells. To live free, humanity must build not according universal and eternal truths, but according to the dispersed and an-archical truth that the earth brings forth in its time and place. Truth must cease to be universal and eternal and become temporal and local, cease drawing everything around the orbit of a summoning center and let chaos be. It must, in short, open itself up to what presents itself. An-archy must replace patriarchy's totalitarian claim of being the originary archy.

It is through wandering ways of thinking that humanity gains freedom, accepts its errors, breaks free of its archy, deconstructs its centers, and attains the truth of its mystery. Unafraid to encounter mystery, accepting its shadows, never forgetting its errancy, thinking freely lets the an-archy of the earth break forward, Being be, the world world. In this, thinking stands opposed to mere reason, which, clinging to its purity, denies its shadows.

Tracing inconspicuous furrows in language, thinking is a friendly openness that does not disrupt the concealing mystery, the earth that makes all things possible, but draws it unbroken into the openness of understanding and truth. But while thinking regards the world with gentleness, it is not necessarily kind to the sophistry of reason.⁽⁷⁰⁾

Standing opposed to reason, thinking must, as the breaking forward of the earth, be discordant and disruptive, letting strange and unfamiliar thoughts rise up against the organization of reason and common sense.

To be free is not to be at the origin of one's actions, the rational self-willing cause of all that one is, but rather to let the world world, the thing thing. As Fred Dallmayr has argued, even though the Thinker has refused to develop an explicit political theory, this conception of freedom does have definite implications for political action.⁽⁷¹⁾ Subverting subjectivity, modernist notions of causality, the correspondence theory of truth, he subverts the archytecture of almost all our institutions. In the modern age institutions ranging from the scientific, to the educational, to the political, to the family are built around the understanding in some way that people are free when they can control their environment, whether social, personal, or natural, and make it submit to their will.

Following the Thinker's reading of the modern age, there are many ironies built into our various institutions quest for freedom. We can state the irony this way, if freedom is control, then control is freedom. To be free, we must be able to control every aspect of ourselves that we want to free. Or, in other words, we become authors of our life only to the extent that we are controlled by it, to the extent that our thoughts, our actions, our beliefs, our relationships, and whatever are all controllable, subject to causal manipulation. Modern freedom is very demanding. It has a lot of disciplines shadowing it, a lot of institutions built around protecting it. People must be made rational, responsible, orderly, law abiding, cooperative, normal, and so on. So they are put in institutions that produce these qualities--the school, the military, the factory, the government. And each one of these disciplines authorizes its shadow, people who fail these disciplines. They are read as irrational, irresponsible, disorderly, delinquent, uncooperative, subversive, and perverted. And housed in institutions for the mad, the criminal, the deformed, the politically incorrect. Those out-of-control people.

To get control their lives, people must be disciplined, forced to be free, or freedom, that is to say, control, will not be theirs. If people are not disciplined, they are not available for production or for us to control, and so we are all less free, less able to control our world, as a result. Perhaps it is because "our" freedom depends upon their submission, our control upon their being controllable.

Political elections in America, according to liberal political theory, are supposed the means by which our government re-presents individual choice, makes the government subject to popular will. Makes the state legitimate and sovereign. But in practice, thanks to modern technology, elections reveal something entirely different from individual choice. Deploying the very latest in political technology, the candidates compete against each other by means of fund drives, public polls, voter analyses, political commercials, and professionally written stump speeches. They struggle with each other to exploit class resentments, sexual and economic insecurities, racial hostilities, and chauvinistic sentiments the public's mind, and then they convert the hatred, fear, or resentment that they have unleashed into political support. Issues are debated not to explore all their implications, to make an informed decision, to enlighten the public, or, especially, to reveal truth, but to invoke symbols and prejudices, inflame emotions, and caricature opponents. When they are over with, American elections establish nothing so clearly as which candidate has the greater power to read, manipulate, and control the public. No one can say that truth has in any sense happened, except, of course, the truth that we are dominated by something far removed from ourselves.

That is not the only institution that truth does not happen in. So that it can turn more control over to the individual, and promote consumer sovereignty in the marketplace, the liberal state draws a sharp line between private and public, the government and the economy, and lets the market be free. That freedom of the marketplace is privately controlled, assumed for the most part by the multinational corporations. And the elites of these corporations are not bashful about asserting their discipline, or their power. At the slightest whim, accountable to no one but themselves, the corporate authorities will lay off tens of thousands workers, speed up assembly lines, displace workers with new technology, move factories overseas, pollute the workplace or the environment with deadly chemicals, or defraud the consumer with dangerous or useless products. And then call this "free enterprise." Of course it is. To them. They control the whole production process. And, of course, they rise up with indignation as soon as someone would limit their authority over their assets, their workers, their consumers, or their environment. That would, shades of Marxism, be a limitation of their freedom, their right to read the whole world as their utility. And they would be right. Freedom depends on control.

Unhappily, none of this would be much improved or significantly changed if somehow the control of production were socialized and then democratized, for that would only universalize the tyranny of control. It would not free anyone from the demands of control, only make control a universal possession. Even if freedom's disciplines are something we choose for ourselves, something we reflectively consent to and will, they still assert their demand on us, subjecting us to their logic, their imperatives, and their truths. If we are free, then we are controlled. Seeking freedom this way, the Thinker would argue, we are not free. Cannot be because we are seeking control.

Freedom, thought in its most profound way, is not control, but friendship, not authority or hierarchy or patriarchy, but thinking in a way that lets differences be. Freedom is a friendly way of being. The way true friends are with each other--sparing, caring, loving. They leave each other be, free of control, manipulation, dishonesty--free to become the best they can be. Freedom as control, whether Liberal or Marxist, is a profoundly unfriendly way of being. Seeking to control things, they both set upon them, challenging them to become something else than they are, demanding that they become useful to something distant to themselves. Instead of letting them find their own meaning, they impose the archytecture of their unqualified way. Everything becomes a means to this freedom, turning everything--people, animals, nature--into its slave, and thus, its enemy. For how can you be a friend to anything you control? The only relationship that freedom as control can know is suggested by the words, struggle, war, conquest, domination, and then, manipulation, deception, submission, subjugation, and exploitation. There is nothing friendly about freedom as control, even when it happens as democracy and voting, and so there is nothing free about it. Only enemy's, opponents, victims, and victors glare at each other in this world of control. And no truth can happen in that kind of place.

For truth to happen the world must world in a way that cultivates inherent worth, equality, difference, assured respect, careful listening, thoughtful meditation, and peaceful engagement. Fear, hierarchy, resentment of domination, inequality, metaphysical judgment, the possibility of rejection, exclusion, and humiliation all work against the happening of truth. It is not enough to give people control over their lives, as some forms of democracy attempt to do. Much more than that, they must be friendly and peacefully engaged, not only to each other, but to the whole world. The birds in the sky, the fish of the deep, the animals of the land, the mountains in the mist, the stars above. All must be listened to, respected, and spared.

Though there is a danger of idealizing them, American Indians lived this way. One of the political institutions that they gave the world is the caucus (the word comes from the Algonquian languages). In a caucus people talk with each other in a friendly way without ever voting until a consensus is reached. They often last a long time because it is important for everyone to be heard, to work out their problems, to feel sure that all of their concerns are respected. In comparison with even democratic procedures, caucus's are less divisive and combative, because all the participants are assured of their worth and do not risk humiliation.⁽⁷²⁾

The Indians treated the rest of the earth the way they treated each other in caucus's. Animals were talked to, taken into account, as were the mountains, the trees, the waters, and everything else. A group of deer, according to one old man in a novel by James Welch, talked to him "about days gone by." They were not happy with the way things are. "They know what a bad time it is. They can tell by the moon when the world is cockeyed."⁽⁷³⁾ Gary Snyder, a contemporary poet, advocates a kind of ultimate democracy that includes the nonhuman, the other. Plants and animals are given place and voice in this democracy through rituals and dances, and perhaps through shamans who become them, then return with their understanding of the world.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Many modern humans, raised by the claims of science and patriarchy, may find it strange to include all the earth in their community, may wonder about the legitimacy of a state that evoked of all the plants and animals in its decisions, but perhaps until we do this, truth will not happen.

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CHAPTER 3

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The ancient masters of science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.⁽⁷⁵⁾

Frankenstein's professor in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

It would seem that modern technology, unlike ancient technology, is based upon, depends on, and is the consequent of the exact mathematics of modern science, the practical application of what science is in theory. Ancient technology, it is true, did not rely on science and mathematics to do what it did, and so could be a handicraft, the concrete application of everyday knowledge. But the Thinker maintains that this understanding modern science and technology have of their relationship should be reversed.⁽⁷⁶⁾ It is not science that makes technology possible, it is the technical ordering of the world, its archytecture that makes everything over into man's utility, that makes modern science possible. Technology is the way the modern world worlds, and mathematics is only a means in that way.

Besides, most new discoveries are made, not because they have been anticipated by science, but because someone has perfected or developed the experimental apparatus that presents the data either in a different, more precise, way, or because someone has developed a new technique or procedure for dealing with the data. As Bob Ackermann and others have argued, instruments, or technical apparatus are an essential moment in a dialectic that moves between data, instruments, and theory.⁽⁷⁷⁾ For instance, new data domains are uncovered as the techniques for producing them are perfected and developed. A slight improvement in technique will sometimes produce anomalous facts, previously ignored because the technique that made them was not judged sophisticated enough to explain the abnormality, cannot be explained by prevailing theory, but can only be understood by a different theory. It is the craftsmanship, the technical character, of science that guides its development, and determines its truth.

According to the Thinker, "science," as we understand it today, is fundamentally different from the doctrina and scientia of the Middle Ages, and especially from the Greek epistemi.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Unlike modern science, Greek science was not exact in calculation or measurement, nor did it need to be to respond to the things present to it. We cannot claim, then, that our science is more true because it is more exact, more mathematical, than theirs. Nor can we say Galileo's doctrine of free falling bodies is true and Aristotle's teaching that light bodies strive upward is false. That is like saying that Shakespeare's poetry is more advanced than that of Aeschylus's. Because of the different technologies, the different ways the world worlds in different times, we cannot say that our science is more correct than another time's or that it has progressed beyond it. Between the world of the Greeks and our world there lies a break, a gap of incommensurable understanding, that cannot be bridged by continuities of measurement and development.⁽⁷⁹⁾

Even if it were, it is hard to know what should be measured. It may well be that in terms of fulfilling emotion need and promoting psychic well being, hardly an irrelevant consideration, the ancient Minoan civilization was far in advance of our own. They seem to have found a joy and meaning in life, and a tranquil acceptance of death and pain, according to those who have studied them, that totally eludes all modern civilizations. It was a social order in which, writes Nicolas Platon, "the fear of death was almost obliterated by the ubiquitous joy of living."⁽⁸⁰⁾ And there are existing today "primitive" cultures that do not experience mental disease of any sort. Thus, to understand the nature of modern science and its technology we must free ourselves from the tired habit of comparing the new science with the old solely in terms of degree and progress, of judging the past in terms of an archytecture that only modern reason knows.

Science is technology, a way of knowing things because it depends on the scientific method, as we saw in the last chapter, for establishing the truth of its claims. Things are true for science because the correct method, that is to say the politically correct technology, has been followed. Every technique or procedure of knowledge, by the fact that its own way is followed, determines beforehand that which is, the world that worlds there.⁽⁸¹⁾ Through the ruling governance of the world's worlding, it uncovers the things--natural events, reactions, processes--appropriate to it and locates them in their unique ordering. And it casts everything else into the shadow, either actively through repression, or unknowingly through concealment.

For example, modern physics, the paradigm science of modernity, uses mathematics obsessively. But it can use mathematical technique only because it already is mathematical.⁽⁸²⁾ In its world, things are present and understood exclusively in terms of its mathematics. This is quite in contrast to the Greeks, who, while being excellent mathematicians and who included the great master Euclid among their number, did not understand physics as numerical or calculative mathematics. Aristotle, for example, did not use numbers or equations to explain the physics of things.

For the Greeks, ta mathemata meant that which man knows in advance in his observation of whatever is and in his relation with things, whether it was the corporeality of bodies, the vegetable character of plants, the animality of animals, the humanness of man, as well as the exactness of numbers. Just because numbers are the most familiar and striking of the already known, does not mean that originally the mathematical is totally encompassed by numbers and calculating. On the contrary. As the already known, the mathematical had a much more expansive domain, covering many more qualities and properties than are contained in numerical exact formal systems. That experience of mathematics has been lost in the shadow modern technology casts.

When Galileo was developing his idea of inertia, he did not passively observe the movement of things as they naturally occurred, as Aristotle would have, but rather he set up an artificial idea, a hypothetical universe that existed only in the mind.⁽⁸³⁾ By means of this utopia, which removed such variables as air resistance and friction from the experiment, he reduced the pure inertial movement of things to a mathematical formula. Creating a placeless place in his mind, he stipulated a numerical world that became the perspective from which all of nature was to be plotted out and understood. Despite nothing in nature behaving exactly as the formulas predicted, despite their utter unreality, Galileo's mathematics have overwhelmingly been accepted as true, at least in non-relativistic normal circumstances, by generations of scientists ever since. The mathematical projection, out of its own ruling, provides its own standards of exactness.⁽⁸⁴⁾ And now the world is governed by the utopian expectation of mathematics, without appeal to any other standard. It is indeed ironic that Aristotle, a far less utopian thinker than any modern scientist, has for centuries been vilified for being a poor empiricist.⁽⁸⁵⁾

In general, physics is the knowledge of material bodies in motion. And if the archy that governs physics is calculable, if everything that it encounters--every motion, every reaction, every weight, whatever--is quantified measured, and subjected to calculation, then that is what nature becomes--something mathematical, numerical, and formalizable. Motion becomes a measurable change of place, and no motion or direction of motion is superior to any other. Nor is any place, in this placeless utopia, superior to any other. All forces are defined according to their consequences, their quantifiable, measurable, effects of transformation. Causality becomes understood as a mere bringing about rather than a bringing forth. All events are only inasmuch as they fit within this utopian projection; outside it they are not. This projected ordering of nature into the mathematical finds its guarantee in every technique applied to the body of nature. What will be learned is already known by its mathematics, and its value is determined by its measure and formal exactness.

It is, thus, the mathematical projection that makes possible our mechanized and rationalized world by reducing the fourfold modes of occasioning to mechanical causality, a simple linkage of material cause and effect. In order for it to attain the rigor that it demands of itself, for it to place itself in its utopia, mathematical reasoning must remain within the framework of its initial premises, drawing upon no assumptions, tacit or otherwise, that were not explicitly postulated at the outset. Modern mathematics is to the core of its nature axiomatic, a formalizable procedure played out within explicit and unambiguous rules of organization. Abstracting itself from all external meaning, seeking to eliminate any appeal to evidence that rests on intuition, modern mathematics becomes nothing but an internally organized and tightly specified configuration of symbols and procedures.⁽⁸⁶⁾ These symbols and procedures are so highly organized and tightly specified that a machine, if it were sophisticated enough and properly programmed, could perform all the operations of mathematics automatically.

From the beginning it was as if the whole necessity of modern mathematics was to advance itself to the point where it became a gigantic, infinitely exacting, machine that could automatically grind out all the truths of mathematics, completely eliminating the creative role of the mathematician. It is no accident that our age has created the computer. It was a machine made necessary, if at first only in metaphor, by the destiny of mathematics itself.

As it is with a mechanic who is creating a well running machine, the task of the modern mathematician is to create a complete system without any contradictions in its axioms. (This is a generalization, I must admit. Some modern mathematical systems, like those developed by Kurt Godel, are unavoidably inconsistent and incomplete. Mechanical procedures break down in it. But this anomaly does nothing to change the character of the reign of mathematics in our world.⁽⁸⁷⁾) Because the truth of mathematics rests on its own internal structure, and not on any form of external evidence or intuition, the truth of any one conclusion, however small or insignificant, is totally dependent on the integrity of the whole structure. The truth of mathematics, thus, depends solely on its consistency, its mastery of contradiction and ambiguity, its total repression of its shadow. A machine is useless, worn out, or broken if the interactions of its assembly do not by themselves produce the desired result. When you wash your clothes in an automatic washing machine, you expect the machine to go through a decision procedure, filling up, agitating, spinning, rinsing, agitating, spinning, all by itself. As with the washing machine, mathematical procedure, following the axioms and definitions imprinted within it, must produce unvarying results, universal truths that any mathematician would come to if they used the correct procedure. Modern mathematics is pure technique, a total reduction to mechanical form and causality.

But the rigorous demands of exactness in physics as mathematical research, the Thinker tells us, are not simply reducible to quantified precision. It seeks quantified precision only because the things present to its reasoning demand mathematical rigor.⁽⁸⁸⁾ If the object of research cannot be measured with quantified precision, as they cannot be in the life sciences, the human sciences, or the historical sciences, then the rigor of mathematical research is satisfied with an analytical and formal discourse. The lack of quantification in these sciences is not a deficiency, but only the appropriate response to the formal nature of this kind of research.⁽⁸⁹⁾

In all these sciences, physics, as well as the life, human, and historical sciences, science becomes mathematical research through the projected plan and through the securing of the plan in the rigor of rational procedure, the technology of accumulating knowledge. If the world mathematical exactness projects is to become secure, objective in its truth, then it must be able to encompass all the facts that exactness uncovers under the rule of laws. For it is only within the ordering of rule and law, the techniques of mathematical procedure, that facts become clear as the facts that they are. Facts in all their plentitude and diversity are mediated and made possible only by the rules, laws, and instruments of measurement that anticipate them.⁽⁹⁰⁾

Clarifying itself based on what is already rational to itself, explanation is the encompassing of facts under rules and laws. As such, it is always two-fold in its nature. It accounts for an unknown by means of a known, and at the same time it verifies the known by means of the unknown. A new technique of knowing unique to modern science, the experiment, is the technique that modern science uses to explain the known and uncover the unknown.⁽⁹¹⁾ The experiment is possible only after the knowledge of nature has been transformed into a calculable presence and science is understood as mathematical explanation.

Although they were often very careful in their observation of things, and demanded compelling evidence for the assertion of any claim, neither medieval doctrina nor Greek episteme performed experiments as modern science does. Contrary to common belief, the Thinker argues, Aristotle was a very careful observer, observing things as they presented themselves, their qualities, their modifications under changing circumstances, and so how things as a rule behaved. He was a very good "empiricist," describing the limits and possibilities of observation, the circumstances under which it was distorted or clear. But Aristotle's "empiricism" remains fundamentally different from the modern experiment, and it remains so even when ancient and medieval observation works with number and measure, or used apparatus and instruments.

Despite seeming similarities that have been interpreted as the origin of the modern experiment in ancient knowledge, a decisive difference remains, separating their techniques of knowledge from ours. "Twisting the lion's tail," as Francis Bacon would say, the modern experiment disturbs things, separates them from their context and subjects them to rigorously planned control to reveal the mechanical causes determining them. Invoking this utopian perspective, it begins by laying down a law as a basis for the experiment, abstracting the thing from the forces, variables, or complications that make impossible a formal observation of the facts or any possibility of the determining causes that will either prove or disprove the law. Where Aristotle sought to observe things in their natural condition, surrounded by all the four modes of occasioning in all their complexity and interplay so that he could know the thing as it is, the modern experiment, invoking its utopian world, establishes artificial, controlled, and planned circumstances, eliminating the complexity and interplay of "irrelevant" variables based on an already known law so that it can know the simple mechanical causes of the thing. It is this controlling based on an already known, this reduction to mechanical procedure, that makes the truth of the modern experiment mathematical, and distinguishes it from ancient and medieval observation.

Contrary to the experiment's mythology, its self-proclaimed progress is not a progress that all ages could acknowledge and revere. By abstracting itself from the natural situation of the thing, by reducing its truth to a mechanical cause or a mathematically formalizable entity, the experiment conceals many things. For instance, the use modern Agribusiness makes of chemicals to kill directly pests that damage crops could only have arisen and been acknowledged as an improvement of technique over the older methods because the experiment concealed the true complexity of nature from itself. Aristotle, for instance, would not have been convinced that the development of a chemical that kills a pest simply and directly would be a useful tool, an advance beyond old techniques, because, by abstracting the insect from its environment, the experiment ignores the place of the insect in the nature of things, making it vulnerable to external consequences that it could not anticipate. What other insects would the chemical kill? What effects would that have on other life forms? What would it do to the soil after many years of use? What would it do to the farmer, her state, her gods? In order for a chemical pesticide to be judged an improvement for Aristotelian science it would have to open itself up to many more questions than it does in modern experimental science. An Aristotelian science might well reveal that organic farming is a much better technique than chemical farming because it looks at a technique from the vantage point of its place in the whole of things. Chemical farming can be revealed as an improvement or as progress only by invoking the utopianism, the unsituated perspective, of modern science.

It must, however, be cautioned that the already known, the projected law that controls the experiment, is not an arbitrary imagining. It comes from the presencing of things drawn out of nature and present to the plan of the experiment. The experiment is a technique that, in its projected plan and execution, is founded on previous experiments and the things made present in them. And the more exact the projection of nature and the things revealed in it, the more exact becomes the possibility of the experiment. The experiment is a technique of knowledge that spirals inward, ever more exactly establishing the conditions and truth of its own knowledge.

Although the social sciences do not always attempt to trace facts back to laws and rules, they never limit themselves to merely reporting the facts. Just as in the physical sciences, the social sciences aim to fix, objectify, and render stable the object of its discourse--human beings.⁽⁹²⁾ And if this process does not always yield universal laws, it never fails to compare everything with everything, explaining everything against the ground plan of history, subjecting human life to the calculation of cause and effect, to the measure of norms and equivalences, the ordinary and the average. The unique, the rare, the great, is eclipsed and rendered invisible by being incomprehensible in the presence of the norm.

As science as experimental research progresses, building on itself through ever more exact experimentation, it relies increasingly on itself, turning inward and relying on proven techniques, methods, and procedures. A fact gains currency and value only because it arose out of an accepted technique, a method that a community or institution of scientists believe will produce truth.⁽⁹³⁾ Because truth arises out of correct method, that is to say an institutionally approved method, science as experimental research is of necessity institutional research.⁽⁹⁴⁾ Results from experiments must be precisely detailed, communicated to other scientists, and reproducible by other scientists. All this takes a closed community of specialists who write articles for one another, talk with one another, and meet one another at conventions. Based on approved techniques, these institutions develop bureaucracies for the funding of experimental apparatus and for selecting those who will receive funding and those who will not, as well as bureaucracies to decide whose results will be published and whose will not. Science as experimental research produces a regime of truth enforced through disciplinary bureaucracies of correct method.⁽⁹⁵⁾Dissent from the established reign of truth is not treated nicely. Tenure may be denied, funding for experiments may disappear, professional stature may be eroded, and the victim stuck with the all the psychic burdens of being a "failure" and an outsider. As a result of this "professionalism," dissident ideas are often quickly banished to the shadows for reasons that have nothing to do with "good" science. And the reign orthodox truth continues, secure from threats against it.

As the institutional character of scientific research extends and consolidates its reign of truth, it more and more establishes the priority of method and technique over whatever is. Facts are true not because they are, not because they rise up from the earth and present themselves in their temporality, but because they are established by an institutionally accepted technique or method. Truth comes not from things thinging, from the breaking forward of the earth, from attending to the whisper of the world worlding, but from a regime of truth that conquers and subjects everything to the reign of its method, its reason, and its technology.⁽⁹⁶⁾ Before this regime of truth that is science as experimental research everything is penetrated by rational method and made objective, and the gods whose presence formerly granted things their boundary, their interpretation and place in the order of things, and their sacred character are put to flight.

Through the institutions it calls into being, the techniques it uses to validate its truth, and the rigor of its method, science as experimental research disciplines and creates a new kind of knower--the researcher. The erudite scholar as well as the thinker and prophet disappear, silenced by the institutions of experimental science. The researcher who takes their place no longer needs a library at home, a meditative place for thinking and reading, and certainly not a desert to retreat to. Instead of seeking a silence to nurture the mystery, a place within herself to acknowledge her own shadow, the researcher is constantly on the move, negotiating at meetings of peers, collecting information at conventions, administrating and participating in the bureaucracies of the experiment.⁽⁹⁷⁾

With the result that the researcher is quite unaware of herself and of the way that her own inner life is projected onto the world she studies. The ancient alchemists, who are often dismissed by the modern researcher for their wasted pursuits, were quite aware of how their inner life was transformed by their outer experiments on nature. Writes Paracelsus: "When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him."⁽⁹⁸⁾ The way the outer is treated is the way the inner is treated, and if the researcher sees in nature only something to be experimented with, something to be used, manipulated, and measured, she will cast into her shadow all the parts of herself that cannot be used, manipulated, and measured. The Alchemists approached their experiments in prayer, awe, and reverence because they knew what modern scientists have denied themselves, that they would become their work. Alchemy was not so much an effort to dominate nature, to extract gold from straw, as it was to transform the soul. Making gold out of straw was only a metaphor for them for making themselves into gold.

Science as experimental research is able to forget what the Alchemists knew because it produces and constitutes the thing as an unconnected object, something distinct and separate from the human subject as knower. Cutting knower off from known, seeking to control the object of knowledge as much as possible, believing the known has no relation to the knower than the one they impose on it, modern experimental research and the researchers who pursue it can only have a relation of domination to the world. All other possibilities are cast into the shadow.

Cut off from the object in every way except the experiment, the subject as knower gains knowledge of the object through representation, re-presenting the thing in the calculating projections of science as experimental research.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Nature, by being calculated in advance as scientific object, and humanity, by being elevated to the status of scientific subject, are "set in place," produced as the doubles of a way of being that makes possible a rational explanation of everything.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Only insofar as the things of these sciences become objects of representation for subjects can they exist at all. In the world of science as experimental research, things simply are not unless they are as formal representations posited by subjects. It is only as representation, secured by the technology of the experiment, that science as research attains certainty of its truth.

Thus, for the Thinker, Descartes prepared the metaphysics--Nietzsche included--for the whole of the modern world, a metaphysics that in its relentless quest for objectivity, its production of the subject, and its use of the experiment as a value neutral means for knowing the truth of things, is unique among all the ages of the world.⁽¹⁰¹⁾

The unique thing about the modern age is not just that humanity has freed itself from the obligations and limits of the Middle Ages, but that the very truth of humanity itself has changed--humanity has become subject, or again, Man, in a way never before possible. The Thinker understands the subject as the Greeks thought it, as hypokeimenon, as that-which-lies-before, gathering as ground or foundation everything into itself.⁽¹⁰²⁾ Originally the Greek subject lacked any special relationship to humanity and none at all to the I.

However, when, as in the metaphysics of Descartes, Man becomes the archytect of the world, the underlying reality of all that is, Man either individually, or later in Marxism, collectively, becomes subject. When Man becomes subject, the comprehension of what is as a whole changes, breaking radically with the worlds of all previous ages. The world becomes understood as picture, as re-presentations of things gathered into objectivity and set in place before a human subject.⁽¹⁰³⁾ To understand the world as picture is not just to see it as picture, an imitation of the thing, but, much more, to be involved with it as picture, to dwell in a world of pictures. In the world as picture everything in it becomes present only as representation, an archytecture built by Man.

As an example, consider a home video camera and screen, a technical device of our time that has gained widespread use. Even though some of us might have momentary difficulties making it work, almost everyone can eventually, though after some effort and usually after reading the instructions. And everyone understands what they are seeing when they watch it and what the image it presents is. They see themselves if the movie is of them, their friends if the movie is of them. Anthropologists, however, recently came across a hunter-gather tribe that after being shown a home video of themselves reported seeing nothing but shadow and flashes of light on the screen, even though the anthropologists clearly saw pictures of the tribe going about its everyday activities.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ The tribe members actually could not see the representations of themselves, no matter how hard the anthropologists pressed them.

Having never experienced the world as picture, as re-presentable object, the tribal members could not experience any similarity or difference, any identity, between themselves and the representations of themselves. To them the world was an immediate temporal experience, in no way present as re-presentation. A re-presentation of their world was an impossible thing for them, an identity as equivalent of unequivalent things. They did not dwell amid the tools of representation, nor the identities between things that determine their use. And the thinging of the thing, the home video, simply could not occur for them, become present in their world. They were not gathered into the fourfold occurrence of our world as picture.

Perhaps not all to their loss. This same tribe could, the anthropologists observed with more than a little awe, travel through hundreds of miles of rain forest unerringly without a compass. Any Westerner would only have seen identical trees and would have been hopelessly lost. But the hunter gatherers saw differences--perhaps differences that no Western eye could ever see--that enabled them to see where to go.

The thing that is present to us, the home video, cannot be reduced to a pure mechanics of causality. Although the physics of perception, the photons that resulted in sense perception, were no doubt the same for both the anthropologists and the members of the tribe, they did not cause the thing, the re-presentation of tribal life, to present itself to the members of the tribe.

Since the world has become picture it has become possible to contrast a new age with the preceding one, to conceive of different "world views."⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ In the Middle Ages a different "world view" was unthinkable.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ For that which is, is created by God, the highest cause. To be is to be put into God's created order, to correspond to the will of God. And nothing is unless God wills it. The world of the Middle Ages could not conceive of things being placed before Man's knowing and always at his disposal. That would be usurping God's place, a sin of pride.

Even less could the Greeks have conceived of Man as subject or thought the world as picture. Parmenides said, as the Thinker translates it: "The apprehending of whatever is belongs to Being because it is demanded and determined by Being."⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Whatever is, thus, is because it arises and breaks forth from unconcealment, coming to presence before Man as the one who opens himself up and comes upon the thing. What is comes to be not because Man looks upon it, representing it to himself as a subjective perception, but rather what is comes to be because humanity is looked upon by that which is. To be human is to be beheld by the earth, to be drawn to the thing and borne along by it, even if it is to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord.

The early Greeks were called upon to gather, to save, and to preserve whatever came upon them, even sundering confusion. Because of their calling to preserve the world, even as sundering and an-archical confusion, the early Greeks could not live the world as picture. It would have required that everything be subjected to a rational ordering posited by Man. Nevertheless, the Thinker points out that when Plato, radically separating appearance and reality, defined the appearance of whatever is as eidos, aspect or view, his thought, often ruling indirectly and in concealment, destined far in advance the world's Man's becoming picture.

In contrast to the pre-Socratic mode of knowing things, modern representing brings what is present at hand before Man, forcing it into an exclusive relation with humanity. It is only through Man, his will to power, his mode of production, his sense data, his intersubjective consciousness, that things are. For the first time in the ages of humanity upon the earth, Man decisively and expressly sets himself up as archytect of the world, narcissistically making himself the origin and ruling archy for everything. And so, it is only through Man's mastering himself as a species being for itself, or setting aside the religious delusions of his super ego, or becoming the overman, or whatever, that he fulfills his truth.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ For the first time humanity, as Man, comes into being.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾And his calling from out of himself is to become master and archy-ical lord over all the earth, to subject to control all that has eluded him in his alienated consciousness, his unconscious delusions, his lies that he has told himself in his weakness. Separated from himself by age old delusions, Man must come to himself by seeing all that is as only himself, master and underlying truth of the world.

It is only because Man has become subject that it becomes necessary for him to ask of himself the specific nature of his mastery over the earth. Is it as an "I" contained by its own preferences and freed by its own arbitrary choosing that Man becomes subject, or does it happen as a "we," a collective self through which each sees itself as a whole and attains its freedom? Is it as individual or community, as unique personality or mere group member in the corporate body, as nation state, or race, or world united humanity, that Man is subject?⁽¹¹⁰⁾ It does not matter. The discourses of Man divide themselves amid these debates in a smothering confusion, all of them united in a quest for archy-ical human mastery of all the world. Life is lived as either a struggle to become a self-sufficient individual free of social entanglements, perhaps as a capitalist property owner or citizen of the liberal state, or else it is lived in the struggle against individualism and for the community, a socialized consciousness, as a goal governing all achievement, usefulness, and possibility of meaning. Individualism and collectivism are doubles of each other, complementing and constituting each other in their differences, united in the knowledge of Man as archy-ical subject, the underlying reality of all that is. The debate between the two is but a debate of the time, containing no possibility of a decisive encounter with the realities and dangers of the modern world.⁽¹¹¹⁾

Within the dialogue of Man a strange and revealing irony occurs. The more Man conquers the world and becomes its subject, making himself ever more the center around which the thing orbits, the more subjective and impetuously arbitrary his observation of it becomes, for in the thing Man encounters only himself, the one who, as its archytect, imposed upon it its order and rank. His care to draw a line of difference between himself and the thing, so that he can be its master, comes to nothing, and comes to it all the more certainly the more efficient and complete his conquest of it. The observation of the world becomes an observation of Man, science becomes anthropology, and humanism becomes the doctrine of the age.⁽¹¹²⁾

Only possible in the world as picture, humanism is a moral-aesthetic anthropology, according to the Thinker, an anthropology not in the sense of an investigation of Man by a natural science, but in the sense of an archeology of Man that explains and values all that is according to Man's subjectivity.⁽¹¹³⁾ Since the 18th century, anthropology has increasingly set its mark on discourse, and the proof of this is that whatever is, is interpreted as a world view, an exclusively human Weltanschauung. When the world becomes a picture for Man, a subjective production, the position of Man as viewer, constituted and limited by his historical situation, becomes a world view, one subjective view among many possible. It goes like this: You have your opinion and I have mine, and any disagreement we have between us is not that important because each position is but personal preference, something that we choose to have, not universal truth. We are each the masters of our own beliefs, and, since we are polite people, we respect each other's territory.

This insistence on individual subjectivity is, no doubt, the impetus behind the liberal state's tolerance for different religions and its protection of speech and assembly.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Such tolerance was impossible for the Greeks who dismissed "other world views" as barbaric, the noisy babble of outsiders, or for the Christian Middle Ages that labeled them sin and conquered them with the salvation of true teachings. But the liberal state's tolerance is a limited tolerance; seeking to expand the reign of subjectivity by drawing a sharp line between subjectivity and objectivity, it is unable to accept the truth of any opinion that does not consider itself subjective. It cannot because such beliefs are chosen, a matter for the will, and not for external verification.

Liberal tolerance was a result of a realization that the religious persecution that happened is such events as the English Civil war and the St. Bartholmew's Day Massacre was not about truth, not the kind of truth that worldly science could establish, but about subjective preference. The participants may have been convinced of the truth of their views, but the age was convinced only that they were subjective, and that by treating them as subjective people would become more tolerant. In the age of the world as picture, only that which secures, organizes, and totalizes Man as the guide and underlying reality of all that is, is allowed to expand to its full extent. The world as view contains all safely within the iron cage of its tolerance, making the world secure for Man's control.

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CHAPTER 4

TECHNOARCHY

The desire for knowledge has been transformed among us into a passion which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own extinction. It may be that mankind may eventually perish from this passion for knowledge.⁽¹¹⁵⁾

Michel Foucault

Modern technology is a revealing of truth, a way in which the world worlds, the thing is brought forth and assumes its identity. Unlike the truth of the early Greeks, and almost certainly the truth of the Minoans, modern truth does not let the thing be itself, shadow and all, but instead imprisons it, demanding that it become Man's utility. The old windmill supplies energy for humans, but it need not take from the wind anything that the wind, as physis, does not freely give. Its sails may spin gently in the summer's breeze, becoming a blurred whirl in the winter blizzard, until its tail sail turns it to meet the spring winds that come heavy with the rain for the growth of the towering tree, the blooming flower, and the grass that feeds the deer. It need not disturb the north winter wind that brings a numbing frost, and it can let the summer afternoon shower go its way after wetting the wild flowers of the field that grow around it. At peace with the seasons, it need not steal energy from the air currents and make them into something other than they are in order to be.

In contrast, the strip mine must imprison the earth, make it totally subject to the human command, before it puts out coal for Man. Locked up in the prison of a purely human archy, the earth becomes a coal mine for Man, the soil a mineral deposit for Man, the sky a place for Man to dispose of the wastes made by burning coal. Indeed, all the earth becomes a coal mine now because it is necessary for it to supply the energy to spin the turbines that supply the electricity to power the factories that supply the products that the consumer consumes that must be consumed in order for the worker to have work and for the owner to make money to pay off her debts to keep the economy healthy so that the state will have a sufficient tax base to build the war machines that are necessary to protect the coal mine. Nothing is left as it is or is unchallenged by the mastery of Man, the modern archy who, having represented everything to himself as his object, has the truth of all that is at his disposal. Originating in Man's representations, subjected to Man's command, everything becomes available for Man's utility.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

The prairies of the American West that the Indians formerly hunted upon and dug for roots, the fertile fields that the Indians of California cultivated and set in order, appear differently, are different, now than they were before the White Man came imprisoned them in his technological utopia.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ According an old holy Wintu woman:

The White People never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes. When we built houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me." But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the White people destroy all . . . How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? . . . Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore.⁽¹¹⁸⁾

She is right: our agribusiness sets upon the soil, and, as if it were nothing more than the use made of it, demands that it produce fiber, protein, vitamins, and calories.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ Herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers disrupt natural cycles, leaving the soil a poisonous chemical vat. The air is set upon to yield nitrogen and carbon dioxide; dammed and diverted, water is set upon to yield its power of growth; and the soil is set upon to yield its produce, then transformed into saline seep or eroded away.⁽¹²⁰⁾

The truth of things as representations projected by Man and made available as calculative utility is limited, constrained, and twisted into unanticipated forms by the regime of efficiency which Man subjects himself to. The coal that has to be hauled out of a strip mine is not sent for the fun of it, at the whim of its owners; it is supplied because it is useful, needed by some industrial process. It is stockpiled, that is to say, at the call of the system of producing things as a totality. What it is as a thing is contained and ordered within a system of efficiency and rationality that greatly exceeds it, one that is driven by economic and technical demands, social and political imperatives, that cover the whole earth.⁽¹²¹⁾ Because of the dangers of inefficiency to the global system of control, everything--every plant, mineral, animal, energy source, and human being--must be drawn into the systems that reason has built and rendered productive. Nothing can be left by itself; the security, rationality, and well-being of the whole system of control demands that it be brought into its ordering.⁽¹²²⁾

The archy that rules over the destiny of things throughout modern technology has a demanding, arrogant, and conquering character, challenging things to come forth and be as they must be for Man as technical master of the earth to continue to his destiny. The energies concealed in nature are challenged forth as Man's object, representation, and utility. They are transformed into the forms most useful for him, stored when and where it is necessary for him, then distributed to serve his end uses, which because they are many, interdependent, and complex, are switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about according to the imperatives of Man's reason are ways of revealing the truth of Man as father, origin, and command. As the modern archy, the one whose representation presents everything that is, whose command everything submits to, Man is that for which everything is organized, done, and accomplished.⁽¹²³⁾ It is his choice. And yet what is there to be organized, done, or accomplished? Nothing except Man, the patriarch's, possibility of command. Since there is no other origin or command to bring things forth, save Man, there is nothing to govern the bringing forth of things, save the possibility of Man's patriarchy. Nothing is for anything except command, more power, more control, more exploitation. Without anything to use all this power for, everything, then, becomes a means for something else. The revealing never comes to an end, a goal, or a purpose. Man may, at last, be subject, patriarch of all the world, but his subjectivity is empty of content, of anything to do. Is the end of the Rhine locked into supplying power for production in factories for the consumption of heat and light in the home, or is it there for the profits of the electrical industry, or the steel and chemical industry, then again might it not end in the security of the German state?⁽¹²⁴⁾ All these ends, these things that it all might be done for, fade into each other and are revealed as intermediate, dependent, and lost in an aimless confusion that must be mastered. Nevertheless, it all must be maintained, kept going. In order for Man to keep his position as master over things, he must regulate and secure things as they move about their interlocking paths, making sure they follow the most efficient course, the way most likely to preserve everything's utility for everything else. So much is this so, that reformulating, regulating, and securing become the chief characteristics of reason's way of revealing.

In the unconcealing of modern technology all things are revealed in the world as the reserved, ordered to stand by and submit to further ordering by Man and his reason. To be there for something else, whatever it is. To become whatever is needed. As the objects of Man's will, they no longer present themselves to us as things, gathered together by a care that is near at hand and responsive to the earth, but rather they come forward as constituent parts of a technical system that orders them over vast distances and compels them to revise themselves continually according to Man's patriarchy and fit within the shifting contexts of whatever command is commanded.

Hegel defined the machine as autonomous tool, immediately ready for the use that can be made of it, something that stood by itself and was for something, and the Thinker agrees that when this definition is applied to the tools of the craftsman it is appropriated because the craftsman, responding to the calling of the earth, uses her tools to respond to the thing before her, quite independent of any other consideration.⁽¹²⁵⁾ The tool is for something specific, nameable. But this definition does not reflect the way machines are now. Revealed as the Reserved, the machine is not autonomous, is not for anything in particular, any good; it does not respond to its place on earth, only to the placeless command. Shifting, pointless, and lost amid its revealing, it belongs to a technical system that itself is without center. In this, the modern machine or tool is sharply at odds with itself. An impossible contradiction that, despite its impossibility, nevertheless is.

A tool is something that is used for something else, a means for bringing a thing forth. It belongs to a situation, and that situation determines what the tool is--how it is made, how it will be used, when it is worn out, how it will be disposed of. Because they are a means for bringing something forth, they cannot be visualized or known apart from the world that they help bring forth, the place they happen at. An interpretation of their use, their purpose, and their meaning must be available for a tool to be a tool. By themselves they are nothing. A hoe is for tilling the earth and making it possible to bear fruit. Depending on the world that it is used in, it can reveal the earth's power to be fruitful or it can reveal the power of Man to impose his will upon it. A tool always refers to a world, a god as the Thinker would describe it in his more poetic works, which provides an interpretation of its use and gives meaning to its purpose.

A tool is for something, yet it is the fundamental character of our age, when everything has become a tool for Man, that our tools are for nothing. The thing that the modern tool brings forth, the purpose that gives the tool its meaning as tool, is only another tool, another instrument for Man's willing. The revealing never comes to an end, a god that would make the tool a tool by making it into a means for something. This is why nihilism, the purposeless and aimless willing of everything as a means for Man, is the ultimate truth of our age. And Man's patriarchy. For us in our use of things there is no god providing an interpretation of their use, nothing to tell us what a thing is for. Nothing is revealed by all our technology; truth does not happen.

It is Man, the tool user, through whom the challenging of the thing takes place, it is he through whom the thing is revealed as the Reserved, and it is he who accomplishes the thoughtless, purposeless, and nihilistic destruction of the earth. But, despite his arrogant illusions to the contrary, Man does not control unconcealing itself, decide, will, or cause the thing to come forth as the Reserved.⁽¹²⁶⁾ On the contrary, and this is most depressing, the Reserved precedes and posses Man, granting him its truth as will amidst the modern world's worlding. If the world has come to us and been interpreted as the lighting of Ideas since the time of Plato, it is not Plato, the writer who is the cause of this--he only responded to what presented itself to him. If the world now is, in its entirety, a tool for our use, it is not that way because we have willed it that way, but because that way is the way that has possessed us.

It is only because Man is already possessed by the ordering challenging that conquers the world as the Reserved that he dwells amidst it as such. And if Man is possessed by a world that is present as the Reserved, he himself becomes more profoundly and more terribly the Reserved, the object of his willing.⁽¹²⁷⁾ As John Kenneth Galbraith has written:

Our wants will be managed in accordance "with the needs of the industrial system"; the policies of the state will be subject to similar influence; education will be adopted to industrial need; the disciplines required by the industrial system will be the conventional morality of the community. All other goals will be made to seem precious, unimportant or antisocial.⁽128)

Fulfilling this need for control over humanity, we see human labor replaced by machines, because it is more gainful, and the unemployed treated little better than worn out machines, a useless clutter only grudgingly left any space at all.

The modern farmer may grow some of the same crops, work the same fields, and live in the same house as her grandmother, but unlike her grandmother, who grew a diversity of crops primarily for herself and her family and only secondarily for profit, the modern farmer is commanded by the aimless imperatives of profit making in Agribusiness. As a businessman or a worker she is subjected both to the market that organizes and fabricates the demand for food and to the market that supplies her with the technology of production that she uses. The food that she grows is grown not for the health of her family or those who she trades with, but for the cash necessary to pay off her debts and her interest on them, and to buy the equipment, fertilizer, chemicals, and fuel necessary for a cash crop. The cash crop bought from the farmers is, again, sold not for the health of the person that eats it, but for the profits of the food processing, transportation, advertizing, and retail industries. Because health is not the concern that gathers the crop up and sets it onto the table, many dangerous chemicals and additives are present in it to secure its profitability.

So much has the health and nutritive concern of food making disappeared from its production, that the cost of the wrapper for a loaf of bread is greater than the cost of the wheat in it. But this is not surprising, because the function of the wrapper as advertisement and preserver is to insure that its consumption is available on demand. The truth of the consumer as Reserved for the food industry is again demonstrated by the monstrous actions of the Nestle's corporation in the "under" developed world.

A dramatic reduction of demand for baby formula, one of Nestle's products, followed the end of the baby boom in the United States. To keep its factories going and its profits high, Nestle's began an advertizing campaign throughout the underdeveloped world. Bottle feeding was sold as a "modern" technique, much more sophisticated than breast feeding. However, because of conditions in the underdeveloped world--low per capita income, poor sanitary conditions, ignorance about modern technology--bottle feeding turned out to be entirely inappropriate, resulting in the death of tens of thousands of babies wherever it was used. Mothers could not afford the amount of formula necessary, so they diluted it with water, often unsanitary water, thinking that would be OK because the formula's powers, as they were presented in the advertisements, were so great. The result was malnutrition, disease, and death.⁽¹²⁹⁾

Both the farmer and the consumer are revealed as the Reserved by the food industry--the consumer because her consumption is a thing to be manipulated and controlled by advertizing technology, the farmer because her craft is measured by its usefulness to the food industry. "Inefficient" farmers go broke and become surplus farmers. The ugly truth of the farmer as Reserved by the food industry is best revealed by President Reagan's joke that we should keep the wheat and export the farmers.⁽¹³⁰⁾ From time to time, though, the farmer's work is dignified and surrounded with respect when her cash crops for export become a weapon, a tool to punish and control communist and third world countries that resist the will of our foreign policy managers.

Yet Man is not gathered into the Reserved as the energies of nature are because he is not passive before its onslaught. In subjecting the world to his will and making it into the Reserved, Man subjects himself to his reason and his destiny, driving technology forward. But the world itself, within which the ordering challenge unfolds, is not and never can be a human handiwork. The world worlds whenever humans open their eyes, unlocks their ears, and attends to what presents itself to them.⁽¹³¹⁾ In their work and their living, their meditations and their entreating, humans reveal the world, bringing its things forth from unconcealment in the earth. When humans reveal the thing, they are merely responding to the calling of the world, the breaking forward of the earth, even when they contradict it.

When Man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature within a web of his own pictures, he is already claimed by a way of revealing that requires him to approach nature as an object of research. And nothing will stop this way of revealing, even if, contradicting itself, the thing disappears into the nihilistic thinglessness of the Reserved, becoming no-thing in the endless web of reason's revealing.

Ordering and revealing the thing as the Reserved, modern technology is not anything Man does, then. He is gathered into it, captured by the world's worlding. The gathering of the thing, the truth of the world, specific to the modern age of technology the Thinker calls "Ge-stell," or "Enframing" as it is commonly translated.⁽¹³²⁾ Technoarchy, as I shall read, translate, and think it in order to draw it near to my own life, is the originary claim, the command and interpretation of the thing that governs the world, revealing it as the Reserved, a mere tool for Man's aimless patriarchy. The commanding origin enframes in that its interpreting assembles and orders things into being, trapping everything that it brings forth in a framework or system, ordering it for a use that is always restructured and revealed anew as Man's will.⁽¹³³⁾

Nihilistic throughout its whole extent, Technoarchy is the way of revealing that is the truth of modern technology, but it itself is nothing technological, since it, in its originary truth, is there before it is, and is in no way anything mechanical, calculative, or procedural. Making the calculating machine calculating, and rational procedure rational, it is what precedes Man's will and reveals the world as the Reserved, the truth producing the thing and presenting it as Man's utility.⁽¹³⁴⁾ A truth preceding Man, it is not, therefore, a human activity, nor a mere means within such activity, but a way of being governing how things are brought forth, a truth that knows everything as a coherence of forces available for exacting calculation and measurement. The truth of technology is not represented by gadgets, exotic tools, and technical accomplishments such as the computer, the space shuttle, or the nuclear reactor, but rather it is present as a ruling command that sets Man up as its origin, the patriarch of the world.

Contrary to popular opinion, far more radical revolutions in technology separate Parmenides from Aristotle, and the 16th century from the 18th century, than anything that has occurred in the last century. Between Parmenides and Aristotle and the 16th and 17th century, entirely different ways of being broke forth from the earth and came into their truth, separating the past from the present with a radical gap of incommensurability.⁽¹³⁵⁾ Amid all the supposed technical revolutions of the modern age, there is in fact complete continuity. All the technical accomplishments of our time have occurred within a way of being that has in its truth remained the same.

Our way of worlding was first revealed in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. As we saw, modern science's view of the world as picture, its separation of the world into subject and object, pursues and entraps the earth as a calculable coherence of forces. And it is experimental not because it is first and foremost empirical, but because it projects nature as something mathematically calculable and measurable in advance. The possibilities, that is, the variables formalized within its structure, of the experiment are ordered and structured in advance so that knowledge can be gained of how nature reveals itself when set up in this way.

But modern mathematical physics existed almost two centuries before the revolutions of modern technology started occurring. "How, then," the Thinker asks, "could it have it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its service?"⁽¹³⁶⁾ Although modern technology advances with the aid of the sciences, it does so only because the way has been prepared for it by the modern physical theory of nature. And this is precisely what the truth of modern technology does; it reveals things, pictures them or objectifies them, in a way that makes it possible for the sciences to know them. Although modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century, and machine-power technology develops only in the second half of the eighteenth century, the truth of technology is revealing and holding sway from the very start of the modern age.

The calling that gathers Man into Technoarchy is his destiny and his doom--his destiny because from the beginning of our world, he is sent on his way to it; his doom because the way to it obliterates all that he is in his truth. But destiny is never a fate that merely compels, for it is only in meeting its destiny, following the ways of the world worlding, that humanity finds its truth and its freedom.

As we said before, the truth of freedom is not connected with the will, collective or individual, or even in the causality of human willing. People do not come to their freedom by means of arbitrary choice, neither do they come to it in the constraint of law, nor do they come to it by means of a demystified fully rational and reflective consciousness; they come to it by sparing the world, preserving the mystery of the earth, and accepting their life.⁽¹³⁷⁾ People are free when they let truth happen.⁽¹³⁸⁾ An-archy describes this way of being. Seeking neither to command nor to trace its origin back to a universal and eternal principle, an-archy is a freeing presencing that conceals in a way that opens the thing up, letting the mysteries of the earth be what they are and the visible openness of the sky be what it is.

As Technoarchy, modern technology, too, is a way of revealing things, of coming to truth. It is our destiny, even if it denies itself its own truth. But, according to the Thinker, letting the world world does not mean that we must blindly and thoughtlessly push on with technology, nor does it mean that we must reject it, rebelling helplessly against it and cursing it as an endless evil. Either action is only a continuation of the will's willing, a judgement that Technoarchy is in full accordance with. However, when we open ourselves up to the truth of technology, knowing it as a way of revealing things, we can free ourselves of its relentless logic and meet the things it reveals as they are--not as the objects of our will, but as the earth breaking forth. It is a lot like a Zen meditation. By accepting the world as it is, we change it. By trying to change it, it stays the same. And in this age especially, caught, as it is, in the tempest of Man's willing. Nothing could be more subversive to it than to stop trying to will things as they should be. By letting the world world it will world in an entirely different way than it does.

If we stop our willing and let the world world, we find ourselves placed in a world open to Technoarchy, closed to an-archy, and ourselves endangered by our own destiny. This changes things because then we know the destiny of Technoarchy is a danger and a possible doom. The Thinker tells us that while Man may well destroy himself and his planet with the awesome power of his machinery of war and production, it is only because he is already dead--dead because his truth is concealed from him and because he pictures himself as only his will. By letting this death be we can see how, seeking to be masters of the earth, we have failed our calling to be the guardians of the world, the friends the earth. And we can redeem ourselves.

And we will need to do it ourselves because God isn't there anymore. When earth's things come to presence in the light of a cause-effect coherence, even God loses all that is exalted and holy, and the mystery of his distance disappears. In the light of patriarchal causality God becomes merely the first cause, the mechanic of creation. Even in theology, God becomes the God of experimental science, his mystery concealed by the causality of making.⁽¹³⁹⁾ In America nowhere is this more evident than in the recurring battle Creationists have with Evolutionists. Evolution, it is asserted by our devout critics of modern science, didn't cause all the plants and animals and especially Man to come into being, God did. Indebted to the science of causality, yet rejecting its scientific truth, such a God as the Creationists have can only be maintained with the most profound hypocrisy, and such a God is dead. Why else does Jerry Falwell demand frequent loyalty oaths from his teachers at his Bible College?⁽¹⁴⁰⁾

When the world's destiny is Technoarchy it is in supreme danger. The danger comes upon Man in two ways. When things are present no longer as the earth's mystery but exclusively as the Reserved, and it becomes Man's destiny to be the master of the Reserved through his reason, he comes to the brink of a catastrophe, a precipitous fall--he himself becomes Reserved, the object of his own willing, a tool for his own utility.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ Meanwhile, as the one threatened, Man exalts himself as the patriarch of the earth, the one who's constructs and representations constitute things as a coherence of forces. This humanist illusion deludes Man into believing that in everything he encounters he meets only himself. But in truth, Man no where encounters only himself, his truth. So totally is Man locked into Technoarchy that he does not understand it as a calling, that he is possessed by it, and that he is the one spoken to. He fails in every way to dwell as a mortal letting the world world, the earth be. He, thus, can never encounter only himself, because what he is, the guardian of the world, is concealed from him by his way of being.

Technoarchy not only denies Man his truth, throwing into oblivion his relationship to himself and to everything that is, it subjects Man himself to its ordering, driving out every other possibility of revealing by its discipline. Through its compelling demand for order and reason, and its subsequent fear that makes it throw everything that is not orderly and reasonable into the shadow, Technoarchy conceals and represses any sense of a revealing that lets things rise up from the earth and come forth of themselves. The shadow must not be allowed to be. Ordering, regulating, and securing things as the Reserved, Technoarchy denies things their own character, their earth-born identity. Fearing its shadow--what it has dismissed, repressed, and made other--and not letting it be, Technoarchy not only denies all things and all humanity their truth, it conceals revealing itself, the way truth happens.⁽¹⁴²⁾

Ordering the world about as its utility, Technoarchy locks all truth of things up into its ordering, denying them any possibility of becoming present as a gift of the earth or letting them hold sway over humanity as such. The destiny that sends us to Technoarchy is consequently the extreme danger. But it is not technology itself that is dangerous, the machinery of destruction and production that have given Man so much power over the earth. They are not the danger of Technoarchy; it is its truth of things, the truth that keeps humanity from its calling to be guardian of the earth, that risks making our destiny into a doom.⁽¹⁴³⁾ Machines of limitless destruction and production are nothing and hold no sway, unless they are ordered into use. Ordered as the Reserved, compelled by the necessities of reason, haunted by their shadow, these machines are useful in a world that uses them.

They don't have to be that way, and they could be quite other than what they are now in a world that let truth happen.

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CHAPTER 5

THE FLIGHT OF THE GODS

Hopes and Dreams

lie shattered on the floor

Broken bits of glass that

tear the flesh

torture the soul

For awhile despair . . .

Then, timeless and dark

the endless night rolls in

And Life becomes

A whisper echoing

in ears that do not hear

A dream that is no more

. . . the author

If the world ever becomes all cold and dark, if death ever becomes a tidal wave that swirls over all the earth, it will not be our greatest tragedy, only our last. Before that, preceding it, making it possible, was a destiny that called us to our fate, a destiny that possessed us before we were born, and now locks us ever more tightly in its grip with every attempt we make to escape it by willing the world otherwise. And we cannot overcome the destiny of our age with yet another triumph of our technology, yet another assertion of our mastery, because any attempt to escape our fate through experimental research, calculating reason, and technological triumph will only serve to advance its cause and assure its triumph.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾

Herein lies the tragedy of our age. For it truly is not our lack of will, our inability, or our negligence in mastering the things we have not yet controlled, but from our method of solving all our problems, our way of technical mastery itself, that we shall come to our tragedy. If we come to it.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ Our very strength, the knower in our scientific and technical discourse, is our weakness, the danger threatening us. It is this self that, knowing that it is not always the master and interior cause of its actions, feels that it must know the ways it is dispossessed of sovereignty, and then, by becoming master of the causes formerly external to itself, repossess its patriarchy and assert its power.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Suspicious that there is always a cause or power external to itself, fearful of any shadow it has not banished, obsessed with being the master of itself, the modern patriarch is possessed by a grim and all-consuming will to truth and mastery. Before it all actions, thoughts, inclinations, and ugly secrets must confess their difficult truth, before it all things must pass in review and be interrogated with a cold ruthless zeal to see if their reality and truth is not something different from what Man has mastered, another shadow not yet banished.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ All things are held in reserve for reason as something else than itself, some concealed truth or being that must not escape the scientific sovereign.

To our age of power through technology, of mastery through reason, were born three great fathers of suspicion--Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ Though they are different from each other in their own way (and Nietzsche much more ambiguously than the other two), they are united in a metaphysic, a technology of truth and power, that makes Man the truth of all beings, the fathering archytect of all the world. Seeking to preserve the legitimacy of what Man fathers, the three great fathers of suspicion share this in common: a deep and abiding suspicion of appearances and accepted interpretations of them, and a certainty that their truth lies either in translating them into the language of human desire, or understanding them as a human production, or conceiving them as the all-too-human deposits of the will to power.

Before each of these fathers of suspicion Man finds himself dispossessed by a shadow he let slip away from his self, and, finding his delusions intolerable, is called on to overcome himself, to grab the moonless night of all of his lies to himself by the neck and make them into his own will. To make the fatherhood of Man legitimate, subordinate to its true origins. Where the Id was the Ego shall be, where there was the mystifying veil of class exploitation there shall be the worker's paradise of communism, where there was the rancorous slave there shall be the overman. The moment of affirmation for all these fathers of suspicion is the moment where Man returns to himself as the abiding power, when the shadow haunting him is removed and he wills only himself, the archytect of the world--the moment when the future classless society and its transparent values become actual, the moment when the ego masters the id and dissolves its pathology, the moment when the revaluation of all values is understood as the positing of value.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾

(But wait, before I go further, I must admit I am reducing Nietzsche, the most worthy of these three fathers and probably the best poet of our time, to something he is not entirely. If Nietzsche is the theorist of the will to power, the one least afraid of openly affirming it, he is also the thinker most able to understand its limits, dangers, and shadows. Nietzsche knows there are shadows in his thought, things left unsaid, things that dare not be said. In fact, unless we miss them, he often points them out. Dots wandering off . . . Zarathustra knows that transparency, pure will willing only itself, is not possible, and he has the courage to face it. Self overcoming cannot end, and we can never become our own fathers. A true poet attending to the earth within, Nietzsche is probably the most courageous thinker to have ever lived, and yet there is still a fear, a shadow that lingers . . .)

What is the fruit of all this fatherly suspicion, this fear that seeks out all the shadows of illegitimacy and wills them away, this attempt to assert control over the revealing of things, and make it only its own? It is, as Nietzsche himself first pointed out, nihilism, the radical repudiation of value and meaning, the dissolution of the world Man's reason has built. For Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, moral truth is approached not as something that is a response to the need of dwelling, nor the truth of the stay of mortals upon the earth, but as an object of knowledge to be researched and analyzed, whose genealogy must be chronicled and synchronic structure mapped, whose causes must be calculated and transformations submitted to scientific interrogation and understanding. Knowing everything as nothing but a re-presentation of Man, an archytecture originating in the will, the necessity of legitimate fatherhood reduces everything, all morals, traditions, and institutions, to the will willing itself, to nothing but Man himself.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ Referring only to itself, without direction or aim, all that this archytecture can reveal is more of itself, more technology, more power, more mastery--more of Man.

Having accomplished the possibility of control, fatherly mastery undermines the value of the things it has conquered. It engages itself in a ceaseless struggle to become only itself, mastery transparent and pure. And yet what institution or value can survive this accomplishment? Once everything becomes Man's value, it can be revalued, reassessed at whim, for whatever reason Man wills.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ And because the value of everything can be reassessed at will, according to whatever Man at the moment wills, it loses whatever value it could have, becoming totally valueless. It is these three fathers of suspicion who, speaking the only truth available to our time, setting themselves up as the sovereigns before whom all values must pass in review and render up an account of themselves, it is these three who have spoken the word that killed God the Father for us, vanquishing all the purpose, value, and meaning that he gave.⁽¹⁵²⁾

Just as well too; the patriarchal god they killed was a god that was judgmental, condemning, hostile to the earth and all life, authoritarian, and an enemy to its own shadow. A bad father. Unlike the goddess that preceded him, this god made life joyless, fearful, hierarchical, and exclusionary. Where the goddess accepted and affirmed the shadow as part of herself, this god refused to, projecting it on his enemies, and then making them pay for "their" sins. In their suspicion, their will to truth, these god killers all revealed this god as something other than himself, helping to break the world free of himself and his gloomy reign. But yet, in other ways, they remained deeply indebted to him, perpetuating his ways. I call them the fathers of suspicion because there is something, like the god they killed, very patriarchal about the world they condemn, and the world they seek.

Before the age of Technoarchy, before the time when Man became master of all the earth and beyond, God was our Father, the absolute positer of value and meaning, the creator of a meta-physical whole, the seminal origin of a beyond infinitely superior to ourselves. Insisting on his fatherhood, demanding its acknowledgement in humility, belief, and obedience, God possessed our being with his fatherhood, his purposes and his ends. We were his children and our life, our joys, needs, connections with each other and the earth, could only be in a way that reflected our love for him. Anything else was sin, forbidden. The meta-physical realm God fathered was not anything that rose up from within, built of all-too-human needs situated in our place on earth, but an external whole that was its own necessity, a beyond by which we measured ourselves, judged the world, valued things, and lived our lives by. Living in fear of it, we were permitted no participation in its being. Father knew best.

The realm of the meta-physical was like the light of Plato's sun shining down on us, lighting up our practices and actions with the Father's meaning and purpose. Afraid of God's judgment and punishment, it was our guide and our hope. But then, technical Man, swallowing up the sea, wiping away the horizon, unhinging the earth from the sun, put himself in the Father's place of authority.⁽¹⁵³⁾ Now, as the technician of value, the judge of all conventions and practices, the sovereign of the new scientific truth, he rose up, as subject, and transformed everything, including the metaphysical realm, into a scientific object to be prodded and turned over, analyzed and dissected.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ To be fathered by him. Morals became conventions, beliefs became values, faith became a delusion, and all were held in reserve for the social technologist, the propagandist, the advertizer, the revolutionary--to work upon, to transform, and to make more rational, more useful.

Casting God down from his throne of authority, we became the technicians of all value positing, and the value we, as masters, have of things becomes the truth we impose on them. We became our own fathers. In our age the sun no longer emits light of itself, free of our meddling, but is instead a dull and dimmed moon, getting what light it gets from us, the masters of the earth. Once autonomous, the metaphysical realm is now nothing but a human point of view, posited by the will to power, a production contingent on the mode of production, a fantasy made necessary by repressed desire. The scientific sovereign of our age seeks to surpass, to overcome, Man's finitude up to now, making itself over into the father of all that is, drawing itself and everything else up into its own willing, a pure will willing only itself.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ All that is, is as that which originates in the will of Man. All the truths or gods that formerly conditioned and limited the truth of Man, providing an interpretation to his life, his actions, and the things in his life, have fled the earth. They, and especially the Christian patriarchal god, are dead.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ As the suspicious father of everything, Man has killed them, plundered the temple, and desecrated all that is holy.⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ Far removed from the earth, lost in empty patriarchy, the world has become lifeless, dead, a circle without a center.

Too true, there is Christian faith here and there. And sometimes it rises up with fanatical strength, but the love, and the fear that more often sustains it, is not the effective, determining truth of our time.⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ No modern state listens to the will of God, and in America, the prototype of the modern state, anything associated with God, is rigorously excluded from the actions of the state. No multinational corporation responds to anything except profit and power. In our work, our making, our living, the Father's holy word, what our being was for, is absent. With its disappearance, all the things of the world lose the Father's judgement--the trees, the flowers, the birds, the animals, the sins of man and woman, the nature of their works, and everything else.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾All morals, traditions, and institutions included.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ No longer is the God, the divine archytect, the underlying truth of things. This is what Nietzsche means when he says that God is dead. It is not a claim about God's existence or nonexistence, but an assertion that God is irrelevant to this age of Man, no longer near to us in our life.

The history of the West is the history of the progressive concealment of Being, the silencing of the earth. Where once the name for Being was "physis," a blooming forth of itself, after Socrates, after the Romans had mistranslated Being as "natura," after Christianity made knowledge of Being into a dogma and metaphysic, Being appeared instead as archytecture of action and reaction, more and more a chain of causes and effects available for reason. Along with Platonism, Christianity is initially responsible for withdrawing Being from the earth and its an-archy, where it was revealed to the early Greeks, and removing it to a metaphysical beyond.⁽¹⁶¹⁾ The truth of things moves beyond (meta) the earth (physis), becoming metaphysical.⁽¹⁶²⁾ The earth is closed off and Man is no longer confronted with its mystery. Cut off from the earth as the revelation of Being, lost in its archytecture, Christianity turns to scripture, which silences all questioning before its dogmatism, and to metaphysics, which elevates categorical understanding as the way of knowing Being.

Although it has become the history of world, Christianity need not have turned to metaphysics and dogmatism. According to the Thinker, the apostles John and Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, still were able to experience Being as the abyss of God, to feel the holy rising up through them, within themselves, but as soon as they attempted to explain their experience, they changed it from an inner experience of connection to an outer experience of domination and they became entangled in metaphysics and dogmatism.⁽¹⁶³⁾ Some Christian mystics, like Meister Eckhart, managed to avoid the archytecture of dogmatism and metaphysics by using contradiction and tautology, but they were unable to find any listeners. Instead, they became saints, vehicles for the church to expand a new dogmatism. Perhaps in our day Wendell Berry is a Christian that has not succumbed to the traps of dogmatism, scripture, and metaphysics. Perhaps he is able to attend to the erupting earth within himself without judgment or fear, free of the Father's archytecture. But he is almost unique in that.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾

Although Christianity has occasional flashes where it has access to Being as an inner revelatory enigma, such flashes are quickly overwhelmed by the dogma of metaphysically interpreted scripture. As a result, God is not a way of Being, a world whose worlding calls on Man to encounter the mystery of the earth, but a being who has created both Man and nature and who has revealed himself in, and as, Christ. As the father of all beings, the archytect of the world, God is understood by dogmatic Christianity as merely the highest and most real being, the first cause, the seminal creator.

Being itself is ever more completely interpreted as archytecture, as causality and fatherhood, retreating ever farther from the human dwelling place. As a result of the earth being entrapped in metaphysics, dogmatism, and archytecture, the fundamental way of Man upon the earth is as a faithful believer. Cut off from the inner experience of the earth by metaphysics and dogma, lost in the Father's archytecture, the only thing left to humanity is faith, the abandonment of all questioning, all thinking.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ Having no access to God save scripture and the certainty of faith, the believer's God must be incomprehensible, beyond all human understanding because only faith can make the impossible leap between the earth and the beyond.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ It is a distant god, this patriarchal god, far removed from the dwelling place of humanity, the daily cares and experiences of mortals. A god that is indifferent to limits, judgmental of fault, insistent on commitment, impossible to know, jealous of alternatives. It is within this archytecture of the distant God that Technoarchy and the danger of nihilism approaches.

Technoarchy appears first as the doubting of the legitimacy of all traditional authority, and especially the authority of scriptural revelation. But, though doubting everything, Man turns not to the earth but to himself as the certainty of everything, leaving the basic archytecture unchanged. He becomes the legitimate father of all beings by becoming their true origin and master, claiming everything, body and soul, as his own to do with as he wills. Even when God has died, Technoarchy remains fundamentally Christian in its way of Being: the certainty of faith becomes the certainty of doubt, divine creation becomes modern technology, and, throwing God down from his place of authority, Man himself becomes the highest being, the prime mover, and final end of the world.

Even when God is dead we remain good Christians, faithful sons and daughters. We will not escape this archytecture by being blind to it, dismissing it as the final delusion of a history that for too long thought that God mattered. Despite ourselves, lurking always at the corners of our thought, our dead God will remain as a shadowy guest, all the more pervasive and influential the less he is thought.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾

According to the Thinker, we do poor service to a thinker when we but repeat their thought, interpret it, or extrapolate it correctly. We do a thinker honor only when we think their thought, listen to the earth breaking forward in it, and draw it near to our own life. And this means that we think about what is near in their thought, that we situate it in our lives and direct ourselves to the unthought in their thought, thinking and, perhaps, living their thoughts more deeply than they. That is how we free ourselves of the archytecture of metaphysics. As he does this for Nietzsche, the Thinker does not limit himself to a correct interpretation of his thought, but goes beyond it to the world that worlded Nietzsche and his thought.⁽¹⁶⁸⁾

He finds that there is yet more shadows in the depths of Nietzsche's nihilism than Nietzsche himself thought, that despite himself, Nietzsche has not overcome nihilism but only served to extend it, rebuild the archytecture of it.⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ According to Nietzsche, the death of God makes possible the overman, the one who will revalue all values, and make himself into master of the earth. This should not simply mean that Man, in the form of the overman, directly takes the place of God, usurping his position as he dissolves his authority, because this would not be thinking in a holy way about the holy.⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Mortal and all too human, Man cannot put himself in the place of God because the truth of Man does not reach up to the realm of the holy. No, according to the Thinker, something more uncanny happens. Thought metaphysically, as it has been throughout the entire history of Christianity, the place of authority belonging to God is as the cause and preservation of everything that is. Everything belongs to God because he created it. But this place can remain empty, and instead of being occupied, another place, another archytecture, corresponding to the age of the overman, can appear in the sky--a place that is identical with neither the realm belonging to God nor to the realm of humanity under his authority.⁽¹⁷¹⁾

The place that Man comes to occupy in his time as the overman is unique to itself, bearing no relation to what was. Despite dissolving his authority, the overman does not usurp the place of God, rather he lives in another world, another time, and another truth governing the way of things. This other archytecture is subjectness. Everything which is, now is for a subject, an object re-presented before an ego cogito. Viewing the world as picture, a re-presentable object, the ego comes to be its own archytect, like a mathematician positing the form and structure of things. Returning to itself from its object, the truth of consciousness is self-consciousness because it re-presents itself as the world to itself. In doing so, it becomes its own father, its own archytect. Everywhere, for every modern thinker, Nietzsche as well as Descartes, the archytecture of whatever is, is as re-presentation, a subject setting itself before itself, becoming its own father. Its own cause, origin, command. Worlding, the world is viewed as picture, as re-presentable object. Everything is delivered over to Man's fathering or re-presenting, putting it in the midst of Man's positing, calculating, and mastery.

Since it bears within itself resistance to the father's will by being other than it, the shadow to its light, the earth itself is revealed as the object of an assault, an aggressive challenge that draws everything into its circle. Resisting the claim of Man's fatherhood, nature becomes an object to be dominated by Man and his technology, and the will to power becomes the truth of all things. As the world comes to be as object and the struggle for dominion over all the earth becomes a frenzy, the age of human subjectness, having revealed the lies underlying all other archies, is driving itself to self-consciousness and to its final archy, the will to power itself.

As we saw, patriarchy is primally experienced as a lack of control over revealing, a fear that it is not in control of things, and so, motivated by its weakness, it seeks control, power, the right to define, limit, and claim. Fearing for the legitimacy of its claim, it builds a succession of archytectures to assure it. At last, driven by honesty to its truth, it comes to rest only on itself, the sheer power to make its claim. The completion of this truth about all things is becoming certain and conscious of itself as master, the archytect of the world.⁽¹⁷²⁾

According to the Thinker, self-consciousness is the necessary instrument of the willing that wills as the will to power, whether it is the therapy mediated consciousness of Freud, the class consciousness of Marx, or the feminist consciousness of sex as the artificial and Man-made fabrication dominating feminine lives. Objectifying the world and everything that denies it its completion, self-consciousness as a way of Being becomes necessary for economic planning, for rational childrearing, for psychiatric therapy, for a scientific theology, for the liberation of the oppressed. Obstacles must be overcame, traditions modified, irrational values and superstitions disposed of, contradictions resolved before control is complete and fully rational, fully willed. The quest for self-consciousness finds it necessary to ceaselessly dissect history, to objectify and interpret it as one archytecture or another Man has possession of. Once this correct interpretation of history is made, reduced to the entirely human thing that secretly determines it, underlies it, and shapes its destiny, then it can be grabbed hold of and made subject to human will, making Man into the world's archytect.

Despite his critique of the subject, reason, and science, despite the fact that he knows that pure transparency of the will is impossible, the thought of Nietzsche represents the "great noon" of human subjectivity, the time of brightest brightness when consciousness becomes conscious of itself as the will to power. At last unashamed of itself, willing itself as the will to power, the age of the overman objectifies everything in its world, making it all totally and uniformly secure as something reserved for itself. But as the will to power wills itself, it must also will the history that makes it possible, every moment of it as the Eternal Return of the Same. To will everything as it is, even the most horrible of moments, the most terrible of conditions, is to accept and profoundly affirm the consciousness that reveals the will to power as the truth of everything. At the moment that everything is willed as it is, as it was, as it always will be, the will to power becomes itself--conscious of itself as the will to power, attaining its highest freedom, the freedom to be the master of the earth. And Man becomes father of himself.

At high noon when the will to power affirms itself and is conscious of itself as the will to power, the world worlds as value, as something posited and affirmed by the will to power. All things become valuable, placed in a monotonously exclusive relation with the purely human will that evaluates and places them in a relation to itself. Valuing becomes the archytecture of the entire world, the underlying truth of everything as the Reserved. As the thinker of the will to power, Nietzsche is the best expression of Technoarchy, however ambiguous his relation to it is as a poet. It would seem that the world could not be more highly esteemed than being as value--and positing the world as value is how Nietzsche overcomes the valuelessness of all values--yet, according to the Thinker, this is not true.⁽¹⁷³⁾ Worlding itself as value, the world is only degraded more. Nihilism is not overcome, it is extended to its terrible, uncanny, conclusion.

When the world worlds as value, its truth is sealed off from itself, obliterating every way of experiencing the mystery of Being, the erupting power of the earth.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ But this has long been the destiny and danger of Western thinking.⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ Since Plato, since Christianity, Western thought is marked by its metaphysical closure, its inward necessity for making the Being of all things a being, for interpreting the inward truth of a thing as a metaphysic or archytecture of some sort--the one God, the logos, transcendental reason, sexual drives, class dynamics, or whatever, and cutting itself off from the earth. When finally, with the triumph of technology, the world appears as value and power, rendering valueless all previous metaphysical systems, metaphysics is only fulfilling its destiny, the complete concealment of the earth.

In our age when technology has made us the master of everything because it is held as the Reserved and is as value for us, the oblivion of Being, the concealment of the earth, the dark night of the world, haunts us unforgivingly. Closing inward on itself around Man, throwing everything else into the shadow, the world worlds nothing, no-thing. Held as the Reserved, everything loses itself in modern patriarchy, an aimless, groundless willing of the will. Nothing permeates our lives, our work, our things, our gods, and beckons at us from our graves. Subjected to control, everything has lost its center, its purpose, the metaphysic that it is for, disappearing in a uniformly and infinitely distant shadow of oblivion. Nothing, no-thing, is near at hand, close to the dwelling place. And thinking in terms of values only draws it nearer to hand, becoming pure nihilism. Nihilism, as the revaluing of all values hitherto, is overcome as an affirmation of valuing, only within its own archytecture. Taking the will to power as the truth of everything, valuing does not let the world world, allow Being to be as Being, or the earth to bring forth its mystery, but instead brings about the consummation of nihilism. Man's patriarchy does not let truth happen.

Not only does this metaphysics of the will to power not think Being as itself and does not spare it its identity, it overturns all metaphysics, setting itself up as the refutation of all previous metaphysics. But the reversal of metaphysics, of Platonism and Christianity, the devaluation of the metaphysical and the revaluation of the physical, is still determined, and in truth remains identical with, what it overthrows.⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ It remains metaphysics, but metaphysics with a difference.⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ It has concealed from itself its own metaphysical truth, doubly throwing Being into oblivion. Once the world is esteemed as value, and the truth of the technical world as the will to power comes into its own, all questions concerning the worlding of value become superfluous and remain that way. If, as the Thinker argues we should, we think Nietzsche's overthrow of metaphysics as metaphysical despite itself, then it and everything it overcomes remains nihilistic. Interpreting God and all the metaphysical as the highest of all values, devaluing them, and interpreting them as the will to power, Nietzsche's metaphysic is not thought from out of Being itself. Taking the will to power as the Being of everything, it unknowingly gives God, the first of all beings, the ultimate blow by degrading God to the highest of all values. God died not because he could not be believed, nor because his existence could not be proved, but because he becomes the highest being, the first cause, and then the highest value, a cultural and social artifact.⁽¹⁷⁸⁾

This attack against God comes not first and foremost from Nietzsche, nor secular humanists, atheists and their ilk, but from Christian theology itself.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ Secular humanism does only what Christianity first started when it cut Man off from the holy by moving it to a metaphysical beyond. Discoursing on the being that is of all beings most in being, Christian theology never stops to think of Being itself, to stand astonished before the actual presence of the holy in the life and dwelling of humanity. Christianity cuts Man off from the earth, the mysterious abyss from which all things come, by knowing God only through scripture. Through scripture and dogma, it continually thinks God as only a being, the underlying metaphysical reality of the world, never as a truth made present by the world worlding. According to Nietzsche, not only is God dead, but, much worse and terrifying, he was killed by all-too-human men. God was killed; the highest of all beings, was vulnerable to Man's insurrection, Man's rebellious uprising into the self positing I-ness of the ego cogito. Through this rebellion, which so suddenly and mysteriously was thrust on us, everything is transformed into object, and the objectivity of the object is swallowed up by self-positing subjectivity. God no longer lights up the world from the patriarchal heights of the metaphysical, but now is nothing more than a value posited by the will to power, a truth to be established by experimental science. And now, even our most devout fundamentalists talk of Christian values.

According to the Thinker, a survey of our history reveals that we never have thought the truth of Being itself, a presencing thought as its own truth, not even pre-Platonic thinking, which came the closest.⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ The history of Being begins, and comes to us, with the forgetting of Being, the oblivion of that which worlds the world. The oblivion of the world worlding, then, is not the unique consequence of the age, which calls the will to power to its truth, but is due to the reality of metaphysics, which is the enduring reality of our history. This uncanny oblivion of Being, which has haunted us throughout all our history, is due to metaphysics as metaphysics. Escaping our metaphysical destiny has thus far been fruitless. If metaphysics attempts to grab hold of its truth, it does so metaphysically, thus constantly falling short of its own truth and remaining incomplete. Every time metaphysics tries to climb beyond itself, to create a metaphysics of itself, it always falls back into itself, without knowing that it has done so. Such was the fate of Marx, Freud, and especially Nietzsche, who struggled the hardest against it.

The nothing that is the ultimate truth of our technology as human power, is constantly lurking in the shadows of our thought, forever threatening to break in and shatter our thoughts, our lives, our work, our dreams, because our thought remains, despite itself, a happening of truth, a revelation of earth. Everywhere, from the beginning of our history until now, nothing is befalling Being and its truth, and so strangely that the truth of Being is forever gone from us.⁽¹⁸¹⁾ But now, in our time when modern technology has pushed Being so much farther into the shadow, nihilism is attaining its completion, pushing itself to its furthest limit, revealing its character most completely. As the danger grows, so grows the possibility that truth might happen, the earth might, at last, reveal itself. When it does, we will set aside the father's fear and let the world world, the earth be.

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CHAPTER 6

A PRISON OF FREEDOM

The Man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjugation much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him into existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.⁽¹⁸²⁾

Michel Foucault

America, our civic religion tells us, is the land of freedom, the land that taught the world about freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. And it is America that built the institutions that protected them--an independent judiciary, representatives held accountable by frequent elections, countervailing powers that keep rulers within the bounds of law. In America, as nowhere else, rulers are under control, limited in the powers that they, as individuals, have at their disposal. Because of our institutions, no one can rule in America at personal whim and thereby endanger the freedom of anyone else. We Americans know that we are freer than any other people in the world. We know that we are free to think what we want, say what we will, choose what we believe.

And that is exactly why we are so subjugated, why truth does not happen for us. Seeking to become masters of our life, subjects whose whim is the world's command, we unthinkingly subjugate ourselves to the discipline of Man's choice. Given what the constitution of our institutions and discursive practices imply, then make necessary because of their rationality, we believe that power is merely a means, that knowledge is not a production of power, and that truth is not penetrated by time and place.⁽¹⁸³⁾ In the age of Technoarchy, Liberalism conceals within its knowledge of what freedom is the boundless will to power underlying the objectivity, the value neutral system of government, and the tolerance for different world views that make it possible. Knowing itself as the freedom of press, assembly, and religion, it conceals from itself its truth, which is freedom through control, choice through mastery, power through subjugation. It is this innocence, this ideology of openness, that makes Americans blind to the totalitarian quest for absolute dominion that abides in their willing, their consenting, and their tolerance.⁽¹⁸⁴⁾

Liberalism is innocent of its truth partially because it cannot think of power, or its tyranny, being separate from the individual human subject.⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ For Liberals, people alone possess power and will it, not institutions, not discursive practices, not the marketplace, not judicial procedures, not even laws. Liberals, both Foucault and the Thinker would say, are blind to the true nature of power.⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ Knowing freedom as only the individual willing their will and power as the ability of an individual to impose their will on others, America is blind to much larger reality of power, what it produces, what it conceals. That the rulers of America are under control in no way limits power or makes it less total. On the contrary, it only throws it into the shadow, concealing its operation, for the archytecture of power is in no way the property or will of individual human beings. They do not possess it or acquire it because they are not capable of mastering it, for they are always and everywhere possessed by it and its truth before they act to master it. The power that controls, that imprisons us, is not located in any expressly human intention or capability, but in an archytecture that we cannot choose to escape, that is there before we are, governing our destiny before we live it, thinking our thoughts before we think them, and choosing our way of life before we will it.

We Americans, because we are constituted as Americans, are caught up in the truth and power relations of our time, and no matter how much we try, we cannot, as good Liberals, assert control over our constitution and become its mastering subjects, for before we even make the effort, the act of choosing has made the self that chooses into a prison, a self governed by the archytecture of subjectivity. Just as a prison does, the American Constitution achieves its effects without anyone presiding over it, intending them.

The truth of everything under the governing archytecture of Technoarchy is its possibility for control. In this, Technoarchy seeks out its shadow, everything that is not under control, that thwarts it, escapes it, or mocks it, and subjects it to its reason. Even in their differences, their irrationality, and obscure resistance, the others of the age of reason--the insane, the criminal, the sexually deviant, and those who challenge the ruling ideology--must be named "other," disciplined, and made into a strategic affirmation of reason.⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ Around the others of reason, Technoarchy builds institutions of control, of exclusion, marginalization, and difference. More real than anything else, Technoarchy builds a world appropriate to its truth. And among the most important of these things that Technoarchy brings forth are institutions that produce human subjects.

The truth of freedom under Technoarchy is control, human control. But so much are the institutions and discourses of control articulated, extended, and built, that the subject that controls disappears into what is controlled. Eventually, the whole extent of human being becomes the pure objectivity of power relations. Seeking control over everything, Technoarchy interprets everything as power, even, at last in Foucault's discourse, human subjectivity. The subject becomes the object of a subjugation more profound than himself.⁽¹⁸⁸⁾

According to Michel Foucault, prisons are not merely repressive mechanisms, simple juridical matters, but complex technologies for the control, subjugation, and production of Man as subject.⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ And its technology of control is not confined to the limits of the prison walls because its truth and archytecture is not; it is spread throughout the whole of our civilization, penetrating our factories, schools, medical clinics, armed forces, and our systems of government.⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ Within its walls, the prison reveals and practices the technologies of control that govern our world and build our institutions and buildings. As a specific archytecture of subjugation, it can be interpreted as a general technology of power in which Technoarchy holds Man as the Reserved and reveals him as subject.

But there is something ironic about Foucault's interpretation of the subject as the subjected, only a means for nonpersonal power strategies. It itself is but an articulation of Technoarchy's truth. Foucault himself describes his works as a tool box that those who seek to resist specific power relations, such as the prison, can use. His works have no specific political agenda, no conception of the good, no specific justice that they seek.⁽¹⁹¹⁾ They are but a means for something else, almost anything else. Like Nietzsche before him, who interpreted everything as power and as a means to something else, Foucault is a nihilist. As nihilists, they both are imprisoned within the truth of modern technology, however much they interpret its subject as the effect of a power that exceeds its grasp.⁽¹⁹²⁾

Thinking everything as power, completely dissolving the subject into relations of power, Nietzsche and Foucault remove themselves as the speakers and writers of such a power to a placeless place,⁽¹⁹³⁾ a dwelling removed from the earth as metaphysics has always done. Unlike more conventional thinkers of metaphysics though, they know that they are aliens to the earth. Dissolving the subject itself into an archytecture of power relations, they have destroyed the only dwelling place of humanity in this age of technology. Amid our institutions of technology, our discourses, and our truths--everything that is near at hand--the only way to be, to actually live, in our time is as a subject. To live and act in modern society, to use the tools that it provides for life, the means that it has for providing, food, shelter, transportation, health, communication, education, political space, and entertainment is to daily, moment by moment, invoke the archytecture that has made it possible, human subjectivity. As we saw before, a tool is for something. It has its use as a tool only in the context of other tools. Using any tool as a means invokes the entire world in which it is useful.

With the dissolution of the archytecture of torture in the Middle Ages, a radically different archytecture of truth came into being in the modern age.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ It was supported by a whole variety of technologies and institutions. According to Lewis Mumford, the development of the technology of glass production was a crucial development for the development of the archytecture of the modern self.⁽¹⁹⁵⁾

By the end of the 17th century, glass became a common substitute for the wooden shutter, or for oiled paper and muslin. It had furthermore become much more clear and colorless, moving beyond its former uses for medieval church decoration, and becoming a transparent medium through which the world could be represented. Glass helped put the world in a frame, transforming it into an object.⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ It made possible the eye glass, the framed window, the telescope, and the microscope. By making it possible to control the visible presentation of things, to move them near or far away, to separate one thing from another for experimental purposes in chemistry and yet see both, it made it possible for Man to see entirely new objects--the moons around Jupiter, the microbes in a drop of water, and the written word when his eyes grew old and tired.

Since it opened up the interior of the household to a new visibility, it revealed dirt where it had never been seen before, in the corners, on the covers of things, underneath the furniture, and, pushing back the shadows, it created a new standard of cleanliness. To be used to its fullest extent, glass must be clean to be seen through. It also is easy to see the slightest trace of dirt on its hard and smooth surface. Glass reveals matter out of place and it helps create the necessity of putting it where it belongs--outside the frame that reveals it.

But more important than its effect on hygiene, is the effect glass, as a presence revealing a new visibility, had on the archytecture of the self.⁽¹⁹⁷⁾ Even in the times of the wealthy Roman empire, mirrors were uncommon and not very good. The images were distorted and the background was dark. By the 16th century, however, the technology of glass making could make excellent large mirrors that accurately represented the world, and the hand mirror became a common possession. The mirror became a metaphorical presence that dominated epistemology and philosophy. For the first time it became possible to think about re-presenting the world. More than that, it provided the metaphor for self-consciousness, seeing oneself as one was. In the presence of the mirror, the ego could see itself and think about asserting control over its appearances--shaving, make-up, hair powdering, at a surface level, but more profoundly, preparing the way for the patriarch who would assert mastery over all the earth by representing it as his own.

Humane punishment, according to Foucault, relied on a whole technology of representations, pictures of punishment, which subjected the subject to its humanity, and through that made civil society correspond to its nature, the willing that willed its rationality. The first technique designed to do this was to make punishment as unarbitrary and uniform in application as possible. A perfect punishment would be transparent to the crime it punishes, mirroring both the nature of the crime itself and the remedy correcting it.⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ Such a picture presented to civil society would function as a deterrent, a lesson immediately intelligible to criminal and society. To do this the nature of the punishment must correspond exactly to the nature of the crime: those who have committed violent crimes must be subjected to physical pain; those who have acted despicably will be subjected to infamy. The more the punishment is transparent to the crime and exactly calibrated to its task, the more effective and efficient this archytecture of representation will be in deterring crime.⁽¹⁹⁹⁾

Besides being constituted in such a way as to be a deterrent to all society, the archytecture of punitive representation must also operate on criminals themselves, preventing a repetition of their crimes and requalifying them as a juridical subject. The technique of representation designed to achieve this end was the adjustment of the punishment to the coherence of causes governing the crime in the criminal, the will determining their criminality. It would either be made painful enough so that in the calculus of pleasure and pain crime would not be worth the pain it was sure to bring, or it would mechanistically oppose the force causing the crime, setting into motion a set of representations that restructured the economy of interests and passions in the criminal.

However, in order for these technologies of representation to be possible, a precise knowledge of the criminal and the crime had to be accumulated. Seeking this knowledge, the humane reformers of the 18th century sought to construct a comprehensive table of knowledge in which each crime and its appropriate punishment would find its exact place reflected in a code of law. Once the various species of criminals had been made into an archytecture of knowledge, classified, and their crimes categorized, it was clear the same punishment could have substantially different effects on criminals from different social groups or with different character structures. The technology of reconstituting juridical subjects demanded ever greater individualization, objective knowledge of the criminal, and precise application of the punishment to attain the desired effect. Through the archytecture of the criminal, all of society became an object for the emerging social sciences. The subject gains her mastery over herself and attains her proper place in civil society only when the social sciences have objectified her, gaining precise knowledge of the ways in which her actions are determined, her will willed, making her available for the precise application of the technology of control. Such is the ignoble origin of the social sciences.⁽²⁰⁰⁾

Where archytecture of torture worked with violent excess upon the bodies of the King's rebellious subjects, the archytecture of humane reform worked with calm reason on the wills of criminals. For the reformers, the body was only an avenue to the will. The aim of the humanist was no longer to crush the body, dismember it, and destroy it, producing the most exquisite agonies while delaying a hellish death, but to operate upon the will, transform the mind, and reconstitute the reason of the subject.⁽²⁰¹⁾

The ideal form of punishment was not, as it would be in the next age, incarceration, but rather public works. Strung together in chain gangs, the criminal worked on roads, canals, and public squares. Traveling throughout the land, she bore the representations of her crimes, benefiting society not only with her work, which repaid the damage her crime had caused, but also, and more importantly, with her lesson, which demonstrated the irrationality of crime.

The signs that the convict bore did not have the physical effect of terror, nor did they bear witness to the power of the king, but rather they were a picture to be viewed, and the convict's public presence was a theater of punishment, designed and manipulated to produce good habits in the citizenry.⁽²⁰²⁾ It was not terror that kept the land's peace, but the gentle and humane art of imprinting pictures upon the soft fibers of the brain.

As suddenly as the archytecture of torture disappeared in the 17th century and was replaced by the humane power of the prison, the archytecture of the virtues that society celebrated and the vices that it hoped to eliminate by condemnation changed. According to Albert Hirschman, all the activities that surrounded money making and generally denounced as vices--avarice, greed, lust for lucre and possessions, were revaluated and became honorable activities practiced by rational men. Even more radical than that, virtue itself seemed to disappear.⁽²⁰³⁾

Today in America we are no longer innocent enough to think that politicians have any virtue. In fact, the word "politician" most often comes to us as the cynical absence of virtue. Our politicians "pull strings," "play hardball," and "project public images." We all know that despite appearances, they are doing it for themselves, or, if they are a little more forward looking than most politicians, for their place in the history books. And we are not even cynical about our businessmen as they seek their interest. They are simply obeying the laws of human nature, however ugly they may be. Any sins our businessmen commit are instantly forgiven because their industry is so useful. The reason for this change, according to Albert Hirschman, is that the pursuit of money suddenly emerged as an instrument of control.⁽²⁰⁴⁾ In exactly the same way as the criminal's character was operated on to mirror Man's subjectivity and reclaim it, the character of everyone else in society was operated on by the marketplace.

Suddenly, in the 17th century people were no longer known or understood as sinners but as passionate beings, driven by powerful and often contradictory desires. Because of the compelling reality of these passions, the life of Man was too often, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, brutal, and short." The age that began with the collapse of the medieval world and the disappearance of virtue, prided itself on seeing Man "as he really is," accepting as the truth of Man whatever base material motives propelled him.⁽²⁰⁵⁾ The archytecture for understanding Man as a coherence of forces, a simple material being identical with his body, was prepared when he was understood as having a mind separate from his body, a spiritual being that was above his passionate being. When the world was being represented as a machine, Man's soul had to be above it, beyond it, mastering it all.

Just as mathematics, celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry, were producing laws of nature, the appearance of human passions became the possibility of formulating laws, so called "natural" laws, of human motion. This explains why people, like Hobbes, Locke, and later Rousseau, were so concerned with projecting a state of nature.⁽²⁰⁶⁾ The state of nature in modern political discourse, is an artificial projection, a utopian thought experiment, designed to reveal the laws of human motion.⁽²⁰⁷⁾ Like Galileo's hypothetical universe, the state of nature need never have actually occurred in reality in order for it to establish true laws of human motion, justice, and legitimacy. Just as Galileo's mathematical projections were not strictly bound to empirical reality for their truth (they hypothesized a circumstance that his science had no access to, an airless, frictionless environment), the state of nature need never have actually have been. A placeless place created for the purpose of revealing the true origin of things, it is sufficient that it reveals Man as the father and master of a world that he can manage. Revealing Man's patriarchy, the strategic function of the state of nature is to establish and justify a technology of human control. The nightmare of a war of all against all is a dystopian thought experiment that removes irrelevant variables (the accidents of history) by controlling for the relevant ones (the passions that govern men's actions) and establishes a counter-example--see what happens when Man is not controlled. Like many who followed him, Hobbes was a utopian thinker, and, like many who found his narrative of the world compelling, he made up for his idealism and impracticality by being a brutalutopian. People would resist his ideal, thwart it, subvert it, so they had to be made to fear it. Death would be given to all who refused the sovereign's will. All utopians ever since have admired Hobbes for his realism and his resourcefulness.

The first application of the new political technology, America was designed in the image of Isaac Newton's vision of the solar system. At the same time that Thomas Hobbes taught the Founders that the state was an artifice willed by Man to save himself from the irrational war of conflicting wills, Newton showed them how exactly counter balancing forces could be structured to create a long enduring system.⁽²⁰⁸⁾ Knowing that the planets were maintained in their orbits about the sun by the exact balance of gravity and orbital motion, the Fathers of America could conceive of a state that could be made to endure because of an exact balance of political powers and individual wills.

Once the laws of human motion were known, they could be used to balance each other and halt the decay of republics into tyranny. The continuous harmonic motion of the planets about the sun provided an image for the founding fathers to emulate. As it was with mathematical physics so too it could be for political science. America was the first state to be founded by the consent of the governed, built acknowledging the causality of the passions, and structured according to the laws of reason. It was the first government built expressly as a means for the will, and for nothing else. As such it had to rip itself free from the traditions, the irrational and unwilled traditions, that thwarted the will in willing only itself, freeing it from its shadow. Cutting itself off from its past, setting aside any conception of the good, any acknowledgement of virtue, any of the traditions of nobility, America engaged itself in revolution, and willed itself as "We the People."⁽²⁰⁹⁾ The will became the originary archy of the American republic, and government only the means for securing its command.

But not without considerable dissent. Various groups of people, sometimes described as Anti-Federalists, sometimes as republicans, had an alternative vision of America. John Winthrop, one of the first Puritans to land in America, describes his "city set upon a hill": "We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body."⁽²¹⁰⁾ The Puritans had many faults, among them the belief that material wealth was a sign of God's approval, yet they did seek an alternative notion of freedom, perhaps describable as friendship. Winthrop criticized what he called "natural liberty," the freedom to do whatever one wants, evil as well as good. In contrast true freedom, what he called "moral" freedom, is freedom "to that only which is good, just, and honest." Justice for him, as Robert Bellah and his associates argues, was a matter not of procedure or technique, but of substance and forgiving friendship.

When it was reported to him during an especially long and hard winter that a poor man in his neighborhood was stealing from his woodpile, Winthrop called the man into his presence and told him that because of the severity of the winter and his need, he had permission to supply himself from Winthrop's woodpile for the rest of the cold season. Thus, he said to his friends, did he effectively cure the man from stealing.⁽²¹¹⁾

Thomas Jefferson latter shared the same thinking. Preferring small egalitarian republics to a large commercial state, he emphasized the role of community in cultivating virtue, friendship, and character. He feared that "our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless," if the people forget themselves "in the sole faculty of making money."⁽²¹²⁾ Both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine advocated direct, participatory, democracy as a way of cultivating the spirit of republicanism, civic responsibility, moral virtue. It also was a way of checking the greed and power of the wealthy.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who advocated a large commercial state, saw things quite differently. They described the small republics that Jefferson and Pain advocated as "tyrannies of the majority," and saw a large state with strong central authority as the best remedy to the passions of local demagogues and unruly mobs. While even Madison agreed that in the end the welfare of the state depended on the virtue and the good of the people, he doubted that it would arise from the community. Only national institutions, checking each other, setting watch over each other, would transform people's passions, raising the public good up over private interest.

According to Bellah and his associates, election and representation, for Madison, would be a filter that would select the most virtuous, most public spirited of people. This public aristocracy of merit would then set aside their specific interests and govern in the public good.⁽²¹³⁾ Perhaps. But that is not the way it turned out, as Bellah and his associates points out. Whatever notion of national community there was in Madison's thought (and it is at best marginal), lost out to unrestrained individualism, self-interest, and commercial expansion. Whatever they were supposed to be, Madison's professional politicians ended up accommodating private interests rather than invoking civic virtue. This is not an accident. Madison and the rest of the founding fathers tied legitimacy of the order and the freedom its citizens so tightly to the individual's consent, willing, and interest, that there was simply no room for the virtues or the freedom that Winthrop and Jefferson preferred. Freedom as truth and justice as substance lost out to freedom as choice and justice as procedure.

Because the will must be left to will, the only function of government became resolving conflicts between wills--protecting property, assuring the free exercise of speech, religion, assembly, and the press. Other than that, the government came to merely letting the individual will go its way unfettered. Government became a purely technical activity, knowing nothing of virtue or the good, caring nothing for the past. Plato's Good, Aristotle's virtues, and Augustine's sins became subjective, private, and, thus, disarmed. The realm of the will's greatest freedom became the marketplace. There, the will could engage in commerce with other wills freely, each will freely becoming a means for others.

The original argument for capitalism, according to Albert Hirschman, was not that it, as a technique of management, could produce more and better washing machines, cars, airplanes, computers, and whatever, but that it could gently assert the power of a technology of the will over Man and, through a mastery of it, make Man master of himself, willing his will in a rational way.⁽²¹⁴⁾ Capitalism, like the prison, is in its truth a technology of human control, an archytecture for the government of the self. The new science of economics, like the new science of politics, could emulate the discoveries of the science of physics and make possible an enduring and harmonic system. No longer was moralistic exhortation, the example of the saints, or the threat of damnation enough: the passions, as causes like the forces of nature, must be traced back to their origins in the individual and through a science of their force, brought under control. The passions were not to be repressed, or attacked as sin, but channelled and made harmless, if not useful and valuable.

Through the science of human passion and its control, the passions that threaten the safety of society like ferocity, avarice, and ambition, are transformed into the nation's defence, commerce, and politics. From dangerous and threatening vices emerge the nation's welfare, strength, and virtue. Properly harnessed by an archytecture of control, human vices, as if by an invisible hand, become human utility.⁽²¹⁵⁾ The life of Man in a properly ordered state is much like Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, who is "a portion of that force that always wills evil and always brings forth good."

The key to such a transformation is the creation of an archytecture where the passions become interests. An interest is a rational passion that countervails an irrational passion. Like a force, a passion can only be controlled by another passion that either negates it or redirects it. For instance, paraphrasing Bacon, an immodest and forward woman can be made modest and induced to restrain herself, by appealing to her vanity and self love, and persuading her that modesty is an invention of love and, most certainly, the means by which it is attained.⁽²¹⁶⁾ Understood as a coherence of forces, the passions are available to be used to control or balance other passions. As a passion, avarice occupied the hallowed position of the deadliest of all deadly sins toward the end of the Middle ages. But when it became apparent that it could be used to control the other passions it suddenly became acclaimed as commerce, and given the task of holding back passions that had long been thought less reprehensible, like lust for glory. With this reversal, greed became economic interest, and was understood as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason.

People were rational to the extent that they pursued their self-interest, and furthermore, people could only be governed through the management of their self-interest. Self interest made people constant and predictable, into a tight unity that revealed their abiding character.⁽²¹⁷⁾ Once there was something constant and predictable, laws of human behavior could be discovered, like the laws of nature that physics had discovered. When a person becomes self-interested their actions become as transparent as they are predictable, almost as though they were a wholly virtuous person. If the impossible happened and the laws of natural interest were repealed, if people truly became disinterested and altruistic, they would break up the universal homogeneity of human nature and make the technology of rational government impossible. Each acting on their own altruism would do whatever their particular form of altruism lead them to do, and thereby escape the management of their government.

For the 17th century, self-interest, as the underlying truth of human behavior, does not lie because it will not produce any action other than those that are intelligible to reason. Though each is pursuing their self interest, the effect as a whole of everyone doing this is a positive benefit to society on all levels, moral, political, and economic. Everyone mutually gains from everyone else's self-interest, if only as a secondary and unintended result, because self-interest leads people to rational actions.⁽²¹⁸⁾ Rational self-interest bridles boundless ambition, making government possible, and, as commercial activity, it links everyone to everyone else, so tightly that the welfare of all must be satisfied as a condition for the satisfaction of any self-interested intention. As people develop economic interests, they develop a rational investment in a strong web of interdependent relationships. If their property is to be secure, they must develop an interest in a government willing to protect it, both against domestic lawbreakers and foreign invaders, and as a rational extension of their self-interest they will be willing to pay taxes for it.

It is for this reason that the founders of America made property a qualification for participating in government. Property, ownership, was not only a demonstration of a person's reason, it subjugated them to the laws that universalized its practice through their self-interest. Furthermore, commercial interdependence across national boundaries makes war, the ancient scourge of mankind, less likely because it becomes a threat to trade, and consequently, to self-interest.⁽²¹⁹⁾

According to the reign of truth that governed early American political thought, government derived its legitimacy, rulers their authority, and laws their justice, from the consent of those governed by them. Unlike the feudal monarchies of the Middle Ages and the states of any age that has preceded America, the American Republic had its point of origin in the human subject, its justification in the individual control freedom made possible. The rulers of the feudal realm, according to the reigning truth of the Middle Ages, derived their legitimacy from their family's descent, which was understood as a sign from God of their authority.⁽²²⁰⁾ God put the sovereign over their subjects and their justice was God's judgement.

However, when the state of nature became an experimental counter-example upon which the legitimacy of the state was derived, the human subject displaced the authority and signification of God. Existing in a state of nature before society, the human self consents, as is its natural power to do, to the terms on which it will enter society, accepting certain terms, rejecting others according to the archytecture of human self-interest. Once the self is understood as a coherence of forces, of countervailing passions, the only legitimate government is a government that is based on the human self as its cause and underlying reality. Mastering itself as a coherence of forces through its science of passions and its technical archytecture of interests, the self-governing self becomes its own prison, the self-governing subject that consents to its government and finds its will in it.⁽²²¹⁾

It was the Quakers of Philadelphia, according to Foucault, who brought the prison to its fulfillment in 1790 with the opening of the Walnut Street prison.⁽²²²⁾ As with the Dutch and English prisons, the economic imperatives put convicts to work paying for their correction. Under careful supervision, the convict's labor-time was organized as efficiently as possible, their day divided into productive segments. The moral imperative also followed the English and Dutch example, with each convict receiving moral guidance and spiritual direction.

The Quakers added some dimensions of their own, however, making the prison even more a site for the technology of control. Reversing torture's archytecture of secrecy for discovering the truth of the crime and its practice of public atrocity for punishing it, the Quakers had public trials and punished in secret behind prison walls, turning responsibility for the criminal's correction over to penal technicians who had total control over all aspects of the convict's life. In this site of total control, these technicians of reason accumulated knowledge of the criminal and the crime, making detailed observations of the prisoner, conducting extensive interrogations, completing dossiers, and scrupulously classifying all relevant facts. They kept records of the criminal's progress under detention, taking special notice of their rebellion against the system or their acceptance of it. The aim of the new archytecture was to produce a docile body, a body that could be trained, exercised, used, transformed, improved, and subjected to supervision. Where once it was a political imperative, punishment became a technical operation, best done free of emotion, meddling influence, and juridical intervention. It was but a politically neutral and rational means of producing the subject.

According to Thomas Dumm, the penitentiary the Quakers developed in Philadelphia was both a liberal institution and was becoming a democratic institution. "It was liberal because the entire force of its operations was to reconstruct the psychology of individual persons. It was to be democratic because the same operations applied to each individual."⁽²²³⁾ According to Dumm, Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, friend to Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading intellectuals among the founding fathers, was the origin in America of the idea of the penitentiary as a "republican machine." Its operation was not just marginal, but essentially to the well being of the republic, reconstituting the moral habits that endangered the republic. When mostly private institutions--the church, the family, the school--failed, producing a criminal, it was necessary for the government to take over. For Rush, people were basically their bodies:

All the operations in the mind are the effects of motions previously excited in the brain, and every idea and thought appears to depend upon a motion peculiar to itself. In a sound state of mind these motions are regular, and succeed impressions upon the brain with the same certainty and uniformity that perceptions succeed impressions upon the senses of the mind.⁽²²⁴⁾

Vice was not a sin, but a disease to be cured. And government's responsibility was to cure, reconstitute, the moral faculty--to make the criminal back into a republican machine, a citizen obedient to the laws of the republic.

Now the object of a technical discourse, Man was appropriated into a system of rational organization that established his truth as a tool of production. His body is revealed as a machine and is subjected to rigorous analysis and to a training procedure that makes him as efficient as a machine.⁽²²⁵⁾ Like a machine with tightly linked and interacting parts, the body is analytically reduced to an archytecture of units--the thumbs, the fingers the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and so on. Each unit's movement is taken up separately, analyzed separately, and subjected to a calculated archytecture of training that reduces each unit to its most efficient operation and then combines everything into a smoothly functioning whole. Details are crucial; complex, vast, interdependent systems are built by attention to the smallest and most obscure details. Nothing must escape specification, reduction, analysis, and disciplinary training.⁽²²⁶⁾

Seeking to keep all details under its control, disciplinary technology relentlessly expands its archytecture across both space and time, imposing its framework on both as it uses them differently. If disciplinary technology is to work efficiently and effectively, it must work continuously, organizing time so that moment by moment the body's motions are specified more precisely and made more docile. The details of the body's motions must be chronographed, because control cannot be applied occasionally or at regular intervals; it must be applied continuously, letting no moment escape its purpose.⁽²²⁷⁾ The efficient operation of many bodies working in interdependent systems, such as factories and military forces, requires that every motion be standardized, the time necessary to do it precisely measured, and applied universally to all the bodies working within it.

The control of space is as essential to disciplinary technology as the control of time is. Disciplinary technology produces its effects by projecting individuals into a carefully organized, specified, and enclosed space, a mathematical grid of truth prepared in advance for the individual.⁽²²⁸⁾ In the hospital, the factory, the school, the prison, or the military field, an orderly grid, a ruling framework, is imposed on everything. Once established, this archytecture produces a precisely organized distribution of individuals available for surveillance. This projected distribution, following the same regime of truth present in the experiment, makes possible and facilitates the accumulation of knowledge on individuals by making their dispersion and location visible. It has the strategic advantage of identifying its others, dangerous groups or wandering individuals and reducing them to docile and fixed categories, or at least of making possible their isolation.

In disciplinary technology the archytecture of space obeys the principle of eliminating uncontrolled spaces and partitioning everything into standardized units based, quite often on a structural principle of presences and absences. In this archytecture of space each slot in the grid is assigned a value and each individual is evaluated and disciplined according to his presence or absence. Within this organized space individuals can be placed, transformed, and observed very efficiently. For the most efficient production of individuals, it is necessary to systematically define beforehand the nature of the parts to be used, stockpile the individuals or parts that fit the definition, place them in places most appropriated to them, and set them to doing their designated function.

All waste, gaps, free margins, must be eliminated and enframed by the system.⁽²²⁹⁾ This elimination of all slack increases the efficiency of the system, and expands its control over individual parts by making possible their interchangeability. In many ways, the penitentiary is an utopian effort--an effort to make the whole world conform to an abstract--unsituated--idea, whether it is able to or not. It defines the world according to its logic, imposes upon it its goal, and--the shadow to every utopia--disciplines those who do not meet its standards. Its dream is the dream of purity and innocence; its reality is discipline and resistance.

By the end of the 18th century, a century before Friedrich Taylor, factories were already organized by the same disciplinary techniques as the prison was. Foucault gives an example of the Oberkampf manufactory at Jouy.⁽²³⁰⁾ It was divided into a series of specialized workshops separated by functions such as printing, handling, coloring, engraving, and drying. In the largest building, 110 meters long and 3 stories high, on the ground floor 132 tables were arranged in 2 rows. At each table a printer worked with an assistant. Because of this archytecture of space, all the workers could easily be put under supervision by a supervisor walking up and down the aisle between the two rows of tables. From this organization of space, the specific production of each pair of workers could easily be compared to the others. As in an experiment, any variable could be defined--strength, promptness, skill, constancy--and then could be observed, measured with exactness, organized into a hierarchy of merit, and then rewarded or punished. Spread out as an archytecture of visibility, a whole multitude of workers could be understood as individuals, and as individuals subjected to precisely calibrated control by an efficient economy of centralized supervision.

From the very beginning of large-scale industry, making it possible and assuring it its efficiency and gain, there existed a division of labor, fragmented into unique individuals and distributed across a tightly organized space and precisely measured time. In such a system, the ordering of the whole multiplicity was carried out and depended on the control, surveillance, and production of the individual. The individual was the focus of control, the part of the whole, that made the dominion of disciplinary technology possible and assured its expansion.

Under the reign of disciplinary technology, individuals are revealed and produced by the examination.⁽²³¹⁾ The specific variable the examination will reveal and the individual it will produce in a heterogeneous population is determined by the specific system and its imperatives--a system of correction and it will measure values of correction, a system of production and it will measure values of production, a system of medical care and it will measure values of sickness, and a system of death, like the concentration camp or the Vietnam war, and it will measure the body count. All systems, needless to say, will measure docility and internalization of the system.

Arrangement of the results of examination into a hierarchy is the key to expanding control and production. The examination individualizes according to a projected grid laid out beforehand and its hierarchical organization of the results links the individual to the system, subjecting her to its dominion through the technology of reward and punishment. The examination, and the hierarchy it makes possible, combine to assure control through surveillance, efficiency through organization, order through an archytecture of space and time.

The first model of these techniques was not the prison--they only attained their perfection there--but the military camp.⁽²³²⁾ Here total organization, total control, and total observation first assumed the forms it was to take. Foucault hints that the application of these new techniques was fostered by the introduction of the musket into warfare.⁽²³³⁾ The musket decisively changed the nature of battle and required the introduction of new techniques of control. Instead of teaching men the art of using the bow, the sword, or the lance, instead of inculcating courage in the face of the enemy, men were now trained; drill displaced art, habit displaced courage, and systems of examination and organization displaced loyalty. And war became cruel in a new and different way. It was no longer fought between men who were either angry, loyal, or sinful, but between men who had become like automatons in systems of slaughter. The continental conquest that Genghis Khan led, all the crusades, the Spanish conquest of America--all were incredibly cruel and all killed many, many, people. But they were human in way that the World War I battles at Verdun and Somme, or the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not. These seemed possessed by a hatred indifferently machine-like, cold, somehow passionless, yet terrifyingly unlimited.

The examination takes many forms rendering the individual visible in all its uniqueness. The imperative of the examination increasingly became part of the architect's design. The necessity of total visibility had to be built into buildings. For instance, at the Parisian Ecole Militaire the buildings were constructed with long halls of monastic cells, each cell a sealed compartment separating the individual from their neighbors--but with a peephole so that they could be observed.⁽²³⁴⁾ In the dining rooms, the tables were neatly arranged for visibility, and the inspector's table was built higher than the others to assure it. The latrines had half-doors, but full side walls. This petty, suspicious archytecture of visibility was designed to produce healthy and vigorous bodies, obedient and docile soldiers, competent and qualified officers, and assure that debauchery and homosexuality did not occur.

When disciplinary technology was applied to productive processes, the number of variables needing to be controlled increased as it played a more important part in the economy. Laziness, fraud, bad workmanship, sabotage, and illness became more costly and important to control as the efficiency and size of the industrial apparatus increased. Disciplinary technology took on a crucial economic function when it entered the productive process, an event that assumed decisive importance for the development of industrial technology.⁽²³⁵⁾ As workers were subjected to disciplinary technology, their tasks were ever more precisely specified, simplified, and integrated into an archytecture of systematic production. They became automatons, mindlessly repeating simple tasks.

Once disciplinary technology was applied to workers it became as easy as it was obvious and necessary to replace them with machines. And in turn, the reserve army of the unemployed that the machine produced subjected workers ever more tightly to the discipline of the labor market. Disciplinary technology and machine technology are in their truth really only extensions of each other, making men and women identical with the machines they work at, nothing more than replaceable parts in an archytecture that exceeds them. People still worked, but it was the archy, automatic and anonymous, that organized and produced things, brought them forth.

In order for disciplinary technology to deploy people in all their specificity at the functions most appropriate to them, to claim them for its archytecture, a normalizing standard was necessary to unify operations and extend control down to the level of micro detail necessary.⁽²³⁶⁾ Assuming a global importance in the economy, disciplinary technology extended its dominion over matters too trivial and isolated to have been included in the legal web. Through a normalizing judgement it imposed a whole micro penalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (incorrect attitudes, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). Because of the imperative for controlling the most detailed aspects of everyday behavior and for making it useful, almost anything could be subjected to an archytecture of micro-penalties. Like a suspicious father, jealous of his claim, insecure about what would be revealed if he did not control everything, disciplinary technology made everything its own.

Within the domain of disciplinary technology, all behavior lies between two poles of use, the functional and the dysfunctional. Between these two poles a graduated series of steps can be imposed, quantifying and ranking deviations from the norm with objectivity and precision. By assessing individuals according to these norms, the truth of the individual's deviation is revealed and the penalty it imposes of itself is legitimated. Being an objective automatic measurement, normalizing judgement produces truth and its own legitimacy. Seemingly natural and normal.

The examination as a ritual of power is a subtle but important reversal of previous archytectures of power.⁽²³⁷⁾ Previous forms of power, like torture, exercised their dominion through the visibility of power, constantly bringing it out into the open, putting it on display. Common people are kept in the shadows, an undifferentiated, unknown mass. The examination, according to Foucault, reverses these relations, bringing common individuals to the fore, concealing the powerful behind a neutral, objective, gaze. In schools, hospitals, the army, and the prison, the examination is a ritual of power that brings forth the individual, making them visible to an objective gaze, and producing knowledge of them. The examination, we may say, is a technique called forth by the truth of the individual held as the Reserved in Technoarchy.

Held as the Reserved, the common individual becomes the source of dossiers that accumulate the minute details of everyday life, a biography of banalities.⁽²³⁸⁾ Previously the biography of common individuals had escaped the web of the legal system and any genre of writing, but under disciplinary technology they received meticulous and endlessly suspicious attention. In the feudal regime, individuality was most apparent for the nobility, and especially for those in succession for the crown. The more power one exercised the more one was an individual, marked with honor, prestige, and in death with elaborate funerals. But in Technoarchy, a kind of writing that had once lauded heros, celebrated the nobility, and focused on the unique and special, now was reversed, and the most mundane activities accumulated in file after endless file. Clerical paperwork becomes essential to the operation of disciplinary technology, enabling the authorities to fabricate a network of objective codification. And in it, the child, the patient, the criminal, the recipient of public charity are known in much greater detail than the adult, the healthy individual, the law abiding citizen, or the employed worker. These misfits, these problematic people, are the shadows haunting the norm, the others who have failed the utopian ideal, and, to maintain the purity of the ideal, they must be known and differentiated as such. Marked out, made safe by being labelled different.

The more the individual is examined and documented, and the more the documentation is systematically organized, the more disciplinary technology is able to measure the gaps between them and calculate their distribution in a given population. The archytecture of documentation makes possible the measurement of general facts, the description of groups, the characterization of collective phenomena. It is no accident that the science of statistics, which made possible the experimental control of variables projected into the population, was progressing by leaps and bounds in this age, nor that the American Constitution required a census every 10 years. Objectified, analyzed, fixed within a mathematically rigorous projection, the modern individual is a historical fabrication, an archytecture unique to our age. Supporting this triumph of technology and extending it, the social sciences are made possible and necessary by its imperatives. Originating within particular institutions of power (schools, prisons, hospitals, the military) the modern social sciences (psychology, demography, statistics, criminology, social hygiene, and so on) are not mere neutral means for a human technology of humans, but rather are the tools of human subjugation to Technoarchy. Knowable Man is the object and product of disciplinary technology, the truth around which the social sciences deploy themselves as a mere means in the service of the human subject.

Jeremy Bentham's plan for the Panopticon, according to Foucault, is the archetype of disciplinary technology.⁽²³⁹⁾ In its archytecture it brings together and assures a political technology of control. Where torture had contained with heavy chains, cold iron, and thick stone walls, and controlled with sheer terror, the Panopticon contains with light and controls with visibility. As an archytecture of power, the Panopticon consists of a large courtyard with a tower in the center; circling around it, at least part way, are a series of cells, usually several levels of them.⁽²⁴⁰⁾ In each cell, there are two windows or openings, one bringing in light from the outside, the other facing the tower, the commanding center. The focus of this optics of visibility, the tower in the center has large observatory windows that, protected by one way glass or shades of some sort, can be seen out of but not into. The originary center and judge must, itself, remain unexamined. In this archytecture of controlled visibility, the cells become small theaters in which each actor is alone, totally individualized, and constantly visible. The individual in the cell is perfectly visible to the watcher in the tower, but only to the watcher in the tower. Separated by walls, they are cut off from contact with anyone else. Isolated from any diversion, totally visible to the authorities, they are the object of knowledge, never the subject of communication.

The major benefit of the Panopticon is its economy of organization, containing and controlling the individual not with brute force, but with an archytecture of visibility.⁽²⁴¹⁾ The inmate in the cell cannot see if the authorities are in the tower or not, so they must always behave as if surveillance is constant, unending, and total. It is not the walls, or the bars, that imprison in the gentle age of reason, the prisoners themselves builds the architecture that imprisons them. Through the architecture of visibility, they internalize the disciplinary power that is operating on them. The prisoner becomes their own guard. So perfect is the Panopticon's archytecture that even if there is no one there watching the prisoner, they could not escape it.

The political technology of the Panopticon is continuous, disciplinary, and anonymous. Anyone, and perhaps no one, could operate it as long as it was organized properly, and anyone could be subjected to its organization. The technology is multipurpose. It could operate as easily on a criminal as it could a madman, a worker, or a schoolboy. If the archytecture of the Panopticon functioned perfectly, it would eliminate any even thought the disciplinary archy of subjectivity could not accept. No shadows in this utopia.

The efficiency of the Panopticon does not end with its control of the individual in the cell, but extends itself to the control of the controllers. Those who stand in the central tower are themselves trapped by an archytecture of visibility. Any failure on their part to control and modify the behavior of the inmates, any lack of diligence in surveillance, quickly becomes visible in the inmates' behavior to the administrators of the controllers. The accumulated knowledge of inmate behavior under the reign of disciplinary technology becomes the norm by which the controllers are judged, and any deviation from it is the mark of their failure.

Making everything its own, disciplinary technology draws everything into its archytecture, controlling inmates and controllers alike, revealing everything as object to be known and subjected to control. Seeking to make Man the master of his world, disciplinary technology escapes anyone who would master it by making their position of mastery contingent on their subjugation to its reign over them. There are no masters in the age of disciplinary technology, only prisoners of Technoarchy. The subject is a trap; the patriarch who would rule a prisoner of his own archytecture, his technology and reason.

The Panopticon is not only a technology of control for individuals, but also a laboratory for their transformation, a controlled archytecture for the execution of experiments.⁽²⁴²⁾ The individual cells, the optics of visibility, the possibility for controlling all variables, and the total availability of the individual for technical control, combine to make the Panopticon a perfect utopia for performing experiments on human beings. The inmates are already appropriated by archytecture of disciplinary technology and it is their destiny to be objects of knowledge in the experiment.

Bringing together knowledge, power, control of the body, and control of space into a subtly effective political technology, the Panopticon is a particular instantiation of a general archytecture for the subjugation of Man. A republican machine as Benjamin Rush described it, it is an adaptable technology, useful whenever there is an imperative for making individuals or populations productive, visible for control, or useful for the accumulation of knowledge. Its basic technology can be generalized and used in different organizations of space. It is a technology of enframing, organizing, and defining spatial structures, and can be deployed wherever a space can be enclosed defined, articulated, and made available for control.

As it was always intended, we are told, our Constitution is a machine for producing laws, for self-government. And, as machinery of control, the aim and purpose of the Panopticon and the Constitution are the same--to transform an unruly and passionate self into a self-governing self through the effects of mechanisms of control. As a result of the balance of powers, the extent of the American state, the accountability of elections, and many other mechanisms, ambition is made to check ambition, and all participants in the system, both rulers and ruled, internalize the archytecture and act in anticipation of its countervailing powers. Just as the modern Panopticon imprisons not with thick walls and iron chains, but with an archytecture of visibility that makes the self govern itself, the Constitution controls the self through the effects of carefully differentiated institutions setting watch over it.⁽²⁴³⁾ Because of the technology of our government, because it has made us all into self-governing selves, irrational passions, illiberal ideas, and "petty local tyrannies of the people" are excluded from the mechanism. As a result, governance in America becomes pure technique.⁽²⁴⁴⁾ Because of its rational structure, no one is permitted to step outside the system and think it, shadow and all, as a whole world worlding.

It is thus, according to the Declaration of Independence, the inalienable right of the self, being its own master, to revolt against any state that violates the ends for which the self contracted to enter civil society--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because government has its origin in self-interested human consent, it is the archytecture of that human consent, the conditions of its possibility and its own necessity, that will determine the form of the legitimate government. Since the inception of our age, neither force, nor accident, nor the ostensible will of God can father the state, only the human subject can. No doubt this is why democracy is universally acclaimed as the only legitimate form of government. Because people are neither angels nor altruists, but "by nature" passionate, contentious, and egotistical beings, they must create a technology, a way of government that will govern their passions while fostering their interests. And so in order to obtain the kind of government that everyone would consent to, certain transformations had to be brought about in the self. Seeking freedom, the self becomes a trap.

Thomas Dumm likens American liberalism to a monkey trap in Polynesia . . .

that works through a subtle and ingenious mechanism. To catch a monkey, one makes a hole in a coconut large enough to allow its hand to slip inside, but small enough so that when it clenches the food that baited the trap it will be unable to remove its hand. All the monkey has to do to be free is unclench its hand. If it gives up the food, it escapes the trap. But the monkey seems unable to understand.⁽²⁴⁵⁾

The pursuit of liberal freedom is much like this. To get the goody, to get the right to control our life, to have our choices protected by rights, we subject ourselves to the disciplines, the shadows, that accompany the power to choose and control. Once we are trapped, we commit ourselves to reform. Those marginalized or silenced by the disciplinary order, start clamoring alternately for privacy acts and protection from hate speech, for an expansion of civil rights and for affirmative action protection, and so on. Seeking freedom as control, we only trap ourselves more by getting it.

Seeking self-government, the self has to be made self-governing, to feel the necessity of restraining itself, of moderating its irrational passions for the sake of its self-interest. To become free, the liberal self must become self-conscious, rational, intentional, unified, and consistent. Otherwise the contracts it would consent to are void, and it becomes in need of "help" to reestablish its reign over itself. Its legitimacy originating in the consent of such subjects, the archytecture of the American Constitution is remarkably like that of the Panopticon's. Like the Panopticon, there are numerous points of surveillance, minutely specified and detailed, to insure the precise application of power to the selves that are governing to make sure that they remain self-governing--that is to say self-conscious, rational, consistent, and accountable for themselves.

The suspicious visibility of the Electoral Commission, for instance, holds the President accountable to the public every four years, as does the popular election of Representatives and Senators. And finally, to subject everything to the suspicion of judicial review, the life time-tenure of Supreme Court Justices gives them the autonomy necessary to maintain surveillance over all the other countervailing branches of government.

Unlike the prison, which has a central point of surveillance, the Constitution has many points of surveillance, or, as it is politely said, many ways of holding the government accountable. This is necessary because the Constitution is a Panopticon not for the deviant portions of society, but for the rulers of the Republic as well as the ruled. In order to keep control safe, it keeps everyone under control. Or in other words, tracing its legitimacy back to it origins, the Constitution that the founders fathered is itself the origin of authority, not The People, and to keep The People faithful to their original intentions, their fatherhood now that they are dead, they must be subjugated to it by the automatic operations of mutually suspicious institutions. That way their patrimony continues . . .

Once the technology of the Constitution is set into place, and ambition sets watch over ambition, the procedures of government automatically govern all alike. Confined within the institutions of the Constitution, held accountable by one constituency or another, forced to acknowledge the interests of all others in the presence of countervailing institutions, the ambitious and self-interested self, satisfying its ambitions in the only way available to itself, will effectively control itself as it rules other selves. Outside the archytecture of the Constitution, and the effects of the founding father's suspicions, the ambitious self is a constant danger to the common good; inside it, however strong its ambition, the self-interested self is a promoter of it, the instrument by which passionate and base energy is turned to good effect. To a continuing commitment to the founding father's original intentions. In this way, America is governed by self-control, a technology of government fathered by people long dead. And so it is not "The People" who govern, but the archytecture of control that governs. Before "The People" will their will, they are possessed by their willing, their self-governing selves, the archytecture the founders fathered. That is the only truth the American political process can reveal. And we continually return to it, silencing any response to our current situation, by invoking the original intentions of the founders. Their will must be willed.

And so, we faithful sons and daughters today continue the patrimony of our founders by expanding the ways we can make the self self-governing, that is to say, subject to their will. The advance of electronic technology has made it possible to extend the archytecture of visibility embodied in the Panopticon without the building. For instance, it is now possible, with sensitive electronic apparatus, to monitor the brainwaves of individuals and, by use of computer surveillance and a history of norms, to determine whether they are performing their function in the work place or not. Any deviation from a normal working pattern sets off warnings of some sort, perhaps recording them for future reference by the authorities, and draws the worker back to her work. First applications will probably be on Air Traffic Controllers.

The National Security Agency now randomly monitors overseas telephone calls from the United States with computers programed to record, analyze, and kickout for human inspection, any conversation in which programed phrases or words occur.⁽²⁴⁶⁾ As computers become more powerful and faster, and as programers become increasingly able to subject ordinary human speech to computer content analyses, this practice will no doubt become more useful and more prevalent. Perhaps it will be, and probably already is, combined with a program to measure and analyze voice stress to see if the person is lying.

Still in an experimental phase as an instrument to monitor people on parole is an electronic radio device that is attached somewhere to a person's body in a way the person cannot remove. It sends out a signal to nearby devices, perhaps in the home, possibly throughout the neighborhood, the city, or the entire country, that records the presence or absence of the person wearing it and sends the information over the telephone to the authorities. By means of this device the authorities can know the location of the individual at any time of the day or night. No doubt this monitoring device could be eventually used to transmit information on what the individual is doing, saying, thinking, and feeling for analysis on a computer.

But perhaps that would be necessary only for the most anti-social, uncooperative, characters. It may well be that the authorities would know enough of people's activities by tracking their credit card purchases, their telephone calls, their TV viewing habits, and their travel plans through computer networks. But even with all this developing technology of control, the project of control is not going to be able to make the world into the utopia it intends. In fact disciplinary technology dare not succeed, completely defeating its shadow, or else it would weaken its own structure, loosening its justification for normalizing control, confusing its organization of space and time, and delegitimating its totalitarian control. Even though it seeks its destruction, reason cannot destroy its shadow because it depends upon it, needs it as other to establish its identity.

As Foucault notes despite the fact that everyone knows that the prison fails to reform, fails to make people better, it is always offered as a solution to itself. "So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of 'failures,' the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.⁽²⁴⁷⁾" The true purpose of the prison is not to eliminate delinquency or criminality, he concludes, but to distribute, accommodate, and supervise illegalities, to make the delinquent into an object of knowledge and control, and to thereby give itself an identity. By producing delinquents, criminals, and perverts, the prison justifies and extends strategies of domination. It tells us what we are, and it differentiates us from what we are not. It gives us the power to control ourselves, and that we are most reluctant to give up.

And so, the self that would free itself to become master of the earth is first produced then mastered by a truth that requires its subjugation. Before it is ever freed to pursue its destiny, the American soul makes itself into a prison of reason.

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CHAPTER 7

THE COLLAPSE OF THE HOUSEHOLD

I remember during the fifties, the outrage with which our political leaders spoke of the forced removal of the populations of entire villages in communist countries. I also remember that at the same time, in Washington, the word on farming was get big or get out--a policy which is still in effect and which has taken an enormous toll. The only difference is that of method: the force used by the communists was military; with us it has been economic--a free market in which the freest were the richest.⁽²⁴⁸⁾

Wendell Berry

From the very beginning, we in America have been homeless wanderers; our ancestors left their homes in the old world and came to life in the new world. And when they came, they still did not stop to dwell. They farmed a piece of ground for a few years, improving it for speculative sale, then moved on West. If they displaced the traditional peoples that already dwelled there, stealing their land, desecrating their sacred places, destroying the ecology that sustained them, and, on more than one occasion, slaughtering them with genocidal intent, it was only done in pursuit of their manifest destiny, the mastery of an entire continent.

It is true that some Americans, especially those advocating a small republic, did come and stay in one place, and that they did set about caring for it and building a community of care around it. But they were always a minority, and, like the Indians before them, they were latter colonized by the necessity of American Empire. Once the vast majority of people in America, farmers were displaced and dispossessed by America's progress. Too soon, they became a small minority, and the nurturance and the connection to place that was a possibility for them almost vanished. Now even the farm is no longer a place to live, a dwelling place to nurture, but a unit of production. Farming is now a business, bankers assure us as they foreclose, like any other business, subject to the same requirements of profits and efficiency. In America people dare not form an attachment to the place they live at, become situated in it, because inevitably they will have to move somewhere else, perhaps because they are forced by the banker, more often because there is a job somewhere else. Today, in America, most families are spread over the entire continent, seeing each other only occasionally and on holidays. Without a permanent attachment to any place, Americans too seldom care for the place they live at; often they merely use it until it is used up and move on. As a result, neighborhoods deteriorate into urban blight, toxic waste is dumped in people's backyards by organized crime, and the entire country is littered with junk.

Because farming is no longer an art of nurturance but a business, at least two bushels of prime Kansas topsoil are swept away by wind and water erosion for every bushel of corn that is grown.⁽²⁴⁹⁾ Besides that the greenhouse effect, the depletion of the ozone layer, conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, the water logging and salting of irrigation systems, falling water tables, and the diversion of irrigation water to nonfarm uses, are all combining to undermine food production. If present trends continue, according to a number of experts, we have only a few decades before this country, holder of some of the richest farmland in the world, will be forced to start importing large amounts of food.⁽²⁵⁰⁾ There is no doubt, when this happens, that Americans will be able to import food from Third World Countries, as we now do in large quantities, but there is also no doubt that when we do so we will be displacing the crops grown in Third World. Land will be taken from subsistence farmers, export crops will displace staple crops for local consumption, and malnutrition will result. All of this can only happen because we have lost our connection to place.

The most profound effect of Technoarchy has been the separation of work places from dwelling places, the dissolution of the household as the primary place where things are made and its replacement by the disciplinary regime of the factory. The way of the premodern household, for all its many patriarchal faults, was a way governed by handmade care, a care that was near to the dwelling place, responsive to it and the things that surrounded it. The way of the factory, on the other hand, is a way governed by necessities far from its place and global in extent. Cold, vast, built as if time did not pass for it, it is a way infinitely distant from the thing and the place that would gather it into being. Its truth is a truth that is callously indifferent to the dwelling place, the community of neighbors, the earth, and the thing, leveling every-thing out and placing it within the rationality of its global order.⁽²⁵¹⁾ Unsituated, unconnected to earth or neighborhood, the only truth that can happen for it is universal and unlimited utility.

As the household lost its connection to place and was caught up in a global economy, a radical reorganization of the work of the sexes took place. Women remained at home, now the homemakers, and men went out into the economy, leaving the dwelling place to make money. Radically reorganized by the archytecture of the world surrounding it, the word "home" came to be associated with a single sex, the woman, who, with the home, evoked a particular emotional tone, the warmth of the hearth, the security of a shelter against the travails of harsh industrial work. With the dissolution of the handmade care of the household, the sexual division between public action and private morality changed and took on an entirely new character, transforming women into passive irrational homebodies, while work was associated with men, reason, and commerce.⁽²⁵²⁾ In their newly restructured place in the household, women became the contrast to men's aggression, domination, and control, especially of and against nature, with which women were identified. More oppressed than ever as the other of the world reason built, women became subordinated doubles of men, everything they were not. And their exploitation and submission followed the exploitation and submission of the earth. With the departure of men, the household ceased to be a place of family work and became a unit of consumption managed by women.

If women have always been abused and subordinated, (at least since the Bronze Age)⁽²⁵³⁾ it is only within our own time, the much promised age of human freedom, that their subordination has become a problem. At the beginning of the modern age just when Man was taking his place, and the enlightening promise of human freedom beckoned, women were excluded from it because they became the sex that supposedly could not master it. Could not control themselves. Women were imprisoned by their sex, which excluded them from the realm of freedom and reason. Men would take care of all of that.

Before this time of human freedom, men remained at home, near the dwelling place, and, though there was a sexual division of labor, the aim of work was essentially the same for both sexes, to nurture the health of the household and make it self-sufficient. Food, shelter, clothing, and most tools, were produced and specifically made for the occupants of the household. The household drew everything near to itself and the care of its place, revealing the necessities of nurturing care and the responsibilities of each member of the household.

The term "husband" in an antiquated, seldom used way still carries with it the meaning that it used to share with "huswife"--to cultivate the land, to care for the dwelling place, the trees, plants, animals, and people in and around it for the health and well being of everything. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'hus' originally meant house, and 'band' is derived from 'bua' and 'boa, ' to build, to dwell, to have a household. To husband means to be governed by care for the things of the household, to be frugal, to spare things and make sure they find their place within the household's economy. To husband, then, following the way of thinking the Thinker taught us, is to set things free, to let them be the things they are as they are in the truth, the nurturing care, of the household.

Originally, freedom is sparing; it is the care the lover shows the beloved. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, freedom is derived from 'beloved' or 'friend' in a variety of ways, some of them going all the way back to Sanskrit. It is derived from the Old English word 'freon,' a cognate of the Sanskrit word 'priya,' dear: thus the Old English, 'freond,' and later, 'friend,' all meaning beloved. Throughout its past, freedom has been contrasted to slavery, a way of being outside the love and nurturing care of the family. Slaves are not free, because they are but tools of use, a means violently set upon and constrained to its utility, while the beloved members of the household--the wife, the husband, the sons, the daughters, the near friends and relatives--are spared the trials and tribulations of a mere being as utility. As a being, a presence, and a truth, the slave is reduced to a means, a tool to be used and discarded when it is useless. In this way, as the one not loved, the slave is not free.

To practice good husbandry is to respond the health and welfare of the beloved, to the things that surround it and assure it, and this means keeping them safe from harm, nurturing them and letting them be as their nature calls them to be. The slave is but a tool, a mere means evoking no such emotions. To be free then, is to be not governed by the necessities of the instrument, to be not a means beyond the care of love, and spared the doom of utility. Good husbandry, good house wifery, each in its own way, is a calling to care for the dwelling place and the people that dwell there. In its truth as gathering place of human concern, the household is the place where all work is governed by care, concern, and love. Things are brought forth, present themselves, and become a gathering of concern in the household as things governed by the way of love. Truth can happen amid love and friendship in a way that it simply cannot in a global economy. This means that there are techniques appropriate for the care of the household and techniques that are inappropriate, ways that spare and husband things and ways that do not, ways that set the world free and ways that do not. The art of good husbandry and good huswifery is knowing and having at hand the appropriate ways or techniques for dwelling in peace.

According to Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the development of modern industrial technology occurred in lockstep with a corresponding development of household technology and transformation of the roles of the sexes. Contrary to popular opinion in our time, which sees the household as a sanctuary from the pressures of industrial civilization, the modern household is in fact intensely involved in it, supported, limited, and transformed by the vast systems of industrial production outside of it.⁽²⁵⁴⁾ Quite unlike the premodern household, the modern household is tightly dependent on vast energy systems extending over entire continents for any of its "labor saving" appliances to work; it is dependent on municipal water and sewage systems for waste disposal, on agribusiness for food, the housing industry for shelter, the clothing industry for clothing, and on an international economy to provide it with tools, income, and social services. As the consumer which must fit into the plans of all these systems, the modern household, and the woman who manages it, is the object of much external management, usually by the advertising industry, but also through choices made necessary by the archytecture of industrial technology.

For example, according to Michael Best and William Connolly, the luxuries of one era become the necessities of the next because the archytecture of consumption on which everyone is dependent requires it. In the 1920's it was a common practice to store food in an ice box because in cities the iceman regularly came around to deliver ice. Moreover, corner grocery stores were common, making it possible to buy groceries on a daily basis and bring them home on foot. But soon the middle class started buying electric refrigerators in mass and buying groceries at supermarkets accessible only with cars. As a result, it was no longer profitable to deliver ice, and corner grocery stores were forced out of business. While the middle class could afford the change, it was a harsh burden for poorer classes. Even though they could hardly afford it, they were forced to adopt middle class practices and tools. Even though income distribution between the classes may have remained the same, the relative ability of poorer classes to participate in the goods of society drastically deteriorated because of the introduction of new household technologies.⁽²⁵⁵⁾ For many people it was not an uncoerced choice to change their practices, but a necessity imposed by the new archytecture of technology. Cars became necessities because work and the sources of most consumption goods moved out of the neighborhood. Public transportation was excluded because transportation by car was more profitable for the transportation monopolies and because the government quickly began a massive highway program for the automobile, establishing a subsidized archytecture of consumption that soon organized the layout of cities and made other modes of transportation unavailable.⁽²⁵⁶⁾

In order for the household to assume its destiny as consumer for industrial factory production, many "labor saving" devices had to be introduced into the household. The true function of such devices was not so much to save woman's labor as it was to provide a market for factory produced goods and to free men of their household responsibilities so that they could take their place in the factory. For instance, according to Cowan, the introduction of the electric and gas range and the centralized heating system with automatic feed eliminated the necessity of chopping wood, hauling it in, and hauling out the ashes--all men's work.⁽²⁵⁷⁾ The introduction of refrigeration eliminated the need for men to handle ice, just as the development of the electric vacuum eliminated the need for men to carry out the carpets so women could beat them. And most significant of all, buying food at the grocery store, which became woman's work, eliminated much of the man's responsibility for directly producing and processing food. Factories began to make boots and shoes, so that men no longer had to work leather at home. They also began to produce pottery and tinware, so that men no longer had to whittle containers and utensils at home. Piped household water meant that children and men no longer had to carry it in. The development of the meat-packing industry, combined with the infrastructure of the refrigerator and the transport industry, meant that men no longer had to butcher or be involved with the care of livestock.

Meanwhile, according to Cowan, the introduction of factory milled white flour into the home greatly increased the amount of work women had to do to make bread.⁽²⁵⁸⁾ Unlike corn bread, the main staple bread in America before industrialization, which is easily mixed and baked, wheat bread (and especially white flour bread) has to be mixed thoroughly, kneaded, yeasted, left to raise, and closely watched while baking. While it reduced significantly the amount of wood men had to bring in, the introduction of the stove made it possible, and then socially necessary, for women to shift from a single course stew or soup to a multiple course meal requiring more hours of preparation. Manufactured cloth also served to increase woman's work.

Before industrialization, most of the materials of clothing that people wore were unwashable, being made of woven woolen goods or of leather, which were simply brushed. As Cowan makes clear, it was not women's labor that was saved with all the advances in household technology, but men's, and more than that, women's labor was not only not saved, but increased, and more importantly, made useful to the distant necessities of Technoarchy's economies.

Instead of being a dwelling place where work was guided by love for its members, the household became an instrument of consumption for factory centered production, a means of extracting profit. The advertizing industry fostered obsessive standards of cleanliness in order to create a demand for its clients, the soap manufactures. Guilt, embarrassment, and insecurity became the means the advertisers and the advocates of factory technology used to convince housewives that they had to use factory made infant formula, that they had to reduce the spread of infection by using paper tissues instead of reusable cloth handkerchiefs, that they could improve their children's schoolwork by sending them off after a breakfast of factory processed cereal, and so on.⁽²⁵⁹⁾

Like their husbands who worked in the factories, the women managing the household were increasingly held as the Reserved for a vast system of factory production, a means for extracting profit. The introduction of household labor saving technology became a means of breaking down the tradition of the household as an autonomous producer responding to its own needs and turning it into a consumer controlled by the technical and economic imperatives of factory production.

Once the household began to be dependent on an industrial economy, and then enslaved to its logic, it was easy to suck it farther in and subject it to control by means of its relations of dependency. Until the 19th century, according to Cowan, most of the grains available in American households were grown and usually milled by the household. But because large commercial mills could do it so much faster and finer and could generate white flour, households began to become dependent on the flour mill to process their grains and eventually on industrial bakers to bake their bread. By 1860, according to Cowan, flour milling was the leading American industry, and the value of its product was more than twice the value of the cotton industry and three times that of iron and steel.⁽²⁶⁰⁾ The use of factory milled flour represents one of the first stages of the industrialized household and of the collapse of its nurturing governance as handmade care.

Because milled flour was a commercial activity, involving bankers, taxes, stockholders, factory made tools, and extensive transportation systems, the household had to have cash in order to benefit from the flower milling system. Bartering with neighbors and friends could not grant access to the budding industrial system because it could not supply it with what it needed, a universal medium of exchange through which it could link up with its supporting systems. The only means of access to its products was by participating in its development, either as a farmer growing a cash crop, or as a wage laborer, or an entrepreneur of some sort. Instead of managing their farms as the nurturative art of husbandry calls on them to, farmers had to learn to manage their farms in a way that would fit into the industrial economy. Once farmers began to participate in the market in order to have access to the products of industrial technology, their fate was sealed.

Farmers began to seek the new techniques--factory made implements, nursery developed seeds, and chemical fertilizers that could increase their yield and replace farm workers, increasing their access to more of the industrial economy while paying off their old debts. As farmers increased their total production, seeking more access to the industrial economy, more farmers became superfluous to it.⁽²⁶¹⁾ At the time of the American revolution, 13 farmers were needed to support every city dweller; by the middle of the 19th century only half of the population of the United States were farmers; and now only 2.5% of the population of the United States are farmers.⁽²⁶²⁾

The disappearance of the family farm and the self-sufficient household and its replacement by the Agribusiness corporation and the dependent household means that people are separated from their responsibility to the earth that sustains them, lost in the industrialization of the entire world. Though the process is gradual, for the most part only barely perceptible to the participants, it ends up producing radical changes. According to Lewontin and Bertan, from the early 1900's to the present day, the ratio of purchased to self-generated inputs on the farm have increased more than 500%, and this despite the fact that land, typically the largest cost of farming, was calculated as a self-generated input!⁽²⁶³⁾ This means that the farmer has changed from being almost self-sufficient, generating most the inputs for production on the farm, to almost total dependence on monopoly capital for inputs. Instead of using last year's crop for seed, the farmer buys it. Instead of using mules and horses for power, which are feed with things grown on the farm, the modern farmer buys tractors, and the fuel, lubricants, and parts necessary to keep them running. Instead of fertilizing her fields with crop rotation and manure from livestock, the modern farmer buys chemical fertilizer and controls pests with chemicals.

With each introduction of modern technology, farmers became more dependent and locked into the dynamics and rationality of vast systems of power. It started innocently enough with the self cleaning steel plow, the early reapers of the 1830's, and then the combine powered by the stationary steam engine.⁽²⁶⁴⁾ Farmers were seduced by the power of the new technology to reduce labor time and speed the production process. According to Lewontin and Bertan, the new combine cut labor time by a factor of eight. Though this first phase radically reduced labor time, it was limited by the immobility of the stationary steam engine. Fields still had to be plowed with horses and the crop gathered up with human labor and animal transportation.

The dependence of the farmer on the monopoly economy deepened substantially with the introduction of mobile power. The internal combustion engine, the differential, and the pneumatic tire, freed the farmer of dependence on the draft animal and the natural restraints that they imposed. Horses could only work so hard and so long, needing rest or their health would be destroyed. Not so with the machine. It labored tirelessly and consumed energy only as it worked. Because the farmer no longer needed to feed draft animals, the land that was used to sustain them could be used to grow a cash crop. Up to 28% more land was available for cash production, and as soon as it was, surpluses became a burden on the market, forcing more and more farmers off the land.⁽²⁶⁵⁾

But this decline in farm ownership has not meant a loss of employment in agribusiness. On the contrary, for every farm that was lost, jobs were created for workers who manufactured, serviced, supplied, repaired, transported, and transformed farm inputs and farm outputs. According to Lewontin and Bertan, 50% of the average value added in agribusiness is added after the product leaves the farm. Moreover, another 40% of the average value added in agribusiness is explained by the cost of farm inputs. Farming itself adds, on average, only 10% of the total value of agribusiness production.⁽²⁶⁶⁾ And so, though the number of farms has radically declined, the size of the food system has not.⁽²⁶⁷⁾ Instead of working on farms, where they might be free to respond to the earth and nurture the household, people are now subjected to the infinitely exacting reign of the factory. The center of food production and the place of the household is no longer the farm but the city.

According to Cowan, as each generation of fathers become increasingly involved in the industrial economy, ceasing to cut haul, and split wood, to butcher animals, to build houses, and to care for crops, each generation of sons knew less and less about how it should be done--and more and more about finding a job that paid wages in the industrial economy. Finding their work undiminished, and indeed, often increased, each generation of mothers continued to train their daughters in the pursuits of an industrialized domesticity.⁽²⁶⁸⁾

Industrialization has eliminated the traditional male responsibilities in the household, leaving the female ones intact, if restructured as the management of consumption. This is largely the reason men were much more likely to join the labor force than women. Freed of their responsibilities as husbands they were "free" to do it; women, made useful as consumers, were not. As a result of this, the household has become the reserve of women who have not yet been "freed" by means of modern technology to join their fathers, brothers, and husbands in the factories. And, inevitably, it has become the great necessity of our age to "free" women as well, to liberate them from the vestiges of the tradition of nurturance that now oppresses them and keeps them from participating in the world of reason that men have built. Women are subjects too! Able to control, choose, reason, and maintain hierarchy as well as any man.

All too true. And no doubt this is the reason some feminists persist in seeing advancing technology as the means to women's freedom. Modern medical technology must be made to provide them with the means to escape the tyranny of their bodies with birth control (and perhaps if they are separatist lesbians, with artificial insemination); industrial technology will provide them with factory prepared meals, disposable diapers, clothes that don't need to be ironed, surfaces that are easy to clean, and so on. At long last, technology will do what it promised to do, give women their means of escape from the nurturing responsibilities of the household, just as it gave men their escape earlier.

When this happens, the triumph of industrial technology will be complete over the earth. Freed from modernity's concept of femininity, freed from the oppression of the remaining vestiges of nurturance, women will become, like men have already become, workers totally held as the Reserved by the machine, slaves to a technology that now requires their "liberation." With woman's final liberation, the household, as a dwelling place governed by love, will be completely destroyed, replaced by the totalitarian organization of the factory, the school, the government institution, and the prison. With the liberation of men from the responsibilities of the household by modern technology, the American household is increasingly becoming a single mother raising her children in poverty, supported by stingy, suspicious, and disciplinary government agencies. Perhaps this kind of household will soon become the norm, no doubt despite attempts by "conservative" politicians to save it from its fate by managing it properly and removing the welfare incentives that are "breaking poor families up."

If it does, we should not be surprised. Once men were freed of their nurturative responsibilities within the household, becoming nothing more than wage earners supporting it from the outside, they were left with only their emotional responsibilities. In the time of the factory, emotional responsibilities bring a heavy economic penalty, being an irrational investment of time and money. No longer productive members of a self sufficient household, children were now an economic liability, needing large amounts of money for food, clothing, transportation, education, health, and recreation. And a wife who does not have a job may not be much less of a penalty, simply another consumer to support. Since men are treated like machines at their jobs, nothing more than tools of production, it is not likely that they will be able to develop a way of being that treats anyone else any differently. The wife becomes simply a source of services--cook, housekeeper, nurse, and prostitute. And children become welfare recipients.

As Lillan Rubin writes of the modern working class family man, "What happens during the day on the job colors--if it doesn't actually dictate--what happens during the evening in the living room, perhaps later in the bedroom."⁽²⁶⁹⁾ Trapped in an endless series of jobs that leave little opportunity for self-expression, require unqualified obedience to authority, usually embody endless repetition of routines, and are at best insecure, work for these men, according to Rubin, is defined by bitterness, alienation, resignation, and boredom.⁽²⁷⁰⁾ Without any power over their work life, humiliated and embittered by their helplessness, they assert their authority relentlessly over their wife and their children, controlling almost every significant aspect of their life--whether they get a job, who they see, what major investments the household makes. Rubin sadly observes, "On the surface, working-class women generally seem to accept and grant legitimacy to their husbands' authority, largely because they understand his need for it. If not at home, where is a man who works on an assembly line, in a warehouse, or a refinery to experience himself as a person whose words have weight, who is "worth" listening to?"⁽²⁷¹⁾

Giving up so much of herself to protect her husband's ego, the working-class housewife dismisses her own needs for self-expression and autonomy by asking herself, "what gives me any right to complain? He sacrifices so much for the family at work, and I am better off than my mother. Aren't I?" And so, she desperately represses her own experiences of powerlessness, misery, alienation, and unfulfillment, attacking herself for her discontent. She stays at home and obeys her husband, living her life through him and her children. But she has her dreams, and often they take the form of getting a job like her husband. According to Rubin:

There is, perhaps, no greater testimony to the deadening and deadly quality of the tasks of the housewife than the fact that so many women find pleasure in working at jobs that by almost any definition would be called alienated labor--low-status, low-paying, dead-end work made up of dull, routine tasks; work that is often considered too menial for men who are less educated than these women.⁽²⁷²⁾

Caught up in the authoritarian discipline the industrial world requires, the household is not a sanctuary or a retreat from the exploitation of the workplace, but rather a reflection of it. The humiliation, discipline, and hierarchy that characterizes the workplace is duplicated at home, repeated in the relations between the sexes and between parents and children. The household is governed by the care of the members for each other, but by the discipline of the outer world. Unable to let its truth happen, divorce, child abuse, wife abuse, failure to pay child support payments--the ethical collapse of the family, in short--is the final result of the industrialized household.⁽²⁷³⁾ When the household is no longer situated in itself, tied together by handmade care, love that is daily reflected in the things people do directly for each other, but is supported and sustained by systems of production and control that spans continents, it is doomed and must disintegrate into abstract individuals, people whose being is chained to the factory as a system of production.

Unlike the household, the factory is governed entirely by a highly rational economy of means, a technology that knows only the truth of efficiency and rationality, and none of the household's truth of care and nurturance. Inputs, and labor is just one among many, must be minimized against the maximum output. Reduced to a means, freed of any responsibility for nurturing care, the worker in the factory becomes a slave in the fullest, most profound sense possible. Although our age has abolished the legal structure supporting slavery, it has deepened, perfected, and universalized its practice. If the ideal of Technoarchy is universal mastery, the truth is universal slavery. As one plantation owner in the South said sardonically as he watched his workers, ragged, homeless, and impoverished, file off a bus, "We don't own slaves anymore, we rent them."⁽²⁷⁴⁾

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CHAPTER 8

HARNESSING THE EARTH TO THE SLAVERY OF MAN

Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did.⁽²⁷⁵⁾

Jacques Ellul

The age of Man the subject, the positer of all value, meaning, use and utility, is the age of the machine because a machine, in its widest sense, is a Man-made fabrication, a system of any kind, material or immaterial brought forth by Man for his use as a means for some-thing. Once the world is viewed as picture, a series of objects posited and organized by Man and available for his exclusive use, it becomes a coherence of forces represented in the mind of Man as a means for his willing. Everything becomes a machine, plants, animals, the world economy, the motion of the solar system, and even, most ominously, Man himself. God, so far as he, the first of all beings, is considered, becomes a mere clock-maker and the universe an elaborate clock-like mechanism, moving in a tight linkage of cause and effect toward a destiny determined from the first moment.

Once Man becomes subject, the underlying reality of all things, everything becomes an object for him, organized according to his will and utility. As an object present as Man's will, the thing is exclusively available as a way of increasing his power and assuring that the will finds only itself in its willing. It does not seem to matter much whether Technoarchy comes forth as Marxism or Liberalism because in one way or another everything ends by becoming a means for Man, a machine for him to manipulate the world with. It is true that Communist China did place limitations on the machine, sacrificing efficiency for a higher metaphysic, social consciousness. But now under new leadership, pragmatism seems once again to have won out. Inequalities due to efficiency and the imperatives of management are returning and sometimes even encouraged. And in Sweden, it is true that some attempts were made to humanize the factory. Instead of working at an assembly line performing repetitive tasks, workers are formed into teams and assemble, say, an entire car together.

But these various efforts to challenge the unrestrained dominion of the machine are exceptions that only prove the rule. Seeking human mastery, recognizing that the machine can dispossess Man of it, these efforts to restrain the machine and humanize the factory remain all too true to Technoarchy, for they insist only on making the machine once again subordinate to human purposes. If the machine escapes human control and enslaves Man to its logic, as Marxists argue very persuasively that it does under capitalism, then the answer is obvious: the creation of a society that can master the machine. It is, it seems, only the logic of individuals acting as individuals in the marketplace that makes the machine into a monster. Socialize the machine, subject it to the unmystified, democratic, and humane control of a society that understands it as a social instrument, and it will make possible a new and unprecedented civilization of human freedom. No longer will Man be subject to the cruel necessities of nature, but, at long last, through the machine, he will become the master of nature. Marx himself was one of our age's most devout worshipers of the machine.⁽²⁷⁶⁾ Capitalism was to be forgiven its sins because, simultaneously revolutionizing the relations of production and the forces of production, it was in the process of perfecting the machine and making possible the full attainment of humanity's reality, its species being.

Perhaps it is not even ironic the Frederick Taylor, the great American champion of the human machine, was celebrated by Lenin himself, who made great use of his principles of scientific management in the Soviet Union. If humanity is to come to its subjectivity through the machine, perhaps it is only after it has been sufficiently subjected to it.⁽²⁷⁷⁾ Only after all of society--economy, class relations, social consciousness, everything--has been made into a machine, a means for revolution, can the revolution finally happen. People, or maybe only the vanguard of the proletariate, can understand the dynamics of the machine and make it into the means of universal freedom. Marxist discourse itself goes a long way toward making this happen, labeling and objectifying the structures of the economy like parts of a machine--how the interaction of the parts function to produce profit, commodity fetishes, class struggle, alienation, ideology, and so on. Dialectical materialism is after all, the engine of history. (Of course, Marxists do use organic metaphors, but this difference, though being more sophisticated because more holistic, is not really a difference. The organism is still a means, and therefore a machine, however much it is a living one.)

Human subjectivity is accomplished by being the underlying cause of what occurs, the archy or commanding origin of things. To be the underlying cause, the will that out of itself wills the first motion, the subject must set about discovering the forces that deny it its mastery, be it by means of the Marxist laws of history, the dynamics of psychoanalysis, the learned patterns of behaviorism, or whatever archy or metaphysic of Man is chosen. Once these forces have been anticipated they can be shaped into whatever utopia the will wills. To build the modern utopia, all forms of human subjectivity, be they individual or collective, proceed by making humanity available for manipulation--that is to say, into a machine, if only for the moment that precedes its mastery.

Seeking human subjectivity through the collective being of humanity, Lenin no doubt concluded that the individual experience of the machine could, under the grim realities of production in the Soviet Union, be sacrificed for the collective good. It was not the individual's freedom that mattered, that made humanity into the subject (capitalism was proof of that), it was the collective's freedom, the whole of society that mattered. If collective freedom was possible only by means of subjecting the individual to the brutal regime of Taylor's factory, then so be it.

And so it goes. Although many socialists outside the Soviet Union think that the Soviet Union has betrayed Marx, that it is a horrible abortion of the revolutionary process, it may only be revealing the full brutality of humanity appropriated as machine. Other systems may not be as brutal--they would call themselves more humane--but in their basic truth they are all the same: by making the world into a coherence of forces to be mastered, they have made it into a machine.

As an instrument of Man's command, a machine is a train of parts, of resistant bodies, connected or chained together in certain way so that if one moves, all receive the motion of the original command. Viewed in terms of its function, a machine is a system of interdependent motions, setting action against action, force against force, in precise, predetermined ways, combining them together into a coherent whole that accomplishes the will of the subject that wills it into action. The human use of a machine is constituted, limited, and deployed by the resistances that the reaction of its parts against each other make possible. Resistance is a strategic deployment of the command within the machine, a hardness used to transmit motion and information to other parts, which act together to perform its function, its meaning.⁽²⁷⁸⁾

A machine becomes better able to fulfill its command, to realize its meaning, as a result of a tighter, more precise and unambiguous connection between the parts or resistances. The machine archytect's aim is to constrain the resistances of the machine's parts, to precisely define their shape and nature, and to juxtapose them so that the possibility of any but the desired motion is eliminated, nothing but the desired information is transmitted. The more resistances are constrained to the planned motion the more complete, the more useful, the machine is as an instrument of command. A machine wears out, becoming ill suited to fulfill its function or perform its meaning, as the resistances wear against each other, producing slack and making possible ill functioning and unwilled deviations from planned motions. The perfection of the machine, and its utility as instrument in the will's utopia, depends on the hardness and precision of the resistances constituting it, the unequivocality of the information they transmit. Parts must retain their shape, definition, and meaning, their strategic resistance, to fulfill their function as utility for Man.⁽²⁷⁹⁾ To belong in the utopia he has planned out.

The more sophisticated and useful the machine is as an instrument of the command, the more essential it is that all the parts are constrained to their defined tolerances. If they aren't, if there is the least bit of slack, some part somewhere in the mechanism could make an unplanned and unwilled motion. Because command wills a machine tightly linked together in a chain of action and reaction, this unplanned motion could have a disastrous effect--the more catastrophic the more complex, interdependent, rigorously linked, useful and powerful the machine is. Either it would make the machine produce something that wasn't planned on, or, more likely, cause it to destroy itself by putting its parts into unplanned configurations that they would destroy themselves in, like a worn out car engine throwing its rods through its valve cover.

As Marx knew well, and yet not well enough, the decisive thing about the machine in our age of machines is not its internal structure but its relation to Man, its alleged master.⁽²⁸⁰⁾ For Marx, the machine is an instrument of production, a tool that does the same thing that the craftsman did. They are interchangeable. Since humans are appropriated as instruments of production, the machine displaces them from their craft, subjecting them to the rule of the mechanism's utopia. So much so that what was once a craftsman becomes a mere instrument of the machine, dwarfin, misshapen, born to a life of craven toil, and her life measured and valued according to her measure and value to the machine. With an awesome assertion of its power, yet too near to us to be seen with the amazement it deserves, the machine breaks Man free of his past and draws him into its coldly rational mechanism, claiming him, body and soul, as part of its utopia.

The scientific management of the human machine in this utopia entails the division of labour, not only the social division of labor, where people specialize in certain crafts, but the detailed division of labor within the factory and the craft. The worker no longer practices her craft as a whole, as she did in the household economy, but is relegated to a narrow segment of a production process organized by the disciplinary regime of the factory.

Holding humanity as Reserved and machine, Technoarchy eventually destroys the worker's skill, her craft, and her openness to the earth by seeking to rationalize her work within the archytecture of production and to subject her to her role as its means. As operations are separated from each other and assigned to different workers, they can be analyzed in isolation and made more efficient, more consistent with the utopia it is building, through an elimination of unnecessary motion. By breaking the productive process into separate parts and dissociating them from the worker's craft knowledge, it becomes possible to separate motions into parts, some that are simpler than others, and each simpler than the whole craft. And once this happens, it becomes increasingly possible to understand the worker's motions mechanically, set them within the archytecture of factory production, and replace them with a machine.⁽²⁸¹⁾

And even if that is not possible a highly skilled worker can be replaced with a less skilled, perhaps even totally unskilled worker, making the more skilled worker more replaceable. Building its utopia, Technoarchy degrades the craftsman into utility and reconstitutes the craft into a production process under the supervision and control of scientific management, destroying the craft as an art revealed in the hands of a craftsman and near to her life.

Building this utopia, of its own logic, brings with it an archytecture of command, techniques for controlling the workplace.⁽²⁸²⁾ The first technique in this utopia is to give scientific management, the agents of reason, the responsibility for gathering together all the traditional knowledge that was possessed by the craftsman and make it rational--classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulas. The aim is to displace the worker from her craft knowledge, freeing the production process from craft, tradition, and the worker's life. Replacing craft with reason, this technique enables scientific management to assume control of the production process, to identify norms of labor, subject workers to it, and to make it proceed according to the projected plans. The second general technique in this utopia, dependent on the first, is that all thinking, all craft knowledge, should be displaced from the actual production process itself and removed to a planning department where it can be organized rationally. Not only must the work be rationalized, but the worker must not have any need for reasoning in their work.⁽²⁸³⁾ All reasoning must be scientific management's. Separating conception from execution, thinking from planning, this technique insures that the worker becomes a pure means of command, alienated from any irrational care for the thing made, far removed from the reason governing the production process.

Needing a place to design its utopia, scientific management develops a need for space to keep books, records, and desks, as well as a hierarchy of planners to define quotas, make specifications, and coordinate the production process. Seeking to displace everything that is not its design, scientific management removes itself from the workplace, and in this displaced place, plans out how it is going to accomplish its designs. Build its utopia. It is a testament to the necessity of planning for Technoarchy that the most ubiquitous characteristic of industrial production, both socialist and capitalist, is planning. But this is unavoidable because, needing the abstractions of reason to plan out the world, they both originate in a place far removed from the earth and the crafts of those who dwell on it.

The third technique in this utopia is the one that gathers the first two together and applies them to production in the factory, the actual movements of the worker amid the machinery of the factory.⁽²⁸⁴⁾ If the first technique is the rationalization of all knowledge of the production process, and the second is the concentration of all power into the hands of the agents of reason, scientific management, the third is to use this knowledge and its concentration to build the world that reason requires, the machinery to control each step of the production process, integrating every motion into the process as a whole. This technique is where the utopia scientific management designed is imposed on the world. As such it is fraught with many dangers, resistances, erupting contingencies because the earth is never in complete correspondence with the plan. Workers rebel, things break, weather frustrates, the plan is an inadequate map of reality. It takes a stern will to make the plan into a reality.

Frederick Taylor first popularized the time study as a technique to get control over the worker and displace her from her craft. A time study measures the elapse of time for each motion in a work process, normalizes the time it takes to do a motion, and then evaluates specific individuals against a hierarchy of possible time values, rewarding them or punishing them according to their utility. The prime instrument of the time study was the stopwatch.

But Taylor's time study was inadequate to scientific management's need for projection, calculation, and formal planning. Time studies could only be done on an actual job in an actual factory, not against universal standards of what the human machine was capable of. Situated in an actual place, they were not nearly utopian enough. As a result, it could not be used to plan, develop, and build more sophisticated factories, but only improve existing ones haphazardly after they were built. For the planning and efficient development of assembly lines, a more formal and mathematical theory of human motion was necessary, a general and abstract theory that could be universalized and then applied.

Frank B. Gilbreth, a follower of Taylor's, responded to scientific management's need for generality and abstraction with the time and motion study. To Taylor's time studies he added the concept of a motion study, that is, he investigated and classified the basic motions of the body independently of concrete work.⁽²⁸⁵⁾ Freeing them from place and situation. In a time and motion study, basic movements were defined, their duration measured, and broken down into units that were projected as the building blocks of any productive activity. These units of motions were called, in a variant of Gilbreth's name spelled backwards, therbligs. To the stop watch, as instrument of control, were added the chronocyclegraph, and stroboscopic pictures, (which were photographs of motion paths superimposed), and eventually the motion picture.

The result was a catalog of the amount of time it took the human body to do certain motions--for instance, the individual amounts of time that it took to select an object, grasp it, transport it loaded, transport it empty and so on. Once these basic motions were cataloged, they could, as abstract building blocks, be assembled in any way necessary for work on a production line. Eliminating the need for repeated and expensive experiments and modifications, the catalog of human motions greatly assisted the planning and construction of assembly lines. No longer needing to observe any existing situations before making their plans, engineers could design the speed of the assembly line and the division of labor in stations along it all on paper. And then, like God fathering the world, make the world correspond with their paper utopia.

With Gilbreth's therbligs, the motions of the human body became as precise an object of definition and control as the other machines on the assembly line. And that was very precise indeed. Eventually, according to Braverman, the therblig was refined into units of one hundred-thousandth of an hour, or thirty-six thousandths of a second.⁽²⁸⁶⁾ With the therblig, scientific management gained control over every instant of time, coming close to leaving no shadow that was unproductive, irrational, or inefficient. They could build whatever utopia of production they could design.

As the machine evolves, asserting its metaphysic of power on things, Man evolves with it, becoming increasingly possessed by the archytecture that governs it and its destiny. As the machine draws near to its destiny as a means for the command, what is essential is not its evolving complexity, size, speed, or technical sophistication, but the way in which its operations are controlled. Similarly, the application of power to such hand tools as drills, saws, grinders, wrenches and so on need not change the nature of the handcraft, it may merely make it easier. As long as the guidance of the tool and the skill behind it remains entirely in the hands of the craftsman, whatever the power added to it, it can remain near to the life of the dweller. It is only when the machine's tool is constrained to a fixed path by the machine's own apparatus and it thereby becomes available for control by some command other than the craftsman's truth, as it can be with drill presses, lathes, sewing machines, triphammers, and so on, that the machine begins to take on its modern utopian character.⁽²⁸⁷⁾ But this is only a beginning. The person controlling the process can still, to some extent in some circumstances, be thought of as a craftsman, responding to the calling of the thing he is making. Under the regime and truth of scientific management, however, the fixed motion paths of these machines can reveal new ways to rationalize and constrain the motion of the tool, displacing it further from the hands of the craftsman and subjecting it to the utopia management commands into being. According to Braverman, for example, a lathe can be easily automated so that it runs through a cycle by itself once a workman starts it on its way, directly transmitting management's command to the product. Once that improvement is made, it is another easy step to have the lathe automatically change tools after a cycle is complete and start itself on another cycle performing another function, and so on, in a specified sequence until the machined product is finished.⁽²⁸⁸⁾ In these kinds of specialized machines the sequence of management's design is built directly into the machine and cannot be changed without changing the structure of the machine. The motions of the mechanism are not, as yet, so much automatic as predetermined, since the control of motion is fixed within the mechanism and has no links with external control or its own working results.

The next step in the evolution of the machine toward its utopian perfection is the introduction of automation, the control of the machine's motions with information coming from outside the direct working mechanism.⁽²⁸⁹⁾ At a simple level, this may take the form of a feedback mechanism that measures the machine's output or regulates its motion, turning it on when its task is done or keeping its motions safely within the limits of its design. Examples of this kind of commanding could be a thermostat or a governor. At a more sophisticated level, the automated machine may measure the results of its work while it is in progress, compare the results with the design specifications, and make adjustments on itself as it proceeds, continually checking its production against the plan and adjusting itself to conform to it.⁽²⁹⁰⁾

With automation a limited reversal takes place. Before the introduction of automation, the evolution of the machine was from general purpose to special purpose, from, say, the hand held drill to the single machine in a factory that simultaneously drills many holes in an engine block, mills its surfaces to final finish, taps threads where needed, and so on. Such large scale machines could have no other function than the specific one they were designed for. The single machine that drills holes in a car block would be completely useless for a slightly bigger or different engine. These machines are made only when the continuous volume of a specific product can cover the cost of elaborate equipment. Under these circumstances production lines are very carefully designed and planned.

However, with the introduction of automation, some flexibility for commanding is regained, making the machine less limited by its situation, more able to respond to changes in plans. A lathe, for instance, can be made to do a variety of things and be controlled by reprogramable magnetic tape rather than mechanical construction. This process of making the machine more flexible is accelerating with the development of computers, artificial intelligence systems, and robots. As the machine becomes more flexible, it becomes more an agent of reason, responding ever more surely to management's commanding. In modern car factories robots are able to spot weld different makes of cars one after another, assemble a variety of components on different makes of cars, and spray paint different colors on different cars, without even slowing the assembly line down. As the robot develops, assuming its destiny, it will become more "human," more able to adapt to different tasks, becoming more "intelligent" and thereby more responsive to the command.

As an assembly line becomes more automatic and rational, the separate machines along it become more adapted to each other, timed and regulated to complete their tasks in harmony with each other. Conveyors and chutes transport the various components of the product from one processing machine to another just as they are needed, becoming almost indistinguishable from the processing machines themselves. When automation reaches this point, the factory ceases to be a series of machines put in stations along an assembly line, and becomes a single machine.⁽²⁹¹⁾Instead of many machines performing many separate tasks, we have a single incredibly large and complex machine performing a single task. The design of the machine then ceases to focus on a part of the production process but on the process as an integrated whole. Factories become, as Lewis Mumford puts it, megamachines, pure expressions of rational production.⁽²⁹²⁾

Perhaps the best example of this is General Motor's Saturn assembly system, where the entire production process, from design, to the initial processing of raw materials, to the fabrication of parts, to their transportation and assembly on the factory floor, to the delivery of the finished product to the customer, is linked and managed by computers and computer controlled machines. As Technoarchy centralizes control, making the production process increasingly subject to its command, it removes the worker further from the thing she makes, the governing care of her craft and her place on earth. Originating from no place, no situation that lets the world world around it, the technology of production becomes ever more utopian, more removed, more distant, more displaced.

It is generally assumed that any increase in technology, the potential for command of the earth, requires an increase in the skill (and the dignity?) of workers. Every advance in technology is an advance in Man's mastery of the earth. This assumption, almost a tautology in our age, is brought out every time an innovation threatens to displace more workers. Economists, our primary apologists for progress, assure one and all that although workers will be displaced from their jobs, the technology that displaces them will require more highly skilled, more highly paid, jobs somewhere else. Indeed, it is actually in the interest of workers to support every technological advance, even if it does require dislocation, because it only secures Man's dominion over nature. It seems that anyone who is opposed to technological advance is crazy and irresponsible--a Luddite.

As long ago as the 1950's, James R. Bright of the Harvard Business school raised some doubts about this myth. After watching actual production in a variety of what were considered highly automated factories of the time, interviewing three to four hundred industrialists, and presenting tentative conclusions to a dozen or so industrial audiences, Bright concluded that in general, with some exceptions in plant maintenance, the need for skill decreased, sometimes becoming non-existent, with advances in automation. In fact, for Bright the myth of skill advancing with technology was dangerous because it raised expectations, created disillusion and resentment when expectations were not meet, and destroyed valid job standards by setting skill standards that were unnecessary for the job.⁽²⁹³⁾

Bright set up a "mechanization profile" of seventeen levels, each specifying a specific machine or hand function and its operating characteristics, from the most backward to the most advanced. On mechanization levels 1 to 4, where the tool remains in the worker's hands, Bright observed that skill was increasing with every advance in the tool. On levels 5 to 8 where control is constrained by the mechanism but still dependent on the worker, some skills are increasing but most have turned downward. In levels 9 to 11, where the machine is partially brought under external control or automated, most skills turn downward. And in the higher levels, where automation increasingly takes control of the machine, every skill required by the worker plummets to nothing or almost nothing. The result of Bright's observations on skills is a curve that shows an increase in skills needed through the first four levels, where the tool is hand held, a decrease as machines are increasingly constrained by their own structure, and a rapid plunge in the skills the worker needs as machines are increasingly controlled by external sources.⁽²⁹⁴⁾

More recently, Lillian Rubin has made the same observation, but with considerably more sympathy for the worker:

Today more than yesterday--because technology has now caught up with work in the office as well as the factory--most work continues to be steadily and systematically standardized and routinized; the skill of the vast majority of workers have been degraded. So profound is the trend that generally we are unaware that the meaning of "skill" itself has been degraded as well . . . Advancing technology means that there is less need than before for skill, more for reliability--that means workers who appear punctually and regularly, who work hard, who don't sabotage the line, and who see their own interests as identical with the welfare of the company. These are the "skills" such capital-intensive industries need.⁽²⁹⁵⁾

It is commonly asserted, in defense of modern technology, that, while it is indeed true that modern work is increasingly deadening, the worker can escape it by going home at night. There, a more meaningful life can be pursued. But Rubin points to the interrelations between work and home:

In fact, any five-year-old child knows when "daddy has had a bad day" at work. He comes home tired, grumpy, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He wants to be left alone; wife and children in that moment are small comfort. When every working day is a "bad day," the family may even feel like the enemy at times. But for them, he may well think, he could leave the hated job, do something where he could feel human again instead of like a robot.⁽²⁹⁶⁾

The amount of skill the worker expresses in their work matters, it matters for their personal self-esteem, it matters for their family's well being, it matters for the state because it affects the nation's health, spouse abuse rates, child abuse rates, crime rates, suicide rates, and many other things. The decisive point for all of this happens when the worker's work ceases to be a handcraft and becomes the controller and monitorer of machines, when Marx would say that the worker becomes an appendage to the machine. That is when the machine enables management increasingly to subject the worker to its reason, command, and utopia by rendering her skills increasingly unnecessary.

It really should come as no surprise that the worker loses her skill as technology progresses because the very archytecture of it dictates as much. The three techniques of the command hinge on the ability of scientific management to displace the worker from her work, transforming her into a means to its utopia, and subjecting her to its rationality. Since the worker is seized body and soul as a means for the command, she must submit to the imperative of efficiency as every other instrument does. Since skill is the antithesis of Technoarchy's command, an unquantifiable, unmeasurable, unspecifiable, and unmanageable variable, it must be eliminated as much as possible, and whatever remains subjected to disciplinary organization.

This transformation of the craftsman into degraded worker and object of Man's utility, occurs most fully in large scale production where management is able to impose its utopia on labor. But in agriculture, where centralization and the full rationalization of production have not yet occurred, the farmer's skills have not suffered nearly so precipitous a drop. In contrast to the "skilled" laborer in the factory, who becomes a skilled worker in 6 weeks or at the most 6 months time, it takes many years for a person to develop the skills necessary to be a farmer, in fact it is almost impossible unless one is born to it. How to care for the soil, the habits of weeds and pests, the patterns of the weather, how to fix equipment, how to care for livestock, the patterns of the markets, and, unfortunately, how to deal with the banker and the government. Unlike many factory skills were a worker can get as good at her job as she is going to get in a couple of months time because they are precisely specified, a farmer can always become a better farmer. There is no limit to her skill.

And yet, according to Wendell Berry, the skills of farmers too have been declining with the introduction of the machine.⁽²⁹⁷⁾ Until the self-powering machine was introduced to the farm, each introduction of new technology brought with it an increase of skill needed by the farmer. The digging stick, the first tool of agriculture, made necessary a new skill. Instead of gathering plants where they grew by nature's power, the early farmer cultivated nature's ways and brought them forth from the earth. Cultivating a place brought with it a building responsibility to the earth, the seasons, and the goddess. Situated in nature, a community, and a culture, early farming was an act of worship, a cultivating of the goddess. It did not set upon the earth and demand that it submit to Man's mastery, nor did it know nature as pure utility; it brought the fruit of the goddess forth and revealed her truth.

So far as she knew how, the early farmer had a responsibility to renew and replenish the place where they lived, to cultivate the mystery of fertility, which yearly brought forth its fruit. Under the governance of the goddess, each new advance in technology--first the use of stone implements, then metal tools, then the use of animals--brought with a greater responsibility because as more and more was disturbed, more and more had to be preserved. As the word "cultivation," by means of its root--the word "cult"--implies, the ideas of tillage and worship are joined in culture. To till is to bring forth the goddess. These words come from an Indo-European root meaning both to revolve and to dwell. To be human, as the word "humus" reminds us, is to take up one's place on the earth, care for it, and worship the goddess whose truth governs its fertility. These ideas are bound up with the idea of a cycle--the cycle of seasons and the cycle of life, death, and fertility that renews the earth. To cultivate is to dwell, to remain and respond to the cycle of fertility that renews the earth and sustains the household.⁽²⁹⁸⁾

With the introduction of the draft animal, the need for skill and the limits it responded to grew together. Now humanity had to respond to the animal in a new way, as Wendell Berry argues, not as food from the hunt, but as collaborator. Two different kinds of beings were involved now in the health of the farm and the nurturance of the household, animal and human, and the health and welfare of each required the development of new skills.⁽²⁹⁹⁾

According to Berry, it requires more skill to use a team of draft animals than a machine because the relationship between human and animal must be cultivated. The machine is simply used. Between human and animal there are limits of natural health that must be respected or death destroys the collaboration. Between Man and machine there are no limits, no need for care, and no need of the skill that responds to limits. Within the possibilities of its mechanism, the machine is a pure expression of human will, starting, stopping, and functioning as its manager wills it. It requires no nurturance, no cultivation, only maintenance. Displacing all limits, it has no connection to the cycle of life on earth, and therefore does not require ethical restraints on its use. In its being, it is purely at the disposal of Man's willing.⁽³⁰⁰⁾

Cut off from the fertility of the earth, indifferent to the cycle of the seasons, the machine, as an instrument of utopian reason, enables Man to displace himself from the complex web of the earth's replenishment, and assert his mastery over it, ruling it from the placeless place of his metaphysics. In agriculture, as culture, there is in dwelling a responsibility and a necessity that gives skill its place by giving it its calling, a caring for the balance between fertility and use, between gain and continuity, for the home place. The fruit that is taken one year must not be allowed to decrease the fruit that is taken the next year. Caring for place, the farmer cares for the cycle that renews it, keeping it whole, holy, complete, no part of it broken. Maintaining the cycle requires skill--erosion must be prevented, the way of life for all kinds of plants, animals, and insects must be known and then cultivated so that each provides a balance to the rest, and wastes must be returned to the soil so that its fertility is renewed.⁽³⁰¹⁾

But the machine, displacing the farmer from her place, does not require these nurturing skills. It enables, and then requires, Man to interrupt natural cycles and balances and take what he wills. Instead of a skill that knows the life cycle of pests and their predators and uses them to maintain a balance of health, the machine gives Man a poison that kills indiscriminately. Instead of the skill that knows how to keep the health of the soil with crop rotation and humus that has been made from waste, the machine gives Man the power to apply factory made chemical fertilizer. Instead of the skill that knows how to use draft animals, the machine gives Man almost limitless power to till the soil at will. The machine does not just give this power either; it insists on it. It draws Man into its utopia by making him dependent on it, and its infrastructure.

And the development of the agribusiness machine has resulted in the deterioration of the farmer's skill in another way. When the machine was first introduced on the farm, it was relatively simple and farmers quickly developed the new skill necessary for repairing it. As farm machines became more complex, farmers developed their skills as mechanics. But recently farm machines have become too complex for even the most skilled farm mechanics. As farm machines increasingly use advanced electronics, high pressure hydraulics, high powered diesel engines, complex traction systems, and exotic materials, repair and maintenance of farm machines must be turned over to specialists, who often need the equivalent of a college education to understand the new farm machine. On my family's ranch, we have a number of very old tractors, some of them dating back to the 20's and the 30's. Even though the companies, like Co-op and Farmall, that made them have long since gone out of business, or have given up making parts for them, we still are able to use them. In fact, we do so every year for one thing or another. And it is really no big deal. They are quite simple, and repairs can be done by substitution, fancy welding, and creative mechanicing.

Not so, with our new tractors. I can't even count the number of times harvesting or planting has ground to a halt because some part somewhere--and sometimes it only costs a couple of dollars--has broken, and we cannot fix it until we get exactly the right repair part. They may be made with high alloy steel, integrated circuits, tight tolerances, or whatever. Only the right part will fit. Fearing that we may mess something up, make things worse with any tinkering, we wait patiently until it shows up, and replace it. If John Deere ever went out of business, we would be out of business the next day. Almost no exaggeration. And so, we replace things now, we don't fix them.

And as the machine replaces the farmer's skills, it increasingly is able to replace them. One day soon, perhaps only 250,000 farmers will produce 90% of the food in this country. Between now and then at least 1 million farms will disappear.⁽³⁰²⁾ The mechanization of the farm was instrumental in the creation of the factory and the displaced worker. Without a surplus of farmers, management would not have had sufficient workers willing to submit to its disciplinary regime for its labor force. The triumph of machine technology would not have occurred unless it had set upon the farmer, broken her free of her traditional practices, and then of her land, transforming her into a displaced worker vulnerable to the necessity and rationality of the factory.⁽³⁰³⁾ In a real sense the Industrial Revolution was built on the displacement of farmers and their way of life. They, almost exclusively, bore the initial sacrifices necessary to create the modern factory. But more than that the skill of many farmers was lost. As farmers lost their places, the governance of the dwelling place, the responsibility for nurturing the earth, and the life governed by the near-at-hand was lost as well. The mechanization of the farm was the first step in a chain of events that drew everything together into a totalitarian system of production that was unresponsive to the earth, the cycle of life, and the place of humanity. No one or thing could escape it, because once they participated in it, they were made more dependent on it, chained to it, and then they were lost to it.

A skill is a knowledge of the right thing to bring forth. Connected to its situation, the world that worlds it, it is an ability to discriminate, to separate things out, know their differences, and to put them in their places. As a sense, more intuitive than rational, of what is right, appropriate, or fitting for that place, a skill is the ability to hear and respond to the earth that governs the revealing of things. From the earth, the mystery that conceals, it draws things forth, letting the world world through them. Situated in a place and in a time, a skill is appropriate only to that place and time. In a different world, governed by a different technology or way of being, it may be entirely useless, as the skill of electric welding would be in any preindustrial age.

As the Thinker would say, a skill is the ability to hear the whisper of the world worlding and let it speak through the hands of the artisan, bringing the thing brought forth near to the dwelling place of the artisan. The deterioration of skill, as merely technical skill, is not the absolute measure of humanity's degradation in the face of the machine. Although reason requires as much as possible an elimination of skill, in the age of Technoarchy there remain some highly skilled workers. But, because they are at the beck and call of utopian reason, these people are in truth no different from the most degraded of workers because their skills are not directed to dwelling but to control and exploitation.

Advertising, for instance, is a real growth industry, and it does require highly skilled people to bring the consumer under its control, and yet it is an entirely suspect skill because it holds the consumer as Reserved, utilizing her as an instrument of profit.⁽³⁰⁴⁾ Many skills that this age finds most useful are skills for controlling other people and making them into a means for some sort of use. In the United States most new jobs are opening up in such occupations as labor relations, public relations, private and public security, correction, advertizing, political lobbying and campaigning, and so on.

As the machine evolves to meet its destiny it is followed, step by step, with the enslavement of humanity. Under the reign of the machine, whether the worker has any skill reason can use or not, they have become a slave, or collectively, a rabble, a heap growing in ignorance, incapacity, irresponsibility, and impotent resentment.⁽³⁰⁵⁾ Asked (but in reality forced) to do nothing more than tend to the machine, the worker becomes incapable of doing anything else--of being a citizen of the republic, of attending to the whisper of the world worlding, of fulfilling their destiny as guardian of being. Their death comes with a whimper, when it comes, and their life is lived as if it never would. Death is the great terror of the modern slave because if the thought of its possibility is ever let in, even for a moment, it becomes the measure and truth of the slave's life, and, since reason knows no meaning except the slave's utility, it finds too little to justify it.

As Hegel knew, the slave dies a miserable death, when they die. This is because fearing death and fleeing from it, the slave submits to being an instrument for another, being for them, thereby living their life by despising themselves, believing themselves a failure. Quaking to the core of their being in the face of their death, they submit themselves to a life of necessity, allowing themselves to be ruled by something far removed from their calling.⁽³⁰⁶⁾

This is not, as the Thinker would describe it, a good death. The life that it gathers up is not a free one; no truth has happened in it, no friendship, no sparing, no caring, or love. Only fear, resentment, humiliation, and pain.

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CHAPTER 9

THE VULNERABLE MACHINE

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go.⁽³⁰⁷⁾

Wendell Berry

According to Time magazine, the Pentagon believes that the command, control, and communications system necessary for nuclear war fighting is so vulnerable that it could easily be decapitated, making it impossible to use America's nuclear weapons as instruments of coercion or destruction in a crisis.⁽³⁰⁸⁾ As soon as top Defense officials read a report made by Bruce Blair, commissioned by Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, they immediately upgraded it to a supersecret clearance level. So high is its classification that only the President and a few top Defense officials are now permitted to see the paper. Even the author of it, who has a top level security clearance himself, is not permitted to see it. According to one senior military officer: "This is the single most dangerous document I have ever seen." The Pentagon hastily sent an official with a top security clearance to round up all the stray copies and destroy them in a high-security incinerator in the offices of the Joint Chiefs.

The Pentagon's panicky attempt to maintain the secret of its vulnerability does nothing to change the fact of it. Technoarchy's power systems, military, political, economic, social, and energy, are inherently insecure and vulnerable because they create vast, tightly linked, and highly organized, systems of information and power and subject them to centralized command and control. As postmodernism, especially deconstructionism, has shown time and again, such systems, unable to tolerate ambiguity, slack, or disorder, are especially vulnerable to subversive strategies, to having their meanings and functions inverted, reverted, diverted, and perverted by being recontextualized.⁽³⁰⁹⁾ No doubt that is why we spend so much money on defense and security.

All the most sophisticated weapons in America's arsenal are dependent on the integrity of an extensive military support system and even more on a functioning industrial economy. Without a continuous supply not only of exotic parts, fabricated only in a very centralized, complex, and interdependent industrial economy, but of vast amounts of exotic fuels and more mundane things like food and clothing, America's vaunted war machine would grind to a screeching halt, a giant crushed by its own strength, rationality, and technical sophistication. Some idea of the extent of the support system necessary to put our high-tech weapons into battle is contained in the fact that it directly takes up to 50 technicians and service personnel to keep one F-15 or F-14 fighter ready for battle.⁽³¹⁰⁾

It is a strange irony of the modern age that it is the strong, the technologically powerful, that are the most vulnerable. Despite the most intensive and most accurate bombing campaigns in the history of warfare, North Vietnam was able to continue its war effort against the US, and, even more, eventually make the most powerful, most technologically advanced, nation in the history of the world simply give up. North Vietnam was able to survive this onslaught because its economy was not centralized, dependent on large-scale power systems, or sophisticated factory production. The bombing campaign against North Vietnam has often been compared to the bombing campaigns of WW II.⁽³¹¹⁾ Vietnam is supposed to have received several times more tons of bombs than were dropped by everyone in WW II. But this comparison drastically underestimates the potential effectiveness of America's bombing campaign against Vietnam, ignoring the Air Force's much improved capabilities for accuracy and intelligence. A bomb is not very effective if it misses its target or if the intelligence governing target selection is faulty, and in WW II most bombs were quite ineffective. But not so in Vietnam. Because of satellite intelligence and very sophisticated targeting devices, the Air Force had a good chance of hitting anything that it wanted to hit the first time it tried--and it didn't do any good. North Vietnam still carried on its struggle to eventual victory.

If, however, even a small portion of the bombing campaign, with all its accuracy and intelligence, that was directed against Vietnam was turned against the United States, we would be living a life much more primitive than anything that was lived in Vietnam, a life without energy, electricity, information, food, clothing, shelter, or economic exchange, because almost everything we need in our life is dependent on the functioning of vast, interdependent, and centralized systems that are easily disrupted. This country has yet to learn the most important lesson of the Vietnam war, the radical fragility of modern life, and the hopeless utopianism of centralized technology.

But actually the US military does understand this quite well, as it demonstrated in the war with Iraq. The choice of targeting in Iraq reveals at least as much about the US's own vulnerabilities as it did about Iraq's. The Pentagon hit the kind of targets that it feared most for the US itself. The first target destroyed in the war was an electrical power-generating station near an Iraqi air defense radar site protecting Baghdad.⁽³¹²⁾ Although the first phase of the air campaign against Iraq included conventional military targets, like Iraq's air defense systems and radar, airfields used by Iraq's 800 combat planes, and Iraq's 30 main SCUD missile-launching sites, the highest priority targets were Iraq's command, control, and communications systems. Without them, the Pentagon knew, Iraq's ability to retaliate and defend itself would rapidly deteriorate, especially since Saddam Hussein had centralized so much authority under himself.

Within the first few days of the war, the US had destroyed Iraq's entire electrical power system, its 12 major petrochemical facilities, including 3 refineries, and its telephone system. The US-led allies then quickly attacked and destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor, and assortment of transportation hubs, roads, bridges, and railroads.⁽³¹³⁾ Eventually, they even destroyed Baghdad's water and sewage systems, making the people of the city drink river water contaminated with human feces. All of these targets had the effect of unraveling the support system sustaining Saddam Hussein's war machine. And with amazing results. One of the largest, most formidable, armies in the world was brought to its knees in a matter of weeks in one of the most lopsided victories in the history of warfare. If it can't manage dispersed economies like Vietnam's, the Pentagon clearly knows how to handle centralized systems like Iraq's. (And equally clearly, Saddam Hussein did not appreciate the vulnerabilities of his opponent, though he is probably a lot smarter now that he knows what the US's targeting priorities are.

There are other ways of destroying modern systems that the Pentagon knows about but did not use in Iraq. (But considered very seriously.) For example, the development and use of the integrated circuit for automation, information processing, and control has made the world's industrial economies radically vulnerable to the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effect.⁽³¹⁴⁾ Integrated circuits are about ten million times as prone to EMP burnout as vacuum tubes, and vacuum tubes are not immune to it. Outer space testing of nuclear explosions in the 50's burned out vacuum tubes throughout the Pacific. A single one megaton nuclear warhead exploded in outer space, according to the Pentagon, can produce a pulse of electromagnetic energy that would be strong enough to damage integrated circuits over a radius possibly up to fourteen hundred miles, enough to cover most of the United States.

EMP works this way: The gamma radiation from a nuclear blast over the atmosphere interacts with the atmosphere, specifically with the electron cloud surrounding the atom's nucleus, striping them off. The result is a very powerful electromagnetic field that very quickly reaches its peak intensity, about a hundred times as fast as lightning. Because it reaches peak intensity so fast, vulnerable circuits cannot be protected by, say, a lightning arrestor.

Power lines, pipelines, telephone lines, railroad tracks, instrument cabinets, and so on, pick up the pulse like an antenna in proportion to their mass, focusing its energy into any unprotected circuits. An EMP blast would cause an instantaneous, simultaneous failure of all of Technoarchy's electronic systems--among them the electric grid, pipeline controls, the telephone system, the radio and TV network, the systems keeping airplanes in flight, and the electronic ignition systems of most modern gasoline engines, and perhaps even nuclear command and control centers. (Part of the reason why the Pentagon is so worried about decapitation.)

The damage might not even be limited to integrated circuits. Power lines, for instance, would collect the pulse over great distances, building up a very powerful surge that could damage insulators, transformer windings, and probably anything like a motor that was attached to the grid. In addition, a blast of EMP would very possibly cause many nuclear power plants, especially the newer ones, to meltdown. They would suddenly lose the computers necessary for automated control of the system, the instruments necessary for monitoring it, and perhaps the electromechanical machines necessary to manage the system.⁽³¹⁵⁾ The results of a single EMP explosion over any modern economy would be an unprecedented catastrophe--a complete failure of all the systems it depends upon for energy, transportation, communication, food, and about everything else.

Possibly the most complex instruments of power ever built, nuclear power plants are the most vulnerable of all of Technoarchy's power systems, reproducing in one system all of the modern age's inherent and unreflective utopianism, making them appropriate metaphors for the entire age. They are the ultimate expression of trying to impose abstract and unsituated reason upon the earth's anarchy. They unleash incredible forces that can be controlled and kept safe only if reason can perfectly anticipate ever contingency, plan for it and contain it. Of course it can't and this is what makes them so utopian.

Here is the situation: Even after the nuclear chain reaction has been shut down with dampening devices, the radioactive decay from the isotopes that it has created continues. The heat and radiation from this radioactive decay cannot be reduced or controlled in any way. All that can be done is to have fail safe devices that contain the radiation and keep the decay heat from damaging the core. At shut down, the radioactive decay heat is six to ten percent of the heat produced at full power. The total decay heat of the fuel in the core is enough to melt down through a solid iron pillar ten feet in diameter and 700 feet long. And though the decay heat slackens, rapidly at first, it is enough for weeks after the shutdown to melt the hundreds of tons of nuclear fuel in the core.

Unless the decay heat is carried away by cooling devices, it builds up, generating steam, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and making possible a chemical reaction between parts of the core that will generate further heat. The decay heat and its effects can build up to such an extent that it ruptures containment, spewing tons of highly radioactive waste over the country side, causing thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths, many billions of dollars of property damage, and long term ecological damage over possibly thousands of square miles.⁽³¹⁶⁾ (Chrenoble wasn't nearly as bad as it can get because the Russians were able to contain most of the core before it escaped into the atmosphere.)

To keep meltdowns from happening, an elaborate cooling system with much redundancy is built to carry the heat away, and if that fails a massive containment system is supposed to keep radioactive wastes from being released. Much effort is devoted to anticipating every reasonablecontingency. And that is the key, reasonable contingency. Only reasonable contingencies can be planned for because all possible contingencies are simply impossible to imagine in the first place, and too expensive to prepare for in the second. Reason cannot anticipate every contingency, map it out, prepare for it, because it is simply too far removed from it. Situated in a placeless place, a dream world far removed from the earth's contingency, it can only impose its technocratic utopia on the world, try to keep it secure. But reason is an inadequate map of reality, has to be. And eventually, something has to go wrong . . .

Because they are utopian, poorly prepared to meet the earth's contingency, repairing Technoarchy's power systems after they have collapsed because of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or miscalculation is made difficult, if not impossible, by their monolithic character.⁽³¹⁷⁾For many of the same reasons that they are vulnerable to catastrophic failure, Technoarchy's power systems are difficult to repair since the repair systems are not independent but often rely, if indirectly, on the same system that they are repairing. The more time that a power system is down, the greater the possibility that its failure will cascade, causing failure even in systems that have comparatively loose links.

Quick repair is essential to stop the cascading effects of system failure because sustained failure will exceed the tolerances that dependent systems have built into them, forcing them to fail as well eventually. Because Technoarchy's economies are built around the imperative for efficiency, the tolerances of most systems are designed to only handle ordinary circumstances, the normal business cycle, typical natural disasters, peace time bottle necks. It is an irrational expenditure of resources to prepare for anything except reasonable contingencies; it is not profitable, not appropriate. Extraordinary occurrences--war, extensive natural disaster, severe depressions, or terrorist attacks--would easily exceed planned tolerances, making quick repair as necessary as it was impossible. Only Israel has built a national power system that has any tolerance for extraordinary circumstances, such as war and terrorism. American power systems have especially low tolerances, and are only capable of responding to variations internal to the system. Any disruption outside of the planned tolerances has no corresponding repair system capable of managing it.

Technoarchy's power technologies often achieve their greatest technical efficiency only by being specially designed for the specific system. Because it draws everything into it so that it can command it, linking everything to a single monolithic system, economizing by means of large scale, there is a necessity for custom-making of most of the components of the system. Assembly line production is not useful because each time a power system is built, it is likely to be designed somewhat differently, a technical improvement here, a cost cutting measure there. The result is that the components of any one power system are unique and not easily replaceable with the components of any other power system. This custom made uniqueness would make repair much more difficult in harsh circumstances.⁽³¹⁸⁾

Severe damage to large scale power systems typically takes many months, sometimes a year or more, to repair.⁽³¹⁹⁾ And repair requires a complex array of supporting systems. The repairs usually require not only small tools and welders, but heavy cranes, hoists, and a well functioning parts supply system. Transportation of things like generator rotors and larger transformers is very difficult under even the best of circumstances, requiring extremely heavy equipment and much coordination and organization.

The manufacturing capacity for replacing key components of power systems cannot be expected to deal with much more than routine demand, and certainly could not be expected to come any where near to dealing with wide-spread disruption and a 10, 100, or 1000 fold jump in demand. Cannibalizing some systems to get other systems working is seldom possible because of severe matching problems. Wide spread disruption would quickly exhaust the small pool of highly skilled technicians necessary to make such repairs. The technical complexity of modern power systems means that they require exotic materials and fabrication techniques, which will only be available if a highly interdependent industrial economy is intact, and only if exotic minerals can be imported from a number of unstable third world countries.

Once the infrastructure supporting the power industry is disrupted, it would be very hard to reestablish it because it itself depends on the power industry for the power it needs for its exotic fabrication techniques. If a major power source fails, its interconnections with other power sources may help it to reestablish itself, assisting it with backup and restarting, but more likely it will mean that its failure is propagated throughout other systems, rippling outward until it is as total as the rationality Technoarchy imposes on all things.⁽³²⁰⁾ Because the time of Technoarchy has woven so many things so tightly together, linking divergent systems technically, economically, politically, and socially, a failure in any one power system entails disruption in others, threatening everything. Radically unprepared to meet these contingencies, it is as if we live in a technological paradise where the plan is an adequate map of reality and everything always goes according to plan. What could be more utopian than our technology?

Technoarchy's technology is never near at hand, able to be governed by handmade care, but is far flung and global in extent. Its tools of power do not draw near to the dwelling place, responding directly to its needs and its contingencies, the way that solar, wind, and animal power can, but orders everything into a vast power system whose rationality is measured by its totality, not by its purpose. Mastery is the truth of Technoarchy, distant power the measure of its truth. Knowing all things as Man's utility and means to more power, Technoarchy conceals all other ways of being, shutting itself off from the mystery of the earth, imposing its rationality on everything, insisting on the appropriateness of the technocratic utopias it builds. In doing this it produces contingency as its shadow, its other, and makes itself radically vulnerable to its eruption. Cutting itself off from the earth, repressing it, and dismissing it, it makes its utopian dreams of reason contingent on the earth erupting only in the ways it has planned out for it.

Seeking power over the earth's contingency, Technoarchy links everything together into a tight totality, subjecting it to a center of command and control, where Man can will his will. To be adequate to the utopia it is dreaming of, the nodes and links in these systems must be precise, sharply defined, and resistant to any contingency that would make them different, because they must efficiently transmit the effects of Man's power throughout the whole system.⁽³²¹⁾ Slack, noise, or ambiguity in the system means that control will not be effectively transmitted and will not arrive at all the dispersed parts with the same command information that it had at its inception, casting a shadow over its legitimacy. Once Man makes his claim on the world, Technoarchy reveals anything that does not fit within its precisely constrained mechanism as danger, a shadow needing to be dispersed, a threat to Man's fatherhood. Because everything is so tightly linked to the origin, the slightest ambiguity or lose linkage, perhaps something like a computer virus, can cause a reversal of meanings, injecting dysfunctional commands that, transmitted throughout the tightly organized system could put all the parts of it into fatal configurations.⁽³²²⁾

Because so much depends subordination to the origin, the primary concern in the time of Technoarchy is security, banishing the shadow. Slack, ambiguity, play, friction, out of place matter or dirt, non-normalized behavior are threats, total threats because the system must be total in order for it to assume its destiny as instrument of human control. But this concern with security reveals the vulnerability of the systems that Technoarchy has brought forth. Although they are enormously powerful, god awful powerful sometimes, they are all brittle, able to be shattered, deconstructed with only the slightest of forces that were not incorporated into their plans. When Technoarchy's systems of control fail, when the utopia it has built fails to anticipate all possible contingencies, all the interdependent relations and functions that they had sustained, maintained, and performed fall apart, cascading like dominos falling into each other until there is nothing but ruin. Because everything has been drawn into them by the necessity of extending power and assuring the triumph of the will, the ruin will be as total as the systems of control were powerful.

In nature's an-archy, as in Technoarchy's economies, things are interdependent, linked in complex ways that interact throughout their entire extent. For instance, the World Health Organization launched a program to control malaria-carrying mosquitos among the inland Dayak people of Borneo with DDT.⁽³²³⁾ The program worked, at least within its defined limits of preventing malaria. But it also caused the roofs of the Dayak people's longhouses to start falling down, made them more vulnerable to sylvatic plague, and killed off their pets. Besides killing mosquitos, the DDT also killed a parasitic wasp that had previously controlled the caterpillars that lived by eating their thatch roofs. Furthermore, their cats started dying off because they accumulated lethal doses of DDT from eating the lizards that had eaten the poisoned mosquitos. Without the cats, the woodland rats multiplied, and with them the flees that carry the plague. A major outbreak was prevented only when the World Health Organization began to parachute live cats into Borneo. Manipulating one part of nature's economy quickly spread to other parts, threatening the entire economy with collapse.

Vulnerable as nature's organic economies are to outside intervention, they are not nearly as vulnerable as Technoarchy's machine economies are. This is because nature's economies are not linked together by the truth of a center, the possibility of unambiguous command, or the necessity of efficient control. Nature comes forth as an-archy. Different species in nature adapt to and coevolve with their environment, each dispersed according to their nature. They are linked together not by the necessity of transmitting precise, unambiguous commands throughout the system, but by their existence as co-dwellers, participants in nature's local household. Radically unlike Technoarchy's machine centered economies, nature's economies have room, even a necessity, for slack, ambiguity, and play, for anarchy and chaos.⁽³²⁴⁾

To a limited extent different species can occupy the same place or niche in the economy, partially duplicating the role of the previous inhabitant. Because of this an-archycal dispersion, the more complex nature's economies are, the more different participants there are in the local household to fill different roles, the more likely it is to be stable. For instance in an economy where rabbits are the only source of food for coyotes, the populations of both species will fluctuate widely, sometimes nearing the point of extinction.

As the population of rabbits grows, the population of coyotes, finding it easy to sustain themselves, will grow also. But they will eventually grow to a point where the population of rabbits will not be able to sustain them. Competition for the declining rabbit population will grow fierce, and the coyotes will follow the rabbits to a point near extinction, declining until there are so few coyotes that rabbits can again multiply. If, however, there are alternative sources of food for the coyotes, mice or grasshoppers perhaps, and alternative predators with somewhat different tastes, bobcats maybe, each species will be able to respond to different food sources based on their availability, giving the other species the slack they need to maintain their numbers.

Similarly, if there was some way of dispersing the regions within which the coyotes and rabbits interact into subregions, separated by, say, a mountain chain, between which either animal can move with some delay and difficulty, stability also would be promoted. Slight random variations in the population dynamics between subregions enables one region to recolonize another, since the population cycle of growth and collapse would be out of step among the subregions. Even if one animal became extinct in one subregion it could be recolonized by the other. Because nature's economies are dispersed and heterogeneous, that is to say an-archycal and chaotic, they can be stable over long periods of time left to themselves and can regenerate themselves even when subject to considerable stress.

Technoarchy's mechanical economies, on the other hand, brought forth and organized around the archycal imperative for human command, have none of nature's an-archycal tendencies toward dispersion and heterogeneity. (Capitalism may present itself as unplanned and decentralized, a free market, at least its advocates describe it that way, but in fact it is a highly centralized system. First of all, everything is present to it as a commodity, locked very tightly to the reign of the market. And even if there is no human being planning out the market, as there is in some versions of socialism, Man's control, read as consumer sovereignty, is supposed to reign, the center around which it spins like a natural law. Of course, it doesn't happen that way, but to the extent that it doesn't and is in fact controlled by monopoly planning systems, it is even more centralized, more the product of Man's will.⁽³²⁵⁾ Whether planned or not, capitalism does have a center that controls everything as an instrument of Man's will.)

Indeed, seeking mastery throughout its whole extent, the pure transmission of the will, dispersion and heterogeneity are obstacles for Technoarchy to overcome. Everything must be made the same, somehow drawn up into a system of control. (Consumer/monopoly sovereignty under capitalism.) To link its systems together so that it can give cause to whatever effect it seeks and accomplish the will that commands it, Technoarchy must eliminate any heterogeneity or dispersion, all ambiguity or slack, in its machine economies, drawing everything together in a tightly woven, efficiently linked, network. (Under capitalism this means variously controlling the monopolies so that they don't mess up the free market, or controlling the consumer so that they don't mess up corporate plans.) Whatever the situation or perspective, heterogeneity, dispersion, ambiguity, anarchy, and slack dampen, confuse, and disorganize the crystalline clarity of the command, threatening mastery with its nemesis, chaos. They must be eliminated and the system allowed to function.

Unlike nature's economies which, lacking a center, are more stable the more complex they are, Technoarchy's economies, requiring submission to the center, become more unstable and more difficult to manage as they become more complex.⁽³²⁶⁾ As Technoarchy's machine economies become more complex, the interactions between different parts grows many times faster, making the design for its utopia of will incredibly complex. Each new part, makes possible new relations between different parts. But unlike nature's an-archycal economies, all the new relations must be subjected to the will, made rational, and organized according to plan. Made controllable by being subjected to the center of command. Despite rapidly accelerating complexity, all contingencies must be known and anticipated so that the operation of the system becomes fail safe and the security of control assured.

That which escapes its plan, the freak, the monster, insanity, irrationality, the poor fitting part, becomes all the more dangerous to it the more extensive and rational the plan--dirt wearing against the fine tolerances of a complex machine. Recognizing this threat to its security, seeking to maintain its control in the face of the unplanned, Technoarchy raises the complexity of its systems of control to new heights to deal with it. But because no system is complete, able to formulate all its truths within itself, this only generates more complexity needing to be managed--and more problems and more vulnerabilities.⁽³²⁷⁾ Another layer of control over a complex system may perhaps solve the immediate problem, but it will add to the network, changing relations within its complex mechanism in unplanned ways, often generating more problems, perhaps more severe, elsewhere.

The more Technoarchy seeks its utopia, the will willing only itself, the more it must control, and the more it controls, the more that escapes its will. Its utopia. Having invested so much of itself in control, Technoarchy has no choice but to attempt to gather into its will that which escaped it yet another time. The attempt to master the earth becomes a death spiral, ever tightening in around itself as more and more escapes the limits of its expanding utopia.

For instance, to use the example of one of Technoarchy's economies, before the Great Depression, the advocates of free enterprise in America knew the role of the state in the economy as largely a "night watchman," a guardian of private property, contracts, and civility. Unlike socialism, which makes everything available for self-conscious control, liberalism, restrained itself, thinking that the market was a self-correcting system. Like an automatic machine, supply would closely follow demand in a competitive privately owned market. The consumer would be sovereign, controlling supply with their demand. But then the Great Depression occurred, bankrupting many capitalists and throwing at least a fifth of the working population of the United States out of work. Obviously control had failed. Following the lead of Maynard Keynes, liberals suddenly recognized the need for "fine tuning," management by economic technicians, because the capitalist had a contradictory relationship to the worker, messing up consumer sovereignty.⁽³²⁸⁾

On the one hand, as individuals, capitalists wanted to pay the worker as little as possible for the work they got so they could maximize their profits. On the other hand, as the sellers of what their workers made, they needed all workers, as consumers, to have a good salary to sell their product to at a profitable rate. Inevitably, as individuals locked within the imperatives of a competitive marketplace, capitalists choose to keep the wages of their workers as low as possible, hoping that other capitalists would go out of business before they did. The result of all capitalists doing this was that there was not enough demand to sustain profits, the market went out of control, and a depression started. Keynesians thought that growth could be regenerated by a taxing and spending policy that redistributed, to some degree, the capitalist's surplus to workers, increasing their demand and stabilizing the capitalist's profits. As a result, it suddenly became apparent that the national economy could be controlled through the management of a national debt.

Keynesianism was an attempt, made necessary by the collapse of the household and its displacement by the market, to expand control over the economy, to master the business cycle and regularize profits and employment. As a recognition of the limits of free enterprise to correct itself, it was a recognition of the necessity of technical management on a national scale, an ideologically awkward acknowledgement that weakened liberalism's traditional separation between public and private. Throughout the 60's Keynesianism worked well as an instrument to manage the economy, at least by the standards of mainstream economists, but it soon became evident that the economy had to be managed in another dimension. Yet more things had to be gathered up and subjected to control.

According to the arguments of traditional liberals, the marketplace is supposed to insure that buyers, at least on average, pay for all the costs of production, and usually a small profit to the producer. The market justly and perfectly distributes all the costs and burdens of production to everyone who benefits from them. If this utopia ever was plausible, it became increasingly implausible in the late 60's and early 70's. Because of industrial development, a whole array of externalities--costs of production not controlled by the market price--became unavoidably apparent. The environment was being polluted, the worker's health was endangered in the factory, farm land was being eroded far faster than it was being rebuilt, energy was being used up at a rate below what it cost to replace it, toxic wastes were being dumped. In all these cases, real costs of industrial development were being sloughed off onto people who either did not participate in or benefit from the market exchanges. The full costs of production were put off on future generations, communities that lived downwind or downstream from the factories, or on a population and a workforce that was increasingly vulnerable to cancer, birth defects, and ill health. The political technology of the free market was inadequate to its task.⁽³²⁹⁾

Liberals, like Charles Schultze, who recognized these externalities and failures of the market, attempted to deal with them as the Keynesian's did--with expanded technical management. More utopia. Schultze's plan for drawing the externalities that escaped the market system back into it was to have the government research the costs that escaped market control, and, though they are more often qualitative in nature than quantitative, fix a price on them. The government would then tax the industry that was profiting from these externalities at a rate that would allow no profit, and give capitalists every incentive for ending their socially disruptive behavior. Through technical control, the public would make use of private interest, channeling and regulating it in a way that again would make market costs reflect real costs.⁽³³⁰⁾ That was his utopia.

However, Schultze's plan for handling the externalities of the marketplace, if it solves anything, would more likely introduce more problems elsewhere. One of the problems, as William Connolly has argued, is that Schultze's attempt to manage externalities through technical control implicitly depends on public managers having vast reservoirs of civic virtue, and Schultze's theory of human motivation, upon which his whole theory of management depends, explicitly acknowledges that such a reservoir of civic virtue is unlikely to exist.⁽³³¹⁾ People are self-interested and are most likely to respond to their self interest. And even if people aren't primarily self-interested, but in fact are capable of patriotic action, treating them as if they were exclusively self-interested and interpreting all their actions as self-interest will make it so.

We can expect, moving from Schultze's utopia to the real world, that our public managers would be prone to corruption, an externality that could poison the republic. Perhaps they would take bribes from the industry they are supposed to be regulating, but more likely they would overlook a "little" fact here, bend an "insignificant" rule there, so that the industry they are regulating might, say, reward them with a high paying job latter on. Once the government becomes an instrument turned toward corruption, the citizenry will no longer feel bound by its rulings and will seek their interest outside it too. As a result of no one's patriotism providing a limit to their interest, the republic will disintegrate into a corrupt and ugly ochlocracy, perhaps further into a war of all against all.

Schultze's dilemma is the dilemma of management and technical control in the age of Technoarchy--how is the controller themselves to be controlled so that their actions keep the system they are controlling within the limits that sustain it? The answer, invariably is that a higher order of technique is necessary to control what had escaped it, a procedure or apparatus that renders the actions of managers visible, normalizes them against a pattern of acceptable behavior, and inscribes them within it by means of reward and punishment.

But this raises the system of management to a higher order of complexity, creating new relationships, new systems of surveillance and control, and new feedback loops. Inevitably, these new dynamics will have results that are unplanned, not contained within the system but needing to be. The technology of management is a utopia doomed to grow, vainly attempting to bring under control everything that escapes its necessity while adding new elements that escape control, making the system more unmanageable as it becomes more in need of management.⁽³³²⁾

Technoarchy's doom is its necessity for continually seeking out its other, that which lies at the margins of its systems of power, outside its borders and yet limiting its control, and subjecting it to its rationality. Once reason knew unreason as its ontological limit, accepting its mystery as God's will. Now, that it is Man's instrument and not God's truth, reason knows unreason only as disease. That which once escaped reason, and thereby revealed God's judgement, is now safely contained within a classification of difference and degree, aetiology and symptomology, and the mystery of unreason is only the inability, one day certain to be overcome, of extending Man's classification to all phenomena.

As Man's instrument, reason imposes crystalline projections on the visible domain of data, sharply defining boundary, category, measure, and difference according to Man's utility. Within this utopia of rigorously posited knowledge, Man, the specialist takes his place, accepting his boundary and extending the power of reason within his specialty. Seeking total control within his enclosure, Man defines variables, simplifying the complexity of his domain with unambiguous categories of difference, which he then makes available for mathematical manipulation. Through the analytic procedure of the specialist, any variable can be controlled for, revealing in its differences its law like relation to other analytically defined variables. By means of his developing ability to manipulate variables mathematically and control their effects, the specialist is able to move from the total control of the laboratory and the experiment to build systems for Technoarchy's economies. The analytic procedure of the experiment is identical with the analytic procedure that builds Technoarchy's political, economic, industrial, and military systems. They both yield their results by simplifying the complexity of the earth to the utility of Man. As the specialist posits variables and manages their relationships, building his utopia, he closes himself off from the earth and conceals from himself the world's real complexity. Seeking total control within the simple enclosure of analytic procedure, the specialist abandons everything that escapes his system of definitions, leaving it totally out of control.⁽³³³⁾ A pragmatist seeking escape from the tyranny of irrelevant dynamics, the specialist repudiates and ignores the complex, subtle, and mysterious patterns that cross his boundaries, recontextualizing the meaning of his system, working in subtle unknown ways against his logic. Because he cannot control everything, and yet tries to, and builds his systems as if he did, the specialist's attempt at total control in the systems he builds is doomed to end in total disorder.⁽³³⁴⁾

The an-archy of the earth will, of itself, eventually rise up and deconstruct his elaborate utopia. And this is the more certain the more rigid and exclusive his boundary, the more precise and exact his definitions, and the more total his control. Because precision, rigid exclusion, and unambiguous logic, as artificial Man made instruments, are impositions on the world's complexity and the earth's power to come forth in unknowable ways, the abstract forms of truth that Technoarchy projects are never adequate to the earth, and yet Technoarchy builds as if they were.

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CHAPTER 10

THE MONSTER

I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.⁽³³⁵⁾

The monster to Frankenstein

From Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

At about the same time that Mary Shelly was writing her dystopian tale of a Man-made monster, another monster, a nonfictional one even more terrible than Mary Shelly's, was haunting the mind of Europe--the Marquis de Sade. It seems strange that one man could provoke such an extreme reaction, unless he represented something that was all too near, too true to the reality of the time. Why has Sade been so thoroughly censored? Why was he imprisoned, locked up, and isolated from the rest of society? Was it just for what he wrote? Or was it not because his moral nihilism, much like the monster in Mary Shelly's famous novel, was the ultimate threat to the thoughts, the personal identities, and the morality of his time? Was he not locked up and isolated not so much for the crimes he might have committed, but for the contagion he represented, for the scandal he made possible, and the threat to civility he posed?⁽³³⁶⁾

Could it be that Sade was, and no doubt still is, the unwelcome guest of our time, a monster representing a shadow in our thought that must be repressed, denied, isolated, silenced; and despite all of this, carefully examined (most preferably by medical doctors), studied, and carefully answered?⁽³³⁷⁾ A good scientist of morals cannot just ignore Sade and his dystopianism, just jail him and censor him; he must have reasons; he must examine him (if in secret), and not fail to have the most complete answer for the isolation and denial of Sade's sort of contagion; for to fail to get this monster under control is the most serious failure a science of morals is capable of.⁽³³⁸⁾ Sade must be made safely other, into the not-self.

The reasons for Sade's thought, the causes of his immorality, the constitution of his mind, his body, and his soul, must be made to speak, to render up their truth of themselves as irrationality or immorality, to confess their secret knowledge, so that Sade and the elements, whether social or organic, which made his obscene dystopianism possible can be manipulated, controlled, subjected, and then, most importantly, made rational.⁽³³⁹⁾ And our utopia made safe again. Nevertheless, a terror haunts us: as we think about the ways in which our technical mastery of morality might circle back on itself, defeating its own ends and purposes, on the ways in which it, itself, helps create the dystopia it denies, we begin to wonder if it is not the fearsome Sade who has trapped us, if it is not possible that the more we try to deny him, the more levers and fulcra we reach for to pry him out of our lives, the more he reveals our utopia as a dystopia, making his dream into our nightmare, and revealing the secret truth of what we are.⁽³⁴⁰⁾

If Technoarchy, which carries with it the necessity for mastering all the earth, cannot help but father a double, a fearsome shadow of itself that it must exclude and repress, if, in building its utopia, it must create wills, modes of behavior, or groupings of people--terrorists, delinquents, a rabble of welfare dependents, sexual perverts--that must be identified, controlled, changed, and made useful as a demonstration of reason's truth, then the legitimacy, the originary archytecture, of modern technology is called into question.⁽³⁴¹⁾ Its patrimony becomes illegitimate. Claiming the purest of origins for itself, needing to only be itself, it is haunted by its own a shadow, what it must not be but nevertheless is. If we are in fact not other than Sade, if his dystopianism and depravity is secretly our own, the more so when we deny it, repress it, and exclude it, we can hardly make any claims to the legitimacy of our thought. It has an other in it that, by our own standards, makes it illegitimate by demonstrating the fear underlying our reason, the cruelty underlying our morality, the will to power underlying our quest for freedom, the lies underlying our will to truth. The fact that Sade, and others like him, are, have lived and thought, raises doubts that we are, what we would like to be.

When monsters like Sade erupt out of nowhere, as tradition has always known, they appear as a warning, a divine omen of an evil yet to come. The Old French word "monstre," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is closely related to "monere," to warn. The appearance of the monster, then, is something marvelous, a divine portent or warning, a fearsome event. Moreover, as its root in the French word "montre" shows, the monster appears as the effect of monitoring, of watching, displaying, showing. Of revealing. As a feared abomination, a divine portent of evil, the monster is put on display (the freak show is the modern variation of an ancient practice) for all to fear, to take heed of, and respond to as a warning.

And yet, as we moderns are apt to forget as we attend freak shows, as if by some monstrous compulsion within, and pity the objects put on display there, the monster is more than an abortion of nature, an accident that reason makes harmless with an aetiology of its being as a coherence of forces.⁽³⁴²⁾ Something that is simply other, bearing no relation to ourselves than its difference. It is a summons, an irruption of Being, that reveals our own monstrous truth. Driven by some hideous compulsion, there we stand before it, watching the monster, more monstrous than it by our gawking, by our act of seeing it as other than ourselves. It reveals that which called it forth, set it on stage. As a divine warning, calling on us to reflect on our own monstrousness, the monster reveals, as it conceals. The Monster reveals and conceals alternately the depravity of watching the monster, of making it other than ourselves, and the fear that makes it different from ourselves, that makes us repress our identity with it.

Kept secure in our identities by our reason, our science, and technology, we moderns, however, know no monsters because we know no evil. Fervently committed to our dreams, repressing the shadows that make them possible, we believe there can be no nightmares in our utopias. Concealed from the gaze of science by the calm assurance of reason, the monster as divine portent of monstrosity is unknown in our age, and yet this age, of all ages, is the age of the monster.⁽³⁴³⁾Because of its truth as object of utility, the world is watched, put on display, viewed as a picture, made into an other to be dominated and used, just as the monster is put on display in a freak show. But it is not the monster that is monstrous in this display of the world as picture, it is the watching, the modern way of looking upon the world as something to be dominated and controlled. The watching that reason insists upon effects a subtle transformation on the watcher. Seeing the world as an object of its will, the watcher assumes a way of being in the world that excludes its nurturance, allows the possibility of love of others or compassion for the unfortunate--any relation to the world that makes it into anything except a means for the will to will itself.⁽³⁴⁴⁾ Nothing is left to break forth from the earth of itself and left to be itself, but rather is gathered up in the tempest of Man's willing it as a means to his willing. This way of being conceals the monster while bringing forth the monstrous.

In Frankenstein, a dystopian tale of a Man-made monster, Mary Shelly was issuing us a warning that goes right to the heart of this time of Man-made people, a warning about utopian fathering that has been ignored as much as it has been transformed into myth.⁽³⁴⁵⁾ Frankenstein is the story of a brilliant scientist who overcomes many technical obstacles, discovers the secret of life, and uses it to create a human being in his laboratory. He becomes a father, so to speak, without recourse to intercourse, motherhood, or mothering. Patriarchy's ideal father. The being that he fathers is brought forth only as the object of his will and it has no other being, no other origin or connection, than that. Only his will. His claim on his progeny is uncontestable. But, as soon as he succeeds, and his creation awakes, Frankenstein is filled with horror, and he abandons his creation to its own devices. He cannot stand even the thought of what he has brought into the world, what it reveals about the world.

Living in a hovel near a family that he spies on, the monster quickly develops his human skills for reading, speaking, and listening to a language. He discovers his unique situation as the first Man-made man from Frankenstein's notebook, which he took with him when he left the laboratory, and that contains Frankenstein's final reaction of horror to his creation. Wherever he goes, whenever he encounters another human being, Frankenstein's creation is quickly made the object of violent assault, a fearsome other. Taking this otherness within himself, accepting society's judgment of him, he flees from all humanity, becoming an outcast from the human race.

Profoundly alone, he desires companionship desperately. A friend. He seeks out his creator and prevails upon him to father him a woman too. But, fearing the consequences, Frankenstein breaks his promise and the monster turns against his creator in revenge, killing everyone that Frankenstein loves. Once he has lost everyone he loves, Frankenstein follows the monster to the Arctic, seeking to kill him. But he dies before he can accomplish his goal. His revenge satisfied, overwhelmed by a most terrible self-disgust, the monster destroys himself in a fiery inferno at the North Pole, far removed from any human habitation.

Contrary to the myth, but very true to it, Frankenstein is not the name of the monster, but of the scientist who made him.⁽³⁴⁶⁾ Cut off from society by his monstrousness, the monster has no relation to someone who would name him. In this curious reversal and forgotten fact lies its own truth--it is not the monster that is monstrous, but the making that made him, brought him forth from unconcealment. But we see in the novel that Frankenstein himself, save for perhaps some minor flaws of character, is no monster either, but as the monster himself concludes, "is the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men." The monster comes into the world not, it would seem, as the issue of some cruel and sadistic hand which despises the world and seeks its torment, but as the exact realization of the dream of its creator, the highest attainment of the most excellent of scientists. The monster was to be the scientific demonstration of the mastery of the secrets of life, of the power for bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, renewing life where death had devoted the body to corruption. It was to be the proof of a self-conscious knowledge of humanity that would be of inestimable benefit to mankind, a total mastery of nature and man's beginnings.⁽³⁴⁷⁾ It would make it possible for the human race to become its own father. And build the perfect utopia.

But the moment that the experiment was complete, and the creation opened its eye, demonstrating the full accomplishment of human self-consciousness, the creator, Dr. Frankenstein, was suddenly repelled by his creation.⁽³⁴⁸⁾ It ceased to be a technical triumph and became an abomination, ugly and hideous to look at. Frankenstein fled from it in horror, hoping that death would take it back into its grave. The dream of complete self-consciousness became a nightmare, the reality of the will being able to father itself a terror. However much he now despised it, the monster that Frankenstein created was not an accident, a miscalculation, or a failure, but the accomplished reality of being able to give a total representation of Man, of being able to master the coherence of forces governing the origins of Man to the point of being able to create one. It is that technical capability for self-consciousness that is so monstrous and makes the monster so horrible. If only an abortion of nature, the monster would merely have been ugly, but as a creation of Man, the full expression of his will being able to will himself, it was an abomination, the truth of humanity as an object of science and technology. The dream of the perfect utopia, once realized, is revealed as a dystopia.

Mimicking God's creation of humanity, Man's creation of Man became the effective death of God as creator. All that was holy in Man and nature was vanquished by the new Adam, becoming nothing more than the re-presentation of a human will. With the new Adam, things were as Man willed them to be and nothing more. Everything became an object for human subjectivity, even Man himself. Technology had overcome the last obstacle, the mastery of Man himself. With its triumph, Man became a slave to himself, an object of his own utility. Frankenstein was repelled by his creation because it brought with it a radical diminution of his own status as a subject and of the subjectivity of everyone he loved. People became what they controlled, something to be controlled. If, by means of his chemical manipulations, he could create human life out of inanimate matter, asserting his will over it, he had also reduced human life to inanimate material, a coherence of forces available for human manipulation. With his success, people became their bodies, inanimate objects composed of dead matter. That was the reality he had fathered.

The night that his creation had opened its watery eye and breathed its first and Frankenstein had fled his lab in horror he fell into a wild and fitful sleep. In his dreams, he thought he saw his beloved Elizabeth in the bloom of health, walking the streets of the town where his lab was. Delighted and surprised because she was in reality many miles away, he embraced her, but with the first kiss, her lips became livid with the hue of death; her features changed and she became his long dead mother. A shroud covered her and he could see the grave-worms crawling in the folds of her dress.⁽³⁴⁹⁾ The monster killed everyone that Frankenstein loved twice, the first death, which occurred when the monster opened his eyes, was much more terrible than the last, which came directly at the monster's hands. If Frankenstein could create human life out of dead matter, equating the two in his chemical equations, then, by simply reversing his equations everyone that he loved was dead matter and object of human command. Something to be used, not loved. Nothing more.

As the story develops and the monster kills everyone that Frankenstein loves he only completes what Frankenstein had in truth already accomplished with his creation. Throughout the rest of the story, with each succeeding death of a beloved friend or family member, Frankenstein is overcome with guilt, and he says repeatedly that he has killed them.⁽³⁵⁰⁾ Everyone dismisses this as incoherence inspired by grief, but Frankenstein is entirely correct and entirely coherent. His creation, by the sheer truth of its being, has killed everyone he loves by destroying their humanity, turning them into an object for Man's utility. The monster is Frankenstein's double, the object of his subjectivity, and the re-presentation of his power as technician. On the surface the double appears as a negation of the self, but more profoundly, the double is a completion of the self, an other, which combined with the self creates a whole. Each exists only because the other exists. Dissolving this difference, making subject and object an identity, the monster is monstrous for Frankenstein because it reveals everything as the will's utility. The differences that made his quest for knowledge matter disappear.

Despite its gentleness, its care and concern for humanity, its overwhelmingly human need for companionship, Frankenstein's creation was doomed to become a monster, a terrorist at war with society, because of its very being as a Man-made fabrication. In its truth as inanimate matter made living by the hand of man, the perfect representation of humanity, it was the incontrovertible denouement of Man as subject and archytect of the world. As the highest accomplishment of Man's technology, the fullest demonstration of his subjectivity, the monster was the other truth of Man, the representation of Man's being as the object of his own technology. Throughout the book, Frankenstein seeks only to accomplish the full humanity of Man, to protect human subjectivity.

When he realized that his creation was not the instrument of humanity's freedom but the demonstration of its slavery, he sought to protect humanity from the terrible truth he so brilliantly demonstrated. This is what Frankenstein was doing when he refused to give the monster the female companion that it desired. Creating a companion to the monster, so that he could father his own children, would only be a further demonstration of Man's non-humanity.⁽³⁵¹⁾ Then, it could perfectly duplicate and represent the reproduction of the human species. In order to prevent this perfect Man-made re-presentation of the human condition from taking place, Frankenstein had to place a limit on his power to manipulate in order to protect humanity from the subjectivity of Man. Risking his own life against the rage of the monster, Frankenstein breaks his promise and rips apart the almost completed female, seeking, as always, the greatest benefit to society rather than his own. Man must be master and nature must be represented as his object. Any confusion of this essential difference, as the monster was, must be suppressed, denied its re-presentation.⁽³⁵²⁾Otherwise the truth of what Technoarchy was actually doing might be revealed.

This is the final insult to the monster. Knowing that he will never be anything except his utility, he begins his reign of bloody terror and revenge. Contrary to the myth, the monster was not created evil, his brain coming from a sadistic criminal, but became that way because of his relation to technical Man as his other. Frankenstein's creation developed as Rousseau's natural Man developed. At first he was benevolent and good, rescuing a child from a raging torrent and secretly helping an impoverished family with its housework, but as his social consciousness developed, and with it his awareness of the cruelties inflicted on him by society, and especially his creator who only made him as a means for his knowledge, he was possessed by bitter resentment.

Everywhere he saw bliss; from which he alone, the hideous other, the object of Man's utility, was irrevocably excluded. At first benevolent and good because he wanted to participate in society, to have friends and to be a friend, his exclusion and his being as utility made him miserable and a fiend. But in contrast to Rousseau, the monster became evil not because society made him that way but because he was excluded from the humanity of society because he was its other, the demonstration of its subjectivity. He became a terrorist bent on revenge because that was the identity forced upon him.

For Rousseau, an author that Mary Shelly is obviously deeply indebted to, people are by nature isolated and solitary, yet, as they mature and begin to develop their social nature, they cease to be alone. In fact, in the fuzzy transition from the state of nature to civilization, in which the dividing line between the natural and the artificial and social is never clearly drawn; it is the social passions, naturally derived, which lead people to form the social contract.⁽³⁵³⁾

Though the legitimacy of the social contract rests upon the interests of individuals, its formation rests upon the recognition and humanity of others, upon the moral claims that others have on the self's actions, beliefs, and commitments. For Rousseau (and Mary Shelly, I think), it is love and hate, the fear of death and the ambition to dominate--all socially made emotions, not given by nature--that lead to the development of language, the formation of the social contract, and the evolution of society from equality to inequality. It is not pure self interest that puts society together, nor individual calculations of marginal utility, but the passions, progressively developed within society, that makes the ties that bind, the reason which considers, and the morality which obligates.

For Rousseau and Mary Shelly, as indeed for the entire epoch of Technoarchy in one way or another, our moral commitments to one another, embodied in social conventions, are the products of society, and within the notions of property, love, hate, ambition, and friendship there is the implication of intersubjectivity, community, and the recognition of another as a will deserving respect.⁽³⁵⁴⁾ Although Mary Shelly's monster is a social outcast, he nonetheless develops into a human being, one fully as human as anyone else. This, given what society must insist upon, is his great tragedy. He belongs to it, but doesn't belong. He has all the emotions of a social being, but, because of what he is, he cannot be permitted the chance to express them.

Though human, his Being as human creation irrevocably excludes him from humanity, community, and love. To keep safe the dichotomies Man's reason requires to dominate its world and free Man for his mastery, the monster must remain in his place as humanity's object. As his self consciousness grew, the monster became aware of his differences, and the act of exclusion that denied him his humanity. An artificial creation, attached to no place, no family, no home, the monster had no relationship to anything, save his experimental utility to his creator. He had no caring father to watch over his childhood, no mother to bless him with smiles and caresses, no one to lament his pain or his annihilation.⁽³⁵⁵⁾ The first Man produced by the new technology was, despite the sociality of his passions, simply an atom, an island of sheer existence surrounded by an endless sea of his utility. As he increasingly became what he was, a human being, he increasingly became a monster, a terrorist at war with his humanity.

As the monster became aware of what he was and how his being as Man made man made him different, how that it excluded him from his humanity, his awareness increasingly became a torment to him. What was he, he wondered? A monster certainly, something different, something horrible and evil--a fallen angel, perhaps? No, not even a fallen angel. Even Satan had his companions, fellow devils to admire and encourage him. Cut off from society, excluded from any relation that could satisfy his social passions, knowing himself as a monster, despair and desolation took the place of his kindness and benevolence, hatred and rage the place of his love and sympathy. A howling revenge, borne by the hell within him, became the purpose of his being. Unable to give love or get it, he could still give pain and death and get terror as his reward. Made human, but denied his humanity by his role as other, the monster declared everlasting war against the humanity of Man, and especially against the humanity of his creator. Radically repudiating every value and meaning that humanity had celebrated and in which he had joyfully participated, the monster became the active agent of nihilism. If he could not be as he wanted, a human being with a home and a place, no one else would be either. Everything human would be destroyed.⁽³⁵⁶⁾

With no-thing thinging for him, no gathering of care to restrain him, no home or god to give him a responsibility for anything, but knowing everything that he lacked and haunted by it, the monster began killing with a devilish despair.⁽³⁵⁷⁾ He did not strike directly at Frankenstein, killing him cleanly and directly. That would be too easy and kind, too human. Instead, he struck at the love that surrounded Frankenstein, the love that reflected his humanity and gave him a home and a place. And as a result of each murder, Frankenstein became more like the monster, a homeless, loveless, man, possessed by a raging necessity for revenge. A slave to his hatred, and the instrumentality his creation had imposed on him, Frankenstein became the monster he despised. Just as Frankenstein used his knowledge of nature to master lifeless matter and create a man, the monster, now a subtle scientist of morals, used his knowledge of society to manipulate Frankenstein, to reduce him to an atom of revengeful utility, an other whose pain was testament to his mastery. And thus, the master becomes slave through technical knowledge and the slave becomes master, round and round in an inward spiral of technical mastery that denies everyone their subjectivity and eventually closes in on a despairing death for all in a cold arctic wasteland far from any human habitation.

Such is Mary Shelly's warning and prophecy. Technoarchy fathers monsters by reducing humanity to slavery. Unlike other possible ways of being, the doubles that it fathers are truly monstrous, hateful, rancorous, beings bent on terrible revenge because the humanity that this age exalts is denied them since their only being is as utility. There is something seriously wrong with the utopia patriarchy's science and technology would build.

Perhaps Sade would have understood Mary Shelly's monster and its need for revenge. For Sade, the pain and horror of other people, inflicted by a master of torture, is a delightful intoxicant, a sign of difference, hierarchy, and inferiority that separates them from the godly self. Other people's pain, degradation, enslavement, and death are testaments to their utility, a subtle demonstration that they have been mastered. Power is the truth of the other's pain, and rape, whether actual or symbolic, is always its technique.⁽³⁵⁸⁾ The problem Sade, as the literary monster of our time, poses for Technoarchy's utopias of mastery is this: how can all the economies of production, hierarchies of control, and systems of order, which hold the individual as the Reserved and that curtail, constitute, and circumscribe her actions as its necessity, justify its morality?

If there is no truth to it but its own, if the only meaning that exists for humanity is what it gives itself as convention, if morality is Man-made and fathered by our history, then what is there in Man's humanity that requires us to submit to it? If morality is a tool of human control, as it is for a scientist of morals like Rousseau, a tool that must be made subject to the will of Man, why must we submit to it in a herd, why not assert our mastery as an individual and make our own morals as our nature prompts us? What is it in modern morality that requires us to recognize the humanity of others, to accept moral virtues, to subordinate our private will to the general will? The truth that, being members of society, we are inescapably implicated in our humanity, that we are moral beings and have always been so, says nothing about why we, as the masters of our morality, should continue to be such. Our mastery of our morality, reflected in our being toward it as social convention, entitles us to make of it what we want. Our technical being toward morality, our recognition of it as utility and tool, gives us the license to do as we, as individuals, will--whatever we will, be it the tortured death of the innocent or the genocidal death of the multitudes.⁽³⁵⁹⁾

Because it knows everything as human instrument, Technoarchy has no argument, save its own power to censor, control, and render the other monstrous, to directly counter this with, since it itself is the will to mastery through human technology and it itself makes everything into utility. Rousseau, Sade's most venomous double, formulates in the Social Contract the conditions in which Man can be master and moral at the same time.⁽³⁶⁰⁾ Indeed, he goes so far as to make Man's mastery contingent upon his social morality. For Rousseau, like Hobbes, Man's moral obligation to others is derived not from immediate nature and not from God, but from the agreement that makes society possible, the social contract, which is the most secure ground of the will. Rousseau, like Sade, seeks only to establish the reign of Man's mastery.

Contrary to Sade, the natural fact of physical power or force does not in any way legitimate or justify the rule of the strongest. Although force is a physical power, as natural as it is real, no morality can result from its effects because yielding to it is an act of necessity and possibly of prudence, not of human will. And although Rousseau is willing to agree that all power comes from God, he is not willing to agree that makes it legitimate because God is as much the source of illegitimate power as he is the source of all illness.⁽³⁶¹⁾ Just as we need not hesitate to call a doctor when we are sick, we need not hesitate to build a legitimate state.⁽³⁶²⁾

Much as Nietzsche did latter, Rousseau locates Man's freedom in the correspondence of his will to his being as master of himself, not in a supernatural beyond.⁽³⁶³⁾ Because Man's being is social, the circumstances of his freedom and his willing must be social. Since force produces no right, nature no natural authority, and God no special privilege, Man must find in himself his own source of legitimate authority. And the measure of his legitimate authority will be the extent to which his state establishes and makes possible Man's correspondence with his being, his freedom as master of himself. Man realizes his place as his will willing itself when the general will, the commitment to the common good, is identical with each particular will.⁽³⁶⁴⁾

This only occurs under the most ideal circumstances--a small, egalitarian, self-sufficient, isolated, agrarian state that has had a long history of conventions and traditions that support democratic participation in the affairs of state.⁽³⁶⁵⁾ Under these conditions the social contract, subordinating the ends of each to the goals of all, defends and protects the person and goods of each associate, even while each individual obeys only themselves. The act of association, in which all agree to subordinate their private will to the common good, produces the virtues and the moral obligation necessary to fulfil the terms of the social contract. The general will, through the developmental act of association, is the means to freedom for each individual. Because their freedom and humanity as a human being is realizable only through their sociality, the individual can be, and should be, forced to be free if their particular will differs significantly from the general will.⁽³⁶⁶⁾

Children of Technoarchy, both Rousseau and Sade recognize its first truth, the Man-made nature of humanity--the artificial nature of his morals, and the necessity of grounding everything on a technology of the will.⁽³⁶⁷⁾ For both Rousseau and Sade, Man is the master of himself, and, through himself, of all the earth. This certainty that the will is the fundamental reality of Man is the truth that unites them throughout their most extreme differences. While Rousseau recognizes the necessity of placing limits, an archytecture of its own possibility, on the individual will in order for it to come to its own truth, Sade rejects any limit to the will's willing, not God's commandments, not Man's own being in his conventions, morals, and traditions, not even nature's promptings. Since everything is human instrument, everything is to be as instruments are used, for the will's willing. Since the truth of humanity is the degradation and instrumental use of everything human, Man is entirely in his right to use the humanity of others as the satisfaction of the monstrous passions his own being as utility for others has brought forth in him. Sade is thus, the ultimate truth of Technoarchy, the pure expression of it as the monster whose willing knows no limit. Because it knows no human limit, it cannot be universalized in a general will or archytecture of any other sort, but must find its satisfaction in the unlimited nihilism of a unique will, in the unbounded archytecture of a single governing will that knows the entire world as its own instrument of play. The unique one knows itself as master, and giddily affirms itself as such, by its violation of everything that opposes its willing--Man's virtues, God's will, nature's inevitable death, and the sanctity of innocence.⁽³⁶⁸⁾

The central point around which Sade's being revolves, the main archytecture of the modern self that he celebrates, and yet secretly despises, is that he is alone in his willing--profoundly, awesomely alone. So alone that not the most terrible agony or need of other people can penetrate the isolation of his will, the archytecture that he has surrounded himself with. Between the will of the unique one and all others, there is an unbridgeable chasm, a separation of the experience of self that transforms all others into the will's utility.⁽³⁶⁹⁾ The most terrible agony of others, unexperienced by the unique one, is nothing to it, while the faintest touch of pleasure that is felt is everything, and should be preferred to the universal sum of others' miseries.

Seeking Technoarchy's freedom through the archytecture of the will's willing, Sade has a very complicated relationship to other people, much like the Master in Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic.⁽³⁷⁰⁾ On the one hand, their will cannot be known as a will since they are inescapably other, the object of the will's utility, and on the other hand, their will can be known because their pain, experienced as their pain, is a demonstration of their otherness, their objectivity, and of the unique one's mastery over them. The consciousness of the other is a necessary moment in the Master's affirmation of his will and freedom.

In his zest to dispossess other people of their will and freedom, to prove that they are nothing but the will's utility, Sade betrays his profound dependence on other people, if only because he needs them as victims to feel his power, to acknowledge his mastery in their slavery. If other people actually are nothing but their utility, why is pleasure gained from torturing them; if other people are just as noble or ignoble as the worms that chew on their corpses, why won't the worms do as well for a ventilation of Sade's energy? No doubt it is because other people are singularly capable of experiencing and knowing the power of the Master. In its final certainty of itself as master, as the command that commands, the will can know itself as will only through the destruction of another will.

This is the depravity Technoarchy comes to when it finally comes to know freedom as only human control. As objects of utility, other people are especially valuable because their consciousness knows their degradation and subjugation, and through it acknowledge the master's mastery. Worms do not. People can know themselves as slaves, tools subjected to necessity and mastery. Worms cannot. The unique one's mastery and freedom depends upon the denial of it to others, even though it is also dependent on the recognition of it by others.

Despite the fact that others are nothing, Sade writes books; he seeks the recognition of others, he desires to be their desire, and the vague realization of this torments him, driving him to the flash of an anger and the depth of a hatred that is truly monstrous. Sade needs Rousseau because his humanity is the perfect object and tool for Sade's master. The virtue that Rousseau celebrates is useful because it can be violated, demonstrating and affirming the mastery of the unique one. The laws which Rousseau saw as being the means by which the individual could come to their freedom, being the truth of their implication in the general will, are for Sade a constraint on his freedom, denying him his will just as they make possible the full expression of his will. Forged for universal application, leveling all differences to the tyranny of passionless reason, laws are by nature in perpetual conflict with the individual's will. Contrary to Rousseau, the laws the general will fabricates for the individual's freedom are in truth an unnatural tyranny over the will. Their being is entirely alien to the will's being as its own master.⁽³⁷¹⁾

If on occasion the laws protect the will, they more often hinder it, trouble it, and fetter it, denying it the limitless assertion of its mastery. For Sade, the archytecture of Man-made laws are secondary to the archytecture of the modern self, of Man fathering himself. Sade goes to such a length in reversing Rousseau's notion of the law being the will's means to come to its freedom as master that he claims it is wrong for the law to kill, while it is acceptable for an individual to do it, for the law is alien to the will and opposed to it, while the individual's natural passions, which inform their act of murder, are not.⁽³⁷²⁾ The particular will, being closer to its truth as master, is always the true means to human freedom. Any limit placed on it is a tyrannical limit, unjustified and false, placed on human freedom. Something false and artificial.

For all his moral nihilism, Sade is not that much different from Rousseau, or any other figure in the Enlightenment. He only has the perverse and ugly courage to think what the will willing itself really means, the emptiness, the violence, the pain. If Rousseau and Hobbes are utopian, dreaming of places of legitimacy that never existed and can never be, Sade, who is no less utopian than they, insisting as he does on the absolute power of the will to will itself, reveals the monstrous absurdity of Technoarchy's quest for a Man-made utopia. Its cruelty, its violence, its utter lack of care and friendship. These are part of the archytecture of Man, unavoidably so--only Technoarchy represses and conceals this, throwing it into its shadow. But it is present in the factory and all the other disciplinary institutions it builds, places where people are treated like machines, simply a means for the will to will itself. And the people in these places do suffer terribly. Their well-being, their health, their dignity, their families, their futures--these are all sacrificed to their utility as instruments of power. That is the violence that Sade reveals.

And we would be fooling ourselves if we didn't admit that all too often that people in positions of power like abusing those they have power over, making them grovel. Hurting them, humiliating them, taking away their jobs, their dignity, their self-respect--it makes them feel powerful, in control, free to do what they will. Unavoidably having been at some time a means to someone else's will themselves, they get revenge for it by giving their pain to others in turn. And the nightmare goes on, each victim passing their pain on to the next. Sade's monstrous cruelty is very close to us. It is present in unemployment lines, deadening work, spouse abuse, child abuse, sexual harassment, every assortment of cruelty from rape to murder, and in the destruction of the earth itself. None of us in this age, I fear, have escaped the sadism of someone who has gloried over our helplessness, and few of us can honestly claim they are completely free of the sadist within, and would not glory in pain inflicted on others--that is the ugly shadow of freedom as control. Until we acknowledge this shadow in our life, accept it as part of ourselves and our thought, and act to heal it, none of us ever will. We must become friends to each other, rather than each other's tool.

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C H A P T E R 11

THE TURNING

Dreams and despair

swallowed by rotting tongues

and stay silent

Forbidden monsters

the endless days,

numb routines,

and dying lives we live

And then the world turns

and hope stalks its prey

on kitten's paws,

clumsy and playful,

then powerful and strong

And dreams

become the most possible things in the world

. . . the author

According to the Thinker, it is not our truth as a metaphysics of command and control that shall set us free, but rather it is this truth, this insistent utopia of universality and eternity, that enslaves us, imprisoning us with its necessity. The idea, so obvious that we cannot deny it, that truth is the means to freedom, the way to power over all the earth, is for us in our time a prison. By making the world into something to be controlled, we also make ourselves into something to be controlled, an object of discourse and discipline. And our souls become, as Foucault observes, the prisons of our bodies. We shall not escape the terrible fates that may await us--nuclear war, ecological disaster, economic collapse, political totalitarianism--by means of this truth of the world, we only assure something like them with it. Indeed, unless we turn from our way, we will die of this will to truth. As a result, we must think about the question of political action, of how we are to live this turning. Other truths, other ways of letting the world world, need to be brought forth. In particular, we need to think of the ways in which freedom is friendship and letting the world world, not will and control.

There is something strange (and something hauntingly familiar) about the debate over the Thinker's Nazi past. Informed by a passion that suggests that something considerably more than a correct reading of the past is at stake, it is raising (and obscuring) questions about the relationship between politics and philosophy, the link between thought and virtue, and the essential character of those who would betray reason. Around this debate, haunting its margins, yet penetrating its core, there are protests of violated innocence, vindictive demands for purity, and angry judgements against evil. Somebody is clearly having problems with their shadow. And perhaps the people making the accusations are telling us more about themselves than they are revealing about the Thinker's involvement in Nazism.

First, why is it that of all the intellectuals who got involved with the Nazis only the Thinker is signaled out for examination? Prominent positivists, analytic philosophers, neo-Kantians, neo-Hegelians, to mention but a few, all used their concepts to elaborate and justify Nazi politics.⁽³⁷³⁾ And yet, only those schools of thought that are influenced by the Thinker are made to respond to the question: are they inherently fascist, somehow contaminated with the Thinker's sins?

Secondly, everyone admits (to varying degrees) that Victor Farias's book, Heidegger and Nazism(which seems to be the focus of much of this debate), is a poor reading of the Thinker's work. No one recommends it as a model of scholarship, not even his editors in their forward to it.⁽³⁷⁴⁾ As critic after critic has pointed out, there are endless distortions, exaggerations, and seedy attempts to discredit The Thinker merely by associating him with the people around him.⁽³⁷⁵⁾ If the debate was not really about something else, if it was only based on the new "facts" it reveals, the debate surrounding this book would, I suspect, be nothing more than a tempest in a toilet bowl. And yet, everyone (even Farias's critics by means of their vehement opposition to it) agrees that the book is a monument, an event that, along with the DeMann controversy, marks the end of innocence for post-modernism. Now, it is implicated in, linked with, and contaminated by politics--the most dangerous kind of politics too. Of all things, and of all the unthinkable ironies, an exclusionary politics seeking to abolish difference and otherness by means of hatred, fear, and naked power. Farias's book has become something to endorse or oppose, something that signifies one's place in the debate over our future. Clearly, Farias's book is a book to be used, not read, certainly not carefully or thoughtfully. The question is, what is it to be used for?

Identifying, as many people in this debate are at least implicitly doing, post-modernism with Nazism--with totalitarianism, torture, genocide, and atavistic aggression--is a dangerous thing, whether they support this identity or oppose it. Regardless of the reader, regardless of post-modernism's doubts about the authority of the author, regardless of the questions that can be raised about the singularity of any unity or text, this debate frames a context for the reading of the Thinker's work, forcefully summoning his work as a whole under its interpretation, and judging it under the exclusive terms of his politics and his failings as a thinker. It links, then poisons, everything with all the horror, fear, anger, and resentment that the abominations of Nazism have come to signify, making it into a monstrous abomination. In the end, it makes quiet and meditative thinking difficult, if not impossible, and destroys any serious encounter with the dangers of modernity that the Thinker tried to reveal. It leaves us lost in our shadow, thoughtless, friendless, unable to let truth happen.

Perhaps this failure to think, this unwillingness to let the shadow be, after all, is the truth of what evil is--opposition to one's hated other, whatever it is. Originally, as the dictionary tells us,⁽³⁷⁶⁾ the meaning of "satan" and "devil" were not as pejorative as they are today. Their root words in Greek meant only opposition. "Satan" meant adversary. To oppose something, by the mere act of opposing it, was to be evil, to bring evil forth.⁽³⁷⁷⁾ The content of the opposition was irrelevant because the good and evil that it assumed was itself constituted by the act of opposition and the hatred from which it originated.⁽³⁷⁸⁾ As it is said in the "Gospel of Philip":

Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this, the "good" are not good, nor the "evil" evil, nor is "life" life, nor is "death" death.⁽³⁷⁹⁾

Good and evil are not differences as much as they are identities. Invoking one, invokes the other, giving it form, purpose, solidity.

If we accept this, it is not such a strange and twisted irony that the greatest events of evil--and truly the Holocaust is one of them--are always fathered by those seeking to identify, isolate, and destroy whatever they believe is evil. To make the world pure and good, obedient to its true origins. Certainly that is what the Nazis wanted, as did the Spanish Inquisitors, the Crusaders, the Witch-hunters, and our more contemporary Cold Warriors. There is something tragic and inevitable about opposition to evil that draws evil to itself, setting it up to play its role of angry, resentful, and vindictive destruction. Whenever there is something to be opposed, evil is the first to judge it evil, the first to hate it, and the first to take the lead against it. And the more absolute the power of the evil opposed, the more evil and powerful, the opponent to evil becomes, drawing its own strength from its opponent.⁽³⁸⁰⁾ Evil is simply the shadow of good, what it is not, what it represses, and must not admit of itself.

Perhaps, this hatred and fear is the nature of all opposition. Perhaps this is why thoughtful, caring, self-reflecting people so rarely engage in it. It is too corrupting, too alien to their nature. But what are we to do when the shadow is all around us, menacing and horrible, when there is an unrelenting evil to be opposed, a vast evil that is destroying everything holy, noble, and good? What are we to do in a world endangered by hunger, the bomb, and environmental catastrophe, by totalitarianism, torture, and obsessive thought control? This is the great question: how to oppose evil without becoming evil? How to oppose hatred without hating, to oppose totalitarianism without becoming totalitarian, to save the earth without destroying it? How are we, putting it into the Thinker's language, to keep safe the thinging of the thing amid the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, and the transformation of humankind into a mass?

As I think about the Thinker's life, and about the undeniable evil of his political involvement with the Nazis, and of the use that is being made of it now, I think about how, perhaps, I should not mention this identity that is linking postmodernism with Nazism, even to oppose it. I think about how that I should not claim my rights as possible victim of it to speak out against it. Perhaps, by opposing it, I will only make the venom that sustains it stronger, more poisonous. And risk my soul in the process. This appears to be Derrida's position.⁽³⁸¹⁾ Much too much has been written about Farias's book. Those who have opposed Farias (and Derrida knows that he too is at least as guilty as anyone of this--no one can let go of it) are responsible for making his work into a monument, a center of debate that swallows everything up, makes everything ugly.⁽³⁸²⁾ In his last book, Of Spirit, Derrida exiles Farias's name, putting it under erasure, but his spirit, an unfriendly one, still haunts every page. His presence is made conspicuous by his absence in a text that makes much of this strategy, refers to it continually. "I'm thinking," Derrida writes, "in particular of all those modalities of "avoiding" which come down to saying without saying, writing without writing, using words without using them. . ."⁽³⁸³⁾ I have no doubt that Derrida's strategy of erasure is a good one, maybe it will even work eventually, but I, risking the shadow, am going to pursue a more direct strategy, follow a more dangerous path, praying that "as the danger grows, so grows the saving power."

Let me, then (and please do forgive me my sins against myself), say what I should not, oppose for a moment an opposition that I want forgotten, an identity that I want undone. That this identity--the Thinker and Nazism--is asserted by so many people, so aggressively seems strange, as if some other strategy were going on than the simple disclosure of truth, as if it were more an attempt to silence, marginalize, and exclude certain thoughts than anything else. How can a body of thought that made way for the deconstruction of totalities possibly be totalitarian? How can a thinking that claims that the essence of truth is its other, untruth, be implicated in a politics that would father death camps to eliminate whole categories of people? The Thinker's thought, especially his latter thought, does not appear to be a likely candidate to father a world of exclusion or sustain a politics of fear, hatred, and resentment. On the contrary, it itself presents itself as a strategy for saving us from the dangers of modernity, the totalitarian need for exclusion, control, will, and purity that are themselves fathered by the logic of all our scientific and technical systems of reason.⁽³⁸⁴⁾ It resists the fear that runs from alterity; it is open to its other, and in fact seeks it out, celebrates it, depends upon it, is grateful to it. And is careful to spare and protect it. It is not afraid for its fatherhood, does not need to claim it, protect its origins with laws of descent, or insist upon hierarchies to establish the legitimacy of its reign.

Technoarchy, more or less like every metaphysical tradition or archytecture that has preceded it, is as totalitarian as it is exclusionary and purifying. Ambiguity, mystery, slack, chaos, equivocality, are all its others that it seeks to dominate, marginalize, and eliminate. According to the Thinker, it divides the world up into that which is its own truth and that which is not, and then it sets out to make the world pure, to master it with a "true" expression of its relentless and universal logic.⁽³⁸⁵⁾ Uncompromising opponent to everything it is not, reason must oppose itself to its irrationality and never fail to overcome it.

The Thinker's life reflects two ways of turning: as demanding submission to spirit and a letting be of spirit. The first strategy made him into a political activist, a monster that supported and legitimated the Nazi state, the second into quiet meditative thinker who thought a way that let the world world, and yet remain a critic of the archytecture of modernity. In his "Rectorship Address" in 1933, the Thinker spoke of a decision in which the Germans, as a historical-spiritual people, gather themselves up and will their truth.⁽³⁸⁶⁾ Every individual participated in this decision, even those who evaded it. On this decision the entire fate of Western Civilization, he thought then, hung in the balance.⁽³⁸⁷⁾ This decision to bring themselves into accord with their truth had to be made by the German people. Not revealed clearly by Being, not known or properly understood by all, it was a choice that they had to be lead in making. So the principle of leadership displaced "academic freedom" and made it obligatory for students and "the little people" to obey those more in tune to Being.

As Arnold Davidson argues, the Thinker breaks radically from his earlier understanding of the self in Being and Time from what he asserts in the "Rectorship Address."⁽³⁸⁸⁾ In Being and Time, the Thinker argues extensively that there is a tension between the authentic self and the self that is lost in the they world, in the apparent thoughts of others. Through resoluteness, the self recovers itself, returning to its "ownmost potentiality-for-Being." This resoluteness, this authentic moment, according to Davidson, is completely set aside in the "Rectorship Address." In its place there is an unequivocal command to submit to authority, to obey the leader, and ignore any inner stirrings of personal conscience. Anxious to protect the claim of the father, the Thinker insists that what is needed is the "genuine following of those who are of a new mind." Without this distinction between authenticity and the they world to protect it, the individual human being, the "I myself," is given no space for independent thinking, and its thought is usurped by the people, the state, and the German fate. Everything must be brought into accord with the Fatherland, as it is represented by the (enlightened) leader. This devotion to the Fatherland is what made Heidegger into a Nazi--for awhile.

But only for awhile. His work after 1945 can be read as an attempt to reappropriate his vocation as a thinker, responding not to the claims of the Fatherland, but to the gentle whisper of the world's worlding. The thinker, now, responds not to the existence of the state, the people, or the German Spirit, but to Being itself, in all its an-archy and dispersion. Nationalism, along with internationalism, individualism, and collectivism, become something to overcome, archytectures to think beyond. The profound and radical homelessness of the modern age becomes the problem he addresses, not the decisions facing any one nation, state, or people. And never again does the Thinker appeal to the authority of the leader to lead, but rather all appeals now come from Being itself, not any person or archytecture. The thinker is thus freed from any of the demands of nation, state, people, or authority.⁽³⁸⁹⁾

But freedom from such demands is only part of the movement toward true freedom. For thinking to come to true freedom it must call into question modern reason and the entire metaphysical tradition, since it has made possible the oblivion of Being found in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States--the three great articulations of modern ideology. As the Thinker argues in "The Turn," a pivotal essay written after he had completed his turn, it is not modernity's reason, with its awesome power for total command and control, its relentless need to displace its others with its placeless and timeless truths, that shall set us free and save us from the dangers and evils of our age, but rather it is our reason itself that is our danger, the origin and domain of the evil that traps us in oppositions that builds, and makes logical, our factories of death, whether they be death camps, nuclear bomb factories, or our toxic agriculture.⁽³⁹⁰⁾ Having built all the things our age knows, cannot deny, or imagine otherwise, having set up a whole world of energy, communications, transportation, and food systems, our reason has turned on us, possessed us with its purifying imperatives, made us dependent on its unequivocal power, and imprisoned us in its clear and crystalline logic, enslaving us to its totalitarian truth, necessity, and doom.

The modern idea--so obvious and rational that we cannot deny it without seeming to blaspheme all the progress of our civilization--that submission to reason is the means to freedom, the way to safety from any danger, is now for the Thinker a monstrous delusion and an entrapping prison for thought.⁽³⁹¹⁾ By means of reason, we shall not escape the terrible evils that reason itself knows may be waiting for us--nuclear war, ecological disaster, economic collapse, political totalitarianism. And especially not the biggest threat of all, nihilism. Thinking of these things rationally, we only assure them yet again, yet more surely. Indeed, unless we turn from the way of reason, we may all die of the world of oppositions it has imprisoned us in.

The power that our reason gives us is a subtle poison that corrupts our Being, opposing us to the earth, our truth, and our place. Making secure the opposition between reason and its betrayal, Man and chaos, good and evil, it cuts us off from that which can save us, the integration of our shadow. And the most dreadful, dangerous, and monstrous truth of modern reason is that it does not reveal itself as a monstrous doom.⁽³⁹²⁾ On the contrary, it seems evident to all that modern reason, and the technology it spawns and makes identical with itself, is but a simple tool, a value neutral means to power in the hands of Man, and that, properly applied, it can save us from any evil, any opponent.⁽³⁹³⁾ We only have to use it properly for it to save us. But Man, as the Thinker (and through him, Derrida and Foucault) has taught us, is not the master of his fate or his technology; for it is Man himself, as new lord and master of all the earth, that is ordered forth by modernity, a way of being that precedes and makes possible Man's mastery.⁽³⁹⁴⁾ For the Thinker, at this time in his thinking, there can be no salvation that comes from submitting to a leader's authority. Such submission could only be a yet more pure expression of human imprisonment in the quest for mastery.

As master of the earth, the positer of the universal and eternal categories by which his whole world becomes available purely as his utility, Man is the subject of a subjugation more profound than himself.⁽³⁹⁵⁾ He is not the master of his technology, the will that orders its use, but, as master, is the one mastered, enslaved, and ordered into use by modernity, enslaved by the logic of reason's opponents.⁽³⁹⁶⁾ Before Man can possess the world with his reason, he, himself, is possessed by reason, delivered over to its metaphysical organization of truth, its logic, its power to designate, name, and create the differences, hierarchies, and oppositions that dominate the ordering of things. It is the concealed monstrousness of this quest to master the whole world that lead the Thinker to write:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its truth, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."⁽³⁹⁷⁾

Lacoue-Labarthe, in his book Heidegger Art and Politics, misunderstands the full horror of what this is saying. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, there is an incommensurable difference between the extermination of Jews in death camps and the way we farm, or even the way we build hydrogen bombs. The horror of it is entirely different, not at all technical, but aimlessly nihilistic. In his reading of this quotation, Heidegger is failing to acknowledge the awesome pain and suffering and tortured deaths that millions of Jews underwent quite aside from any rational or technical purpose. The annihilation of the Jews, an entirely heterogeneous population, without any sort of systematic linkage or purpose, was completely irrational, based on nothing but hatred and fear. This, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, is the true horror of the death camps--they served no purpose at all.

Perhaps the Thinker is slighting the horror of it, possibly to mitigate his own implication in it, but, counter to Lacoue-Labarthe, the extermination of the Jews was not purposeless, but a necessity of a world that reason has built. Denying its shadow, reason must fear its others, hate them, try to destroy them. It feels persecuted by them. And if Jews were the main targets of the Nazis, the archytecture of their hatred was pretty much the same for communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and so on. (Contrary to Lacoue-Labarthe, the purpose of the death camps was not overwhelmingly to kill Jews. Only about half of those killed in them were Jews.) The slaughter of all these people was not purposeless; the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing, and could give lots of reasonsfor it. It all really was very logical. These Jews, Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, and so on, were contaminating the purity of the Aryan race; they had to be destroyed.

The otherness of these people, what made them targets for genocide, was constituted and structured by the archytecture of reason, which is totalitarian, exclusionary, and extinguishing. Fathered by the fear that reason has of its others, the Holocaust could only happen in the modern age the way it did. Jews have long been hated in the West, and have long suffered tragedies like the Spanish Inquisition, but the dream of extinguishing all of them is an extreme possibility only made necessary by modernity's unbounded need for purity. Nor were the death camps mutations unique to the Nazis. Their character and organization, their need for isolating and extinguishing otherness, is almost indistinguishable in structure from the internment camps that the US government used to isolate Japanese-Americans during WW II.⁽³⁹⁸⁾

And, again to the point that Lacoue-Labarthe makes about the Holocaust being unique in its quest for purity⁽³⁹⁹⁾, is there really any essential difference between the Holocaust and our preparations for a nuclear holocaust, save the accident or crisis that would start it? Because the Jews are dead and the billions, very possibly all of humanity, that would die in a nuclear holocaust are not yet dead, surely. But what essential difference is there between past attempts to totally purify the earth of otherness and future attempts, which a nuclear war would surely do? Once we imagine what the future may bring because of what the truth of our age has made possible, Lacoue-Labarthe's incommensurable difference becomes nothing more than a known body count versus an unknown one, nothing more than the horror of a known past versus the horror of an unknown, but possible, future. Thought essentially, there is nothing terribly unique about the Holocaust. And the future effects of our mechanized agriculture, which must be so negligent of the earth, so careless of the life-giving soil it exploits, could easily surpass the horrors of the death camps.⁽⁴⁰⁰⁾

But the fact that we are imprisoned in the world reason has built does not mean, according to the Thinker, that humanity is forever delivered helplessly over to commanding reason, pure slave to a master that does not die.⁽⁴⁰¹⁾ On the contrary, we are doomed to reason's slavery only as long as we are called to be its masters. Our unique danger is that our way of being, Man and his reason, does not allow us to know that our understanding of freedom as rational control, as opposition to that which would escape control, is the destiny trapping us in the evils we would abolish. Modernity's reason possesses us before we can master it and denies us the possibility of thinking any thought that says that our freedom is not our salvation but our prison. Knowing freedom only as Man's command and control we thoughtlessly push on with it, reasoning that somehow, some way, it will save us. According to the Thinker, this danger, the domain of reason's oppositions, has been our destiny for so long that it is in its own way moving toward a decision that will reveal another destiny, enabling us to think of freedom in another way than as Man's control, as opposition to that which thwarts reason's reign over the earth.

A destiny blooms forth in its own way from the earth, and the world it becomes is continually adapting itself to it. As a world, a destiny carries on a dialogue with the earth, revealing it until the earth breaks its limits, its time, and becomes another destiny, another world. Destinies do not change in a rational way, limited by the logic of oppositions they must assume in their own time, or at the hand of a powerful leader, but break radically and incommensurably with each other, becoming a destiny that cannot be any other destiny than its own.⁽⁴⁰²⁾

But, if a change in the destiny of modernity occurs and another destiny, another way of being that does not reestablish reason's enemies, breaks forth and takes its place, this, according to the Thinker, does not mean that the technology whose truth for us lies in modernity will be done completely away with, that we will necessarily assume the most primitive way of life excluding any use of things, abandoning all the power reason has given us over things.⁽⁴⁰³⁾ In its truth as the way of revealing truth, and not merely as it is revealed by modern reason, technology is the way of human being on the earth; humanity cannot be without bringing things forth from the earth.

But we can think about our technology and we can adopt a way of bringing things forth that spares the earth, preserves the world, and leaves the mystery untrapped by the dangers and oppositions of modern reason's logic. Thought carefully, the technology our reason deploys is neither the means by which we attain our mastery, nor the means by which we are mastered. Always preceding it, it is something wholly other than the dialectic of master and slave, of opposition and control, and especially of leader and follower, because it is something other than the Man-made purity of a human doing founded merely on itself. It is that which worlds the world, things the thing. Without any opponent to constitute it, any leader to bring it about, this presencing cannot, at bottom, be mastered any more than it can master. It simply is. And so, bringing things forth is not mastering them, but revealing their truth. Freedom is not control, is not submission to a leader, is not the conquest of reason's others, but simply allowing truth to happen unopposed. Responding to the governance of the world worlding, we reveal truth when we use our technology to free us from the oppositions that sustained it. We are free when the earth happens unopposed in what we reveal, in what we know.

Between humanity and world a complex interplay occurs. The world's worlding in the gathering of the thing occurs only in the presence of mortal humankind. It is under our care and guardianship, our life and our dwelling, that things are brought forth and interpreted as the things they are. Because of this, the danger that is the truth of modern technology cannot change over into another destiny, another truth, way of being, or interpretation of the thing, without the gentle and undemanding cooperation of humanity.

According to the Thinker, thinking is a handcraft, it must draw near and be near to the thing it thinks, the life it lives, and let it be.⁽⁴⁰⁴⁾ The coming to presence of the destiny and the truth that will spare the earth and free the thing to itself will occur in the lives of the thinkers who will open themselves up to the earth and think another way of being, a way that can be without opposing itself to its other, without demanding the submission of mastery. Their way of being, their technology, their interpretation of the thing, must change and be appropriate for the destiny the earth calls them toward. As this change in their ways occurs, new things, unthought of, undreamed of before because they do not oppose themselves to reason's domain of governance and try to master it, will rise up from the earth and appear in their presence, calling upon them for their thought. The coming to presence of technology as a thing to be thought, the turning to the new world, will occur in a way that restores it into its yet concealed truth.

As the Thinker suggests, this turning is like what happens when, in emotional terms, one gets over grief or a lost love.⁽⁴⁰⁵⁾ The sudden absence of that which was so near to one's life, the loss of links and ties to another, leaves one disoriented for awhile, lost to the cares of life. The cares and needs that governed one's life, gathering its actions into meaningful acts, now perhaps poisoned with resentment that absence brings with it, still pull even though the thing calling them into being no longer is. Everything loses its meaning in the absence of the oppositions that governed the thinging of all things. The world appears as a dream, a distant twilight, but then gradually things draw near again, though in a different way, making possible a different life. And dwelling in the midst of one's cares occurs again.

Moving from one way of Being to another, from a life constituted by metaphysical oppositions to anarchy, from the mastery of leader and follower to letting the world be, humanity must open itself up to the earth, ceasing to live a life built of fear of the other. In keeping with this governing interpretation of the thing, all that is near to the lives of specific, living, and doing people, all that is true to humankind's dwelling place, must first open itself up to the place of technology, the bringing forth of things from the earth. But before mortals can become attentive to the place of technology, before it is possible to deconstruct modernity's oppositions and have a dwelling relation between the truth of technology and the truth of humanity, humankind must first and above all else, find its way back to its dwelling place and begin to interpret things as originating in the abyss of Being, the earth, and not as the Reserved for the far flung imperatives of modern Man's quest for mastery. The dwelling place of man and woman receives its place from the world's worlding, not from reason's opponents, and it is the most true responsibility of humanity to become the world's guardian, to spare the earth on which it dwells, and to let the world world through it.

Unless humanity opens itself up to the earth in all its mystery, ceasing to stand in opposition to it as its master, and there takes up its dwelling, it will not be capable of anything it is called to be. Caught up in opposition to its enemies, it will remain entrapped in the links of modernity. Not seeking Man's mastery, thinking is not governed by the archytecture of reason's oppositions, its fears, its hatreds; it does not know or seek the purity of universal and eternal truths, but rather it brings forth temporal and local truths--truths that are near to the dwelling place, unopposed to its differences. It does not command things forth according to the fatherly logic of its purest origins, but rather opens itself up to what appears from the earth, even if it appears in a chaotic dispersion.

Thinking is an-archical, without a guiding principle to command it, to make it pure, or to oppose it to its enemies.⁽⁴⁰⁶⁾ As such it is radically unlike anything that modernity knows. Before they can dwell as the earth calls them to, to let Being be, to live without the trapped logic of universal opposition, mortals must learn to think. For thinking, according to the Thinker, is an earthy activity, a handcraft that means lending a hand and a care to the earth, in all its dispersion and mystery, as it brings the thing forth. Thinking means building a place for the world to world unopposed, opening up a way for the thing to rise up from the mystery of the earth and become present at. This occurs in the way we live our daily lives, and it is reflected in the language we use. By listening to our language, interpreting the things present in it, we can hear the gentle whisper of the world worlding, and through its calling, we can come to the most radical changes.

True revolutions, real changes in Being, come not with the thunder of ungodly force, the roar of cannons, and the screaming death of those condemned to a judgement of pure evil, but on the wings of butterflies and the soft paws of cats, in the gentle murmur of the words we use and the truths we know. And suddenly, without the brutal hand of a leader who would make us different from what we are, the world is different.⁽⁴⁰⁷⁾

Perhaps one day, without the benefit of a leader who would insist on it, the danger that conceals itself as innocent reason seeking only to purify the world of its most evil enemies will, itself, come to presence as evil, a monstrous command of opposition to the evil governing our life, and we will at last begin to think, to build, and to dwell in a way that does not submit to evil, mastery, or opposition. We would then be able to open ourselves up to the an-archy of the earth. No longer imprisoned by the monstrous necessity of modernity, the need to subject everything to the command, to the leader, and to the authority of reason, the thing will be spared, the world will world as world, the earth will be left its mystery, and we will dwell in peace.

Perhaps we who follow the Thinker on his path to anarchy, and try to think the thoughts he thought and the ones he left unthought, perhaps we stand already in the shadow cast ahead by the advent of the turning. But we who live with our danger hanging heavy on our shoulders, dare not, he tells us, think we can plan out how humanity will dwell without opposing itself to the earth, what technology it will use, what gods or goddesses they will know, nor dare we lay down heavy prescriptions that it should fill.⁽⁴⁰⁸⁾ That would be totalitarian, oppositional, hierarchical, and that would make it necessary to purify the world of those who do not fit in this utopia. To imagine how mortals will build after the turn, to dream of an an-archy where the evils of our world are not possible, is to ensure, yet again and more terribly, that our endangered system of metaphysics and opposition prevails. To plan things out as they might be, to dream of utopias and then to try to impose them on the world, is to make them over, ever more securely, into things as they are. That is what our factory planners, our scientific experimenters, our technocrats of discipline have always done. To attempt to save the world from its danger, as the Thinker did when he joined the Nazis, is only to further ensure it, for any such attempt would at bottom rely on that which is bringing it, the truth and reasoning that technoarchy reveals. Chasing after the future, planning, calculating, and extending the incomplete truths of our time in the hope of creating an order that is not ensnared by our reason and its fears only continues and extends our prevailing attitude of mastering the world through technology and calculating representation.

But this does not mean that we must helplessly submit to our danger, the domain of reason and its enemies, and withdraw from its politics, only that we must be careful about the way we free ourselves from it, oppose ourselves to it. We free ourselves from technoarchy by thinking of it as a danger sent to us as a whole, by becoming aware of how all the horrors and monstrosities of our time, such as the Nazi death camps, the arms race, the desecration of our land with toxic waste dumps, the collapse of the household, and the slaughter of the whales, are possibilities sent to us by the truth we affirm in our lives, our reason and everything we pursue with it. Because of reason's fears, its quest for power and control, its need for making the whole world pure with its absolute presence, all these things have become possible. Reason has built the modern world. Its evils, its monstrous horrors, its opponents and dangers, are not unrelated to its affirmations. Once our truth is present to us as our danger, a monstrousness governing our whole lives, and once we know that it conceals the earth from which it springs, the way is opened to an-archy, a way of bringing things forth without subjecting them to an archytecture that commands them forth in a totality as Man's utility.⁽⁴⁰⁹⁾

Toward the end of his book⁽⁴¹⁰⁾, Michael Gillespie argues that there is cause for concern in the Thinker's turn toward Being because, according to him:

We must first prepare ourselves for the experience of Being by purging ourselves of all past metaphysical standards and valuations, of all categories of logic, of all distinctions of natural kinds, of all our conceptions of justice and right, of freedom and necessity, of causality, indeed of every idea, structure, and institution with which we are familiar.⁽⁴¹¹⁾

Gillespie's fear as we follow the Thinker in acknowledging the nihilism that is the truth of our world, as we follow Being into the abyss and wait for whatever revelation emerges there and resolutely follow it where ever it may lead, is that we may become monsters, raging agents of destruction and evil. He says:

Having abandoned the categorical reason of metaphysics for something approaching pure intuitionism and the orderly world of everyday experience for the terrors of the abyss, man is thus is liable to fall prey to the most subterranean forces in his soul or at least is in danger of mistaking the subrational for the superrational.⁽⁴¹²⁾

This, Gillespie thinks, is why the Thinker was seduced by National Socialism for a brief while. Since the Thinker surrenders all responsibility for his thought to Being, and since there is no ground for distinguishing between good and evil, linked, as they are, as doubles of the same truth, any thinker, Gillespie fears, can practice evil with impunity. As the Thinker himself said, "He who thinks greatly, errs greatly."

Because it goes fearlessly into the abyss, Gillespie argues that the thinker's thought, despite itself, might be subjective (he uses that word), which is to say whimsical caprice. In thinking there are no clear rules that allow a thinker to differentiate an authentic revelation of Being from mere caprice, the claims of true prophets from the demagogic claims of false prophets. Thinking does not appeal to intersubjectivity, shared understandings, community standards. Disregarding such standards, it can be caught by anything, the nightmares of madness, the distorted resentment of the weak, the revenge of the wronged. How is the thinker to know when they are being lead astray?

Quite simply, they can't, not for sure, but this doesn't put them in any worse situation than rationalists, theists, or any other archytecture, which usually conceal something at least as errant in their claims to universality, intersubjectivity, or whatever. And thinking has one advantage over any metaphysic of morality: Drawing near to its place, losing all other worlds in its shadow, it knows that it is in error, always and unavoidably, and so is likely to encourage humility, not conquest and oppression.

Besides that, it has its way. Silencing her will, opening herself toward friendship, turning toward Being, the thinker attends to the world's worlding, and lets truth happen. The way that she reveals things is likely to reveal a world free of fear, suspicion, resentment, domination, and control. This is quite in contrast to the world Technoarchy reveals. As long as she has cause to believe that truth is happening, the thinker has cause to believe that she is not lost in whimsical caprice. She is letting the world world, and in doing so, she sets herself free.

Because thinking does not advance itself with leadership, ideology, or policy, it does not restrict itself to an elite that leads, imposes, or demands. It is something that everyone, whatever their place, can open themselves up to. They think by drawing near to the cares and concerns in their lives, letting truth happen in poetry, song, dance, and prayer while they dwell amid friendship and meditative attentiveness. The truth of the world's worlding cannot be elaborated as a policy that others must submit to, because the criterion of truth is that it happens amid dwelling. It is something people must draw near. There really is no danger, given the way that she approaches truth, that the thinker, so long as she is thinking, is going to fall prey to the most subterranean forces in her soul, or mistake the subrational for the superrational, as Gillespie fears. Or that thinking will somehow turn her toward Nazism or something like it. Nothing could be more unlikely. The Thinker became a Nazi because he failed to think, because he was afraid, because he lost himself in the they world. It was his failure, not thinking's.

Without an archytecture of any sort, the insecurities of the abyss are indeed frightening, but the horrors of the world that reason has built are worse. Monsters like Sade and the Nazis may well come up out of the abyss in this age, but they can be monsters only because the shadow reason has built is monstrous, made of fear, hatred, resentment, and exclusion. Nihilistic subjectivity, like that of Sade's, is deeply indebted to the archytecture of modern self. Cruel and sadistic whims do not reach far, and cannot govern unless a place is already prepared for them. Otherwise they disappear from history, forgotten, unsustainable.

It is reason, its standards of objectivity, universality, and discipline, and the others that it produces to constitute itself that breeds monsters and prepares a place for them. Having reduced all of humanity to its utility, reason governs the world without allowing any aim or purpose that does not refer back to its arbitrary utility, its groundless and aimless subjectivity. It is reason itself that has produced the monster, the reign of arbitrary subjectivity, that Gillespie fears. Seeking to make the subject's will master of everything, it is reason which destroys limits, ethics, morals, and traditions by subjecting them to its utility and power. By making them into a means. It is reason, not an-archy, which prepares the world for the reign of subjectivity, giving the monster the thought that frees him from any restraint that would stop him from playing with humanity or keep him from making them into objects of his raging utility. And so we need not look at the ways of thinking to find a dangerous thought. Despite its certainty that it is pure, reason is already pregnant with its own monsters.

This does not mean that thinking is not without its dangers, especially not if it is done in the world reason has built. Thinking is the highest form of action, and so, the most dangerous.⁽⁴¹³⁾ It is thinking, drawing near to the life which does it, which reveals the monstrousness of our ways, and calls on us to adopt others. Building and dwelling according the new truths that it knows makes inevitable the destruction of the old--and all the traditions, institutions systems, and procedures that depended on them. Even if thinking proceeds in the most gentle and innocent ways--building houses that do not need external heat, finding alternative energy sources, growing food in gardens and greenhouses close to the household--it endangers the economies reason has built with sudden failure because everything was built according to the ready availability of consumer demand.

The Thinker quotes one of Holderlin's poem in supporting this point: "But where the danger is, grows the saving power also."⁽⁴¹⁴⁾ Thinking this poem more essentially than Holderlin thought it, the Thinker interprets it as saying that the saving power does not appear incidentally, as random unconnected externality, but as part of the very danger, the act of opposition, itself. Modern reason, the evil of our age, is also its saving power, because, as the concealment of the truth of evil by means of its exclusion, it calls on us from concealment to turn to an-archy, to open up to the earth, and de-construct the archytecture that sustains it. Precisely because technoarchy conceals itself as eternal reason, it makes it possible for us to open ourselves up to the concealed, to live without the oppositions that brings reason's evil monsters into being. In technoarchy concealing is present in opposition, critique, and exclusion.

To save means to free, to spare and husband, to protect and guard, to let the thing thing. The danger that the saving power would save us from is the danger that condemns us to live in a place that is always something other than itself, something at war with itself, a placeless place in which all presencing is determined by a metaphysic that, removed from the earth, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. When the truth governing our lives is present as danger, when all about us every-thing is present as something monstrous and evil, a desecration of the earth, and known as the Reserved, then, in this moment of deepest despair, the an-archical nothingness that is the origin of all things rises up and calls on us to think it. As we mortals draw near to this abyss of mystery, silence, and nothingness we are called on by the world's worlding to speak to the silence and to the no-thingness, to address our thought to what Being, pursuing the modern quest for rational purity, has concealed from us, the monstrous oppositions of Man as will willing only itself.⁽⁴¹⁵⁾

Thus saved from its own silence, recognized as oblivion, the silence is no longer a silence, a nothingness pure, absolute, and unknown, but the place from which the saving power grows, the place from which things arise unopposed and are no-thing. With such turning, the oblivion that is the destiny of modernity is no longer a nihilism that silences the truth of its own place, but rather an an-archycal turning that spares and preserves the abyss of Being as the mystery of the earth. The turning that separates one time from another always occurs suddenly, without explanation, anticipation, or cause. Things come forth from the earth, are present, in an entirely different way, and an entirely different truth presides over whatever is brought forth.

And so, the politics that the Thinker's thought makes possible is not a politics founded on a vision of the future that would justify the exclusion, repression, or destruction of any sort of difference that was not a pure expression of its truth. On the contrary, it would save us from that kind of politics, the kind that built the death camps, that seeks extermination of its others, destruction of opponents. The Thinker had learned something by the time he wrote "The Turn." He had learned that the turning could not be forced with an act of will, brought about by a leader, or raw power making us submit to the spirit, but that, if it came, the turning would be a gentle letting be, a caring and nonjudgemental releasement.

To save the earth, we let the world world, truth happen. We do not build utopias, nor do we invoke universal standards or timeless principles to judge, condemn, or marginalize. We accept the world as it happens at our place, and live there in as friendly a way as possible. This way of living is a possibility for a number of movements that are happening in our time. The New Age movement has possibilities in this direction, as does the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, and the holistic health movement. (For all their talk about community and equality, Marxists are hopeless, lost in dogmatism, critique, and resentment.) Accepting otherness in a way almost no other movement has ever done, the New Age movement often cultivates nonjudgemental releasement toward life, accepting whatever happens as a lesson to be learned.

Feminism naturally reveals the exclusion, oppression, and repression of patriarchy, and celebrates what patriarchy has denigrated--sensuality, connection, and physis. If some feminists, like the separatists, have advocated very familiar strategies of exclusion and hierarchy, other feminists have more often tried to break them down. If some feminists have isolated themselves in cults of victimhood and rage, other feminists have reached out toward men and the earth and argued that the woman most in need of liberation is the woman inside of every man and woman. They know that patriarchy is as bad for men as it is for women, even if it is less apparent because men do seem to derive some benefit from it. Men oppress themselves, each other, and the earth as much as they do women, and they won't be free of it until the woman they have cast into their shadow is accepted as a worthy part of themselves and the world. At its best, feminism is not just about gaining equality with men, its about cultivating a healthy self for both men and women, and a healthy earth to live on.

The Peace movement is releasing us from our fear, freeing us of the projections that we have cast on our enemies. It seeks out our shadow, what we are not, and finds ways of becoming friends with it. Not just, at its best, to overcome differences, to conceal and deny them, but to accept and celebrate them.

The environmental movement decenters our human community, revealing the rest of the world, all the plants and animals, as beings belonging in community with us. It upsets the hierarchy between Man and nature and turns us away from dominating the earth to friendship with it. In much the same way, holistic health moves us out of ourselves to our relation with the rest of the world, to the world's worlding. We cannot be healthy, it knows, unless we protect and cultivate the health of everything else. Both the environmental movement and the holistic health movement turn us toward a friendly sparing of all the earth.

The turning is, in fact, happening; it is happening in each of these movements. They all propose alternatives to Technoarchy, and they all are turning away from Man's willing and domination. Of course, all of them have their moments when they invoke the old metaphysics, but they all are doing it less as time goes by, and they all are becoming more thoughtful. Hope is justified.

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CHAPTER 12

BUILDING WILDERNESS

Mortals dwell in leaving to the sun and moon their journey, the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency, they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest. Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.⁽⁴¹⁶⁾

The Thinker

This quotation from The Thinker is about how dwelling lets the wildness of things be, how it leaves to the sun and the moon their journey, the stars their courses, the seasons their differences, and the gods their absence. Leaving things alone, dwelling does not impose any truth on the thing that is not its own, but lets the wild-erness of being be. And it does this while it builds a world, while mortals, man and woman, draw things near to their life, handling them, dwelling amid them. Situated in time, life, and culture, dwelling builds wild-erness, an an-archical, centerless, and nonmetaphysical interpretation of the thing's thinging. Forgetting the authority of origins, the claims of patriarchy, and the morality of metaphysics, dwelling cultivates difference, includes alterity, nurtures diversity, protects ambiguity, spares multiplicity, frees irony, and makes it possible to understand it all as the world's worlding.

Before I wrote my dissertation, I returned home from my graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts to my family's ranch in Montana and built an underground house on the south side of a hilltop. I guess that I was homesick. I wanted something to stay near, to be at home with.

The examples that guided my building were the Arks that the New Alchemists had built--greenhouses that nurtured and supported a wide diversity of life, whose boundaries between "inside" and "outside," "wild" and "cultivated," were thoroughly transgressed. Inside, the Arks duplicated, by means of cultivation, the wilderness the outside represented, but lacked.⁽⁴¹⁷⁾Seeking to live a life that was my own, free of the demands of reason and economy that had ruined so much of the land I was raised on, and wanting a home that I could keep safe. I turned to The Thinker and Henry David Thoreau to guide my thinking. Looking for a home when the whole world seemed lost and homeless, I built to keep my life, my home, and my thought from being claimed by the logic and imperatives of Technoarchy. By situating what it had displaced, by gathering my building around my dwelling, my thought around my life and my place, I hoped to recover from my homesickness. Perhaps Thoreau thought it all for me when he went home to the wilderness around Walden Pond to sort the irrupting, an-archical, and possibly mean, experience of life out from the distant demands modernity has imprisoned it in and let it be:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.⁽⁴¹⁸⁾

Building somewhat more luxuriously than Thoreau because I wanted to build permanently, the earth-sheltered house that I built still only cost about $6,000 for materials. With a little help from my family, I did most of the work myself, from designing it, digging out the hillside, mixing and pouring the concrete, erecting the walls, to doing the wiring and the plumbing and the finishing. When I was through a year latter I had a family-sized house and greenhouse that, using only passive solar heat, seldom went below 60 degrees on even the coldest and windiest of Montana's winter days.⁽⁴¹⁹⁾ Unlike Thoreau, I had less luck feeding myself with the food that I grow from my garden because a series of exceptionally severe droughts produced a plague of grasshoppers that have stripped my garden to bare ground several years in a row. Some day I hope to build wind powered electrical and water systems to make my house completely independent of the utilities.

In this age when the world's industrial economies threaten the entire biosphere with the twin perils of the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer, when the ecologically essential forests of the Amazon are being mowed down to provide profits for the fast food industry, when the topsoil of almost every country in the world is eroding many times faster than it is being rebuilt, when the number of species becoming extinct is comparable only to the Great Extinction that ended the age of the dinosaurs, it seems like a pitifully small thing to build a house that does not need utility heat. And perhaps it is. Perhaps I should be instead engaged in a desperate politics of reform and protest, maybe even revolution. Time is so short. And there is no promise that the Turning will come in time to spare the earth or humanity.

Even though there is desperate need for world-wide change, limited by the knowledge my place makes possible, I hesitate to legislate the law of other places. To provide, at last, a solution to our problems. That, after all, is the problem--trying to control things, to separate them out into universal and timeless dualities, this one good that one bad, and subjecting one to the other. That is the prison our metaphysical archytecture of science, reason, principles, and morals has trapped us in. It has made us homeless by making our body, our place, our culture, our hopes and dreams, our frustrations and despairs, irrelevant and meaningless. They are merely "subjective." Instead of drawing near to our place, we offer universal and objective critiques, judgements, condemnations, and promises of salvation.⁽⁴²⁰⁾ Even when the philosophies underlying them are purely materialistic, as in Marxism or Freudianism.

Seeking universal foundations for action by separating the knower from the known, then building a discursive utopia that supports itself with rejection, marginalization, exclusion, and control, modern critique conventionally leads us to separate our life from ourselves and our place on the earth and put everything under the governance of a politics of cold distance--of rules, systems, laws, principles. Things have to be the same for everyone, everywhere. That is what meta-physics is after all, the submission of the physis--Greek for nature or earth--to something above it, beyond it, to something it is not, reason, logic, principle. The patriarchal claim. Building the archytecture of universal reason, eternal truth, and unqualified technology, we reject the an-archy of our place, our home, our life, the earth itself, and put ourselves beyond them. And our lives become governed by things far removed from our own home--our cares, fears, loves, and needs. Caught in the discursive archytecture of Technoarchy, we become homeless.

When time is short and the earth is dying it seems like we should do something--a dictatorship of ecologists maybe? But perhaps it is especially when time grows short that there is need of careful thought--thought that is freed from the archytecture that has built the systems that, having removed themselves from it, endanger the whole earth. Acting, I suspect, without turning away from Technoarchy's reason and technology and ceasing to live and think it will only assure that everything will be rebuilt once again as it was. Even under a dictatorship of ecologists. If it survives the archytecture of Technoarchy, humanity will build and live differently, will think first of home and act first locally. It will learn to respond with care to the earth, the sky, the sacred, and the death of all mortals, instead of a reason that is far removed from the earth. The thoughts of Technoarchy must be deconstructed where they are the most secure, in the lives of we mortal humans who build and dwell, in our dependence on its institutions and its systems that trap us in its networks of technopower, its bipolar hierarchies, and the reign of monstrous others it produces.

Freedom does not come by making the world conform to our prescriptions, demands, and chosen imperatives, but only with a gentle releasement toward Being, with a meditative listening to the whisper of the world worlding as it happens at home. Then, as an-archysts repudiating the archytecture of reason, ideology, technology, methodology, and principle, we build and dwell in a way that does not destroy the earth. An-archy is the way of Being following the Turn, the way in which the thinker lets the wilderness of things be.

Perhaps this is in its own way utopian, that is to say inappropriate to the dangers at hand. (If it is, it wouldn't be the first time that I have preached against the sins I am most guilty of.) Perhaps things have become so horrible, that this can be described as a retreat, a withdrawal from the world. And that, by letting this Being be, it simply consents to letting the nightmare continue. Perhaps so. I cannot be sure. But I believe that it helps. Whether they are able to make a change in the world or not, anyone's effort at thinking, at drawing near to their place, caring for it, makes the world better. Because it lets truth, friendship, and freedom happen. I cannot offer a theory of why such local efforts can have any effect of importance in the world; I can only hope. And trust. Even when these efforts seem to touch nothing but themselves. But I digress.

The wilderness, or anarchy, of Being is not the opposite of civilization, as it has long been characterized in the Western tradition, virginal, unhandled, inhuman, untouched, but rather a building that we dwell in, that we have built because of what we are. In Being's wilderness we do not strip away our connections, our belonging with others, becoming a lonely outcast in the world's vastness, at last free of ourselves, but rather we find a place where we learn of our life's connections with otherness, with the shadow we think we are not, with the community of Being we have tried to escape. In going into the wilderness, which is as easily found in the city as the vast rainforest, we are going home because wilderness is the place where we recover the things that are most ourselves, but that we have denied, repressed, forgotten. Building wilderness is a lot like interpreting dreams. In doing it, we encounter the surprise of otherness, a shadow that is not really so other because it is our own being. A returning of the other, it is a place in our life that reminds us of our ties to the earth and our place on it. As such, it is a life governed by the inner and situated ways of thinking and love, not by the external and distant summons of patriarchy's morals, principles, or reason. To dwell is to build a place to think of love, care, and peace. And, unavoidably, their others too.

Surprisingly, the Old English and the High German word for building, "baun," means to dwell, to remain, to stay in a place, according to The Thinker.⁽⁴²¹⁾ The original meaning of the verb "bauen," namely to dwell, has been more or less lost to us. But in the word "neighbor," in Old English "neahgebur," a trace of it remains. "Neah" means near and "gebur" means dweller--near-dweller. Not only does the old word "baun" tell us that to build is really to dwell, it also suggests what dwelling brings forth--Being. In German, the old word "bauen" is also related to the words "bin" and "bist." Thus, "ich bin," I am, and "du bist," you are, mean, not only that we are, but that I dwell, you dwell. We live; we have a place that we live at, the world worlds because we are there. The way in which you are and I am, the way in which we, as mortal beings, are upon the earth, is as dwellers. To be a human being is to be a dweller, a human whose life is built amid a place on earth. Living, we build a world for ourselves, tend for it, care for the people and things that share it with us. Even such things as "nature," "the gods," "humanity" and "death," are buildings, names for the thoughts that we dwell amid, construct our world with. The world worlds when we build, dwell, and think.

Building also means, though less commonly now, to cherish and protect, to bring forth as a preserving and caring, and especially as a cultivating and nurturing of the earth. For example, after many years of careful work, after a farmer has cultivated a rich layer of humus in his soil, she says that her soil is built. As cultivating and nurturing of the abyss, building is an open and responsive caring that brings forth the gods. Making possible any interpretation of the world's worlding, it takes place before them and seeks their blessing and their gifts in a bountiful harvest. To practice the art of agriculture, as the past of the word suggests, is to cult-ivate the favor of the gods, to bring their message forth, to attend to the earth that conceals it, and to abide with the truth brought forth.⁽⁴²²⁾

But not all building is tending to the soil, since ships and temples are also built. This distinction does not, however, mean that building as cultivation and building as construction are two different things, contraries that must oppose each other. As ways of making things, both modes of building bring forth, cultivate and care for, the sacred ones that govern dwelling.⁽⁴²³⁾ All thoughts, names, words, or things, are buildings, care-ful constructs made for the purpose of dwelling. Building is always world building, and, whatever is built, it is done in poetry, prayer, and song.

Even in this, the darkest of times, when the gods have fled, and poetry is an embarrassment, prayer a superstition, and song an industry. When Technoarchy darkens the world, building as artful cultivation is eclipsed and building as willful fabrication guided by the universal imperatives of technological efficiency comes to the foreground, concealing the world's mystery and beauty. "The earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposed goals."⁽⁴²⁴⁾ This is a decisive occurrence: dwelling is no longer experienced as humanity's being, its way of living in the world.⁽⁴²⁵⁾ Instead, harnessing the whole world to its cold and de-secrating logic, it becomes a slave to Man's distant economies and imperatives, and the wild anarchy of the world's worlding is concealed. Even so, this silence that conceals the poetic and sacred character of dwelling can yet be listened to, heard beneath the distracting noise of modernity's archytecture of definitions that it builds in the service of Man's reason.

If we cultivate this silence, this flight of the gods, the Thinker says, we can still hear the calling amid our life's cares that calls us to think building as dwelling, to spare, venerate, and free the wildness in our being on earth, and to understand building as a cultivating of the abyss. Without foundation, archytecture, or universal reality, the abyss is the true ground, the earth on which our world is built. It is necessary to acknowledge this in our thinking before our building is free:

The word for abyss--Abgrund--originally means the soil and ground toward which, because it is undermost, a thing tends toward. But in what follows we shall think of the Ab- as the complete absence of ground. The ground is the soil in which to strike root and to stand. The age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss . . . In the age of the world's night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss.⁽⁴²⁶⁾

If we reach into the abyss that now conceals the poetry in building, we come to understand that we dwell not because we have built, have erected houses, bridges, and roads, but we build and have built because we dwell, because we cultivate the (absent) gods in our thinking, because we are, as living mortals, possessed by the summons of poetry and prayer as they rise up singing from the abyss.⁽⁴²⁷⁾ Just as we cannot speak language, master all its ambiguities, and subject it to our will, but must yield to its appropriation of our being, allowing it to speak us as the callings we are, so too we build only because we dwell, only because the song of poetry has already gathered us into the absence that governs the thinging of the thing.

"But in what," The Thinker continues, "does the nature of dwelling consist?"⁽⁴²⁸⁾ To answer we must again follow language back into its home. According to The Thinker, the German word for dwelling, "wohnen," has its roots in the Old Saxon word, "wuon," and the Gothic word, "wunian," which both, like the old word "bauen," mean to remain, to stay in place. But, unlike the word for dwelling that latter developed into the English word for dwelling, the Gothic word is more descriptive of how this dwelling is experienced. "Wunian" used to say to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. As Old English did once too, the German language said peace with the word "friede," now meaning, the free. Long ago, the word, "free," was associated with what was loved and called for protection from harm and danger, safeguarded in its nature. To free means to spare, to love, befriend, and care for; to spare not only in the negative sense of not harming what we love, to not set upon it as a means, a tool, a way to will the will, but also, and more importantly, in the positive sense of leaving something beforehand to its own nature, actively, thoughtfully, lovingly, preserving it in its peace, keeping it safe in its serenity or tranquility. Leaving their being wild, in other words, free of any archytecture that would deny them their truth.

To dwell, then, in its most profound sense, is to preserve things in their peace, to spare them actively from anything that might disturb them, make them different from they are, as a lover would a beloved, a mother her child. As dwellers our calling, as The Thinker has described it from time to time, is to be the "Guardians of Being," the friends of the world's worlding, the lovers of the earth's wilderness. The fundamental way of dwelling, even in this destitute time of the world's night, is this nurturative sparing and preserving that accepts things as they are--despite their wildness, their difference, their contrary nature, and allows them become what they will.

Gently unassuming, making none of patriarchy's claims, dwelling builds no centers that demand the submission of everything in the world to principle, ethic, or law. And so it is not anthrocentric, or even biocentric or ecocentric. The haunting wail of the coyote, the timid wanderings of the rabbit, the predatory hunger of the wolf and the bear, the graceful leap of the deer, the awesome complexity of the whale's song, the formidable hiss of the mountain lion, the soaring arch of the eagle--all of these are buildings that house the world's differences. And because the world is built of them, the thinker loves all of them as they are, without judgment, evaluation, or reservation. And she will in turn build a way to dwell in peace with them. Throughout its whole sundering breadth the acceptance of the friend, the foresight of the wise, the care of the lover, and the courage of the hero pervades dwelling, determining its whole way of being, which is the stay of mortals on the earth, under the sky, before the gods. To dwell, The Thinker argues, is to gather things together--the earth, the sky, the gods, and the life together of mortals--and accept each, however different, however other, as a part of the dwelling place, keeping safe the peace of the world.

The earth, the sky, the gods, and the mortals are the different aspects of the world's worlding. Worlded by the world's worlding, mortals dwell by sparing and keeping safe the oneness and the alterity of earth and sky, gods and mortals, that happens in the fourfold occurrence of things. As The Thinker says: "Thinging, the thing stays the united four, earth and sky, divinities and mortals, in the simple onefold of their self-united fourfold."⁽⁴²⁹⁾

As the fruitful womb of all that rises forth as plant and animal, that irrupts with rock and water, and yet takes it all back again in death, decay, and time, the earth is the wild and concealing darkness, the fertile mystery hiding the truth of things in dark obscurity.⁽⁴³⁰⁾ Says The Thinker, "Earth is the building bearer, nourishing with its fruits, tending water and rock, plant and animal."⁽⁴³¹⁾ Earth is what the early Greeks thought as chaos. Chaos, according to Vycinas was not the mindless disorder that we think now under the reign of reason's archytecture, but the open abyss, the wild nothingness, the groundless ground, the womb from which things rise up and appear of their own mysterious unknowable nature.⁽⁴³²⁾ Physis, as the mystery and power of the earth that brings things forth, brings them forth from the earth's concealment.⁽⁴³³⁾ For The Thinker the earth, as physis, is not an object of utility, an universal archytecture, or a timeless foundation, but a way of Being, the way it is when it is concealed. Despite its unfathomable anarchy, it, like the other parts of the fourfold, is a building, a construct of dwelling and thinking brought forth by the world's worlding. The source of the wilderness of being, the earth keeps and safeguards the seeds of things that, in their own way and time, rise up into the sky to be greeted by the gaze of mortals and drawn near to the bounds of the holy.⁽⁴³⁴⁾

The sky, as the horizon surrounding the place of mortals in their life upon the earth, reveals things as they present themselves in the life of mortals. "The sky is the sun's path, the course of the moon, the glitter of the stars, the year's seasons, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and the blue depth of the ether."⁽⁴³⁵⁾ All these things that appear under the sky appear in the nearness of mortals. The world world's the nearness of their life, tra