The idea that technology may be opposed to humanity has a long pedigree. The second Lateran Council of 1 1 39, for example, banned the use of the crossbow on the basis that human life should not be taken by an automatic device. Other authorities suggested that technology may influence the human heart and mind. The philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius, Aquinas, Locke, and Hegel, for instance, criticise the application of pure reason as a formative force in human society. While they do not argue that people's rational faculty may, in part or in whole, be informed by a technically dominated milieu, there is a suspicion that cultures which rely on mechanical arrangements brought about by technical practical reason are ' ... neither armed for all circumstances nor adequately secured against...change that may be wrought by new allurements.' (Kant: 368)
This intuition that a technical milieu causes a certain cognitive inflexibility is developed by later philosophers and commentators such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, Julia Kristeva, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom argue that technical modes of operation may be indirectly damaging; that there is such a thing as a mechanical, rational mode of being and that the human mind may be profoundly influenced by a milieu dominated by the technical - not merely in the form of physical apparatuses but in the guise of bureaucratic and institutional technics as well. These and other writers, therefore distinguish between the ostensible meaning of an object or phenomenon and the actual meaning of such. So, for Kant and He gel and, later, Marxists and Existentialists, the point of art, and indeed the point of philosophy itself, is to reveal essence. Indeed, Kant writes of humanity's capacity to 'cognise' : that is, to see beyond the surface; to go beyond an acceptance of a thing as thing; to criticise the manifest in order to reveal the 'Real'; to unmask the latent truth that is inherent in all phenomena. But whilst Kant saw
in technology the ' injurious' spirit of capitalism, it was for others to detail the nature of the injuries . (Kant: 9)
Later, non-literary, responses to the technological milieu of the First Machine Age were often, but not exclusively, politically
motivated. According to Gaskell's well known The Manfacturing
Population of England the steam engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power; an enemy that ' enabled the capitalist to
tread under foot the growing claims of the workmen. ' (Gaskell in K.
Marx: 2 1 4) Karl Marx, however, more thoroughly defines the
relationship between the industrial order and human consciousness: 'Modem industry' , he wrote, ' ... convert[s] the workman into a living appendage of the machine. ' (K. Marx: 238)
For Marx, then, the factory perpetrated a subtle but nonetheless profound assault on human sensibility; the same kind of insidious colonisation of consciousness that Carlyle had earlier perceived. Coming later, in response to the Second Machine Age, J. A. Hobson's
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism takes Marx's ideas one step
further. 'Machinery', Hobson asserts, ' ... can only teach what it
practises. Order, exactitude, persistence, conformity to unbending law these are the lessons which must emanate from the machine. Therefore, if you confme a man to spending his energy in trying to conform exactly to the movements of a machine, you teach him to abrogate the very principles of life. Variety is the essence of life, and the machine is the enemy of variety,' (Hobson: 35 1 )
Hobson, therefore, comes closer than Marx to revealing the effects of technology on the human psyche. But Max Weber comes closer still because he perceives that technology takes a variety of guises. For instance, he sees the army as the cognate mechanism that gives birth to all discipline. 'No special proof , he writes, ' is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modem capitalist factory .. . ' (Weber: 1 79) However, Weber's perspicacity is further foregrounded when he writes: 'This whole process of rationalisation, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralisation of the material
implements of organisation in the discretionary power of the overlord. ' (ibid)
So, Weber's appreciation of technology goes well beyond physical mechanisms and their psychological effects. But whilst he argues that the technical milieu is controlled by the few at the expense of the many, he also foregrounds the specific effects of bureaucratic and technical organisation on individuals: 'The universal phenomenon [of rationalisation] increasingly restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.' (ibid) Thus, Weber, like his academic heir Michel Foucalt, sees that there exists a cultural matrix of technical operations which has the effect of making us less human. That Weber is writing about a form of psychic assault is plain enough, as is apparent to other commentators. In reflecting on Weber, for instance, Peter Berger writes: 'The discontents of the modem world derive from rationalisation; that impulse of modem technology that imposes itself upon both the activity and the consciousness of the individual as control and limitation. ' (Berger: 1 8 1 )
Jacques Ellul too sees that technology variously manifests itself and closes off as many horizons as it opens up. In his best known work, The Technological Society, Ellul writes: 'The machine's senses and organs have multiplied the powers of human senses and organs, enabling man to penetrate a new milieu and revealing to him unknown sights, liberties, and servitudes. ' (Ellul: 325) It is on the concept of servitude that The Technological Society focuses and according to Ellul, technique (that is: use of standardised means to attain predetermined ends) beguiles us by purporting to offer a marvellous escape - ironically from the kind of repressed life that technique forces us to lead in the first place. 166 'In the process' , writes Ellul, [we are] reduced to near nullity.' (302) In a later conference paper, Ideas of Technology, he elaborates thus: 'technique has become the new milieu; all social phenomena are situated in it' . (Ellul in Stover: 1 1 ) In the same paper he also notes that man's beliefs, judgements, myths, and very cognition have been shaped by his technical environment and that technique, moreover, perverts the traditional moral and ethical milieux. 'Nothing' , he adds, 'is left untouched by technique.' (ibid: 1 4)
It is a truth also apprehended by Lewis Mumford whose The Myth of the Machine is directly and decisively relevant here. In the chapter entitled 'Pioneers of Mechanisation', Mumford considers the rigid, formal 'rule' of the Benedictine Order and argues that in renouncing the human will, the monk became 'an integral part of .. . [an] etherealised and moralised megamachine. ' (MM: 264) This transformation from human being to monastic functionary was achieved, of course, through the application of the most rigorous regime of prayer, fasting, and manual labour. As Mumford observes, when yoked together with systematic privations and renunciations, the Benedictine regime formed the perfect model for a capitalist factory culture which demands not just the body, but the mind as well. For Mumford, then, the machine could certainly colonise the consciousness. This was, as noted earlier, a notion embraced by the Italian Futurists who ironically looked to the machine as a means to liberate the consciousness. And so, in Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom, Marinetti declares: 'Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries in science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph . . . the bicycle, the automobile .. . do not yet realise that these various means of communication have a decisive influence on their psyches. ' (Marinetti in Bozolla and Tisdall : 24) Not surprisingly, then, the motor-car became for the Futurists an emblem of a super agency, whilst for other, more wary, writers it became a sign of the reified technological order, the rationalities that attend it, and the violence that it does on the human mind. Above everything else, then, the motor-car was for them a vehicle par excellence for foregrounding the technical consciousness.