The Negative Positation of the Transcendent
Ellul asserts that the only viable response to the technical milieu which constitutes the modern world is through the “negative” positation of the transcendent. In order to demonstrate this, it is necessary to understand Ellul’s three basic analyses of the world. The first of these is his conception of the Christian God and theology, which informs to a significant extent his fundamental beliefs about the purpose of life in this world and consequently the appropriate response to the technical milieu. The second is his secondary, secular metaphysical beliefs; in particular the theory of the dialectical quality of the evolution of history, political action and personal relation. The third is his sociological critique of the modern world as the age of Technique. Holding these beliefs in view, we will be able to discern his overall offering for a picture of the conditions of life in our age and for a prescribed course of action.
Christian Theology
With respect to his theological conclusions, Ellul speaks out of an ecumenical Christian paradigm. This has several implications. To begin with, God is fully “transcendent”. This means that there is a hard and fast division between the province of God’s being and that of the world’s. God exists completely outside of the mode of existence of the world; he is separate; he is different in kind. There is no ontological continuity between his realm and ours and therefore no ascension of man toward communion with or intellectual apprehension of God. Additionally, God is completely “unconditioned”. That is to say he is not bound by any kind of necessity in his actions or being; not subject to any laws conceivable by man. He is not a rational causal agent; he is the inexplicable origin of all this is, probable, possible, or otherwise; completely free. It may also be said that God is completely “other”, inasmuch as his nature is completely alien to man’s. The generation of a true idea of God from out of man is impossible because God is essentially different from man; man does not have the tools to furnish a God-concept; God is ineffable and unthinkable.
For these reasons, “revelation” plays an important role. God communicates himself to man even though he doesn’t make himself available to be understood through man’s extension of himself. He does this through revelation, which is the reaching down of God into the world to make himself evident, in whatever respect he chooses (e.g. his existence, his qualities, his expectations, etc). However, he indicates himself in the realm of concrete human possibilities rather than exposing himself directly in his God-ness. Hence revelation takes place in the form of the “Word” - human language - and also implicitly in the form of historical events. So for example, to those with eyes to see, God’s fulfillment of a promise can be seen in the timely appearance of a ram. (Perspectives On Our Age, pp.76-78)
In other words, the road descends. God descends to humanity and joins us where we are. This is the opposite of the religious movement, in which people would like to ascend to where God is. Hence we see a radical contradiction between all religions… and the fundamental path of revelation. (p.78)
Harmony (the correspondence of two notes such that they resonate in a pleasing way) is not the “natural state” or “default mode” of the world. Despite a fallacious equation of nature unfettered by human intervention with perfect balance and equilibrium, on the part of both vulgar Christianity and the contemporary ecological movement, disharmony pervades the natural environment of which man is a part equally as much and probably more. As far as we can see, the universe is populated mostly by giant calamitous clouds of dust and plasma without even a soul in sight to see them. Only on this one small blue marble, due to highly exact and unusual circumstances involving heat, gravity, water, etc has life precariously bloomed. And on this planet we surely don’t see some permanent harmonious stasis. In the ongoing process of evolution, billions of different races adapt to constantly, sometimes catastrophically, morphing environs. It is only for mere blips of time that animal species and their environs sync up in the harmonious correspondence that allows them to flourish mutually. Then, with the passing of time and the morphing of one of the other element, this musical relationship corrodes back into the discordant chaos out of which it arose. As rapidly as the harmonious correspondence began, the disjunction of the species with the environment sets in, and it dies or mutates.
Humanity is no exception; except for that, somewhat uniquely, it is itself responsible for systematically effecting the rapid change of the environment to which it is adapted. Technology and civilization increasingly transition humanity into a new world of buildings, computers, and mechanics. In doing so they alienate him spiritually and physically; humanity is increasingly riddled with neuroses and cancer. There is no correspondence between him and the world. There is no harmony, because he dwells in a world which he has built up with no regard to for what he himself is.
This is why, I repeat, we cannot talk about harmony of the laws of nature. We cannot talk about economic harmony, the free play of the laws of the marketplace. Harmony is to be found when certain events come together, but above all it is to be made, created, invented, and produced. Harmony is our affair. (p.51)
Ellul understands the biblical story of Genesis to provide commentary on this situation. Adam and Eve were given one imperative when placed into Eden: “tend and keep the garden”. In Eden, there existed harmonious correspondence between Adam and the garden, as can be seen, for example, in his naming of the animals, which represents an apprehension of them and their place in the world. The eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as much a symbol of technology as of man’s insecurity with respect to God’s control, signifies the advent of man’s misguided domination of the planet and consequently, his disharmonious non-correspondence with it.
However, the imperative to tend the garden remains the same as it ever did. Amidst the prevailing milieu of alienation that human civilization manifests every day through ecocide and colonization, it must act to restore correspondence, keeping in mind along the way that must be ever vigilant. Harmony is intrinsically fragile in the context of the overwhelmingly entropic and constantly morphing cosmos. If harmony is to be found anywhere, it is in man’s ongoing antithetical positation of harmony over/against nature’s constant distortion and dissolution. This constant rebellion is an imperative because, indeed, it is what gives life meaning, gives man a role to play.
This is why is so important to destroy the idea of an independent, established harmony that goes with the package of the universe. This idea undermines human responsibility. I believe that our vocation on this earth is to establish harmony that includes all that we call justice, liberty, joy, peace, and truth. Our vocation is to set up harmony between people, between earthly things, between the elements that compose our universe. (p.51)
The inherent struggle of this vocation is for Ellul essential. Life is activity. It is the confrontation of novelty, the surmounting of challenges, and the creation of new relationships. Without the flux of living history, nothing would be worthwhile. No meaning would exist unless men were incomplete yet in a state of striving towards completion. “Our job is not to accomplish what is not yet accomplished (a regression to moralism).” He says, “An actual fullness of accomplishments goes hand in hand with an actual experience of total nonaccomplishment.” (p.39) For this reason, harmony can be found only in the undetermined, the potential, the spontaneous. A society which is structured to the very last in order to make it as just and peaceful as possible is “destiny, not harmony” (p. 56).
Secular Metaphysics (Dialectics)
The next essential component of Ellul’s worldview is the “metaphysical” concept of dialectics, which he understands in a twofold sense. In one sense the concrete reality of history manifests the structure of a dialectic; in other sense reasoning and understanding must also proceed dialectically. This latter is a necessity because, of course, there must a qualitative correspondence between reality and understanding. As per Hegel and Marx (and originally Heraclitus), the world is constantly in flux, constantly undergoing progressive (though, Ellul emphasizes, not necessarily in the sense of positive “progress”) change. One implication of this is that simple logic, which proceeds linearly form terms to conclusions, is not quite adequate to describe reality. Indeed, in reality there are no truly fixed categories; it is a process of which temporality and therefore impermanence is an essential feature; truth and reality are dynamic, rather than static. Ellul believes that the modus operandi of this flux is dialectic, which is to say, it is the process of the constant negation of the status quo, the thesis, by an opposing force, which results in a qualitative transformation of both into a newly integrated whole, or synthesis, which in some sense changes, and in another leaves intact, the two opposing elements. For example, when negative and positive electrical charges combine, they form a flash of energy which encompasses both, yet is wholly new.
Reality includes not only contradictory elements but also a permanent process of change. If we relate two elements, it is easy to see that the negative element acts on the positive and that this action brings about a modification. In other words, contradictory factors do not relate to one another in a way that is inert or static. They are in interaction. The simple formula: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, implies already the trans formation of the first two factors into a third that neither suppresses one or the other of them, nor confuses them, nor adds to them. (p.31)
In order to intellectually grasp a reality that manifests in this way, dialectic must also be the modus operandi of human reasoning and understanding. This means that it must itself be dynamic rather than static; it must move through time and through categories along with the flux of history. In other words, it must be ready to integrate contradictory and logically insoluble, yet historically necessary, truth, into its current paradigm in order to bring about some transformative, yet still ongoing, understanding.
In other words, dialectic is not demonstrative reasoning or a system for the formal deployment of thought. It claims always to be dealing with reality, to be a means of taking account of reality. But reality includes positive and negative things. It includes contradictory things that do not exclude one another but coexist. Hence a system of vigorous thought ought to take account of both the yes and the no without ruling out either, without choosing between them, since every choice excludes one part of reality. (p.31)
The important point, however, is that the contradictory factors cannot exist without eliminating one another unless they are correlative in a temporal movement that leads to a new situation. On the one side, it is coexistence that in real history rules out any idea of an inert and immutable absolute, and hence that rules out metaphysical thinking. On the other side, the manner of knowing must also be in evolution if it is to keep up with the contradictions and evolution of reality, for even when I begin to think, reality is in a process of change. Thus there is no fixed state that I can impose on the object. The flux of time comes into knowledge itself. (p.32)
While this is essentially Socratic, Ellul believes it to originate implicitly in the faith of the ancient Jews and to be the key to understanding the biblical picture of reality. So, for example, the narrative of God - as that which is transcendent, unconditioned, and wholly other - humbling himself to manifest through the story of a people - limiting his own power, submitting to sin, changing his mind, etc - is the logically insoluble reality of a dialectic. The same may be said of the men being saved “by grace through faith”; or of the simultaneous contemporaneity and futurity of the “Kingdom of Heaven” and the kingship of Christ; or of the narrowing of the chosen people of God from the Jews, to the remnant, to Jesus, simultaneous with the broadening of the scope of salvation from the few to the recapitulation of all creation. Any true understanding of these biblical paradoxes must not relax the tension intrinsic in their incongruous realities; rather it must embrace their contradictions as complementary and seek to manifest their coexistence through living praxis.
Praxis, in the context of this metaphysical framework, takes the form of “negativity”. At any given time, the world-historical process exists (and can be understood) in a certain way, manifests as a certain cultural and economic milieu, posits a certain thesis. Because the modus operandi of change in the world is dialectic, human action, in order to effect any significant change, must catalyze the transformative recombination of two contradictory elements, through manifesting the element which confronts the status quo; he must posit the negation of the positive. Since the thesis of world-history is constantly in dialectical flux, mans response to it must also be ever-renewed and reconsidered. Every age, every action, requires its unique dialectical counterpart in order to participate in the all-pervading consummation of dialectical tension.
This is how negativity induces and provokes innovation and the consequent history of the group or individual. One thus sees clearly that negativity has a positive aspect. Where there is transition from one state to another, we owe it to negativity. (p.33)
It is in this respect that negativity comes to the fore. In one of my books I thus adopted the well-known formula of Guehenno that our first task as human beings is to say no. (p.34)
Sociological Critique of Technique
The last essential aspect of Ellul’s worldview is his sociological critique of the modern world. While the essence of his thought in this area is almost deceptively simple, the body of work he has written to describe it is voluminous. This is because, while the idea of Technique (which is central to his critique) is a simple one, its consequences are tremendously wide ranging. At times, Ellul seems to have the capacity to discern them all to the last detail, and often does. So what is Technique?
First of all, what it is not: Technique is not mere techniques. Techniques are methods for accomplishing a given task i.e. procedures intended to produce a certain result. These procedures can range from rational to ritualistic and anywhere in between. They can be chosen to be used or discarded. They are always isolated procedures that occur once at the time they are employed. They are subordinate to and dependant on the human agent employing them. Techniques are merely servants put to the use of manifesting human values. Examples include: rain dances, well digging, law making, melee, medicine, rhetoric, and virtually any other procedure the parameters of which are circumscribed in advance I order to secure the effectiveness of.
Technique, however, is the totalitarian consummation of the interrelation of isolated techniques at the scale of society, i.e. a fully fledged cultural milieu. It is the ecosystem of the modern world, which has grown out of more primitive societies because of the teleologically determined destiny of an ecology of techniques like that in primitive society. The final outcome of an ecology of techniques is a Technical singularity (i.e. Technique), because the presence of efficiency in the dynamic interplay of techniques necessitates the escalation of the efficiency of technical means indefinitely. In order to expound on this definition, let us follow the narrative of the evolution from non-technical societies to Technological Society.
In previous epochs, prior to Technological Society (Technique), man inhabited a world wherein efficiency was only one consideration among many with respect to the choosing and implementing of techniques. The field of application was small in the sense of limited or isolated; only rare occasions and specific activities warranted calculated technical application (think rain dances, medicine, well digging, etc) and for much of man’s life he was free to act spontaneously. Rather than acting merely at the behest of efficiency or technical necessity, his local culture, his religion, and his aesthetics all informed and justified his techniques. When confronted with alternative techniques for accomplishing the same task, no universal standard of good existed. He was free to insist on his own techniques or to convert based on a whole complex of contributing values. The caprice of human choice entered decisively into the methods of production he employed. (The Technological Society – Chap.2)
The proliferation of society and culture occurred naturally given the natural resources at man’s disposal, and the proliferation of technology is a natural accompaniment to this. Man-made though it may be, pre-Technological technology (techniques) was a natural and healthy development of society, as long as it only served man’s ends. However it did not stay this way due to the concealed but inevitable factor of efficiency. This is because throughout this time period the rational that a reduction in input with respect to output (efficiency) is necessarily better was implicit, because techniques were primitive and efficiency was an unusual benefit. This allowed efficiency to pursue it natural course of ascendency unchecked by the exclusive prioritization of human values. This “natural course of ascendency” results from the reality of the fact that efficiency, and along with it efficient techniques, is intrinsically more effectual than inefficiency. So increasingly and inevitably the ecology of techniques comes to be dominated by those which are most efficient.
For example, consider the production of furniture. The artisan woodworker who produces his work by hand and sees it through from beginning to end surely produces a quality chair, but the progress is slow and the cost of reimbursement is substantial. The furniture factory can very simply produce more furniture more quickly, and with reduced cost in materials and labor. Inferior though the factory chairs may be (to say nothing of the spiritual condition of the people making them), in a cultural setting where the superiority of easier-quicker-cheaper is assumed, they dominate the market. This creates displacement such that artisanal manufacture of chairs can no longer even take place. Indeed, eventually, the would-be woodworker must submit to employment at the local chair factory in order to feed his family. The very same process of the proliferation of efficiency, very often at the expense of true quality, can be seen in almost every context. Of what relevance is the reflective thinker in the presence of the scientific researcher, decked out with a technically advanced laboratory and all? Or the old fashioned salesman in competition with the modern one, wired into his cell phone and social networks, not to mention his corporate employer’s widespread propaganda marketing campaign?
This results in an exponential quantitative increase in the proliferation of efficiency, the sheer number of which at a certain point gives rise to a qualitative change. The proliferation of technology combined with the unchecked assumption that technical innovation, or increased efficiency, is of positive benefit, results in a cultural-technological-ecological situation wherein the values, or end goals, of the infrastructure of society are converted into efficiency itself. Therefore, Technique may be understood as the epoch in which efficiency is ubiquitously valued as a means unto itself, or as an end; wherein the very infrastructure of society is oriented around the production of technical innovation. It is the same absurd and unavoidably escalatory cycle that Marx spied in economics’ money-commodity-money cycle, only converted to the technical means-end-means.
The great difference between the two is in their respective characters. First of all, there is the participation of the rational. Until the eighteenth century, technique was, purely and simply, a practical matter. In the eighteenth century, people began to think about techniques: they compared them and tried to rationalize their application, which completely changed the perspective. A technique was no longer merely an operation. Now, technique passed through a rational intervention, and it had a completely different object; its object was efficiency. When studying the old techniques, one is extremely surprised to see how unimportant efficiency was as a decisive or determining notion. Techniques were used for religious reasons, for purely traditional reasons, and the like. If one technique was more efficient than another, that didn’t trouble the users very much. The technical phenomenon, however, is characterized by evaluation of techniques, and comparison in terms of this criterion of efficiency. (Perspectives On Our Age, pp.29-30)
The internal governing logic of Technique inevitably secures it in its indefinite autonomous proliferation and eventual complete insubordination of human choice. Ellul assigns five characteristics to Technique, which I am calling its internal governing logic, that secure its dominance. They are as follows: automatism, self-augmentation, monism, the necessary linking together of all techniques, and monism. Respectively, these characteristics imply the following behavior. 1) The selection of the most efficient means possible happens automatically rather than contending with some alternative because the rational of Technique supposes that all operations have a “one best way” against which techniques can be measured in quantitative terms. The choice (of which technique to use) is made even before the option arises because there is always only one most technically streamlined operation and it must be selected. 2) Technique augments its own growth in two ways. First, every technical innovation makes possible technical advancement in an unpredictably multitudinous number of other fields. For example, technical innovation of the combustion engine implied the innovation of aeronautical, submarine, and automobile techniques. Second, every technical innovation creates unintended consequences which require resolution qua further application of techniques. So for example, monocultural agriculture implies the use of pesticides which implies the use of certain medications in the event of human illness. For both of these reasons, Technique augments its own growth at an exponential rate. 3) All operations ordered along the lines of technical rationalization come to the same essential end: efficiency. Therefore, all differences are accidental. It cannot be said that one the one hand, Technique may be put to the use of producing a good outcome, or one which manifests this or that value, or on the other hand that it may be put to some bad use. The outcome of all technical operations within Technique is the same holistic technical rationalization which can embody no other set of values. 4) All procedures operating along non-technically rationalized lines, i.e. with other values, are incapable of coping with Technique and cannot coexist with it. Any system contiguous to a technically structured one faces two options: rationalization or nullification. 5) Naturally, all systems integral to the ongoing proliferation and consummation of Technique will be rationalized and integrated, and those which are not will suffer extinction. (The Technological Society - Chap.2)
In brief this situation may be described as a complex system of positive feedback loops which force man - and everything else - to take part in the propagation of technical rationalization, even when it subverts more highly held values or the stability and health of the environment. This results in trenchant and sweeping absurdity.
Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for 8 hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out onto fields. See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve by twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets. (The Technological Society, p.321)
Upon critical inspection, the myth that the technological society frees man from the stress and exigencies of the wild gives way to macabre revelation that it merely replaces them with the less dignified, sicklier exigency of constant nervous agitation. The average civilized automaton, even though he spent his entire day seated on a cushion, given periodic bathroom breaks, and free from any kind of distracting variation in his environment, has nevertheless worked all day, relentlessly monitoring the same banal task under the pressure of watchful authoritarian eyes.
When he leaves his job, his joy in finishing his stint is mixed with dissatisfaction with work as fruitless as it is incomprehensible and as far from being really productive work as possible. At home he “finds himself” again. He finds a phantom. If he ever thinks, his reflections terrify him. Personal destiny is fulfilled only by death, but reflection tells him there has not been anything between his adolescent adventures and his death, no point at which at he himself ever initiated a decision or made a change.
Changes are the exclusive prerogative of organized technical society, which one day may have decked him out in khaki to defend it, and on another in stripes because he has sabotaged or betrayed it. (p.376)
The incomprehensibly large and frighteningly impersonal interlocking systems of the technological society threaten and always finally succeed in stamping man out for no reason at all that has any meaning to a man as such – only to the logic of the machine. His very life may hang in the balance – of a budget. His untapped capacity for ecstatic dance, love-making, and song is drained out until only an unwilling, vacuous inner core remains. Life is determined at every turn by the inhuman complex of number columns, sterile enclosures, and monotonous buzzing, and he has no way to change it.
He dreads the knowledge that everything ends “six feet under”. He could accept it the six-feet-under if, and only if, he could choose to, say, die. But when nothing makes sense, when nothing is the result of free choice, the final six-feet-under is an abominable injustice. (p.376)
Prescription (Negative Positation of the Transcendent)
Ellul combines these four premises – the transcendence and revelation of God; the biblical imperative to promote harmony in a chaotic world; the dialectical quality of world history and personal relation; and the absurd and totalitarian trajectory of western society’s preoccupation with techniques – into a picture of prescribed action that takes the following form:
The prevailing order of the day in this world, Technique, ever more rapidly approaches its teleologically determined consummation in the conversion of all human values into technical values. It is inherently chaotic, absurd, wasteful, irresponsible, tyrannical, and otherwise destructive to the world. This situation may be understood as the positive side (thesis) of the dialectical opposition composing the modern age. If we have an imperative to promote harmony amidst this destruction, and if we must operate dialectically, then our action must take the form of a contradiction to the technical milieu. In other words, we must posit a negation of the Technical thesis; and not merely an a-Technical response (for this would be the dialectical situation prior to the positation of Technique) but a counter-Technique, a manifestation of that which Technique essentially lacks.
However, Technique is intrinsically more effectual than any countermanding force able to be brought against it at a parallel plain of existence i.e. in this world. Any merely political or technological action is destined to be less efficient and therefore less effectual in the production of its values than Technique is in its inevitable realization of total rationalization. Therefore, any negation of Technique must come from without of the Technical system and the realm in which it has preeminence, i.e. the world. The world’s salvation must come from and be the transcendent, which as an external referent, serves as a vantage from which to clearly observe and evaluate Technique. This is possible because God uniquely lies completely outside of the purview of technical application. (What I Believe, pp.45-46)
The integration of this transcendent into the world resolves into what Ellul calls the Kingdom of Heaven. That is to say, the synthesis of the transcendent and the world is the “new Heaven” and the “new Earth” envisaged by the biblical prophets. Everything that this entails is unclear, but Ellul understands this transformed world to be the end goal of human action and the ultimate manifestation of the “positation of the transcendent”. But how do we get from here to there? What kind of praxis could henceforth be manifested that would bring about this transformed world?
To begin with, this goal defiantly implies real material action within the present world. As per Ellul’s conception of dialectics, this world will be present in some sense in the Kingdom of Heaven. Though it will be transformed, it will not be destroyed; it is from out of this world that the next will be created. Therefore our activity is required in the sense of concrete world-action (political, personal, etc). We cannot escape into merely awaiting the afterlife. We must not simply reject Technique outright, in favor of some apathy or flight into isolation, yet leave Technique as it is. This course is not even tenable, as we have established that in the face of Technique the world and the individual faces either assimilation or destruction. However, given our understanding of God as God, we may revoke Technique’s status as an idol, as a value, and thereby revoke its power over us. In an act of the most subversive iconoclasm possible in our age, we must “destroy the religious deified character of technique” (POA, p.89) so that we may become “mutants… who can use techniques and at the same time not be used by them, assimilated by, or subordinated to them”.[1] (p.66)
To become mutants means to evolve so as to adapt to the new environment in which we find ourselves. Technique and the world of the artificial which it has created cannot be abandoned, but it can be harmonized with in the sense that a species fleetingly harmonizes with its surroundings. But in order to do this we must evolve so as to correspond to the technical milieu in the appropriate way. Thus it must be determined in what respect man and the world can correspond. The realization of God as transcendent and of his promise of a restorative transformation of this world (“understanding of God as God”) dictates that man corresponds to the technical milieu such that as he places ultimate primacy on the realm of the transcendent. In doing so he simultaneously places the present world in its proper relation: inferior in the sense of being impermanent and incomplete. Thus Technique, and every human enterprise, is humiliated to a desacralized status and humanity is freed to from illusion that Technique is its salvation. So it becomes clear: to mutate in such a way as to adapt to Technique is identical with revoking for oneself and for humanity Technique’s status as an idol.
Man must not hope for salvation in merely human enterprises, Technique or otherwise. The longer hope of this kind still exists, the longer and more precipitously he delivers himself over to that from which he needs liberated. Instead, given his understanding of God and revelation, he must acknowledge that the synthesis of this world with the transcendent will take the form of revelation from God. Any working-toward the arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven is identical with the ineffectual “religious movement” upwards; only the condescension of the transcendent can catalyze the synthesis.
Yet simultaneously, we are called to action of the most imperative nature. For, in the face of the onset of total technological assimilation, man’s very receptivity to the revelation of God is threatened. The very possibility of a meaningful existence depends on man’s clearing away a space for himself wherein he may pay head to the revelation of God. Thus he must act at all costs to secure his freedom to understand and accept this revelation.
It is in response to this particular challenge that Ellul posits a concrete political formula: anarchism. The world approaches absolutely determined constraint under the dominion of Technique, the consummation of which is the totalitarian control of this world-realm. As such, Technique is the dominant “arche” of our time - the rule which informs the mode of order of society, the power which forcefully decides its outcome, the final authority.
In acting thus, it is not only a source of disharmony and destruction, which does therefore merit our rebellion in the form of the antithetical positation of harmony, but it is essentially a binding, structuring, ordering force which seeks to rob man and his relationship with the world and others of its spontaneity, its caprice, its dynamic playfulness. It merits rebellion no less it this diabolical aspect because, without the freedom to choose, man’s relationship to the revelation of God is threatened. Thus it must be rebelled against qua arche. This is to say, its sheer quality as a force of order and control must be countermanded (thus by “anarchism” is meant “anti-archism”, wherein the arche in question is Technique).
What force is antithetical to order and control itself? Spontaneous acts of unruliness. The highest danger rests in our foolish belief that we are already free, that we are the masters of Technique, of technical progress, and of our destiny. In reality we are radically determined to enact a history that is – internally – totally hopeless; and to fail to recognize his is to destine it of our own volition. (Technological Bluff, p.411)
Yet not really, for the system does not stop growing, and thus far we have no examples of growth that does not reach the point of imbalance and rupture… Even without nuclear war or an exceptional crisis, we may thus expect enormous global disorder which will be the expression of all the contradictions and disarray. This must be made to cost as little as possible. (p.412)
Finally, not really, if we know how little room there is to maneuver and therefore, not by one’s high position or by power, but always after the model of development from a source and by the sole aptitude for astonishment, we profit from the existence of little cracks of freedom, and install in them a trembling freedom which is not attributed to or mediated by machines or politics, but which is truly effective, so that we may truly invent the thing for which humanity is waiting. (p.412)
If we wish find hope in that which is external (the transcendent) then we must safeguard our freedom to choose the revelation of God. Consequently, we must be “unruly”. We must exploit lapses in the structure of Technological Society, strive to act spontaneously, to introduce free play between the elements society, to move within the empty spaces. If within these strongholds we can foster the saving power of the open, spontaneous freedom to choose, we may secure the means which are “bearers of the presence of the kingdom of God” (POA, p.87) from out of the world.
[1]From the reader’s perspective, do I need a footnote here explaining the dialectical relationship between the optimism of the inevitability of the kingdom of heaven and the totalitarian determinism of technological society? Analogously, between our imperative to act concretely and the futility of doing so? Or, do I resolve the dialectical tension of those things by asserting that the point is to work for the freedom to understand the revelation of God, which is medium through which the transcendent will be synthesized into the world?
Just sticking this quote here for personal reference:
What does all this mean? First, there is always one history, not two (secular and sacred). In this one history we have the conjunction and opposition of independent human work and God’s “relational” work. Every actual event in history expresses this twofold force. It is a product of human activity… But all this moves not toward the kingdom of God, but toward the crises triggered by the absolute contradiction between vain human effort and God’s exclusive novelty. The crises or judgment, however, does not mean the annulment or insignificance of history. As in the dialectical crises, no factor suppressed. The two are integrated in a synthesis. All human history, then, will enter the new Jerusalem. The creation of the final city is the obvious consummation, not the result, of all that we attempt in history. Nothing in history (collective or individual) is lost, but everything is qualitatively transformed. (What I Believe, p.42)
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