I would like to share a translation of a subsection from the recently published manuscript, Le nouvel esprit technologique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2020) which is symbolized by the acronym NET. It is my hypothesis that this book makes up an early portion of Laruelle’s work, though the placement of it I am unsure of. It fits closer to themes present in Le principe de minorité (1981) and Theory of Identities (1992), so my working hypothesis is to place this text in Philosophy II, somewhere in the mid-1980s. This subsection (p.66-72) is in the chapter entitled “The Critique of Technological Reason.” In this chapter and the book as a whole, Laruelle is envisioning the break from the ‘philosophy of technics’, more than likely comprised of Simondon, but equally Deleuze and Leroi-Gourhan, with a critique leveled against Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology. This as much is demonstrated below. Another figure among them is a compatriot of Laruelle’s who is barely known or spoken about in Anglophone secondary scholarship, Gilbert Hottois. Hottois’ book, Le signe et la technique: la philosophie à l’épreuve de la technique (Sign and Technics: Putting Philosophy to the Test of Technics), was published by Laruelle’s edited series, L’invention philosophique in 1984 by Aubier (and republished in 2018 by Vrin). Please enjoy.
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What one spontaneously estimates by habit is that a classical philosophical project of research into the technological a priori or conditions of possibilities of technologies is possible, sometimes adding to it a caveat: how does one make philosophy abandon its dominating and legislative attitude over its objects? Without renouncing this operation, we must say that we do nearly the inverse here, and it is this new working hypothesis which we propose by testing on the basis of the precedent description of the NET.
A preliminary question to any critique of Technological Reason is indeed this: what can philosophy really do regarding this phenomenon? Does technology not represent, if not a hindrance, at least a tautology for philosophy, being given its very great proximity and perhaps its identity to it? Must we not therefore imagine an utterly non-philosophical critique of Technological Reason? Can we define a minimal programme, if not philosophical at least a transcendental yet scientific programme (if these two requirements are together possible) which would be useful for these knowledges and grounded on an elucidation of the essence of technology? To what conditions of the modes of traditional intervention of philosophy, which are rather hegemonic (foundation, legitimation, legislation), can they be abandoned without which the dimension of essence itself would be so? How does one articulate to each of them the transcendental determinations of the essence of technology and the technological limits of philosophy? Philosophy is always resented as necessary, but also as deceiving. Nothing can save us from this deception and nothing allows us from making the economy of this ambiguity. Philosophy is a need, but it is not a panacea (cf. Kant): we must not conclude on the obvious need of philosophy for its operational utility.
We insist on the failures of philosophy (traditional or contemporary) and we elaborate a new schema which is no longer valued certainly as “philosophical” in this current and dominant sense. It is a question of a quasi-Husserlian project of a transcendental science: neither an empirical science nor philosophy, but the a priori unity of the two, wherein the present sciences within technologies are like a mode, and wherein one of the objects could be “Technology-with-a-capital-T” [«la» téchnologie]. The classical problems of philosophy can also be rejected at the end and displaced as tasks which can no longer be understood and resolved but on this new foundation of the NET and, within it, science.
We therefore conceive this task of a critique of Technological Reason other than strictly in a philosophical way. A purely philosophical critique remains conceivable, but this is no longer at all our perspective. Philosophy in general remains valid to describe and delimit a philosophical essence of technology precisely, but not its scientific essence. The limit of philosophy is that it cannot lead to any scientific and real critique of Technological Reason which would not already be compromised by its object.
The ultimate question which should be posed to philosophy is perhaps this: does a critique of “Technology-with-a-capital-T” necessarily pass through the form of a de-limitation of it? Does it pass either from one critique de-limitation in the Kantian fashion (but is there still a locatable technological fact? And to suppose that there is, what types, new or not, of the techno-logical a priori can pretend to extricate this fact?)? Or does it pass from a retroceding step in the Heideggerian fashion? Or, lastly, does it pass from a lag, delay, difference, etc., put towards the reconstitution of the interiority of a technological system?
It is necessary – we have seen – to exhibit the existence of technological a priori. Yet the very question of such a priori is this: in what limits is it still valid? There exist some regularities of formation and functioning of contemporary technological “facts,” and such that the development that they program of modern technology would be close to this prolonging of “metaphysics,” conforming to the Heideggerian hypothesis, but we are not sure that these regularities exhaust the NET and in particular its scientific side.
A Critique of Technological Reason is necessary, but it is only possible on the condition of considerably modifying (and according to the paths which are no longer more Heideggerian than Nietzschean) our concept and our practice of “critique” (of the technological fact, the a priori, the conditions of possibility, etc.). We cannot already empirically confront, term by term, the philosophical categories and the “equivalent” concepts utilized by the technologists to define their object and their field of research. This tarrying would suppose a condition that is itself philosophical: the bracketing or the suspension of an impossibility of principle to directly, bi-univocally, oppose socio-technological concepts and philosophical concepts. This impossibility holds to the specific dimension of the philosophical which is both withdrawal and conditioning, regression and possibilization. This dimension is obviously the major obstacle for a practical, empirically efficacious intervention of philosophy. What’s more, a science and a critique grounded on philosophy are incommensurable to it. They both transform this withdrawal, this distance, in order so that they would no longer be the means of a domination and a violence, and that they allow an efficacious investment. From there is a displacement of the Greco-Western problematic and its “unitary” invariants (and not only “representative” or “metaphysical” ones).
Indeed, these problems of a philosophy of technics are so capital – we retrieve them at any rate, but precisely transformed and displaced under the authority of a transcendental science – that they still assume that philosophy remains a master of itself and a master of technics, a mastery which is the symptom of the technological nature of the Philosophical Decision itself. A philosophical critique of Technological Reason is therefore not more than a means in our problem which is of a global evaluation of the philosophical and technological posture in general. Even though numerous works of the “philosophy of technics” exist, there is nearly nothing on the general problem of what philosophy can and cannot do as to technics. It is nevertheless the essential problem, a problem not of the reciprocal critical limitation of philosophy and technics, but of the limitation of philosophy (which is itself a technology) by its real critique by science. The inventory of possible philosophical positions, the problem of the distinction between technics and technology, and that of the technological a priori, etc., are subordinated by the resolution of this preliminary problem. Thus, the point is to define first a specifically scientific perspective, irreducible to the sociological, economic, historical perspectives and so on, but also to the philosophical perspective and, at the same time, to test it as such. From there is the condition of a good rapport, without violence nor claim to domination, to the positive knowledges which have technologies as an object. From this new perspective, philosophy no longer appears to us solely nor even essentially as a relay between these knowledges, which it can be obviously, nor even as the means of radically distinguishing science (as an essential relation to the real) and technology, but rather as a hindrance to this fundamental distinction and a hindrance to a critique which would no longer be illusory by Technological Reason.
This is more than or another thing than a simple anti-philosophical skepticism. We attempt to ground it, to legitimate it, and to legitimate this global confrontation on an evidently non-philosophical basis, and what we can describe as such (despite the wager that is scandalous for the philosophers) is to claim to speak non-philosophically on philosophy. We record the traditional observation of the impotency of philosophy as to technology and negate it at once: philosophy is already a technology, it is therefore powerless to really critique it. One will object to us that there is no simple identity among them but there is an overt, perhaps already altered and broken circularity, a topological neighboring at least, etc., but these are precisely these mixtures, these entanglements, these residua of transcendent identity which (measured to immanence and the rigor of a scientific knowledge) appeal to a non-philosophical critique. We must therefore displace this observation in relation to what subsists in it of a simply ante-philosophical positivism. This is the meaning of its transcendental, yet “scientific,” rather than philosophical, foundation.
This shelving of the Philosophical Decision in general, the very possibility of treating it “in general” – what the Philosophical Decision itself refuses – obviously supposes that we have a real scientific instance at our disposal, not determined by philosophical operations and capable, if not to delimit at least to globally de-realize the Philosophical Decision. The uni-lateral, irreversible distinction of a transcendental science articulated within the transcendental experience non-thetic (of) oneself which we call “the One,” and the Philosophical Decision which is globally thetic or positional (despite all of the nuances and alterations contributed by the contemporaries on this ontological trait) – this distinction is what grounds the programme of a real and scientific critique of Techno-Logical Reason (the mixture of technics and philosophy). Our goal is not to add to positivist descriptions (it is too positivist to be really positive) which exist of tools, machines and models, and not more to critique them as modes of metaphysics. In particular, all of these investigations repose on the hypothesis of a non-technological which is not that of Heidegger’s at all even if, on one of their sides, they radicalize Heidegger’s position (technics are the prolonging and completion of metaphysics). Without possible, otherwise illusory synthesis, we distinguish science and technics. This distinction of an absolutely immediate experience of the real, which grounds its scientific representation and its techno-logical representation, is the “rock” of these investigations. We are lead to place techno-logy which the sociological and philosophical knowledges speak of beside metaphysics; but to place science, as it relates itself in a radically immanent way to the real, before them, not falling under Being or Logos, beside these two things and a being that is all alone on its side. We attempt to break the illusion of a techno-scientific complex at least of an identity of science and technology, introducing rather among them a duality without reciprocity. And finally: the point is to enroot not technè but its critique within a thought of the One, rather than a thought of Being.
en-demic 