We're working backwards here. The argument in Autonomous Technology was based on a 'materialist' reconstruction of the techno-criticism that people like Mumford gave voice to in the sixties. Basically, Winner wanted to demonstrate that you needn't subscribe to some paranoid fear of what 'they' (which could be anyone from political elites to sentient machines) are doing with technology to legitimately worry about what's happening with technology. Instead, we can simply argue that the systematic interaction of certain aspects of modern technology (inter-connectivity, reverse adaptation, technical imperative) with certain characteristics of human political, social, and psychological organization (cognitive limits, group think, desire for security) leads to a world increasingly dominated by goal-seeking machines run amok. Last time I discussed how this idea opens up a new set of questions that Winner appears unprepared for, but generally I think this systematic and structural type of analysis is very useful. And in tracing backwards to Winner's predecessors like Mumford, it's clear why he took this approach.
Because Mumford was certainly not afraid to think of the machine as The Man. The reason he's comfortable doing this, however, has less to do with the embrace of some vague techno-vitalism, than with the fact that he has a very concrete Man in mind -- Pharaoh. Our situation today is Pharaoh's fault. That is the basic story of Volume 1 of The Myth of the Machine -- Technics and Human Development. In this book, Mumford tries to trace the history of human technical development all the way back to the point at which our species disappears back into the apes. Most of the prehistory we encounter in this volume is a frankly speculative endeavor. In fact, history proper begins with Pharaoh's wrong turn. But first let's recap the early years.
Humans were developing just fine, and had invented all kinds of sophisticated 'technologies' like ritual, language, omnivorous hunting and foraging strategies, and domestic horticulture. Of course, we don't often think of any of these as technologies because they don't look like simple machines or tools. Nevertheless, they are all learned behavior patterns that serve to enhance εὐδαιμονία, for lack of a better word. They open new possibilities for life, expand human experience in many dimensions, and increase our power in Deleuze and Spinoza's sense. Developing this type of 'technology' is precisely what, in Mumford's view separated us from the animals. So, while one of Mumford's goals is to reject the idea the humans are just tool-using apes, he's not really opposed to the idea that we are a technical species right from the outset.
Then along comes Pharaoh. And he builds a proper machine, a tool for increasing his personal individual power. Mumford calls this divine tool the megamachine, because it's so large that individual humans just serve as its component parts. It's a machine of enormous power and precision, capable of erecting pyramids that have stood for 5,000 years already. At first, calling the structure of ancient Egypt a machine might seem like a somewhat loose and metaphorical extension of the concept. But by considering everything that went into the production of these monuments, Mumford would like to convince us that the truth is almost the reverse -- our latter day concept of a machine is actually patterned on Pharaoh's breakthrough technology. What did it take to get the pyramids built? For one, it required the production of a huge agricultural surplus. This had to support not only a massive diversion of human labor into pushing around big stone blocks, but it also had to feed the army of scribes who organized this labor. This large informational bureaucracy itself had to designed and constructed to introduce the first standardized units of space, time, and labor. And all of this newly massed and organized human power needed to be put at the service of the dream of immortality of one allegedly divine individual. The whole apparatus was a clockwork mechanism that sucked in everything around it in pursuit of an insane and life-denying goal. For how can the quest for immortality be anything but the denial that life is real? In a sense, this unquenchable thirst for personal power is almost Mumford's definition of a machine. For him, it connotes a goal oriented mechanism that breaks free of its human context, a sort of teleology gone mad. In the pyramids, Mumford see the root of our current obsession with more, more, more ... something ... that technology will somehow magically provide for each of us. All that has happened in between these two is that the machines have been miniaturized and the number of individuals expanded. But we still imagine that organizing and optimizing the productivity of the world will allow us to live forever.
This is the illusion that Mumford hopes to dispel for us. Because while Pharaoh's megamachine undoubtedly increased his power, it was at the cost of enslaving all the rest of us. While we'll have to wait till volume 2 to discover how Mumford extends this slavery analogy into the modern era, its application to ancient Egypt is pretty obvious. Pharaoh quite literally made humans the cogs of his divine machine. He took full living human individuals and turned them into standardized parts in a larger system. In Simondon's language, he reduced humans to technical elements, and constituted himself as the first true technical individual.
This raises an obvious question: why did the people go along with it? Mumford style is long on suggestion and analogy, and short on careful causal analysis. He mentions the terror and violence of Pharaoh's regime, though this begs the question of how violence alone would allow king and court to sustainably control a large population. Ultimately, his answer is that Pharaoh enslaved us by exploiting a much older human 'technology' -- myth and ritual. It's the myth of the machine that keeps us from seeing its perverse and life-denying reality. Mechanistically speaking, this is almost no answer at all. The Eqyptians were simply hoodwinked into enslaving themselves? And yet there's something that rings true here. There's some way in which technology lends itself to a certain forgetfulness. We seem to become so enthralled by its prodigious efficacy that we lose track of what we really wanted to accomplish with it in the first place. Somehow the servant turns into the master, or perhaps more accurately, the master falls asleep while the servant continues his mechanical march along a predetermined course. We seem to be susceptible to a sort of willful ignorance, a tendency to rely on magical thinking, especially when it consecrates our little life to a higher purpose. We'll see next time how Mumford develops these themes in volume 2. For now, I'll just leave you with my brief individual chapter notes.
2) Suddenly humans got big brains that they didn't know what to do with. The growth of the brain was not an adaptive evolutionary response.
3) Big brains dream up all kinds of crazy shit. The unconscious becomes a chaos that can only be tamed by the repetitiveness of ritual.
4) Language extends ritual and is really the first technical operation. Standardized sounds are introduced that can be recombined for expressive production. Language is not primarily about communicating information, but about structuring the chaos of a big brain. It's a form of magical control over our growing internal life.
5) Foraging develops technical intelligence in a way that predated tool making. But the necessities of ice-age hunting introduced the first concept of work with the repetitive actions needed for fashioning stone tools. The first true machine is the bow and arrow because it is not just a better hand.
6) The agricultural revolution is misnamed. There was a long slow transition from horticulture to agriculture. At this point everything becomes more settled. Domesticated plants and animals arrive with the domestication of human lifestyle. The big innovations are ground stone tools and ground cereals, which begin to make life a daily grind. Containers of surplus become important for the first time -- the basket as a technology.
7) The neolithic synthesis of foraging and agriculture (basically, gardening) strikes the perfect balance between grinding work and ritual play. Everyone person, plant, and animal is integrated into a domestic situation. But this paradise easily becomes too stable and insular.
8) Kingship fuses divine religious power with administrative control of violence to create the first megamachine formed of human parts. People begin looking to astronomical, rather than biological regularity as a model of order.
9) The king's magamachine captured and coordinated human labor to both productive (pyramids) and destructive (war) ends. It functioned through an elaborate bureaucracy that relied on conspicuous consumption to reinforce class divisions.
10) The megamachine must consume the surplus it produces either through elite fantasy or through war. The rulers become neurotically anxious, and the collective human sacrifice of war appeases this the way individual human sacrifice used to appease a neolithic community's anxiety. Cities manage to be partially exempt from machine conscription, and the synagogue is a form of organized resistance to its dehumanization.
11) The megamachine is not the only kind of technology. There has always been a small scale 'democratic' technology that serves human scale life and aesthetics. The prophets of the Axial Age actively resist the megamachine -- the preach a movement of the importance of the smallest.
12) The Benedictines invented the minimachine. A small scale 'democratic' technics (based on the water wheel) was placed in service of a regimented spiritual life. Small machines were invented on the fringes of great empires because they are more valuable where there are fewer slaves. The middle ages generally strike a balance by placing machine power in service to human life. This balance is destroyed when the religious aspiration of the Benedictines is replaced by the infinitely unsatisfiable monetary aspirations of early capitalism. Mammon becomes the new pharaoh.
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