Politics and Technology Course

I'm designing a course on politics and technology - from a political theory perspective, but also including study of specific cases (biotechnology and global warming come to mind). Do any of you have any suggestions for books, articles, etc., or links to syllabi by other people who are currently teaching something similar? I am currently considering Hans Jonas' The Imperative of Responsibility and Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts as main theory texts; does anything else come to mind?

Changing the template of the blog

Jeremy wants to change the template of this blog. I am not especially attached to it right now, but it would be good to hear some other voices. Take a look at the templates available and comment below. (Not sure if the link will work; if not, just post a link to an example you like).

Technique, Techne, Technology

As part of a longer project about the state I've been working on, I have become interested in understanding the concept of technology. The question of the bigger project is whether the modern state can be understood as a technology - or at least as a specific deployment of techniques and technologies - of "rule" (let's leave that unspecified for a minute). But in order to get there, it is necessary to reach some clarity about this "technology" thing.

Two concepts appear to be important to understanding "technology": the concept of a technique and the concept of a techne or know-how.

A “technique” seems to me to be simply an algorithm or recipe for doing something. As such, it “exploits” some (possibly quite local and limited) regularity of the world to provide a relatively reliable way of achieving some end in some unspecified (but possibly quite limited) set of circumstances. Techniques do not need to be (and hardly ever are) foolproof: it just suffices that they do better than random muddling through (or than any other available recipe or algorithm) at achieving some end given the circumstances, and that they do so time and again, though perhaps not forever. (A technique that is so sensitive to changes in circumstances that it only works once or twice is no technique at all but rather a kind of “magic”).

This recipe or algorithm may be available in a variety of media (paper, memory, digital storage) with greater or lesser degrees of specificity and completeness, depending on the kind and amount of tacit knowledge that the prospective user of the technique brings in advance; so, for example, a cookbook intended for the expert cook will spend far less time explaining how to scale and fillet a fish or make sauce béarnaise than a cookbook intended for the novice cook. But they need not be polished recipes, unambiguous and shorn of any superfluous steps. A single recipe may, for example, have different uses, in which some steps that are superfluous for some purpose turn out to be essential for others; or the “superfluous” steps may not be known to be superfluous; or they may be relatively “inexpensive” in terms of energy or money, and prized for their aesthetic or otherwise social value. A technique is thus a kind of tool, related to some social network of purposes, some of which it serves more or less well, and depending for its successful utilization on the availability of more general forms of know-how that are able to “fill in the gaps” left in every recipe. We may thus speak of a techne or art (the classical unit of human know-how) as a set of techniques related to the achievement of some general end and undergirded by a great deal of poorly or un- articulated “tacit” knowledge.

Now, it seems to me that if a technique is merely an algorithm or recipe (and hence, in a certain sense, independent of its material embodiment), a technology, by contrast, is always a kind of embodied technique, a “machine.” A machine is an “implementation” – to use the terminology of computer science – in a material being or beings of an algorithmic recipe for achieving some end. The term “machine” here should be understood quite broadly: a book, a hammer, the power grid, are all examples of machines, and thus of technologies. In the process of implementation in a material being, however, the very nature of the technique is transformed.

It seems to me that two points of this transformation are worth noting. First, the kind of tacit (or explicit) knowledge required of a user of a machine is usually quite different, and often less demanding, than the kind of knowledge required of the user of a technique (you need to know very little about the algorithm of division to use a calculator, for example, though you do need to know other things). A technology thus may make a technique available to those who do not possess knowledge (but possess other things, such as for example money). Second, because technology is implemented in material beings, it normally harnesses the energies of the physical universe for human purposes, extending the power - in the broadest sense - of the naked human being, especially in the physical world.

Given these understandings of technique, techne and technology, I think one could conceive of the state as a kind of materialization of a wide variety of techniques of rule. But this would be something for another day. Do these understandings of technique, techne, and technology make sense?

Strategies for successful dissertation completion

Strategies for successful dissertation completion is a useful list of suggestions for people writing a dissertation - or indeed, any sort of long research project, I would say.

Blogging and academia

This is a good introduction to the issues.

College Makeover - Let them solve problems. By Alison Gopnik

This article at Slate, "College Makeover - Let them solve problems. By Alison Gopnik," is pretty interesting, I thought. It's a wild idea (and won't come to pass), but she's right: the way we teach in the classroom is rather medieval, and not usually in a good sense.

Plato's STATESMAN and Torture

Longish post. Bear with me - I'm working on this for part of a job talk.

One of the questions I've been concerned in my work on the STATESMAN is the question of the conceptual function of the statesman. It seems to me quite clear that the statesman of the dialogue is a logical construction: it answers the question concerning the shape of the kind of knowledge that would actually be able to care properly for human beings, but the dialogue resolutely refuses to say whether such knowledge is actually achievable by any form of education, and indeed strongly suggests that it is not. The figure of the statesman who rules without law thus appears as a standard by which to evaluate practice, and in particular the law, not as a plausible alternative to the rule of law. It is a normative, not a positive concept, to put the point in modern terminology.

This point comes to mind in part because of the recent debates on torture. As the Eleatic Stranger tells young Socrates (293dff), somebody who ruled a city with this kind of complete wisdom could kill and maim anybody, without regard for any written rules, so long as the act was for the good of the city. The Stranger of course abstracts from the idea that the good of the parts and the good of the whole may differ, and in comparing the city to a swarm of bees points to the fact that this person would have to be as superior to the ruled as a queen bee is in respect to the other bees (cf. also 301d-e, where the comparison to the bees is even more explicit), but we may assume for the sake of argument that the point holds, i.e., that there is some unique way of measuring the good of the whole such that violence against particular people appears as necessary and justified.

This argument would thus clearly justify torture - which in the dialogue is clearly one of those forms of violence that would disgust young Socrates and the Athenians- under some unspecified circumstances for the sake of the good of the city, assuming the statesman possesses this special knowledge. If this assumption is not met, the Stranger suggests, there can be no justification for the kind of violence he described (a violence that would eo ipso be against the law, which is conceived as the repository of those practices that have worked well for our own care as human beings). In fact, the point goes deeper: it's not so much that there would be no "justification" (a word which brings with it the idea of law, which does not apply to the statesman, who is above all law), but that it is only when such violence is applied with complete knowledge that it would be objectively good. And any sort of violence is otherwise impious (except in very narrowly defined cases), as Plato (or some near contemporary follower) says explicitly in the SEVENTH LETTER (331cff).

One interesting thing about the debate on torture now is that it is (in part) about what necessity authorizes people in positions of authority to do. The question is not so much, or at least not very explicitly, what kind of knowledge they have (though there is of course debate on whether there is a real techne of interrogation that includes the use of physical violence as a way to reliably obtain true information, a question whose answer seems to be negative, for reasons Hobbes pointed out), but what kind of thing are they authorized to do. The debate thus has roots in modern political philosophy - in Locke's discussion of prerogative, or, as Scott Horton points out in an interesting post over at Balkinization, in Carl Schmitt. While Locke and Schmitt are very different - I don't think there's an idea of a social contract in Schmitt, though perhaps Jeremy can help me here - both argue about authorization rather than knowledge, and in this respect their idea of an unconstrained executive acting for the good (or merely the self-preservation) of the community is strikingly different from the Platonic argument. It illustrates the divide between ancient and modern political philosophy quite nicely, it seems to me.

Necessity, in the STATESMAN, does not appear to authorize anything (only knowledge does); it is better for the city to perish than for its rulers to break the law without true knowledge. The point, indeed, is not about authorization but about the objective good of the polis; and since this objective good cannot be reliably determined without an impossible sort of knowledge, then no one in effect can really be authorized to contravene the laws, which are the closest the city gets to knowledge. The city is simply not made to be flexible; but its inflexibility is part of its dignity.

Some thoughts on the naturalness of the polis in Aristotle

Thinking of Kevin's arguments today on the naturalness of the polis in Aristotle, it occurred to me that we were not fully clear on the distinctions we were using.

When Aristotle says that the polis comes into being "by" nature he means that nature is casually involved in the emergence of the polis, though "casually" in a teleological, not a mechanistic, sense. Nature is involved as setting (or being?) the end (1252b30), i.e., the completion of the sequence of natural partnerships leading to ever greater degrees of self-sufficiency. For the polis to be by nature is thus simply to be the only complete community. This leads Aristotle to suggest that the city is the nature of the lesser partnerships, just as the adult horse is or exhibits the nature of the newborn horse and the oak tree is or exhibits the nature of the acorn.

The sequence of partnerships exhibits a certain progression in time and necessity: there are daily needs (met by the household: their daily character means that in the household necessity rules supreme), nondaily needs (met by the village: their more sporadic character means that in the village there is some space for freedom from necessity), and then there is whatever the city fulfills which is evidently not a need properly speaking: "living well" (implying something you could do not well and still exist) rather than "living."

If this is so, however, what then is the contrast that Aristotle is drawing on? What is the polar term here? The contrast to nature cannot be freedom, for the city seems to be the fulfillment of freedom - the space where "need" as such is no longer supreme, either on a daily or on a non-daily basis. Is it convention? What would it mean to say, in Aristotle's terms, that the city comes into being by convention (per impossibile, since Aristotle does not say that)?

Some resources

The website www.politicaltheory.info is a constantly updated and somewhat idiosyncratic list of political theory resources on the web (the editor tends to link to some weird communist commentary on Chavez every so often). Anyone know of any good ones?