Etho-techno-logy: Of Ethics in an Intense Technological Milieu
Franois Laruelle, Alyosha Edlebi
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 21, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2013, pp. 157-167 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press For additional information about this article Access provided by Central European University (18 Sep 2014 20:52 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v021/21.2.laruelle.html Etho- techno- logy Of Ethics in an Intense Technological Milieu franois laruelle Translated by Alyosha Edlebi Ethics will have known several historical deaths. But beyond these deaths in the Enlightenment, the de- Christianization, the murder of the moral God, as beyond its ts and starts, assembling these ac- cidents in the ux of a unique decline, there is a death- process of ethics that fuses with the effectivity of its existence. This process in which it does not cease to sink in an interminable fall, we call Ethologos, the becoming- ethological of ethics. This formula must be complicated, explicated, prolonged also by the following thesis, which adds to it almost nothing, except the supplement of which it is capable by itself: No known form of the occidental eld of ethics is still capable of furnishing a rule of life, a criterion or a basis for de- cision, the principle of a legitimation of human existence when this existence develops in an intense technological milieu. The problem of legitimation begins to be posed when it is too late and there are no more criteria of legitimation. Legitimation becomes a problem when the problem of legitimation is no longer itself legitimate. To be more precise, the etho- logical formation in which our existence and our values are increasingly submerged functions we must grasp this at once as a hypo- legitimation, an active lack of legiti- mation affecting all of our behaviors, and as an over- legitimation in qui parle spring/summer 2013 vol.21, no.2 158 which any behavior whatever is immediately justied and valorized by means of its overdetermination by the others. This mechanism of Ethologos has to be elucidated in itself and in its relations to the conditions of over- technological existence that are our own. But such a mechanism gradually proves to be nothing other than the self- asphyxiation of the Decision. We lack a concept and a criterion of the Decision that would render it pos- sible anew. Because everything becomes possible, the possible is rareed and turns into effectivity. And the rarity of the possible is unlike that of goods: it is distressing. If ethics has to be awak- ened from its slumber, which makes up the life of our occidental memory, it must indeed be awakened against universal Ethologos. Doubtless, the strict conditions that prohibit this awakening from being nothing more than a new avatar of old forms of ethics, and of the Metaphysics that supported it, remain to be xed. A legiti- mation of ethics through the regressive return to something like a foundation, an ontology, a theology, an onto- theo- logy, a Chris- tian or transcendental personalism, a formal or material practical reason all of this is undoubtedly excluded here. Not only because these games have already drawn out all their consequences and, in multiple senses of this word, are interminable, but because all of these possibilities are truly dead. Not in the sense that they have vanished from our present historical horizon (repetition com- pensating this type of loss is always possible), but on the contrary because they have merged with this horizon and form henceforth a part of our most immediate conditions of existence. There is no need to resurrect love, justice, reason, values, and the person. They are only too much there rather than not enough, and we need a solid ignorance of repetition to believe so casually that we repeat at will, when all of this already returned a long time ago and does not cease returning without even passing by philosophy anymore. Returned, and thus gone, innitely gone as it were. If an ethics is still possible, if the possible can be re- injected into existence, it is beyond this effectivity, this carnival where love, justice, responsi- bility, and the person do not stop revolving and communicating to us the nausea of things, at times too drab, at others too brilliant. The effectivity of our existence, it is Ethologos that constitutes Laruelle: Etho-techno-logy 159 it, and thinkers overburdened with their concern for legitimat- ing ethics always arrive too late relative to Ethologos, which is the whole possible legitimation. The question of ethics is it still a question, in fact, isnt every question onto- ethical, isnt it gathered in Ethology? requires that we rst determine its scope, then but we will not tackle these tasks here the conditions of possibility of a non- metaphysical thought and, on its basis, the conditions of a non- ethological ethics. The history of occidental ethics is thus that of its necessary de- cline into Ethologos. It unfolds in the space of onto- ethical or etho- logical Difference, which is the ethical mode of the ontologi- cal Difference of Being and being. Ethics having in effect begun only as a particular mode of metaphysics, its decline follows that of ontology. Its unfolding concludes under the form of universal fusion of ethos and ethics, of both with technologos, in an etho- techno- logos that is the condensation of all the historical forms of ethics with the conditions of existence heavily regulated by tech- nology. We cannot content ourselves with considering, in their em- pirical generality, Technology and Ethics as such, in their forms conserved as fossils by the fossilized traditions of Philosophy [la philosophie] and its academic exercise. They are not tran- scendent and exclusive themes or objects, which we would put in relation after the fact; they have to be re- immersed in the universal movement they constitute out of their fusion and out of their ap- parent separation, understood still as the symptom of an etho- techno- logical tendency that produces many others. This universal tendency is the following: onto- ethical Difference is simply the correlation of the individual and the rule, a synthesis that appears self- evident but is perhaps, as synthesis, only Greco- Occidental and thus planetary. This correlation of the individual and the rule is the matrix of every possible ethics, at least of the one that the philosophical West has known. It is innocent only for us who have transformed it so much into a condition of existence that we no longer notice it even, when it in fact implicates several effects that explain the decline of ethics: (1) ethics as subsump- tion of the individual to the rule; (2) a subsumption that has as its counterpart the thoroughly relative transcendence, subject to qui parle spring/summer 2013 vol.21, no.2 160 accidents and becomings, of the rule to the individual; (3) nally, the unity of these two phenomena in the mutual, reciprocal, revers- ible ordering of the individual and the rule and in the ordering of this relationship to its own synthetic unity (the and) in which it is the onto- ethical correlation itself and in totality that is posited, becomes principle or auto- position, the absolute that subordinates its two components. Hence the tragic or destinal essence, at once of the individual and of ethics, which are engaged in a reciprocal and ill- fated strug- gle for domination because they are both, in reality, ordered to the supreme violence of onto- ethical Difference. Neither the individ- ual nor ethics is truly emancipated; they are bound in an internal struggle and a quarrel that philosophers treat as the ethical cause. On one hand, ethics is condemned to gradually yet inexorably lose its transcendence, to reinforce the coupling or the Same of man and the rule. The Law is so little made for man that it is con- demned, even though it should have been emancipatory, to chain the individual more and more intensely, bringing it a supplement of servitude, ethics as simple supplement to political, economic, technical . . . servitude. On the other hand, the individual is forced to locate its effective conditions of existence in a tissue of rules or norms all and each of which have at once economic, political, ideological, sexual, linguistic, and ethical . . . effects: if there are no ethical (moral) phenomena, but only an ethical interpretation of phenomena, it is because ethics has lost so much of its tran- scendence, which was only relative to men, that any phenomenon whatever comprises juxtaposed to others and overdetermined by them what is nothing more than an ethical effect or aspect along- side others. The result is a tendency that ties in two others at each of its points. On one side, the continuous and certain ruin of ethi- cal transcendence, which turns into a generalized ethology, merges with the universal conditions of existence of modern man: the sole rules that still apply to him and which could ensure his govern- ment are in fact all complex, where the old ethical burden is un- decidable, inseparable from determinations of other types (techno- logical among others), etho- technology enveloping both ethics and technology in the strict or scientico- industrial sense. On the other Laruelle: Etho-techno-logy 161 side, the product of this fusion which is immanent to onto- ethical Difference and its process: the modern individual, thoroughly con- ditioned by those rules that are more and more immanent to it and which give it this bearing, this existence of a mummy fused with its bandages, as one is with ones prostheses. This unique and double tendency must thus be outlined a priori just to render possible the apperception of its symptoms, those of the becoming of ethics in an intense technological milieu. It merg- es with a line of facts that punctuate the technological becoming of ethics (techno- ethics) and the ethical becoming of technology (etho- technology), the interface of Ethics and Technology which are inseparable and, separated from their common boundary, are abstractions. These facts, among others: 1. The affect of the Decisions deadlock spreads out in an unin- terrupted manner; it is the experience not of the Decisions paraly- sis but of the continuous extension of this paralysis that spreads to all the levels and all the spheres of existence. The lack of a pos- sible ethics, but above all the extension, even the intensication of this lack, becomes a universal lived co- extensive with the intensi- cation of technological possibility. 2. A more profound aspect of the same global phenomenon: the softening of the categorical imperative, which becomes at once im- manent and universal. It is fragmented, disseminated, loses some of its transcendence and rigor, some of its formal purity as well; it becomes pluralized in innumerable rules: emergence of a micro- ethics of everyday life that lls up all the spaces left empty or ex- cluded as pathological (Kant) by pure ethics (profession, sexual- ity, information, culture . . . of the individual are interpenetrated by a more and more micrological one must or you ought); fragmentation and universal extension of responsibility, in the form of a soft responsabilization and imputation extended to all the behaviors of existence; ceaseless fragmentation of tasks, goals, responsibilities. 3. More profoundly still, an apparent dissolution of the categor- ical imperative in an interminable and circular play inhibiting the rational Decision of means and ends, of the pure principle and its applications. As if the rigor or rigorism of a pure and formal qui parle spring/summer 2013 vol.21, no.2 162 a priori principle of determination of the will blended in, without being truly destroyed by the empirical or the material content of acts, with the metaphysics of morals and the multiplicity of duties. Moral Law merges with the technological, economical, sexual, ide- ological . . . empiricity of individuals, but without truly losing its rigor. It only loses the exclusive, classical rational form of transcen- dence, but continues from its universality become multiple to dominate individuals, themselves raised to the state if not of rea- sonable, then at least of over- rational or over- reasonable be- ings. To each individual its maxims, but the maxims of the modern human no longer need to be universalized, because its maxims run less and less the risk of being pathological individual expressions and because, for its part, reason alters in nature without ceasing to dominate, and loses the transcendence of its traditional scientico- ethical contents. The fusion of duty (with a view to or out of duty) with legality or conformity does not quite mean the destruc- tion of formalism, but merely its becoming- immanent. 4. Finally, a radicalization and a universalization of the phenom- ena of displacement and overdetermination of ends. As if hetero- tely were generalized (hence the inhibition of the classical rational Decision) and, in this very generalization, tended toward a homo- tely; if not an identity, then at least a sameness of ends. It is the fusion of an increased transversality of ends and means, duty and its material content, and of their reversibility (any pure form of duty represents without losing its purity and formality a ma- terial or pathological content for another pure determination of duty, and vice versa). Those indices being marked, the term Ethologos has to be understood correctly. The becoming- immanent of rules does not signify their materialist reduction to a nature or to technology, to a homo ex natura or a homo ex technologia (if we can invent this Hellenism in Latin after the fact), but equally the a- parallel transformation of nature and technology. The law reveals its es- sence as custom, ethics its ethological essence. The fusion of ethics and animal or social ethology (that of the man massively informed by technology, that of Man- machine systems) transforms both of them and produces a complex that in order to be absolutely ex- act we should call etho- ethical, or in a still more precise fashion: Laruelle: Etho-techno-logy 163 ethico- ethological. The immanent rule becomes continuous, or be- comes custom, but does not entirely lose (in the face of technol- ogy) its purity and its formality devoid of all content. The in- telligible law of Duty passes not only to the state of a categorical imperative (necessary for a reasonable nite being, says Kant, and who, in order to have a pure will, lacks a saintly one); it pursues its becoming by passing to the state of an immanent rule (necessary when the more or less pathological material contents are under- stood as essentially co- belonging to the form of the Law). It does not lose, for this reason, its formality. The ethological rule, that which is the correlate of the modern individual, is no longer merely, like rational Law or practical Reason, a priori synthesis of self and will. This synthesis, let us recall, is a mode of onto- ethical Difference and involved in a history. It is an a priori synthesis of self, which is to say, of onto- ethical Difference, and of the multiplicities of conditions in which mans existence is embed- ded (physiological, economical, cultural, linguistic, sexual, and so on). Ethology is a response to the oldest problem of occidental eth- ics, to the most ancient point of interrogation, that of the ethicity or governmentality of human multiplicities. It is not a very origi- nal response in relation to the question, but it owes its nature as response to the fact that it only prolongs the question, that it is its interiorization or its intensication. The Rule is always conceived as a rule of principal and absolute synthesis, but it has now be- come immanent and ensures the fusion of the most transcendent forms of Law and Responsibility with the human material, which for its part is transformed with a view to the common enterprise, etho- techno- logy as absolutely conforming and unconditioned behavior. The totality of those facts enables us to trace a curve that traverses both Ethics and Technology as their interface, that goes beyond or expels them both for new combinations. Reciprocal im- plosion of ethical rationalism and technological rationalism in a mixed formation. Beyond simple ethico- professional responsibil- ity (the schema of Max Weber, which must not be generalized, but universalized, not only extended to other spheres of existence but intensied), there is a continuous process of responsabiliza- tion, at once a co- extension of responsibility to any social rela- qui parle spring/summer 2013 vol.21, no.2 164 tions on which this new relation is grafted and which it hijacks, a whole soft ethics adapted to the multiplicity of social and, above all, technological relations and an inverse co- extension of tech- nology to all decisions, whatever they may be. Ethics also functions as support for technological decision making, and technology, be- sides its classical functions in production, as support for ethical decision making. To the soft ethics apt for technology responds a soft technology of responsibility. The generalization of processes of decision- making support has the function of furnishing to each ge- neric or specic type of decision a supplement, which is that of its conditions of existence, conditions in which it becomes entangled, loses its simplicity, makes use at the same time of short circuits and detours, becomes paralyzed in its peculiar complexity. Ethology is the destruction, in the process of being realized, of the classical criteria of ethical reality, the destruction of the princi- ple of ethical reality or its becoming- immanent. The parallelism of ends and means or, better yet, of the pure form and the material of duty, is partially subverted. Sufciently to render the Decision more and more improbable, insufciently not to continue to condemn man to the Decision. This man who must still decide, but who can no longer cause a decision to emerge in its radical transcendence beyond facts, and for whom every fact is immediately burdensome or presents itself as a micro- project he has to undertake and with the softened transcendence of which he must identify himself he simultaneously experiments with the empirical (economical, politi- cal, sexual) facticity of ethics and the ethicity of every existence. He experiences daily, in the combination of their tragic knot, the lack of legitimation of every ethics and the excess of legitimation that weighs on the most innocent decisions. Compelled to further his own misery, he witnesses impotent and paralyzed the dis- memberment of his body, his language, his culture, his values, the recombination of the obtained fragments according to laws that are those crisscrossed, disjointed, and reversible of a becoming- technological of ethics and a becoming- ethical of technology. It is the thoroughly conforming man: no longer to a state, a country, a culture, a law, nor even to himself, but to Conformity itself. It is the human type of conformity, conformity par excellence, that is to say, incarnated and become the esh of his esh. There is Laruelle: Etho-techno-logy 165 therefore an ethological parousia in which onto- ethical Difference closes and winds on itself, manifests itself as equal to its unequal essence of difference and returns to their vacuity all of the already realized attempts of a return to ethics. The being of man is identical to the totality of his behaviors or his dis- positions; it is the plenitude of onto- ethical dif- ference, impregnated with all the never- taken decisions, itself the matrix of every possible be- havior, ethical and/or technological. The parousia of ethics, eth- ics sinking in parousia, lies entirely in this coincidence or this re- ciprocal determination (without remainder it is the expulsion of every indetermination) of the difference of the rule in relation to man and the difference of man in relation to the rule. Making the will, but nite and even affected by pathology, coincide with the Law, but rid of the most exclusive, most separated or most gregarious kinds of its formality and its transcendence, is the peak of etho- techno- logical contemplation. We understand noth- ing of the problem of ethics, its impasse, its predicament and the tragic aporia in which it places every decision, so long as we have not grasped that ethological man that of the West and, by con- sequence, the only planetary one is embarked on the path of an unheard- of saintliness, of a becoming- saint(ly) that resides in the identication of his will and his etho- techno- logical conditions, of his essence and his existence. In him, the individual and the rule, or if you want, the Law of power and the power of the Law, af- ter so many avatars and difcult obstacles, embark on a- parallel but merging evolutions. In him, they are determined in a revers- ible manner, absolutely without remainder or residue hence his saintliness, which is also a wisdom, the rst identication of saint- liness and wisdom in order to forge out of their totality a general economy of the decision. The existence of the modern individual is a tissue of etho- technological Games, in other words, immediately undecided deci- sions, undecidable choices, inhibited ruptures, whose aporetic es- sence makes it more crucial and more necessary to seek if and how an absolute decision would be possible anew, without being simply an avatar of the rational type of decision. This parousia renders useless every ethical attempt that would remain at the interior of Difference and would exploit its resourc- qui parle spring/summer 2013 vol.21, no.2 166 es. But, above all, it renders the Decision problematic. Ethical (and not only ethical) conditions that would render a rational Decision possible are no longer fullled. This Decision lets itself be over- taken, from the inside and the outside, by an inertia, an inhibition that has two aspects: one wholly relative to the conditions of lo- cal existence whose mobilization is at stake; the other, global and manifested by the emergence of an absolute gureless Undecidable, but against which every decision, whatever its genus and species, comes up more and more rapidly as against a movable yet un- surpassable Limit, as this Limit gradually blends and merges with the whole of everyday behaviors. Whence the more and more un- graspable nature of every situation, inescapable to the exact extent, paradoxically, that it is no longer simply a fact or a given at the interior of the World, of History, or of a technical system, but sets these horizons themselves in play each time. Of course, the deadlock of decision making is the condition of ef- fective possibility or the threshold of epistemological unlocking of a Decision Theory, of the discipline that takes decision as its ob- ject and which is itself only one of those techno- sciences that con- tribute to deadlocking the effective decision. This Decision Theory is one of the modes of Ethologos and, to this extent, has no need for a supplement of ethics, for it is already, by its essence, the gath- ering and fulllment of every possible ethics. Decision Theory, if not by its realization, then at least by its etho- logical essence, un- derstands the decision in such a way that it aims to constitute it as the universal ethical eld, but devoid of ethical objects, ends or rules. It renders decision the very ethicity of every ethical rule and contributes to destroying ethical fetishism in the name of ethics. It is one of the modes of fulllment of the great rationalist ethics at once the critique of its most transcendent forms and the conserva- tion of its content in ethicity, that is to say, in onto- ethical dif- ference. The one and the other, Kantian ethical rationalism, for example, and Decision Theory, as far apart as they seem to a meta- physicians gaze, have the same locus, are both avatars of etho- logical closure. Decision Theory is the sole possible ethics in an in- tense technological milieu and under etho- technological conditions Laruelle: Etho-techno-logy 167 or at least insofar as thought does not seek to shatter the original onto- ethical difference. Under what conditions, which would be neither illusory nor re- gressive, is it possible from the outset to break ethico- ethological Difference? It appears initially as incontrovertible, as encompass- ing, as inhibitive precisely of every decision beyond or beneath ethology as ontico- ontological Difference. The task is neverthe- less clearly dened: it is useless and presumptuous to seek in the Greco- Occidental ethical resources a given solution. Everything is already with the philosophical decision itself consumed and gone in it. If ethics, that is, the possibility of an emancipatory deci- sion of the individual and which is strictly its own, is possible, it will not be discovered in the eld of ethico- ontological Difference, in the idea of a correlation between the individual and the rule and in the reciprocal subjection of the latter and the former. But how can we shatter the anthroplogico- ethical, ethico- ethological mixture, how can we liberate the individual from the Law and re- store to the Law a sphere of exercise that is no longer that of the subjection of man? Is a form of thought possible and does the word possible retain a sense here? that no longer proceeds by mixture and, among others, by difference, synthesis, and correla- tion? Which would be capable of thinking the individual on the basis of its essence alone, and this essence prior to every universal or every law? Prior to every correlation with a rule, a city, a nature, a state, a technology? And if this thought existed, undiscerned by the principle of Greco- Occidental metaphysics, too immediate no doubt to be noticed by the latter . . . , wouldnt the remainderless destruction of the primacy and auto- position of ethico- ethological Difference be the condition of a liberation of ethics itself, which would nally evade its becoming- ethological? This is undoubtedly another story [histoire]. And no doubt a whole other thing still than a history [histoire] . . . Acknowledgments We would like to thank Vrin and Franois Laruelle for granting their permission for this translation. Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. http://vrin.fr.