Technics and the "Indirect Production of Science"

Connecting last week's lecture on technics with Virilio's writing on the accident, I'm finding myself more curious about the presence of technology in my disaster, which I hadn't really grappled with directly when making my video on Senate Bill 6 last spring.  A frequent translator of Bernard Stiegler's work, Stephen Barker comments on the vital role of technics in the shaping of (human) experience:

What is being “profoundly transformed,” according to Stiegler, is nothing less that the nature of the human itself, by which Stiegler does not mean some traditional notion of “human nature”: since for Stiegler technics and technology are temporally prior to “the human” (and obviously, therefore, to any “humanism”) our need to attempt to “understand the process of technical evolution” is a vitally important ontological (and existential) imperative.

And so, here's a question we could be asking: What is the ontological or existential significance of the technics at work in my accident/disaster? Or, more specifically, how does the disaster reveal the "indirect production" (those qualities concealed/obscured by narratives of progress and utility) of the technics involved?

In the case of my disaster (the rampant proliferation of mandatory standardized testing as stipulated by FL's SB 6), my next blog post will look at the technologies that underlay if not engender that thought of such educational policies/practices.  Indeed, if we accept Stiegler's notion that technics precede human subjectivity, then technologies like photocopiers and scanners become reframed as immensely significant from an ontological perspective, rather than (boring) machines that sit passively in the sense of a "standing reserve."  A survey of the history of standardized testing, for example, reveals that the very concept of a standardized, multiple-choice test was, at least in the West, unheard of (and unthought) until soon after the Industrial Revolution; furthermore, the concept and cultural place of standardized testing wasn't really developed until the 1930's--the same decade in which the first automatic scanner was invented: the IBM 805.

The IBM 805

Of course, after noting this relation between the evolution of copy/scan technology and standardized testing, we have to qualify the terms of relationship.  For instance, my video (ABCDE, see in blog below) critiques the FCAT education environment as an "evaluation machine gone crazy," and I use image repetition and audio looping to suggest the experience of teaching a standard, drill-based, top-down mandated curriculum.  Throughout the video, though, I am relying upon the exact same copy/scan technologies that underlie standardized testing; my engages these technologies to create an aesthetic and visceral affect, while standardized testing uses them to establish and enforce a disembodied/universal jungle-gym of utilitarian rationality.  So we cannot claim that the technologies of copy/scan (the bedrock of computational media) inherently foster the kind of dull repetition symbolized by standardized testing and other forms of bureaucratic paperwork.

If, as Virilio (a la Ulmer) suggests, we treat contemporary standardized testing--and its surrounding policy debates--as a sign of the coming metaphysics, then we need to approach this particular practice of copy/scan technics as an entry point.  Rather than interpret, critique, and condemn the situation (and then just complain about it as it persists), a heuretic encounter with standardized testing aims to learn something from it--something about how our society tends to conceive of and relate to copy/scan technics.  If we can learn something here about copy/paste technics, then perhaps we'll be in a better position to articulate an alternative strategy for governing or occupying copy/scan technics--a strategy that contrasts from the utilitarian rationality evident in the FCAT, but a strategy that nonetheless answers to the same historical, technological, and political conditions.