THE ARTIFACTS OF KNOWLEDGE: A BIOGENETIC
	
STRUCTURAL ACCOUNT OF SYMBOL AND TECHNOLOGY

by

Charles D. Laughlin, Jr.

Intention, viewed behaviorally, has several measurable features: anticipation of the outcome of an act, selection among appropriate means for achievement of an end state, sustained direction of behavior during deployment of means, a stop order defined by an end state, and finally some form of substitution rule whereby alternative means can be deployed for correction of deviation or to fit idiosyncratic conditions.  It can be argued from evidence that the capacity for all of these is present from birth ...and that the patterned behavior that initially occurs "reflexly" or "instinctually" is, by virtue of these capacities, converted into intentional action when the infant has had an opportunity to observe the results of his own acts.

				Jerome S. Bruner (1974: 168-169)

	As anthropology becomes more a science of symbols (Geertz 1973, 1983, Turner 1967, 1975, Dow 1986, Fernandez 1986, Noll 1985) and increasingly embraces a more phenomenologically sophisticated field of experience (Turner 1969, 1982, Turner and Bruner 1986, Winkelman 1986, Schechner 1985), the more debilitating to understanding appears to be the mind-body dualism inherent in much of anthropological theory.
  The tendency in Euroamerican culture is to conceptually oppose things mental and things physical, thus creating a tacit ontological Scylla and Charybdis between the temptations of materialism on the one hand and idealism on the other.  The former (evidenced in some brands of structural-functionalism, cultural materialism and Marxist anthropology; see Harris 1979, Godelier 1977) tends to view the material conditions of life as causally deterministic over mental events, while the latter (evidenced in semiotic structuralism, Freudian psychological anthropology, hermeneutical anthropology; see Levi-Strauss 1967, Rasmussen 1971) tends to view mental events as determining activity and material conditions.  The dichotomous effects of mind-body dualism are no better exemplified than in the common distinction between "technology" or "material culture" on the one hand, and "symbolic" or non-material forms of culture on the other hand found in accounts of human evolution (see eg., Spier 1970: 2).
	The failure to fully eliminate the pernicious effects of mind-body dualism in ethnological theory is due in no small measure to the systematic ignorance on the part of anthropologists of the potential applications of modern neuroscience (see Atran 1982 for a refreshing exception).  Of course, there is a phenomenological basis for mind-body dualism, as well as for this practiced ignorance of neuroscience.  It is very easy -- understandable really, considering typical patterns of Euroamerican enculturation  -- for one to experience ones mind as thoroughly distinct from ones body and the rest of the physical world (see Merleau-Ponty 1962 on this issue).  Given this pre-scientifically and ideologically conditioned experiential base, bridging from the physical to the mental becomes a perennial problematic in science (Campbell 1984).  Yet a serious inclusion of a neuroscience component in ethnology would go a long way toward ameliorating the problem, for it can lay the foundation for understanding that the nervous system is that part of the body that produces experience.  That is, experience may be understood as the way our nervous system portrays many of its functions to itself, and the nervous system may be understood as providing the structures mediating experience (Turner 1983, Laughlin 1988d, d'Aquili 1982).
	To this end we wish to suggest a theoretical perspective that allows a more productive bridging of the material and mental components of culture, especially as these involve symbolism and technology.  This perspective is that of biogenetic structuralism (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974, Laughlin and Brady 1978, d'Aquili, Laughlin and McManus 1979, Rubinstein, Laughlin and McManus 1984, Laughlin, McManus and d'Aquili 1990), a neurophysiologically informed theory of human consciousness, culture and society.  Our group has expended a good deal of effort in coming to understand the symbolic processes operating within the human brain.  And although our theory of the symbolic function has been fleshed out at length elsewhere (see especially Laughlin 1989, Laughlin and Stephens 1980, Laughlin et al. 1986, Laughlin, McManus and Stephens 1981), we wish here to show how that theory better helps us to account for technology as a special case of the symbolic function.  

The Cognized and Operational Environments.
	A central concept we will use in this paper is that of the individual's cognized environment.  This refers to the entire system of neurocognitive and perceptual models developed in an individual's brain in adaptation to his/her operational environment -- which is the real nature of that individual and that individual's world.  The cognized environment emerges during the course of life -- especially early life -- by means of the entrainment of networks of neural cells that become active in development, that grow, and that become progressively stratified into more complex and hierarchical organizations (Bruner 1974).  The prime function of the cognized environment is the adaptation of the individual to its operational environment (Piaget 1971), which is to say to itself and its world.
	TECHNOLOGY AND THE SYMBOLIC FUNCTION
	The human brain constructs its cognized environment by way of the symbolic function.  That is, the brain develops models of the operational environment by developing a relationship between the sensory object and the cognitive, neuroendocrinal and other somatic processes intended upon the object.  In other words, the symbolic function of the nervous system is that by which the whole network of models mediating the "meaning" of an object is associated with the object.  The object of the intentional polarity is commonly called a "symbol."  The cognitive associations intended upon the object -- that is, the conceptual, imaginal, affective, arousal, metabolic and motor networks that become configurationally entrained to the network formed between the "subject" and the "object" -- function to extend and elaborate the meaning of the object-as-symbol for the subject.
	The relations between the models subserving "meaning" and the models subserving "object" or "symbol" are reciprocal feedback loops.  The "meaning" models may be activated and seek the "object" that fulfills (the fulfilling mode of the symbolic function) them, or the "object" may evoke (the evocative mode) the "meaning" models.  And the objects may become a symbol in the communicative sense in that it can express (the expressive mode) the "meaning" models, and can evoke meaning models in the brain of the recipient.  All of these modes are subserved by the entrainment process -- that is, neural models becoming operationally linked to other neural models.
	It is our task here to show that technology is essentially a special case of the symbolic function involving both activity in the operational environment ("praxis," or physiological fulfillment and expression) and feedback about effects upon the operational environment (physiological evocation).  This should be a fairly straightforward effort, given the root meaning of the term "technology."  The word derives from the Greek root for the "art," "skill" and "method" involved in doing something -- a connotation obviously focused upon knowledge.  Through this root, technology is related to other words in English like tectonic, architect, technician, technicism, all of which involve method or knowledge about accomplishing something.  
What Do We Mean By "Technology?"
	Unfortunately, there is confusion over the proper meaning of "technology" in the  anthropological literature.  In its most restricted and commonplace usage, the term technology simply connotes tools and tool-use.  In its broadest sense the term, and its concomitant terms "technique" and "technical," may refer to any attention to procedure in accomplishing some practical end.  Robert Spier, while acknowledging its broader sense, chooses in his book, From the Hand of Man, to restrict himself to the most narrow materialist usage of the term:
"Technology" is used in this study to refer to the means by which man seeks to modify or control his natural environment.  Excluded are the magico-religious means by which he may seek the same ends.  It is tempting to confine technology to "rational" means, but this is best avoided when we are unable to examine others' rationalities.  It should be noted here that technological pursuits may have their magico-religious aspects, but these are auxiliary to an avowedly technical approach.
(Spier 1970: 2)
	For Spier, as for many anthropologists, a clear distinction between things physical (or natural) and things having no clear physical concomitants seems to make perfect sense.  By way of contrast, A.F.C. Wallace in his text, Religion: An Anthropological View, uses a broader meaning of technology to include aspects Spier would code as "magico-religious;" for example, ritual:
Technological rituals are rituals intended to control various aspects of nature, other than man himself, for the purpose of human exploitation.  There are two obvious and ubiquitous kinds of technological ritual: divination and hunting and agricultural rites of intensification.  Ritual that aims to extract useful information from nature is called divination.  Ritual that purports directly or indirectly to control the availability and fertility of game..., of flocks and herds, or of wild and cultivated vegetable crops is called rites of intensification.  We may also add a third category: protective rituals, intended to prevent or avoid a diversity of ills or disasters... .
(Wallace 1966: 107-108)
Yet even here there is a taxonomic distinction being made between those things of a physical nature and those not of such a nature.
	As Martin Heidegger (1977; see also Ellul 1980, Ihde 1983) has pointed out, restricting our understanding of the concept "technology" to tools, tool-use, or even practical, tool-like rituals, will result in our failing to get at the full essence of technology.  In biogenetic structural theory this essence has to do with the relationship between the respective organizations of the cognized and operational environments -- the latter including both the being producing the cognized environment and that being's world.  Because they are two aspects of the same organism, both have evolved through time, [as have the relations between them.
	And this co-evolution is evidenced in artifacts that are the material transformations of the external operational environment used to open up, control, exploit, fertilize and otherwise extend the explorations and adaptations possible given the limitations of the unaided motor and sensory facilities of the human body.  These material transformations are the artifacts of knowledge, the material fulfillment and expression of cognized environments of individuals in various societies and at various points in hominid evolution.  In the fulfilling mode an artifact may facilitate the occurrence of desired sensory events; eg., a spear brings down a deer.  In the expressive mode an artifact may operate as a symbolic mechanism; eg., a signal flag is used to send a message.  The same artifact may operate in both modes simultaneously; eg., a physician's stethoscope may fulfill the physician's desire to hear the heartbeat, and be a symbol of the physician's status for the patient.  And in every case there is an evocative mode to the interaction in that the artifact is perceived and is meaningful prior to and during its use.  It is this technological interaction between the cognized and operational environments (both internal and external) that is facilitated and expressed by material transformations in the external operational environment -- transformations that we normally refer to as technology.  
	Orientation toward the processes of interaction, rather than merely toward the material artifacts, will allow us to show:  (1) that treating artifacts as if they are the essence of culture is an exercise in misplaced concreteness, (2) that artifacts are both the fulfillment and the expression of cognitive competence, (3) that language and technology evolved in tandem as two media for manipulation and control of the operational environment, (4) that technology through much of human evolution has been an existentially empowering process, but for much of modern humanity has become a disempowering process, (5) that technologies also exist to produce transformations in the being, and (6) that the technological process influences the way in which individuals come to cognize themselves.
TECHNOLOGY AND HOMINID EVOLUTION
	Physical anthropologists and archaeologists are typically artifact-centered.  This is understandable considering the nature of the material remains to which they are usually limited for data.  But this orientation has colored our picture of the course of hominid evolution, frequently placing the advent of tool-making and tool-use at the forefront of causality in the emergence of human culture and sociality (eg., Washburn 1960), usually to the exclusion of neurophysiological factors (but see Holloway 1981, 1983, Passingham 1982, Calvin 1987).  
	In our earlier work (see Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974: 93) we argue that, because tool-making and tool-use are clearly evident among chimpanzees, that it was not the manufacture and use of tools that distinguished early hominids, but rather it was the retention of tools over lengthy periods of time that was adaptively significant.  For it was not merely the capacity of the animal to transform the materials about him for practical use, but the capacity to anticipate that use over time that is so marked among the early hominids, this being an emergent function of an evolutionarily advancing prefrontal lobe development.  This is the capacity that Whitehead (1964) calls "purpose," Pribram (1971) calls "planning" and Elster (1984: 39) calls "binding."
	Research over the last decade and a half has added support to this position.  Chimpanzees have been shown to carry appropriate sticks for lengthy periods of time in apparent anticipation of using them to catch termites (Teleki 1974).  And a remarkable number of species have been shown to use tools in ways that make access to foods possible, or cut down the time required to access foods (Beck 1980).  Moreover, as Kurland and Beckerman (1985: 76) note, most tool-use on the part of animals is a solitary activity and obviously does not lead to an evolutionary advance in culture or sociality.  Beck (1982) has even given convincing evidence that the cognitive facilities required by chimpanzees for termite fishing are closely matched in complexity by gulls dropping mollusks in order to open their shells.  It is apparent that complex temporal planning is mediated by prefrontal cortex, and we know a great deal more now about the evolution and function of this area of the brain (see Pribram 1971, Fuster 1980, Stuss and Benson 1986, Laughlin 1988c).
The Cognitive Extension of Prehension.
	An evolutionary advance in cognitive complexity and social cooperation is clearly evident in the hominid line -- at least by the stage of Homo erectus.  We have suggested (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974: Chapter 4) that this advance was due, not to increased reliance upon tool-use, but upon developments in the capacity of the hominid brain to mediate cognized relations in both space and time that were progressively less stimulus-bound (we called this development the "cognitive extension of prehension").  That is, the brain could now cognize a world significantly more extensive than the perceptual field, and causally more complex than temporal immediacy.  Images and behaviors became embedded in spatially more extensive maps and bound into temporally more complex "plans" (Pribram 1971).  We suggest that, despite the temptation to place technology at center stage in explaining the evolution of the brain (eg., Passingham 1982: 166ff), neural evolution was minimally linked to technology, the latter being more an artifactual expression of advances in cognitive competence caused by other, non-technological factors (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974).
	This evolutionary advance in cognitive capacity, if it had occurred separately from those neurophysiological processes mediating interlocution, would potentially have produced the formulation of divergent cognized environments among group members to the detriment of sociality and cohesive action (Count 1973).  But of course the nervous system evolves all of a piece, and the symbolic function along with it.   Not only was there an advance in the neurocognitive capacity to elaborate meanings of sensory objects beyond immediate perceptual space-time, there was also an advance in the capacity to express (describe, instruct about, augment, etc.) the cognized environment.  In other words, not only did the evocative mode of the symbolic function evolve, but so too did its fulfilling and expressive modes as well.  
	To fully appreciate our argument here it is crucial to keep in mind that the expressive mode of symbolic functioning is a behavioral elaboration of the fulfilling mode.  The organism will anticipate the fulfillment of meaning; that is, the neural structures that are the meaning of an object will cause the organism to seek that object (Neisser 1976).  This desire for fulfillment may result in behavior as simple as scanning with the eyes, or as complex as a chimpanzee trudging off to find a termite hill, stick in hand.  As we have noted above, such behavior in part functions to control perception so that the desired object or event arises in the sensorium.  Sometimes these controlling (fulfilling) behaviors will take on a signalling (expressive) function (ethologists call this the "formalization" or "ritualization" of behavior; see W. John Smith in d'Aquili et al. 1979: 52).  Expressive behavior may function as well to fulfill anticipated sensorial events, as when the male bird attracts a mate or repulses a rival with his call.  Fulfilling operations and behaviors manipulate the individual and its world, while expressive operations and behaviors may further manipulate the individual's conspecifics.
The Evolution of Communication-As-Technology.
	Thus, with the advent of the cognitive extension of prehension both the evocative and the fulfilling modes of symbolic operations became more elaborate, and there likely was a vigorous selection in favor of expressive faculties producing a balance between neurocognitive evolution and social cohesion.  Communication was no longer merely an augmentation of experience largely bound by the perceptual field, but became capable of transmitting vicarious experience and of sharing information about resources and features encountered individually while separate from conspecifics.  
	This transformation of communication and sociality among the early hominids has been admirably worked out in optimal foraging theory:
In comparison to their immediate, forest-dwelling ancestors, early hominids evolved in a more open-country environment where high-quality prey items such as game, carrion, nuts, and fruits and low-quality items such as roots and tubers were widely distributed.  Such environmental circumstances favor a more varied diet.  This expanded diet breadth itself selects for feeding tactics that can lower the search costs for high-quality foods and the variability in search success.  Each hominid forager could maximize its yeald by sharing information about the location of particularly profitable, large prey patches.  Such social foraging could evolve into a dynamically stable system of communication and foraging reciprocity.
				(Kurland and Beckerman 1985: 87)
Indeed, Parker and Gibson (1979, 1982, Parker 1985) have argued persuasively that language began to develop among the early hominids in precisely this way -- as an augmentation of technology for the joint exploitation of food resources by the group.  Language (whether expressed in gestures or speech) expanded the range of subsistence strategies beyond that of individual foraging by making possible the indication of hidden foodstuffs and other resources, recruitment of cooperative ventures like game drives and the processing and transportation of materials, and so on (Parker 1985: 25).  Of course, we are insisting upon a broader range of coordinations among cognized environments requisite to the evolution of sociality, technology and communication than those limited to and by subsistence activities.  But optimal foraging theory is a move in the right direction.  And, of course, the work of Leroi-Gourhan (1968) on the symbolism and technology of the Upper Paleolithic is very relevant here, but we will not discuss his work because he does not chart the neurocognitive relations that produced the florescence of forms apparent during that period.

TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION
	What most of us seem to mean by "technology" are activities (neurocognitive operations and behaviors) that result in more or less enduring transformations of the outer operational environment.  We have insisted upon consideration of both the fulfilling and the evocative modes of those activities.  Transformations within the cognized environment are, of course,  mediated by transformations within the inner operational environment (i.e., the nervous system), and these may or may not involve behaviors that produce transformations in the outer operational environment.  Even if transformations in the outer operational environment do occur, they may be of an ephemeral or intentionally insignificant nature; eg, speech resulting in a momentary transformation of the atmosphere between interlocutors, swimming across a lake producing waves on the shore, walking on a path disturbing the dust.  
	Technological activities (as commonly construed) generally produce artifactual or intentionally significant transformations in the outer operational environment; eg., manufacture of a tool, sculpture, text, shelter, clothing, terraced field, container, etc.  The transformed materials may at the same time facilitate the fulfilling mode (eg., render the activity possible, or more efficient, more pleasing, more adaptive, etc.) and participate in the evocative mode (eg., as a meaningful text, object of personal identification, mnemonic device, performance prop, etc.).

Technology and the Transformation of Being.
	However, it is precisely in the typically western, absolute and uncritical distinction between inner and outer operational environments that many theories of technology flounder in the mire of materialist reification.  For, in many societies the transformation intended by a technique -- even one with artifactual components -- is within the internal operational environment; that is, within the organization of the individual being.  The outer operational environment is transformed as a medium to produce inner transformations.  To an extent, any textual material depends upon this type of technology -- it is in written text that language truly becomes technological.  
	To give another example, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners will execute meticulous paintings intended to aid in perfecting internal visualizations (see Laughlin, McManus and Webber 1984).  The paintings are not strictly necessary for the visualization practices, but are useful as an intermediary step in the internalization of the image; in other words, the construction of an eidetic image independent of the outer operational environment.  Thus, at the same time, the painting is an artifactual aid to the fulfillment of an anticipated sensorial object, and an evocator of that object, and beyond that object a penetrator to the domain of arcane knowledge.
The Problem of the "Practical."
	The distinctions we take so for granted as scientists between the being and the world, between the mental and the physical, and between the supernatural (mystical) and empirical are not so clear cut, if indeed they are made at all, in most non-western societies.  Much technology in other societies is directed as much at access to, or control over the hidden cosmic forces in the world, or the hidden aspects of being, as it is at what we perceive through our Euroamerican materialist eyes as strictly practical ends.  
	Perhaps the classical example of this blending of intents is to be found in Bronislaw Malinowski's discussion of Trobriand Island canoe-building.  The Trobrianders are a sea-going society living in Melanesia who subsist in part upon the proceeds of fishing, and who take part in exchange expeditions (called kula) to neighboring islands.  These expeditions involve lengthy and occasionally dangerous sea voyages (Malinowski 1922).  The canoes used by these people for fishing are of two types:  One called kewo'u is owned by an individual, is relatively simple in construction and is used for local personal needs.  There are no ritual or magical phases to the manufacture of these canoes.  Another called kalipoulo is owned by a headman of a team of fishermen and is more complex and seaworthy in construction.  There is some ritual and magic involved in the manufacture of these canoes.  There is a third type of canoe called a masawa that is used exclusively for sea-going expeditions (ibid: 112ff). The masawa is carefully manufactured and the ritual-magical preparations involved in the manufacture are elaborate (ibid: 113).  It is owned by a large social organization and there is a specialist who supervises all aspects, ritual-magical and technical, in its construction.  
	As Malinowski (ibid: 124-125) repeatedly emphasizes, however, no clear distinction is made by the natives between "practical" labor and "impractical" ritual-magic.  Rather, both are requisite to the construction of a safe and seaworthy canoe and a successful expedition.  The canoe must not only be built, but it must be protected from the dangers it will confront on the voyage, as well as malevolent social influences upon and potential failure of exchange transactions.  It is significant that the simplest canoe, and the one in which people confront the least risk, has no ritual-magical component to its construction.  The larger vessel in which more serious fishing is carried out does require some ritual-magical protection.  But it is the sea-going canoes that pose the greatest risk to life and reputation that are the subject of the most severe ritual-magical sanctions.
Developmental and Transcendental Repercussions.
	In the same way as the capacity to symbolize ontogenetically and phylogenetically proceeds that of using formal mathematics, so too does technology ontogenetically, phylogenetically and historically proceed science (Idhe 1983:25ff).  By this we mean that there exists a fundamental technological interaction between cognized and operational environments requisite to the emergence of truly scientific mindstates, both in individual development and in the course of human history.  And, as we have made amply clear, this decidedly human pattern of interaction involves transformations in the operational environment -- transformations that impress projected cognitive organizations upon the operational environment, and once impressed, symbolically reflect the organization of the cognized environments that produced them.   In other words, meaning is impressed upon the being and the world, and the being and world thus impressed symbolically evoke meaning -- world and being take forms that are both fulfillment-expressions of meaning, and penetrators to meaning.  The operational environment becomes an artifact of knowledge.
	The technological projection of cognized environment upon operational environment leaves the world and being changed in two important aspects: developmental and transcendental repercussions.  Both being and world are transformed into formations or structures that further the intentions of consciousness, but because the world and being are both transcendental  in nature, any change in their respective organizations will have transcendental repercussions.  We change the world and the being in ways we intend, but any such change will have unintended, unanticipated, and perhaps even unknowable consequences.  
	These two aspects of technological intention are inevitable.  They are two sides of the same coin.  It is impossible to unleash the one without the other.  We wish to dam a river to control flooding and produce hydroelectric power, but we also change the ecology in unanticipated (given our cognitive limitations, perhaps even unpredictable) ways.  We wish to practice meditation in order to relax, but we come to unanticipated insights that change ourselves and our lives -- self-awareness inevitably results in transformations of the self that has been the object of our awareness.
EMPOWERMENT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY
	A crucial point made by Don Ihde in his book, Existential Technics, is that it is not possible to reorganize our world without transforming our being.  This is because we interpret ourselves in our interaction with the world.  Let us recall once again that a principal role of behavior is the control of perception such that the desired aspects of the cognized environment do in fact arise within the sensorium.  Thus, an important dimension of self-interpretation is the sense of power, or mastery, that we develop by way of the practice of matching sensorial events against anticipated outcomes of our actions.  
	And, of course, insofar as we interact with the world through the medium of technology, and insofar as we dwell within the context of an operational environment that has been transformed by technology, we thereby technologize ourselves.  
Central to my understanding and use of technics is the sense of human action engaged with, through, among concrete artifacts or material entities.  I wish to retain a "hardware" reference for technology and yet not as some objectified realm apart from human action and interaction.  ...I wish to underline even more clearly an aspect of the human response to our use of artifacts, hence existential technics.  Existential technics, then, is the focus upon our experiential involvement with our own creation, technology.
								(Ihde 1983: 1)
	Both the developmental and the transcendental repercussions of technological adaptations are evident enough in the ethnographic literature of preindustrial peoples.  Hunter-gatherers are quite different in personality type and social identity than horticultural peoples.  They view themselves differently, organize their societies differently, view the cosmos differently.  So too are pastoral peoples distinct.  As Ihde suggests, the technological stance taken by a people will influence the way they interpret both themselves as agents in the world and events in which they become involved in the world.  The overwhelming sense one gets from reading ethnographies is that technology is largely empowering in the experience of traditional peoples.  The canoe building technology of the Trobrianders gives them a sense of mastery over the multitudinous forces in the world so as to assure a successful expedition.
	Considering our own Euroamerican cultural tradition, the dual aspects (development and transcendence) of technological intervention in the operational environment have become very dramatic during the past couple of centuries with the industrial revolution and its myriad consequences.  Indeed, so prevalent has technology become in our lives that most of us live within a thoroughly "technological world," and via reflexive feedback into our cognized environment, within a "technological society" and "technological conception of self."  
	Yet technology is not empowering for us as it has been for preindustrial peoples.  In fact it is generally disempowering for the common man, and this influence of modern technology upon our society and consciousness has raised alarm in certain quarters.  Jacques Ellul (1980) has taught that the condition is not merely one of mind relating to machine, but rather a human developing within a technological world already in place. Much of his enculturation centers upon values and skills requisite to serving a world and society that has come to evaluate effort solely upon the criteria of efficiency and material practicality.  Education for "technological man" is oriented towards producing technicians who are becoming ever more specialized in their occupations.  Such individuals come to perceive themselves as competent only within the narrow confines of their specialties, but as disenfranchised, ignorant and helpless within the greater sphere of their lives.  Technicians come to rely upon other technicians whose proficiencies are outside the limited purview of their own specialties to carry out the technologically loaded interactions requisite to their life styles.  This dependence upon technical expertise pervades every realm of experience.  In a somewhat cynical vein, we are born by the grace of obstetrics and die in the domains of palliative care and mortuary science, and in the interim we are conditioned to adapt to a pervasive technological world:
This influence is a lot greater than that of school or work.  The technological system contains its own agents of adjustment.  Advertising, mass media entertainment, political propaganda, human and public relations -- all these things, with superficial divergences, have one single function: to adapt man to technology; to furnish him with psychological satisfactions, motivations that will allow him to live and work efficiently in this universe.  The entire mental panorama in which man is situated is produced by technicians and shapes man to a technological universe, the only one reflected toward him by anything represented to him.  Not only does he live spontaneously in the technological environment, but advertising and entertainment offer the image, the reflection, the hypostasis of that environment.
								(1980: 213)
	Accepting Ellul's depiction of the essentially disempowering effects of technological society, George Grant (1969, 1980) carries the alarm further with specific reference to the English-speaking world:
	For those who stay within the central stream of our society and are therefore dominant in its institutions, the effect of nihilism is the narrowing to an unmitigated reliance on technique.  Nietzsche's equivocation about the relation between the highest will to power and the will to technology has never been a part of the English speaking tradition.  With us the identity was securely thought from the very beginning of our modernity.  Therefore as our liberal horizons fade in the winter of nihilism, and as the dominating amongst us see themselves within no horizon except their own creating of the world, the pure will to technology (whether personal or public) more and more gives sole content to that  creating.  In the official intellectual community this process has been called "the end of ideology."  What that phrase flatteringly covers is the closing down of willing to all content except the desire to make the future by mastery, and the closing down of all thinking which transcends calculation.  Within the practical liberalism of our past, techniques could be set within some context other than themselves -- even if that context was shallow.  We now move towards the position where technological progress becomes itself the sole context within which all that is other to it must attempt to be present.

	We live then in the most realized technological society which has yet been; one which is, moreover, the chief imperial centre from which technique is spread around the world.  It might seem then that because we are destined so to be, we might also be the people best able to comprehend what it is to be so.  Because we are first and most fully there, the need might seem to press upon us to try to know where we are in this new found land which is so obviously a "terra incognita."  Yet the very substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique, stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism.
							(Grant 1969: 40)
	Grant argues that the influence of modern technology upon the consciousness and culture that produced it is transformative (i.e., is positive feedback) in a way that is antithetical to the tacit values that made the original social consciousness requisite to science and justice possible.  In particular it is the sense of justice that has marked English-speaking culture for centuries that is in jeopardy from the effects of technological society.  The same system of values produced both this sense of justice (essentially the attitude that human rights are ontologically prior to cultural or ideological points of view) and the free and individuated scientific intellect.  Yet the modern byproducts of science, such as mechanistic conceptions of the world and of ourselves, heavily technologized life-styles, automated production processes, vast depersonalized data bases and bureaucratized social institutions, produce unintended changes in that system of values in service of those byproducts and against our traditional sense of justice.
The Potentially Ameliorating Influence of Awareness.
	As both Ellul and Grant have noted, these unintended consequences of the process of technologizing culture only operate in a detrimental way so long as they remain unconscious to us as social actors.  The values and other components of social consciousness at risk are so basic that they are largely tacit to awareness.  They are thus vulnerable to change without our being aware that they are changing.  Indeed, we may well become aware of these components only when they have eroded away beyond recovery.
	However, the raising into consciousness of these transcendental consequences may ameliorate their deleterious influence upon our cultural values.  Of course awareness of the consequences will not stop the culture change, nor will it cause us to technologically regress.  But awareness may allow facilitation of an alternative organization of social consciousness and social relations so as to retain both the unique level of individuation upon which optimal science depends and the realization of freedom and empowerment upon which justice depends.  
	What is necessary in part to increase this self-awareness is an educational curriculum geared as much to the development of awareness of fundamental values as it is to the inculcation of technological/bureaucratic skills.  At the core of this curriculum should be training in self-awareness and the empowering effects of an active exploration of our own way of life.  It takes but a slight elevation of awareness to see that there are many, and perhaps better ways to evaluate events and projects than whether or not they are efficient, lucrative and practical.  To end on a positive note, there are encouraging signs that our modern societies seem to be entering an era of greater self-reflection and environmental awareness, and it is hoped that by exercising this enhanced and critical awareness we may yet retrieve those values upon which future generations will depend for a continuation of scientific understanding and personal freedom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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NOTES