CONCEPT
The Illusion of Technique
William Barrett’s diagnosis that the culture of technique has converted every question into a problem and every problem into an amenable technical solution—thereby closing the space in which wonder, meaning, and genuine questioning can arise.
The illusion of technique is
William Barrett’s name for the cultural pathology that results when a civilization treats every question as a problem and every problem as amenable to a technical solution. Drawing on Jacques Ellul’s account of
la technique—the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity—Barrett argued that Western modernity had systematically converted open questions into closed problems, and that the conversion was always accompanied by a loss: the question opened a space for wondering, the problem demanded a solution, and the solution, once found, closed the space the question had opened. The question “How should I live?” becomes the problem “How can I optimize my life?” The question “What does this suffering mean?” becomes “How can I eliminate this suffering?” Each conversion is subtle and, in the short run, productive; the problem-solution pair delivers results that the open question could not. What it delivers them at