Intermediate Reflection: Tools for Critique

A first round of explorations into the technicity of action has now been completed. In Chapter 1, the appropriateness of a hermeneutic approach to this aspect of action has been defended. At the same time, I demonstrated the presence of technicity in the heart of the human interaction of the emission, transmission and interpretation of meaning, in other words, in the efficacy of symbols. In Chapter 2, I examined the technicity of action as a feature of human existence, over the whole span of human civilizations and with all the variation and cultural specificity that capabilities and means may have at any specific place and time. The interplay between capabilities and means has been studied as a dimension of the understanding interaction that people have with their world. Through an exploration of the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities in Chapter 3, it was possible to get a grip on the contingency and uncertainty of action as action. Chapter 4 expanded this view on the technicity of agency by considering the technicity of organized action: the agency of individuals in organizations and of collectives as organizations. Again, the interrelation of capabilities and incapabilities provided a view on the way adverbial increments of action vary as action plays out. Finally, aspects of the broader social theoretic framework of the previous chapters were studied in Chapter 5. The question of the teleological structure of action and the relation between agents and institutions has been clarified and its technical dimensions have been highlighted. Looking back over the five chapters in this way, one observes the major thrust as descriptive, clarifying and detailing. Still, each time this descriptive work opened up a view on the stakes involved in the respective views on the technicity of action. If symbols have efficacy, as I argued in Chapter 1, this calls for vigilance regarding the use people make of them, the power relations symbolic efficacy draws from, maintains or creates. Hence the question of social asymmetries, and in particular those depending on symbolic violence. Chapter 2 showed how people’s self-understanding is influenced by the technical dimension of interaction and how people come to play social roles that are technical acquisitions, as much as normative constructions. But such roles, and the ideals they embody, may also be imposed on people (for example, under degrading and exploitative working conditions from which some people cannot escape). Furthermore, the politics of debate about the improvement of people’s fate or about the values to be enforced by technical means is itself co-constituted by