Abstract

Grasping the novelty of contemporary technological mediation in its ubiquity, particularly within information and communications networks, typically involves recognizing the post-human status
of subjects relationally embedded to technical processes that are increasingly autonomous relative to the individual. Problems with this approach become apparent once we consider both the symbolic character of human beings and the technical relation to objects as only a partial moment of a subject’s interaction with the world. Providing an answer to these concerns, Michel Freitag’s theory of the symbolic grants a sociological understanding of the role of technique
within action in its historical unfolding as a distinctly productive activity in modernity. In this context, the predominance of theory over technique in the production of knowledge within modern scientific practice will slowly reverse as modern epistemology regresses into the abyss of the subject-object dualism of the enlightened individual while scientific production itself is progressively appropriated by industry as of the 19th century. This new operational understanding of scientific epistemology will reach its archetypical form in the post war field of cybernetics, where information ontology will quickly instigate further technical automation within productive labour and later influence neoliberal epistemologies in matters of governance.
The latter, increasingly realized in the technocratic management of social life, will further effectuate itself in the digital infrastructure of contemporary communications systems under algorithmic governmentality in which both the normative and expressive ends of action tend to be subsumed. In this context, the reduction of language to its communication and of action to its operability will signal the ideological confusion between reality and its representation, together tending towards the unraveling of the transcendental unity of the subject and betraying the disavowed yearning for an absolute freedom liberated from worldly constraint.