4 - Technē: Creating Organizational Forms from the Earth

Summary

Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an otherwise unforgiving surround by knowing when to sow or harvest in accordance with the almanack’s alignment of experiential, mythical and cosmological clues. The epoch of technē is characterized by an intimacy between humans and their surroundings, the term planning itself finding its roots in the way in which seedlings are pushed into the ground by a farmer’s foot. But there is also violence; both imposed on the human body, whose shape is bent and twisted, ground down and severed by the acts of labour and the growing numbers of devices that extend human reach; as well upon nature, which becomes a place in need of taming and cultivating; cutting, slicing, ploughing, killing and using.