Responsibility. One seemingly simple concept, but when beginning to dissect it, its not so simple at all. It is defined as the fact of being accountable or to blame for something, and with this definition there can already be flaws seen. It’s too general. There are a vast number of different steps and procedures to everything now-a-days that there is no one to blame and no one is responsible as Jacques Ellul brilliantly portrayed. His example with the bursting dam shows how responsibility is slipping away from us when we can’t even assign responsibility to something so small as the building of a dam. He associates this collapse to technology, which it does play a huge role, however technology isn’t solely to blame. As seen in The Visit, the people in Gullen were being very irresponsible and technology was nowhere to be seen. They condemned Alfred Ill to dead based on a simple bribe, then the attempt at rationalization and justification of it began. They tried to shift the thinking from a moral responsibility to a responsibility to the town’s well being. Like Professor Rickenbach stated in class, they had they’re end goal in mind and just had to add twists and turns in their logic to get there. A good comparison is seen between the two when they talk about losing individuality. Ellul makes a direct remark about this when he talks about the illusion of freedom from technology. It looks like we are more free however we end up huddling up turning into a “coherent mass.” His examples of the millions of people getting into their cars going to the Mediterranean and the image shown of the bunch of people in the airport display this point very vividly. This loss of individuality is also seen in The Visit, but less explicitly. One way that its shown is through everyone getting the same yellow shoes conforming toward the bribe. It is also seen when Alfred is trying to get on the train and the huddled mass of people is in front of him stopping him. If Alfred would had ran through the crowd, and someone would have killed him there who would have been to blame? No one would have know because the responsibility would have been lost in the mass, along with individuality.
Good! I would say that Ellul’s point about technology and responsibility is more subtle than the one I think you’re trying to work with here. He’s getting at the fact that our world, with the help of and through technology, has become a very fragmented world, in that no one person really handles the whole of a situation. We all play a small role in the metaphorical building of the dam, but none of us are responsible for the whole thing. So when it goes wrong, who is responsible? Implicit is a critique on what we take ‘responsibility’ to mean — which you lead your post with. What he’s getting at is that in our technologized world, we are all inherently responsible for everything. This can be seen within a democracy as well. Güllen is a good example here. No one really kills Ill. That is, no ONE PERSON kills ill, so no one can be held responsible (if we think of responsibility landing on the shoulders of one person who must’ve pulled the trigger, so to speak). Instead, everyone is complicit in Ill’s death, even if they never laid a hand on him. Remember what we discussed. Ellul will say that NO ONE is responsible, but what is implicit in this statement is that it isn’t so much NO ONE is responsible, but that EVERY ONE is responsible. The One becomes Many; we uncover the inherent plurality and multiplicities that belie every illusion of the Singular. Good reading, though! Very astute. 5/5