One can call a technological attitude that which compels man to look after not only the utilization of a technical being, but after the correlation of technical beings among each other. The current opposition between culture and technics comes from the fact that the technical object is considered identical with the machine. Culture does not understand the machine; it is inadequate to technical reality because it considers the machine to be a closed block, and considers mechanical functioning to be an iterative stereotypy. The opposition between technics and culture will last until culture discovers that each machine is not an absolute unit, but only an individualized technical reality that is open according to two paths: that of the relation to elements, and that of the inter-individual relations within the technical ensemble. The role culture has assigned to man alongside the machine is at odds with technical reality; it assumes that the machine is substantialized, materialized, and consequently devalued; the machine is in fact less consistent and less substantial than culture assumes; it does not relate to man as a single block, but through the free plurality of its elements, or the open series of its possible relations with other machines within the technical ensemble. Culture is unjust toward the machine, not only in its judgments or its preconceptions, but at the very level of knowledge: the cognitive intention of culture toward the machine is substantializing; the machine is closed up in this reductive vision that considers it to be perfect and finished in itself, that makes it coincide with its actual state, with its material determinations. With respect to the art object, such an attitude would consist in reducing a painting to a certain expanse of dried and cracked paint on a stretched canvas. In regard to the human being, the same attitude would consist in reducing the subject to a fixed set of vices and virtues, or character traits.
To reduce art to art objects, to reduce humanity to a series of individuals that are mere carriers of character traits, is to act as one does when reducing technical reality to a collection of machines: yet, in the first two cases, this attitude is judged crude, in the second case, it passes for being in conformity with the values of culture, although it operates with the same destructive reduction as it does in the first two cases. Except that it operates by making an implicit judgment through knowledge itself. It is the very notion of the machine that is already distorted, like the representation of the foreigner [étranger] in group stereotypies.
However, it is not the foreigner as foreigner who can become the object of cultured thought, but only the human being. The stereotype of the foreigner cannot be transformed into a just and adequate representation unless the relation between the being who judges and the one who is the foreigner is diversified and is multiplied in order to acquire a multiform mobility that confers upon it a certain consistency, a definite power of reality. A stereotype is a two-dimensional representation, like an image, without depth and without plasticity. For the stereotype to become a representation, the experiences of the relationship with the foreigner must be multiple and varied. The foreigner is no longer foreign, but other, when there are foreign beings not only with respect to the subject who judges, but also with respect to other foreigners; the stereotype falls away when this relation of man to the foreign is known in its entirety between other people, rather than enclosing the subject and the foreigner within an asymmetrical, immutable mutual situation. In the same manner, the stereotypes relating to the machine cannot change unless the relation between man and machine (an asymmetrical relation for as long as it is lived as an exclusive relation) can be seen objectively in the process of producing itself between terms that are independent of the subject, between technical objects. In order for the representation of technical contents to be incorporated into culture, an objectivation of the technical relation must exist for man.
The predominant and exclusive attention to a machine cannot lead to the discovery of technicity, any more than the relation with a single sort of stranger or foreigner can allow one to penetrate the interiority of their way of life, and to know it according to culture. Even interaction with several machines is not enough, any more than successive interactions with several foreigners; these experiences only lead to xenophobia or to xenophilia, which are opposite but equally passionate attitudes. In order to consider a foreigner through culture, one needs to have objectively seen the relation whereby two beings are foreigners to one another play out. Likewise, if a single technics does not suffice to offer cultural content, neither does a polytechnics; it merely engenders the tendency toward technocracy or the refusal of technics as a whole.