As activity I call an appropriation behavior, in which I reflect this behavior also in relation to its efficiency. When I am active, I always think about how I could do it better. From an evolutionary point of view, this seems to me to be a more significant criterion for being human than making tools, even if this reflection mainly shows itself in the form of improved tools.[1] But I also speak – metaphorically – of different techniques when I perform activities in which I do not use tools. For example, I can use different techniques when swimming or jumping up, which I never see in the behavioral repertoire of animals. The fact that I speak of techniques in such cases shows me that I think of technique when I really want to be more efficient. A motorboat or a bridge is much more efficient than any form of swimming, if swimming is not seen as a pure practise, but has the purpose of crossing a body of water.
I use the term technique for the art of being efficient. Actually, I use the term as a product identifier for procedures preserved in artifacts that make me more efficient. Then I use the term technique in a generalized sense as a process-designator for efficient activities, when I speak of, say, negotiation technique or the technique of an artist or a footballer. In this figurative sense, I observe procedures that can be suspended in an artifact, such as a robot. As a technique I refer to a context of action in which procedures are suspended in artifacts.[2]
Technique in this sense means the intentional repeatable causations of institutionalized procedures, which in the developed case are stored in external memory, that is, in artifacts that make the procedure reconstructible. I will give an example. I can draw water by forming a bowl with my hands. I can show someone how I drink water from a stream by means of my hands. He can copy the procedure and then apply a certain technique that, for example, my cat does not use. I can use a bowl instead of my hands – which then shows me why I talk about forming a bowl with my hands. I can use a hollow fruit bowl, for example, or a manufactured bowl. Any manufactured shell is consciously formed material. For example, I can form a bowl out of clay with my hands, which is quite different from forming a bowl in the shape of my hands. The made bowl has an object meaning, which I recognize when I use it as a bowl. The bowl, in this sense, is a conserved instruction for a process I call scooping. I refer to it as external memory because it reminds me of scooping. As external memory, it is social in the sense that other people can also reconstruct its meaning.
Using a manufactured shell by means of the hands is not efficient in many cases. That is why it is often used in machines, for example in water bailers or in excavators. And of course, machines are not very efficient either if you have to control them by hand. That’s why I prefer to use controlled machines, i.e. automatic machines. Making a shell involves not only what the shell is good for, but also that and how it can be technologically developed.
A shell is initially not a tool, but a device, but in the course of its development it becomes a tool. The representational activity consists in essence in using tools, which in turn are products of representational activities. The greatest efficiency consists in producing by means of tools, more developed tools. The technical development represents so to speak a self-referential production, in which tools are produced for the production of tools.
The most developed tools are automata programmable by means of so-called programming languages. If I program an automaton, I manufacture the respective automaton. Before it is programmed, it is only a semi-finished product. The programs of appropriately developed automata are manufactured 
as texts.[3] As programming language I designate a control mechanism, whose configuration requires as control elements so arranged character bodies, for example punched cards, so that these are secondarily readable. When I write programs, I write material parts of those automata, in which the programs are used. In this, text-making shows itself as the subtle making of tools.
That I can write and read programs is only important for me,
for their function in the machine it is without relevance. But programming without a programming language is extremely complicated and very inefficient. To produce programs as texts shows in a specific sense what texts are – and to what extent writing has always been a technique of technique. If I draw a construction plan of a machine, afterwards a mechanic has to produce the machine. If the labor scientist F. Taylor describes exactly how which work must be done, this work must be done by workers. If, on the other hand, I write a program, no one has to do any manual work. Writing appears in this respect as the most highly developed technical activity, in which the difference between producing and describing is abolished.
I have described these technological connections in detail in my book “Technical Intelligence.”[4]
[1] K. Marx, for example, did comment quite peculiarly on the use of the criterion “toolmaking animals”, although I do not see that he would have rejected it.
[2] In the context of economic production, technology serves the material improvement of wealth, or in other words, the sparing of labor. A robot can replace a worker, a PC can make a secretary ten times faster. “Technology = saving labor” (Ortega y Gasset, Ropohl, 1979:197).
[3] Vividly, these machine parts are, for example, punched cards, where their secondary textual nature is not yet so obvious, such as in J. Jacquard’s loom control. The programs of the first computers were not yet seen as texts, because the programming language had not yet been invented and the computers (for example the Colossus or the Eniac) were programmed by an arrangement of cables.
[4] Todesco, Rolf: Technische Intelligenz oder Wie Ingenieure über Computer sprechen. Stuttgart, frommann-holzboog, 1992.
explicitly in H. Maturana’s terminology – every observer is a human being. To observe an observer is to observe the distinction he or she uses – and to be aware that this in turn is an observation. That is why H. Maturana calls this 2nd order observation.
K. Marx did not write anything about this, because at that time the concept of the observer, which we are talking about here, did not exist. Of course, K. Marx observed like every human being, but that was not a separate subject for him. A form of observer became popular fifty years after his death. Physicists discovered an observer. A. Einstein in his Relativity made observations dependent on how the observer himself moves, and W. Heisenberg in his Quantum History found measurement results dependent on observation. In these cases, there is talk of an observer, but he plays no role in the sense that he has no contingency at his disposal. Only the cyberneticists, perhaps G. Pask first, addressed the fact that their models are contingent, i.e. constructions that serve as explanations. H. Maturana formulated this aspect of cybernetic thinking.
Very long and steep climbs are mountain roads of the first category, relatively short climbs are mountain roads of the fourth category. Mountain roads that are really difficult to master do not fit into any of these categories, which is why they are virtually out of competition, although they are decisive for the competition among cyclists, hors de categorie. The question of why in this case we are talking about categories and not classes remains open for the time being. However, the matter referred to is not only clear to the senses of professional cyclists.
When I write with a pencil, I make strokes on the paper, just as I do when I draw. When I write with a computer, I arrange pixels on the screen or on the printed paper. In both cases, the arrangement is mediated by a grammar or a script, but I apply color.
have acquired their agreement. A naive, as it were also natural idea consists in the fact that I have learned individual words by a pointing procedure. My mother would have taught me to speak by saying dog every time we saw a dog. After that, my elementary school teacher taught me with which strokes I could represent the sound “dog”. Here it does not matter how I learned to speak and write, nor what it is good for. What matters here is what I do when I write.
thus among other things for the representation of the syntax of so-called programming languages. Important and interesting here is how the characters are introduced as tokens like chess pieces. All characters, something 2, a or + are introduced like bishop and knight as figurative bodies. (
itself as the subject of the picture. When I recognize a dog in a picture, I recognize the motive. In a metaphorical sense I speak then at most of the motive of the manufacturer of the picture and mean with it that he wanted to represent a certain object. By motive, however, I do not mean here the psychologically meant motivation or intention of the painter, but that which determines the movement of the craftsman painter in the application of paint. When I draw a dog, my hand must follow the shape of the dog.
with all images, I can use quasi-aesthetic criteria to find the image beautiful or less so. My point here is that the two ways of referencing have different objects of reference. One I can see in the picture, the other I cannot see beyond pictures:
the product, not the manufacturing process. A process cannot be drawn. I can, however – of which Ikea instructions are exemplary – use a sequence of individual pictures to show how the product develops in its manufacture. When the images are viewed in rapid succession, they appear as a film that makes the process appear as constant change.
of images.
processor which changes its state in a given clock in discrete steps. This is not to be seen in the program text as techno picture, I must read it in. However I must do it logically compellingly, if in a program for example “a=a+1” is written and I do not want to read nonsense. I then realize that the value of a has changed in the next bar, so that a cannot be a and a+1 at the same time. I have to understand what is shown in the picture.
on dialog 