The Internal Technologies

Presence, Presencing, and the Genius Between

We are accustomed, in this age, to think of technology as something we construct outside ourselves — an apparatus, a device, a tool fashioned from the world to extend our reach into it. There is no quarrel here with any of it. But there is an older technology, and a more intimate one, which this work means to recover — for a great deal of what we now ask machines to do for us was once done, and can be done again, within. By technology we mean only what the word means: a disciplined know-how by which a capacity is reliably produced. An internal technology, then, is that know-how turned inward — a craft by which a state of being, a quality of perception, a manner of relation is reliably produced in oneself and drawn out in another. Its singular virtue, in an age straining the limits of the world’s material generosity, is that it requires no material at all. Its only raw resources are attention and care, of which there is no shortage but the one we impose upon ourselves.