Call for Papers: Strategy and Techne
Call for Papers: Strategy and Techne
Edited by Nathaniel Wooding
The present state of geopolitics requires more than ever a reflection on strategy and techne, not only in relation to those wars now daily represented in the media but also to the creeping militarization of society itself. Further, there is a pressing need to think the new diffuse forms of warfare, coextensive with certain technological advancements whose strategic goals are often the manipulation of perceptions and where the distinctions between civilian and military, war and peace, begin to break down. The history of warfare is one which is profoundly modified by technological advancements, the latter either bringing about alterations in the relations of power, or else completely changing the nature of war, as in the invention of the atomic bomb (Herman Kahn). Despite this, the philosophical tradition does not readily offer sufficient tools for such a task. This special issue of Technophany seeks to remedy this paucity of reflection on strategy and techne.
Technics and strategy might, as such, be seen as having a shared history. Both are disregarded (or accorded a merely marginal role) by philosophy for being concerned merely with contingency, reduced to domains of means rather than ends. The history of the co-articulation of these two concepts is, however, a long and ambiguous one. It is a history of complicity, conflation, mirroring, and opposition. From ancient Greece, where techne was intimately bound up with the idea of metis or “cunning” (Detienne and Vernant); to the more modern alliance between science and technology which espouses a certain strategy of control and mastery (Adorno and Horkheimer; Heidegger). But strategy cannot and should not be reduced to a notion of control. Indeed, against any naïve philosophical commitment to truth, governance and peace, whose stability are always technologically and strategically re-produced, whether as an effect of language, the calculated use of violence, or the ideological masking of (material) relations of power, strategy insists that the original predicament of thinking is that of a reflection on and within an environment that is essentially unstable, inassimilable, and hostile.
Despite their similarities, in one of the more extended and arguably philosophically important reflections on strategy, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) insists on a conceptual scission between technical and strategical activity. Strategy is defined precisely in opposition to the technical activity of the architect, which, for Clausewitz, involves the application of indifferent mechanical processes onto an inert reality. In war, the intelligent reaction of the adversary and the continually shifting forms of actuality mean that such abstract and mechanical processes have no purchase—the knowledge of the strategist must be mutable, able to transform and adapt itself to its changing and hostile object. These considerations lead Clausewitz to reject an art of war, insisting instead that since, in war, one’s object is a living and reacting one, the analogy with art (or Kraft), which presupposes the passivity of its object, can only be deceptive. However, one historical response to viewing techne as simply inert might be seen in the way that technological and strategic thought are articulated together by cybernetics, in particular, Norbert Wiener’s work on the idea of negative feed-back, which was itself conceived during WWII, developed technological machines where there is a constant readjustment in relation to signals received from the goal (telos) of the action.
This issue seeks to ask what a philosophy of strategy might learn from a philosophy of technics and vice versa and whether it is possible to think the two together without falling into the conceptual cul-de-sac of a codified art of war. It invites contributions on all aspects of the interaction between the two domains. Contributions on Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Simondon, Kahn, Guy Debord (notes on Stratégie), Günter Anders, Détienne and Vernant, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato (Wars and Capital), Babara Cassin, Howard Caygill (On Resistance), Friedrich Kittler, and any other figures and themes that intersect with the issue’s topic are are welcome)
Submissions:
We invite contributions in the form of academic articles from across disciplines that deal with strategy and technics. The average required length of a contribution is 6,000–8,000 words, accompanied by an abstract. Interested contributors please send 300–500-word abstracts and a short 100-word biography to the editors (technestrategy@proton.me) before 1st February. As for the house style of formatting, please follow the Technophany submission guidelines, where a word template for articles can be found: http://journal.philosophyandtechnology.network/submission-guidelines/
Key Dates:
Abstracts due: 1st February 2026
Abstracts Accepted: 1st March 2026
First draft Articles due: 1st July 2026
Publication: Late November/December 2026.
