The tendency of neurotic children to lose neurotic traits 
when telephoning has been a puzzle to psychiatrists. Some 
stutterers lose their stutter when they switch to a foreign 
language. That technologies are ways of translating one kind of 
knowledge into another mode has been expressed by Lyman 
Bryson in the phrase “technology is explicitness.” Translation is 
thus a “spelling-out” of forms of knowing. What we call 
“mechanization” is a translation of nature, and of our own 
natures, into amplified and specialized forms. Thus the quip in 
Finnegans Wake , “What bird has done yesterday man may do 
next year,” is a strictly literal observation of the courses of 
technology. The power of technology as dependent on 
alternately grasping and letting go in order to enlarge the 
scope of action has been observed as the power of the higher 
arboreal apes as compared with those that are on the ground. 
Elias Canetti made the proper association of this power of the