8.a Machine technology is not the same as technology itself. Machines are concrete assemblages that redirect energy and organize means to ends, not occasionally or in isolation, but repeatedly, and ultimately as part of systems that involve other machines. Materially and conceptually, technology came before machinery. Both tools, such as the plow, and systems, such as crop rotation, preceded the machine age; they are part of what I have been calling architechnology, to avoid the confusion caused by the exclusively mechanical connotations that common usage lends the term technology. Furthermore, insofar as we allow it an "essence," technology essentially rivals poetry in revealing or producing things; as an elaboration of art or technê it maintains a primal relation to Being and is ontologically prior to the technological as machine or even as tool or system. Nevertheless, it is necessary to keep in mind Jacques Derrida's insight that "the essence of technology" cannot be protected from "the technological" at the origin or archê, even if it is different from it (Derrida 1989, 10). Something like machinery always heralds technology. We mustn't be surprised, then, if a few machines attend the advent of technology in Shakespeare's Sonnets, since the volume was issued on the verge of modern science's appearance in the seventeenth century, and science, as Martin Heidegger claims, bears a close if contradictory relation to machine technology (Heidegger 1993c, 327).