TECHNICS AND AGENCY

Abstract

One of the orienting claims in Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China is that an adequate accounting for the pluralism of technicity remains forthcoming. Hui brings this to our attention by arguing that a cosmological dimension, animate in the evolution of technology, leads to distinct “local” technicities; this should be contrasted to the consensus that technology is a universal phenomenon. Hui defends this differentiating role of the cosmic, by way of a Kantian antimony between two genetic problems. In Hui’s presentation, this antimony specifically concerns the status of an “anthropological universality” within technics. On the one hand, technics as the “extension of somatic functions and the externalisation of memory” is only differentiated by its passage through local conditions, but on the other, technics would be genetically affected by a cosmological (cultural, mythic) dimension, that would differently orient distinctive evolutionary developments within it.

In this paper, I consider another source for Hui’s technical pluralism by arguing that functional differences inhere within the technical, itself. What this implies, is not only a reconsideration of technic’s “universality,” but also the anthropomorphism implied in the image of homo faber: what defines technicity and technology as an immanent, extensive and human-exclusive prosthesis. In order to do so, I return to Aristotle’s primary (or primitive) centralisation of the technite to argue that his causal accounting of technics should not have been restricted exclusively to the human, but rather considered as a general property of how agents deviate primary processes. I then show how technē – reconstituted as the affective power of many agents – suggests that a technically mediated agency is not only constitutive of human difference (Stiegler’s foundational prosthesis) but must more generally be evident in the agential character of diverse, even primordial species.

This also entails a reconsideration of the relationship between technics and telos. This is because it is not only the agential distinction Aristotle draws between humans and other species that requires renovation, but also the widely criticised move to extend telos (the efficient cause specific to the technites) into a teleological purpose animating nature. However, rather than follow the critique of teleology in the Aristotelianism of the early modern period (with Suarez, Descartes and Spinoza), I will rather argue that telos should be recast as a dynamic interventional power that belongs broadly to agents. That is to say, if technē is a model of agency inseparable from the emergence of even primordial life, then we require an analysis of how an artificial, technical dimension inheres within non-human agents. I will finally outline how this technicity of non-human agents remains compatible with Hui’s cosmotechnics.

Keywords:

• Yuk Hui
• technē
• technics
• agency
• artificial

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank Taylor Adkins for his generosity and collegiality in the preparation of this essay.

1 This reduction of the Hellenistic complexity of technē, while frequently acknowledged, has not led to a sufficient reconsideration of the term. This is especially where an account of technē, affecting manipulations of causal processes, is particularly effaced (Tuckwell, Creation and the Function). Arthur Bradley provides an effective summary of this reduction through the Aristotelianism of the early moderns, where technē is taken as a foundational resource for a mechanistic concept of nature.

2 This is the major theme of The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, but it is a topic elaborated throughout Simondon’s oeuvre. Of particular relevance to the discussion I develop here, are Simondon’s recommendations for integrating technics and culture through a common notion of technique (“Culture and Technics” 21–22).

3 If abduction is also felt in the genetic conditions of technical genesis, it might be attributable to a logical necessity where evolutionary processes are animated by an inherent and purposive directedness. This is not an innate purposiveness, but a stochastic projective-ness: a finite, probable set of what “might be,” which is selective and purposive in order to displace any reliance upon infinite potential or possibility (Peirce 217). This seems to follow from the calculative finitude of living beings. Peirce suggests this is the reason why evolution cannot result from a thermodynamic impetus and pure contingency alone (217).

4 For Peirce, whether in evolution or scientific thinking, habitual and repetitious functions are determined by inductive and deductive logical processes which appear to be reflexive or compulsive. These seem to constitute the normative constraints that define a particular “nature” of a given disciplinary or living system.

5 This is of course a very different reading of the ontological forces at work in Aristotelian metaphysics than the one Simondon presents in his famous critique of hylomorphism in L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but a comparison of Heidegger’s and Simondon’s critiques of Aristotelian metaphysics would be illuminating for both aesthetics and technology.

6 I have elaborated on how Simondon justifies this move in Creation and the Function of Art (Tuckwell 89).

7 This is Martha Nussbaum’s famous thesis in The Fragility of Goodness.

8 This early characterisation of technē has been the target of contemporary thinking about technics, especially in Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon and Stiegler, who rather posit that technics possesses “self-productive” powers. While this is a crucial finding, this ontological distinction does not seem to obviate the analysis that finds poiesis continues to have a cause outside of itself, which is not solely material in nature but differently resides in the technical agent (technite). That racial biases have been built into facial recognition algorithms might serve here as a contemporary example: the self-productive evolutions of computing systems do not surpass but are complicated by the causal effects of human telos.

9 For example:

[W]here there are two things of which one is a means and the other an end, they have nothing in common except that the one receives what the other produces. Such, for example, is the relation in which workmen and tools stand to their work; the house and the builder have nothing in common, but the art of the builder is for the sake of the house. (Aristotle, “Politics” 1328a27–35)

10 While this definition of choice – a voluntary action that is exercised whether a telos motivates action or not – is Aristotle’s (“Nicomachean Ethics” 1111b7–10), I am applying it in a contrary way, according to the expanding reading of technē developed across the essay.

11 This point is already amply evident in the methodological underpinning of The Question Concerning Technology in China, but a more explicit statement of this commitment can be found in the conclusion of Recursivity and Contingency, that returns to the theme of cosmotechnics (230).

12 Stiegler earlier develops this distinction of the human through Derrida’s notion of différance in phusis. Although he is critical of a certain ambiguity in Derrida’s formulation, Stiegler more affirmatively draws on this (non)origin of the human, via the concept of gramme (playing on grammar and programme) as a break from the biological origin of writing, which constitutes the rupture between genetic and non-genetic programmes (139–41). This is one of the conceptual resources for the “epiphylogenetic” reading of tertiary retentions as constitutive of human difference.

13 Hui quotes a passage from Simondon that clearly expresses this condition:

By the intermediary of the technical object an interhuman relation is created. That is the model of transindividuality … The relation to technical objects cannot become adequate individual by individual, except in some very rare and isolated cases; [the relation] can only be instituted under the condition that it succeeds in bringing this collective inter-individual reality into existence, which we call transindividual, because it creates a coupling between the inventive and organizing capacities of multiple subjects. (Simondon qtd in Recursivity 176–77)

14 Although this elaboration has been very provisional, this might constitute a method for challenging the naturalist assumptions about instinct, intention and creativity with respect to agency, more generally.