The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action

Abstract

Many critical approaches ascribe a deficit of meaning to technology. The theory of technological action developed in the paper treats technology as an important, eventful terrain for collective life. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s idea of problematisation, it places contemporary technological actions in settings suffused by power relations. It finds in the work of Gilbert Simondon ways of explaining how technological action overflows social norms, forms, identities and structures. Based on analysis of processes of abstraction and concretisation in a spectrum of symptomatic examples, it contends that cultural theory should develop understandings of the potentials that give rise to technological acts as a way of being with others. The paper suggests how cultural theory can engage with the specificities of these actions.

Notes

¹ ‘Through the intermediary of the technical object, an interhuman relation that is the model of transindividuality creates itself. This can be understood as a relation which does not put individuals in relation by means of their constituted individuality, which separates the one from the other, nor by means of that which is identical in each human subject, for example, the a priori forms of sensibility, but by means of this charge of pre‐individual reality, this charge of nature which is conserved with individual being, and which contains potentials and virtuality.’

² ‘There is no purely internal, entirely isolated auto‐regulation; the results of action are results not only in themselves but also through their relation to the exterior milieu, to the ensemble. […] The type of memory and the type of perception that suits this aspect of regulation necessitates the integration or transformation of a posteriori into a priori that the living alone realises itself.’

³ Much could be said about how Simondon understands life as playing out on surfaces and membranes separating adjacent interior and exterior milieus or zones of individuation.

⁴ ‘the concrete technical object is one that is no longer in conflict with itself’

⁵ ‘This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryrist prejudices – a cycle of production) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a territorial level that we could call “the basin of immaterial labor”’ (Lazzarato 1996: 137).

⁶ ‘In effect, technical norms are entirely accessible to the individual without him needing to have recourse to a social normativity.’

⁷ ‘The presence of the world is never eliminated by use of machines. However, relation to the world can be split and pass through the several intermediate stages of symbolisation, to which there corresponds a technical construction that distributes viable points throughout the world perceived through the intermediary of the machine. This perception is no more automatic than perception by sensory organs.’

⁸ With some notable exceptions – such as Walter Benjamin – critical responses to technology – such as Heidegger, the Frankfurt School thinkers and poststructuralist theory – maintain a radical separation, even an opposition between technological action and reflective or critical thought. Critical thought was predicated on the assumption that the conditions of perception, representation, conceptualisation and judgment are themselves separate or detached from the technological practices and contexts in which they were located. Such an assumption persists in much contemporary critical theory of technology (Feenberg 1999; Poster 1990) and in many attempts to regulate or normalise technology, ranging from advertising to government legislation.

⁹ ‘A technical operation achieves in effect what work or other functions of communication cannot fulfil: the reactivity of the act. Constructive activity gives to human beings the real image of the act because what is in the moment object of construction becomes the means to a further construction thanks to a permanent mediation. It is this continuous and open regime of the time of technical effort that permits an individual to have a reactive consciousness of her own action, and to be her own norm.’