On the mode of existence of technical objects

by Simondon, Gilbert (2017)

Key Passage

The technical object thus carries with it a broader category than that of work: operational functioning. This operational functioning presupposes, firstly, as a condition of possibility, an act of invention. Now, invention is not work; it does not presuppose the mediation between nature and the human species to be played out by somato-psychic man. Invention is not only an adaptive and defensive reaction; it is a mental operation, a mental functioning that is of the same order as scientific knowledge. There is an equality of levels between science and technical invention; the mental schema is what enables invention and science; it is the mental schema, once more, that allows the use of the technical object as productive, in an industrial ensemble, or as scientific, in an experimental setup. Technical thought is present in all technical activity, and technical thought is of the order of invention; it can be communicated; it authorizes participation. Henceforth, above the social community of work and beyond the inter-individual relationship not supported by an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity establishes itself, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up \assume\ by a human subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would like to name transindividual. The technical object can be read as carrier of a definite information; if it is only used, employed, and consequently enslaved, then it cannot bring any information, any more than a book that would be used as a wedge or pedestal. The technical object that is appreciated and known according to its essence, i.e., according to the human act that has founded it, penetrated it with functional intelligibility, valorized it 253 according to its internal norms, carries with it pure information. One can call pure information an information that is not evental, one that can be understood only if the subject receiving it solicits within itself a form analogous to the forms carried by the medium [le support] of information; what is known in the technical object is the form, the material crystallization of an operational schema and of a thought that has resolved a problem. In order for this form to be understood it is necessary that there be analogous forms in the subject: information is not an absolute advent, but the signification resulting from a relation of forms, one extrinsic and the other intrinsic with respect to the subject. Hence, in order for the object to be received as technical and not only as useful, in order for it to be judged as the result of invention, as a carrier of information, and not as utensil, the subject receiving it must have technical forms within himself. An inter-human relation that is the model of transindividuality is thus created through the intermediary of the technical object. This can be understood as a relationship that does not relate individuals by means of their constituted individuality separating them from one another, nor by means of what is identical in every human subject, for instance the a priori forms of sensibility, but by means of this weight [charge] of pre-individual reality, this weight of nature that is preserved with the individual being, and which contains potentials and virtualities.
The object that emerges from technical invention carries with it something of the being that has produced it, and from this being expresses what is least attached to the hic et nunc, one could say that there is something of human nature in the technical being, in the sense that this word “nature” could be used to designate the remainder of what is original, prior even to the humanity constituted in man; man invents by putting to work his own natural material [support], this arceipov [âpeiron] which remains attached to each individual being. No anthropology taking as its starting point man as individual being can account for the transindividual technical relationship. Work, conceived as productive, insofar as it comes from the localized individual hic et nunc, cannot account for the invented technical being; it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject, vaster than the individual, richer than it, and having, in addition to the individuality of the individuated being, a certain weight of nature, of non-individuated being. The social group of functional solidarity, like the community of work, puts only individuated beings into relation. For this reason, it necessarily localizes and alienates them, even beyond all economic modality such as the one Marx describes under the name of capitalism: one could define a pre-capitalist alienation essential to work as work. Moreover, and symmetrically, the inter-individual psychological relation cannot put anything other than constituted individuals into relation; rather than putting them into relation by means of their somatic functioning, as work does, it puts them into relation at the level of certain ways of conscious, affective, representative functioning, and alienates them just as much. The alienation of work cannot be compensated by way of another alienation, which would be that of the psychical detachment [psychique détaché\\ which is what explains the weakness of the psychological methods applied to the problem of work and which want to resolve the problems by means of mental functions. The problems of work are the problems having to do with the alienation caused by work, and this alienation is not only economic, through the play of surplus value; neither Marxism, nor this counter-Marxism, that is the psychologism in the study of work through human relations, can find the true solution, because they place both sources of alienation outside of work, whereas work itself insofar as it is work is the source of alienation. We don’t mean to say that economic alienation doesn’t exist; but it is possible that the primary cause of alienation resides essentially within work, and that the alienation described by Marx is only one of the modalities of this alienation: the notion of alienation is worth generalizing in order that one might situate the economic aspect of alienation; according to this doctrine, economic alienation would already exist at the level of the superstructures, and would presuppose a more implicit foundation, which is the alienation that is essential to the situation of the individual at work. (p.252)

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