The Secret Life of Machines

What exactly does it mean to live amongst the machines, to be involved in the creation of technical finality even as we recreate our own human finality along the way?  And how are these finalities related?  On the one hand, Simondon seems to want us to reprise our earlier, artisanal, role as the technical individual.  We are not to let ourselves be reduced to the level of elements or elevated to the level of ensembles.  We are meant to insert ourselves into the workings of the machines, join them together as elements in a concrete new technical individual, perhaps creating some sort of new informational mega-machine.  In this case it appears that we once again machine ourselves.  On the other hand, our new regulation (not control) of the machines seems to occur at a level removed from them.  Simondon sees our interaction with them as a means of discovering or rediscovering the construction of our own finality, but also as a way to appreciate that finality itself is merely one aspect of living things.  In that case, it would seem that the new technical individual would just be one aspect of a larger sense of what it means to be a human individual.  So then, which is it?  Are humans themselves machines, or somehow essentially different?  

In retrospect, I see that this ambiguity runs through the remainder of Part 2 (2.2.2-2.2.4) and is what forced me to read it a couple of times before I felt like I had some grip on his argument.  Here, Simondon attempts to explain in some detail how the new "self-determination" we ended with last time is supposed to work.  It's a fairly complicated story that will take us to the foundations of information theory.  

First, though, the short version -- the new cybernetic technical individual that Simondon hopes to help create is like a virtual version of what was previously the actual craftsman or artisan as technical individual.  It's as if there's another phase shift in the definition of the individual, which moves it from begin an integrator of elements to an integrator of other individuals.  This new role differs from the capitalist's management of ensembles, which assumed that each machine had a distinct and fixed purpose that served his invariant end, an arrangement which effectively turns the old "man of ensembles" into a "machine of machines".  Instead, the new cybernetic individual is investigating what tendencies machines have and asking what they might want to do and what problems they could be made to solve.  Such an investigation explores the individual's self direction at the same time as it virtually integrates the machines.  In a sense, this takes us back to our earlier role as craftsman or tool user, but our tools are now directly aimed at fabricating new human possibilities and not simply some specific material object.

Man as witness to machines is responsible for their relation; the individual machine represents man, but man represents the ensemble of machines, for there is not one machine of all machines, whereas there can be a thought that encompasses all machines. (METO, 157)

The long version is considerably longer and departs from some observations on the difference between human and machine memory that at first might seem irrelevant.  Simondon notes that humans only remember certain things, whereas machines remember everything.  A human who remembered everything would (famously) be pathological.  Likewise, a computer's omnivorous memory is, without any classification system, completely useless (for example, without a functioning file system to interface with humans, my external hard drive is just a sea of varying magnetic charge).  Memory is only useful when it has both context and content.  The computer keeps these two aspects of memory as separate as file name and file data.  Simondon is way ahead of his time in observing that human memory blurs these.  We don't remember what happened shortly after noon on November 22, 1963.  We remember the content only together with the context: we were trading cow lips for alien technology when Kennedy was shot.  

Noting this mixing of context and content in human memory is just the tip of a profound iceberg of reexamining how the living mind operates.  Simondon is ahead of his time here because he's groping towards a predictive processing Bayesian inference model of cognition.  He even seems to think of this as a sort of feedback in time (mirroring the feedback in neural processing that was discovered much later).

Content introduced into human memory will superimpose itself on prior content and take form on it: the living is that in which the a posteriori becomes a priori; memory is the function by which a posteriori matters become a priori. (METO, 138)

Normally of course, we think of memory as the faculty by which the prior (the a priori) comes back as subsequent experience (the a posteriori).  In reversing this direction, Simondon means to suggest that perception is a form of memory, in which our formed experience of what we perceive becomes what we are 'given' (the a priori).  Our experience of the world is not given as raw data, but as a series of models interpreting how this data might fit together based on our past experience.  It's this 'perceiving the past' that makes life possible, that allows us to select what's relevant from the world and act on it without ending up as paralyzed as Funes.  Which means that it's not just the past that gets involved in the present, but the future of possible actions which also get implicated in this passing present.  The error correcting feedback of predictive processing leads us to construct and reconstruct 'what happened' on the basis of what we're going to do about it.  The temporality of all this is interesting to think about but hard to describe.  The present is actually the past (statistical likelihood of certain forms).  But the past is actually the future (likelihood of the forms relevant to our organism).  And now what in God's holy name am I blathering about?  The point here is just that for Simondon, life is inherently virtual.  Living is the art of possibility, where the 'not real' somehow intervenes in the real and opens it up.  Time is the perfect symbol of this fact, and this is why he begins with a discussion of memory.

Machines, by contrast, live only in the present.  No matter how sophisticated we make them, no matter how much of the past they store up or how many simulations of the future they incorporate into their functioning, all of their goals are laid out in advance by their creator.  They simply execute.  Their execution may be enormously complex and impossible to predict.  It may even contain elements of randomness (like Ashby's homeostat) or some other limited ability to reprogram itself.  Try as it might though, the machine cannot ask itself, "what should I do?" in general, but only with reference to the specific task assigned to it.  This general direction is always supplied to the machine from outside, and never generated from within.  While an intelligent machine may solve many subsidiary problems along the way, it is incapable of grappling with the problem of self definition. This is precisely what makes something like Bostrom's paperclip maximizer so scary.  The problem with a completely autonomous machine is that there is no way to interact with it at all.  It just does what it was programmed to do, regardless.  Simondon explicitly likens the situation to Leibniz's monad, whose actions are entirely determined in advance from its internal wiring, so to speak, so that it never communicates with the outside world (Proposition 7: monads have no windows).  If you think about it, you'll see that this makes our fully autonomous and self-perpetuating dream machine kinda useless.  By hypothesis, you can't turn it off, nor can you modify it.  So unless its programmed goal happens to be your own unique goal for all of eternity, you two will inevitably part ways at some point.

At this point I'm sure it's obvious that Simondon has set up this contrast between the machine and the living in order to point out that it's the living, and most relevantly the human, that gives the machine its goal and alters it when need be.  Ultimately though, this is not so much an observation as a definition.  Having a temporality, having access to the virtual, having a capacity for self definition -- these are just what it means to be 'living'.  Likewise, executing operations in the present and lacking a capacity for self redefinition are what it means to be a 'dead' machine.  Seeing these as definitions rather than descriptions goes a long way to clearing up the ambiguity I mentioned at the outset.  

Recall that the problem with capitalism was that it took the finality of the machines for granted.  By contrast, the craftsman was directly involved in the recurrent causality that created the finality of the technical individual he represented.  The point of Simondon's Techno-Marxist history was to show us that there is a 'living' and a 'dead' mode of interacting with our technology.  In the first case we interact with our technology on its own level, by providing the ongoing feedback between different elements and regulating their interaction as an artisan working alongside a material that has its own structure and potentialities, and not according to some goal fixed forever in advance.   An analogy might be the manner that a sculptor interacts with her stone -- beginning with a general plan, but letting the outcome depend on the reaction of the material, thus allowing the combined system of sculptor and stone together to access possibilities that were not apparent at the outset.  In the second, capitalist, mode, we interact with technology either from above or below, forcing it to serve our pre-determined agenda or vice versa.  Here there is no creative feedback loop between ourselves and our technology.  The analogy would no longer be sculpting a recalcitrant material with 'a life of its own', but casting or moulding a pre-determined shape using a material presumed to be perfectly malleable.  It's all just a bunch of dead machines that execute their function, despite the fact that we claim in this instance that (certain) humans are in charge of it all.  This is to say that the role of the same biological individual completely changes depending on the mode of interaction with our technology.  Despite the fact we earlier described the craftsman as a sort of machine and the capitalist as a purely human overseer, it's actually the former that is alive and the latter dead in Simondon's sense.  In short, life is not an inherent property of biological organisms that is forever denied to other causal networks like machines -- it's a mode of interaction between something and its environment.  When we interact with technology by integrating the virtual into its operation, we literally bring it to life.

There is something alive in a technical ensemble, and the integrative function of life can be ensured only by human beings; the human being has the capacity to understand the func­tioning of the machine, on the one hand, and the capacity to live, on the other: one can speak of technical life as being that which actualizes this relation between these two functions in man. (METO, 140)

Hopefully, I've elucidated the root cause of the Simondon's tendency to flip between seeing opposition and seeing continuity between man and machine.  But this really only sets the stage for a more detailed discussion of how the living mode operates.   For instance, at this point you might still feel there's a vague whiff of vitalism about Simondon's notion of technical life.  Just how exactly does the living thing incorporate the virtual into the technical ensemble?  Or for that matter how does the organism, interpreted as a physical entity, incorporate the virtual into itself?  How is the 'not real' made real?  Fortunately, Simondon's discussion of memory has already given us the key to understanding this.  We can actually just restate those idea in information theoretic terms to see how humans could give meaning and life to the machine -- it's all a matter of expectations.

Simondon begins by distinguishing between thermodynamic and informational coupling of machines, and seems to consistently use the term "regulation" for the latter.  Of course, Maxwell's Demon assures us that these two can't be completely divorced, and the example he starts with blurs them.  Consider how a centrifugal governor works.  It is designed to maintain a constant engine speed under a load.   When the engine speed starts to slow down, the rotating balls coupled to it also slow down, and thus drop, which opens the throttle and increases the speed.  In short, the governor couples to the engine to create a more self-regulating engine.  In this case, we could say that the position of the balls provides 'information' which regulates the throttle.  This sounds kinda funny though, since the governor just seems to be part of the machine; for instance, we wouldn't really say that the pressure in the combustion chamber 'regulates' the position of the piston, though it's hard ot see much physical difference between these situations.  Simondon clarifies this confusion when he points out that this governor's regulation is not as perfect as it could be. In this scheme, the engine has to actually start to slow down appreciably before it can speed back up.  In other words, the regulation operates on the same time scale as the machine it regulates.  It would be better (ie. the engine RPM would remain more constant) if the feedback from the regulation happened much faster than the variation in the engine's thermodynamic variables.  At the limit, it would be nice if feedback from internal operating variables were made instantaneous.  Though actually, since instantaneity is a limit, it would be best if the regulator knew what was about to happen to the engine.  For example, if we had a sensor that looked ahead and saw we were about to go up a hill, it could rev the engine just in time to compensate for this.  This would enable us to track our target RPM much closely.  In that case, we would intuitively say that the sensor provides 'information' used to regulate the engine.  This makes sense for two reasons.  First, the time scale of this regulation is much faster than the time scale of relevant fluctuations in the thing we're trying to regulate.  Second, true information actually comes from outside the machine.  It coordinates the machine's potential interactions with its environment.  

So when Simondon talks about the cybernetic individual living amongst the machines and regulating them, he's talking about creating an informational coupling that goes beyond the thermodynamic coupling.  In fact, he points out that the difference between these types leads directly to differences in our technology.  Thermodynamic machines tend to be very large and very isolated from their environment, since this leads to the highest thermodynamic efficiency (defined as energy-out/ energy-in).  On the other hand, informational machines tend to get smaller and smaller, since we'd like the information to be as fast and consume as little energy as possible (a pretty prescient observation to make in 1958, seven years ahead of Moore's Law).  

Ultimately, we dream of making the information instantaneous and completely disembodied.  Alas, this is not possible.  If we send the information down an electrical wire, we run into the limits of the speed of light and quantum fluctuations (aka noise).  Even if we consider the problem in general thermodynamic terms (irrespective of the physical substrate used to transmit the information) we run into Maxwell's Demon.  And Simondon adds a philosophical reason -- information can never be 'pure' because it is parasitic upon the forms that it in-forms.  All of these arguments converge on the same idea -- if we make information too disembodied, we end up confusing it with random variation.  We see the consequences of this everyday.  To transmit information more efficiently in the thermodynamic sense (faster and with less use of energy) we compress it.  And the better we compress it, the more it ends up looking like a random string of numbers because we've rung all the redundancy out of it.  At first, there's something paradoxical about the fact that information, when it is perfected, seems to turn into its exact opposite -- randomness.  But then you realize that this almost follows from its definition as "surprisal".  For data to be informative, you have to have some expectation about what the data could have been.  Information depends on the existence of a set of background possibilities.  Without knowing what might happen, and what we might do about it, data we take in from the environment doesn't constitute information.  Which, as Gregory Bateson famously said, is a difference that makes a difference.  Consider all the data we take in about the speed of air molecules colliding with out skin; it isn't information until we decide the room is too hot or too cold, meanings which are obviously relative to our bodies attempt to maintain an equilibrium form.  Apart from the attempt to maintain this form, we could either see the stream of collision data as utterly meaningless thermal noise, or as a wealth of information about the speed of individual air molecules (if we adopt the demonic perspective).  The point is simply that information is variability with respect to a set of possible forms.    

Information is thus halfway between pure chance and absolute regularity. One can say that form, conceived as absolute spatial as well as temporal regularity, is not information but a condition of information; it is what receives information, the a priori that receives information. Form has a function of selectivity. But informa­tion is not form, nor is it a collection \ensemble] of forms; it is the variability of forms, the influx of variation with respect to a form. It is the unpredictability of a variation of form, not pure unpredictability of all variation. (METO, 150)

Just as information cannot be totally disembodied, the regulation of machines cannot dispense with the living.  Of course we can imagine a thermodynamic coupling of machines into some mega-machine (though Simondon's careful causal analysis would distinguish between whether this larger entity is actually a machine per se, or better described as an ensemble of machines, or even jsut a collection of elements).  And we can even imagine a direct 'informational' coupling of machines where the operations of one machine change the behavior of another.  In this case though, we are simply seeing the goals of life baked directly into the machine ensemble.  Because a machine's functioning can only truly be information for another machine when we have some notion of what the first machine should do.  It's only against this background of human derived expectations that the variations in the operation of a machine can become meaningful for other machines.  What the machine actually does needs to be compared to what it should do.  Humans program these informational evaluations into machines and humans re-program them all the time.  Life (really by definition) is the only thing that can invent and evaluate the new possibilities for what a set of machines could do, which means that it's the only force that can change the inter-machine wiring diagram in order to make it carry out a new goal.  

For Simondon, the informational regulation of machines means incorporating the living, the virtual, into their operation.  And with this piece, we can finally bring the whole scope of his METO project into view.  His goal is for our culture to incorporate the technical knowledge of how machines and humans are actually causally coupled.  We need to create people who understand how the machines are hooked up, how they influence us and how we influence them, what tendencies they have and what goals they can serve -- a sociologist of machines, a mechanologist, a cybernetician.  As I mentioned at the beginning, these would be new "technical individuals" in Simondon's causal definition.  Their evaluation of the possibilities afforded by different configurations of the ensemble of machines makes them a necessary element in machine function, one that can close the causal loop by which a new mega-machine defines its own finality.  Their thought becomes an essential node in the exact type of feedback system that defines a technical individual.  This makes them the virtual, informational, counterpart of the traditional artisan.  

However, the role of this new technical individual is not, as Weiner dreamed, to serve as technocratic philosopher king.  Simondon wants many of these individuals to grow from a general culture.  Ultimately, he'd like to see a technical understanding so ubiquitous that everyone can think about how technology shapes their aims and how they might, in turn, repurpose that technology to new ends.  Which is to say that he's not interested in creating a new technocratic class of cybernetician dedicated to optimizing society according to some fixed, homeostatic, metric.  Instead, he's interested in giving us the knowledge to effectively govern ourselves, that is to define what's important, and change our minds about it.  So finally, the goal of Simondon's new culture is not a better realization of a particular homeostasis, but a realization that all goals are constructed, and that finality is just one mode of approaching life, a technical one.  

A Sort of ... Ugh ... Techno-Marxism

Simondon's ideas are getting more interesting and complicated as the book progresses, so I'm going to have to start breaking it into smaller chunks.  Section 2.2.1 uses the history of technology we outlined in the first two posts as a means of reworking the Marxist notion of class warfare.  A quick elaboration of this history suffices to let us see how much more relevant Simondon's definition of "class" is for our contemporary world.  How do you say Autobahn in French? 

Once upon a time, there was traditional artisanal production.  At this stage of technical development man was the machine -- the human individual coincided with the technical individual.  The craftsmen (technical individual) is the means by which all the tools in the workshop (technical elements) come together in a concrete relation in order to accomplish some task.  

As we move through the Enlightenment and into the era of early modern production, the output of these various technical individuals starts to become diverse enough, yet causally elated enough, to begin constituting a system in its own right (technical ensemble).  We've seen how the Encyclopédie represents the spirit of this transition and gives birth to a new, more abstract, level subjectivity we might call the "man of ensembles".  While conceived by an individual human, this subjectivity lodges itself at the level of the technical ensemble by considering the abstract scientific and functional principles common to all the machines.  What's happening concretely, however, is the emergence of industrial production, which represents a significant improvement in the cost and quality of what each technical individual can produce.  At first, the coming together of this new ensemble of production doesn't change the level at which the machine is made concrete; its still human individuals integrating the effects of distinct tools into the machine (ie. the technical individual).  But because these individuals are now also coupled in an ensemble, the quality and variety of the tools available to them begins to rapidly increase.  Recall that this is how Simondon's dialectic of technical progress functions -- ensembles of individuals produce new elements that are incorporated into new individuals.  Because of the Enlightenment era's technical circumstances, this progress is felt as an increase in power at the level of the individual human.  Man preserves his role as the technical individual at the center of his workshop, but each new and improved technical element is a tool that lets him do the same job faster and more accurately.  In short, the Enlightenment naturally adopts a positive view of technical progress because the corresponding ensemble doesn't change the nature of the concrete technical individual.  We might say that while the Enlightenment invents a totally new abstract subjectivity, this largely remains confined to a bunch of Encyclopedists, while the concrete subjectivity of the average individual doesn't shift that radically.   

By the time of the Romantic reaction, however, the valence of 'progress' has begun to change.  This results from a gap opening up between the machine's notion of progress (as concretization) and the individual's feeling of progress as an increase in their personal power.  As we saw, once the industrial ensemble really gets going, its effect is to create concrete machines that mechanize everything the human individuals used to do -- machine replaces man.  The new elements produced by the industrial ensemble eventually get so precise and standardized that they can be coupled together directly to form a concrete new technical individual (which we commonly refer to as a machine), thus displacing the human individual from their role as tool user.  It's almost as if there's a phase transition to a new sense of 'the individual' (Simondon seems to think of this along the lines of a relaxation oscillator).  Suddenly 'progress' starts to feel pretty scary and disorienting.  There may be progress in general, or progress on average and over longer time periods, but for the average human individual, progress starts to feel threateningly discontinuous and revolutionary.  Progress for the machine can now feel like regress for the human.  It starts to make you understand how the Luddites saw 'progress'.  Or how Stephen King sees it today (or perhaps tomorrow).  

So the progress of technology has pushed the human individual out of their old role as technical individual, and left us with two possibilities.  Either we are reduced to elements in the new machine, made subservient to its finality, or we are reduced to managing the ensemble of machines by treating each of them as an abstract functional black box that should be dominated by our finality.  The Luddites combat the former tendency while the Encyclopedists embrace the latter.  In either case, the human individual is no longer in amongst the machines at the level of a technical individual.  We are no longer an integral link in how the machine comes together as a machine -- a concrete individuated unit defined by the network of recurrent causality.  Human action no longer provides the continuous feedback interactions between elements that concretizes the machine, which results in an alienation of the human individual from the technical individual.  

By now you can probably see how we've managed to retell the story of the class split at the heart of Marxism as a technical, rather than economic or political problem.  Workers become elements and capitalists manage ensembles.  But does reframing capitalism as a 'technical' system help us to say anything new?  I can think of a few advantages to this point of view.  

First, it seems to me more mechanistic and less ideological.  Simondon's technical description class-ifys people on the basis of how they related to concrete, material, machines.  Marx's description is (deliberately) abstracted from this level in order to focus on the political and jurisprudential question of who owns the machines.  But do we really believe that control over the means of production ultimately derives solely from such an arbitrary and purely human institution, and not, at least in part, from our everyday habits of action and thought?  The magic of the Marxist revolution lies in precisely this idealistic conceit that ownership completely determines use.  Some day the workers will wake up and see that the capitalists don't do anything productive.  So they'll redefine who the real owners are with a wave of their abstract legal wand.  Poof, we're all prime ministers!  And suddenly everything will be awesome, even though (by hypothesis) nothing in the concrete mechanistic world of cause and effect is different.  We've seen how these sorts of thought experiments work out.  In fairness to Marx, I'm sure he did imagine that all sorts of concrete things would need to change after the revolution.  But by the same token, we have to admit that Marxism has always been rather vague on just what those changes should be; the assumption has mostly been that they will just work themselves out once the place is under new management.  By contrast, Simondon's scheme implicitly makes these details central because it runs the opposite direction -- from causal control to an abstraction like ownership, and not vice versa.  Who interacts with which machines in what ways in order to accomplish which goals?  

The collectivization of the means of production cannot achieve a reduction of alien­ation on its own; it can only achieve this reduction if it is the precondition for the acquisition of the intelligence of the individuated technical object by the human individual. This relation between the human individual and the technical individual is the most difficult to form. It presupposes a technical culture, which introduces the capacity o f different attitudes rather than that o f work and o f action (work corresponding to the intelligence of the elements and action to the intelli­gence of ensembles). (METO, 134)

How will worker's interactions with the machines that constitute the means of production actually change when they become owners?  While there's clearly a feedback loop between the technical and legal system (which still means that we need, at a minimum, to account for both sides), what we're interested in at the end of the day is changing the daily experience of people in particular ways.  If we focus on changing everyday actions and attitudes, maybe the revolution will follow, instead of lead.

Second, I find that Simondon's scheme is more philosophical than Marx's (or perhaps just less tied to a Hegelian philosophy I find distasteful). This makes it less prone to simplistic moralizing.  For example, Marx constantly speaks of labor's alienation from its production, giving us the impression that it is a simple moral question of capital having stolen something.  The implicit idea is that capital possesses what rightfully belongs to labor.  Simondon, however, explicitly tells us that both labor and capital are equally alienated from their full potential as human individuals.  The problem is that both accept the finality of the machine as already given, though from opposite directions.  By being reduced to the level of the element, the worker has become a literal cog in a machine whose purposes lie beyond them.  On the other hand, as manager of the ensemble of machines, the capitalist comes to see each as a functional black box that is just supposed to spit out money.  While he theoretically controls the finality of the machine, in practice, the capitalist is no more self-determining than the worker.  All machines are useful only insofar as they produce dollar dollar bills y'all.  How they work and what happens inside them is irrelevant to the capitalist; their point is to carry out his function, and it turns out that this function is always the same.  

Alienation does indeed emerge the moment the worker is no longer the owner o f his means of production, but it does not emerge solely because of this rupture in the link of property. It also emerges outside of all collective relation to the means of production, at the physiological and psychological level of the individual properly speaking. The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporeal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines.  Bankers whose social role has been exalted by mathematicians such as the Saint-Simonians and Auguste Comte are as alienated in their relation to the machine as the members of the pro­letariat. (METO, 133)

This strikes me as a much better description of how the actual capitalists I know operate.  They aren't the blood sucking rapacious vampires and moral monsters of Marxist myth.  They aren't even in control in the way we usually use the term to refer to the ability to change directions or decide one's own unique course.  Their situation with respect to the machine is simply too abstract.  They're actually more machine than man, not because they're twisted and evil, but simply because they have only one stereotypical reaction to every situation.  They have become prisoners of their own fixed and limited finality, which alienates them from the continuous self-determination that Simondon considers the hallmark of the human.  

What work and action have in common is the predominance of finality over causality; in both cases, the effort is directed at a certain result to be obtained; the employment of means finds itself in the position of minority with respect to the result: the schema of action matters less than the result of the action. In the technical individual, however, this disequilibrium between causality and finality disappears; viewed from the outside the machine is made in order to obtain a certain result; but, the more the technical being becomes individualized, the more this external finality effaces itself for the benefit o f the internal coherence of functioning; the functioning is finalized with respect to itself before being so in its relation with the external world. Such is the automatism of the machine, and such is its self-regulation: there is, at the level of regulations, a functioning, and not only a causality or finality; in self-regulated functioning, all causality has a sense of finality, and all finality a sense of causality. (METO, 143)

But where did this finality of 'ensemble man' come from?  We take it for granted that everybody wants to become a capitalist, especially in our "ownership society".  That way, you get to do ... whatever you want, right?  Strangely though, all the ownership society seems to want to own is more money.  So how are our actual wants constructed, and how are they so frequently perverted by this abstraction?   This question reflects the third way I find Simondon's technical explanation of class conflict superior.  With Marx, the nature of the socialist utopia seems rather ... conservative.  People continue to want more or less the same stuff they want now, it's just that after the rapture, everyone gets what they want.  By contrast, as METO unfolds, the more radical implications of an innocuous sounding "theory of the technical object" become clearer.  When Simondon talks about integrating technical knowledge into our culture so as to reduce our alienation from machines that are, after all, products of that culture, he is not primarily seeking a pedagodgical reform.  He is really looking to restore the freedom of human self-definition.  The problem with being relegated to either the element or ensemble level is that in the individual ends up having their finality assigned to them.  Our own goals come to seem like forces outside ourselves and take on an almost unquestionable sacred aspect.  For the worker, this finality might come from corporation or nation or society.  Perhaps for us modern globalized capitalists it shows up as an almost solipsistic belief in a purely subjective 'inner' freedom.   Our little man knows what we want because, well ... he's us.  Since the goals are fixed for us from the outside (in this case by an essential self paradoxically within us) we sacralize the efficient pursuit of these allegedly individual goals.  In either case, we lose touch with how finality doesn't come from some mysterious pre-formed unit, regardless of whether we think of it as existing internally or externally.  In short, we lose touch with the fact that all finality -- of both machines and ourselves -- is constructed.  Simondon wants cybernetics to renew our understanding of what it means to be a technical individual that creates its own finality as it functions.   This is not so that we can control the function of the machines from the outside, but so that we can live amongst them, form part of them as they form part of us, in a sort of co-evolution of self-determination.  Demystifying the concept of finality by seeing it as a form of recurrent causality completely changes the meaning of the people's revolution.  Instead of history's crowning moment and a gateway to a new utopia, it becomes a dynamic path of perpetual self reinvention.  Simondon is actually aiming at a new, and much larger, notion of what it means to be an individual.  If we make ourselves large enough we will feel totally free, because we will feel completely determined -- from within.

Who Steers the Steersman?

Why study technnology?  Of course, there are many utilitarian perspectives from which it's easy to answer this question. Philosophy, however, is not one of them.  So just what is it that Simondon thinks we should do with his theory of technical objects?  In this second part of the book, he builds towards a theory of why need to study technology for both philosophical and cultural reasons.

He begins with a fairly commonplace observation.  Kids just use technology without understanding it.  When exposed to it early on, they develop a knack or know how, a hands on expertise with no theoretical underpinning.  Simondon calls this the minority mode of technical knowledge.  This is not a value judgement, but simply a reminder that we usually acquire it as yutes.  By contrast, adults develop a rational, theoretical and abstract knowledge of technology.  This is the majority mode, which Simondon also calls encyclopedic (after the Encyclopédie).  In this mode, we experience technology as a sort of functional or logical diagram.  We understand its general principles without necessarily knowing how to operate it.  The two modes are related as the craftsman is related to the engineer, as know-how is to know-that.  

In Simondon's eyes, neither mode alone adequately conceives the relationship between humans and technology.  His ultimate conclusion is that both are necessary, and that they should be integrated in precisely the way his analogy suggests; we must inevitably pass through childhood in order to become adults.  No one but Athena springs into the world fully formed, and an adults' encyclopedic knowledge is incomplete without an understanding of its development and an acknowledgement of its path dependency.  Nevertheless, the way he reaches this conclusion does imply a certain centrality of the majority mode of knowledge.  And since the most interesting idea in Part 2 Chapter 1 is Simondon's conception of cybernetics as a new variety of encyclopedism, I want to spend some time exploring his idea of how majoritarian knowledge works.

Simondon's reference point for majority knowledge is Diderot and d'Alembert's Enlightenment era classic: the Encyclopédie.  While I vaguely thought this was mainly a philosophical work, it turns out it contained an enormous number of engravings that diagrammed in detail how various machines work (as might have been obvious from reading the subtitle: "a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts").  Simondon uses the example of the Encyclopédie to concretely illustrate how the Enlightenment ushers us into a new era of majoritarian knowledge.  Until its publication, knowledge of how these various machines worked was the exclusive property of the medieval guilds, that is, of the people who were trained through experience to use these machines every day.  Which makes it easier to understand why the book was briefly banned.  So the Encyclopédie was an early example of what we would now call the democratization of knowledge.  It was universal in two senses.  First, it described all these machines on the basis of scientific principles that they all shared.  This perspective in itself eliminates each guild's claim that only they know how their mill or saw or whathaveyou works.  As a result, the Encyclopedia illuminated a general technical reality that integrated previously unrelated esoteric knowledges.   Second, the book was aimed at everyone.  Of course, these days we would immediately jump in to say, well, every rich, educated, white male of a certain social status.   And while there's undoubtedly merit in this objection, (and indeed, Simondon will next discuss just how incomplete this 'universalization' was) it is nevertheless true that the Encyclopedia aspired to make knowledge of the technical world much more broadly available than ever before.  So the Encyclopédie was universalizing both in terms of the object it addressed (general technical knowledge) and the subject to whom it was addressed ('rational man').

Majority knowledge always aspires to this sort of universality.  It attempts to include everything and be for everybody (in principle we can all become adults).  It liberates knowledge from the prison of specialization, making it the property of every adult, and in this sense it is always democratic and revolutionary.   At the same time it also constructs the very notion of 'adult' and defines the unity of 'what can be known'.  The Encyclopédie is not just universalizing but totalizing and comprehensive in scope.  In this context, Simondon points out that while majority and minority knowledge are opposed in most respects, they do share a common goal — roughly speaking, to produce a competent adult as master of some technical reality.  In the case of the minority knowledge of the craftsman, this process culminates in the initiation rites that induct people into guilds or specialized societies.  Through a period of practice, the apprentice becomes an adult by proving that he can master the material of his trade.  In a sense, he's learning to domesticate or tame his technical reality, to dominate it, as if he were casting a magic spell over it.  But by the same token this domination also defines what it means to be an adult craftsman.  It represents a coming of age ritual or rite of passage, a test to prove one's manhood, but also something that demands a sacred respect for the material itself.  I can think of no better contemporary example than the power and arrogance conferred by surviving the hazing ritual of med school.  While it's less obvious, and at first even seems to move in the opposite direction, the same type of process is actually at work in majority knowledge at a more abstract level.  Through reading the encyclopedia we come to tame technical reality as a whole, and in general.  And this sort of universal rational knowledge is precisely what it means to be an educated 'Enlightened' adult.  In short, both the universal object of technology and the universal subject who masters it have to be constructed through an encyclopedic revolution that defines "everything" and "everyone".  But through this construction, we gain an almost magical power over the technical reality we tame.  "He fixes radios by thinking!"

The fact that both subject and object of encyclopedic knowledge must be constructed in the process of writing the encyclopedia explains why we've seen several of these revolutions, each of which builds on the partial success of the previous ones.  Every construction is incomplete.  Simondon discusses three examples of encyclopedic movements — the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Cybernetic.  Each one liberates knowledge from a type of specialization and thus includes more of the world as something that every human can understand.  It's in this sense that Simondon refers to each of these as a humanist movement that reduces alienation.  The Renaissance liberated us from the dogmatic reliance on the church's interpretation of ancient philosophers.  Direct knowledge of Greek texts was 'reborn' as the birthright of all mankind.  As we've seen, the Enlightenment represented the maturing of an objective scientific and technical view of the world that liberated us from the social specialization of knowledge and the 'irrational' power of king and clergy.  Finally, we come to the contemporary, or cybernetic revolution.  Since this is exactly the revolution Simondon hopes to conceptualize with his theory of technics, he can only describe it as a work in progress.  But since it is analogous to the other encyclopedic revolutions, we can say something about how it should proceed.  Remarkably, given that Simondon is writing in 1958, I think we can still usefully describe ourselves as in the midst of the cybernetic revolution as he construes it.

So what is cybernetics anyhow?  We've mostly lost this word, which Nobert Weiner coined to refer to the feedback loop involved in steering a ship.  And to recover its roots as an academic discipline would take us well beyond the scope of a single blog post (one of my old professors, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, wrote an interesting book about the history of the first wave of cybernetics). I think the only crucial point to understand is that cybernetics was conceived by its founders as the study of "teleological mechanisms" that operate via feedback.  Like, say, the thermostat.  Despite the fact that it is a simple material device, it makes some sense to claim that the thermostat has a goal of maintaining the room at a fixed temperature.  It achieves this goal of homeostasis through a negative feedback control loop.  As far as I can tell, early cybernetics basically amounted to the applying information theory's equation of information with negative entropy to the problem of constructing negative feedback control.  It's information processing that allows any system to maintain itself in an ordered internal equilibrium or homeostasis in the face of the environment's tendency towards disorder.  At least, this is what I gleaned from the first half of Wiener's famous book, The Human Use of Human Beings (and Dupuy's discusssion).  

Simondon's conception of cybernetics takes the same idea in a much more radical direction, and explains why I left off reading Wiener in the middle.  Wiener's conception of cybernetics is completely conservative.  The whole issue is framed as a question of how things stay the same.  Which means that its not so much a study of how teleological mechanisms actually come to exist as it is a study of how what are really goal-less mechanisms come to look like they have a teleology.  [A related modern idea would be Daniel Dennett's intentional stance and his related attempt to explain consciousness away.]  Wiener wants to know how an already constituted unit maintains its identity.  Such a unit doesn't "really" have goals, other that self-preservation, which is more a condition of existence than a goal, per se.  By contrast, Simondon is interested in how there got to be a unit in the first place.  Which is is why he constantly speaks of "recurrent causality", and not feedback.  We can use these terms as synonyms only if we understand that in Simondon's theory it's feedback that actually creates the stable identity we're interested in studying.  His 'steersman' is not a homonculus in charge of manipulating a wheel to hold an already given external boat on pre-determined course.  Instead, he steers the boat, that is himself, into existence.  This was exactly the kernel of the theory articulated in Part 1 -- recurrent causality creates the concrete technical object.  

But how is this more radical understanding of what cybernetics has to offer related to Simondon's idea that it represents a major new encyclopedic revolution?  What object does cybernetics unify?  What new subjectivity does it construct?  And what exactly does it liberate us from?  For Simondon, cybernetics is the general study of how teleological mechanisms comes to exist at all.  It aims to be a 'science of finality', a study of how goals get established and accomplished in any system.  So cybernetics is encyclopedic in the sense that it attempts to unify all self-regulating systems as a single object of study.  Simondon's theory of the technical object and its evolution is the first step in such a universal study.  These objects become more self-regulating by becoming more concrete, and this process proceeds through element-individual-ensemble cycles that explicitly include human invention as part of the cycle (as necessary for concretizing an individual).  Once we have studied the creation of finality as a technical subject, we should be able to apply this understanding to organisms as well, thus creating a new universal science.

Adopting this type of techno-logical viewpoint is meant to liberate us from our contemporary sense that technology is spinning out of our control.  Already in 1958, Simondon feels the Enlightenment's "march of progress" has become a sort of frog march towards an unknown and scary new destination.  And our sense of dread has only grown in the intervening 65 years.  We can only address this apocalyptic fear by understanding how technical objects actually come by the goals they have.  This is the only way to tame our complex and overwhelming new technical reality.  Cybernetics promises to help us study the recurrent causal connections that lead to goal seeking behavior in any system, and hence to demystify the whole notion of teleology by including it as part of the technical realm.  The Renaissance freed us from dogmatic thought (secret theoretical knowledge possessed by the clergy).  The Enlightenment freed us from 'irrational' expertise (secret practical knowledge possessed only by guild initiates).  The Cybernetic revolution is meant to free us from the idea that our machines, and the machine of society itself, are beyond the individual's comprehension, and thus somehow foreign or alien to our human world (secret cabal knowledge, perhaps possessed only by ChatGPT).  In short, through cybernetics we come to see that finality is just an aspect of how certain systems operate.

Including ourselves.  Because we too are "teleological mechanisms".  Simondon's cybernetic revolution promises to reach a point of self-reflexivity that makes it qualitatively different than the previous universalizing revolutions.  By studying teleological mechanisms in general, we study ourselves.  But by studying ourselves, we change ourselves.  This is the important distinction between Simondon's understanding of cybernetics and that of first wave thinkers like Wiener.  If we accept as intuitive axiom a simple analogy between self-regulating machines and living organisms, we accept the fixed identity of the self-regulating unit as an already given object.  But if we develop cybernetics as a purely objective scientific discipline, we limit its universality and drain it of its true revolutionary potential.  Wiener would like to think he can apply cybernetic ideas to humans as well.  But by starting with the premise that both are equilibrium and identity maintaining systems, he prejudges the question and limits his new science to systems whose sole goal is self-preservation.  This allows us to situate his subjective point of view at some stable remove outside the investigation, and not apply it directly to himself. 

The old universality of the Enlightenment position simply isn't tenable anymore.  Not because machines have finally become autonomous and indistinguishable from humans in their functional capacities, but precisely because these two distinct sides have become coupled.  The causal construction of teleology has changed in the past century.  Previously we took human teleology for granted as the bedrock of our technical world.  We built these machines for us.  They served our purposes, and any goal they appeared to have was borrowed from humanity.  In short, as we saw last time, the "technical individual" was a human.  Gradually, the machines developed analogous capacities that appear to replace the human and displace the individual to the level of elements or ensembles.  Wiener's cybernetics, just like the modern computational AI it influenced, would like to analyze this situation abstractly, by considering the human and the machine as simply different instantiations of a single teleo-logical mechanism.  But this simply isn't the concrete reality of the technical situation.  As we saw, while there may be an abstract analogy between man and machine, in concrete causal terms the mechanisms are quite different.  And what 's more, the two types of causal mechanisms are now coupled in a recurrent feedback system that influences the evolution of, and blurs the boundaries of, both of them.  This is the situation Simondon thinks cybernetics is called to investigate.  It would constitute a qualitatively new revolution because it would inevitably alter the identity of the individual investigator, who in turn would alter her technology, who in turn ...  The result is a universal encyclopedia that's filled with turtles on every page.  It implies a majority knowledge where we never stop growing up, and where our path to adulthood will depend on the trajectory of our upbringing.  This may not, in the end, even be a science so much as a philosophy or a mode of living.

I've tried my best to convey what I see as the profundity of Simondon's very different conception of cybernetics.  It's always difficult to adequately describe these feedback loops that put the identity of every term into flux.  But to emphasize that such dissolutions can be creative, I want to give Simondon the last word on the importance of a 'technics of finality':

However, it is wrong to say that the technics of finalized organization are useful only because of their practical results; they are useful in the sense that they bring finality from the magical level to the technical level. Whereas the evocation of a superior end, and of the order that realizes this end, is considered to be the final term in the search for its justification (because life is conflated with finality, in an age when technical schemas are mere schemas of causality), the introduction of technological schemas of finality in thought plays a cathartic role. That of which there is a technics cannot act as an ultimate justification. Both individual life and social life contain many aspects of finalized processes, but perhaps finality is not the most profound aspect of individual or social life, any more so than the different modalities of finalized actions, such as adaptation to a milieu.
One could undoubtedly say that it is not a veritable finality that animates the processes of recurrent causality with negative reaction; at the very least this techni­cal production of teleological mechanisms enables the most inferior, most primitive aspect of finality to leave the magical domain behind: the subordination of a means to an end, hence the superiority of an end with respect to its means. By becom­ing a technical matter, such organization is henceforth only one of the aspects of social or individual life, and its prestige can no longer mask the possibilities for the development, advent, and emergence of new forms, which cannot be justified by finality, since they produce their own end as the last term of evolution; evolution maladapts as much as it adapts. The realization of adaptations is but one of life's aspects; homeostases are partial functions; technology, in incorporating them and allowing them not only to be thought, but to be brought into existence rationally, leaves the open processes of social and individual life fully exposed. In this sense, technology reduces alienation. (METO, 121).