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.
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