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.
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).
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