On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part Three, Introduction

 Summary of Part Three, [Introduction]: Evolution of Technical Reality

Part three, “The Essence of Technicity,” begins with this brief introduction, which is not listed in the table of contents, and is given the title “Evolution of Technical Reality” only in the header. Sort of a hidden track, you could say.

S lays out the underlying question for part three (167): “what is the sense of the genesis of technical objects with respect to the whole of thought, of man’s existence, and of his manner of being in the world?” His answer to this question will be a “generalized genetic interpretation of the relation between man and the world” (167-8).

He discusses his particular meaning of genesis, which was developed in his other book, as “as the process of individuation in its generality” (168):

There is genesis when the coming-into-being of a system of a primitively oversaturated reality, rich in potential, greater than unity and harboring an internal incompatibility, constitutes for this system the discovery of compatibility, a resolution through the advent of structure. This structuration is the advent of an organization that is the basis of an equilibrium of metastability. Such genesis opposes itself to the degradation of the potential energies contained in a system through the passage to a stable state from which transformation is no longer possible.

He criticizes, or rather questions the relevance in this context, of the evolutionary concept of adaptation, which implies a correction of the relationship between species and environment towards a “functional finality” and a “stable equilibrium,” “which does not appear to be correct in man’s case, perhaps no more than it is for any living being.” He discusses the Bergsonian concept of élan vital as an alternative to adaptation, then announces that the truth is somewhere between these:

It seems that these two opposed notions, as the couple they form, can be replaced, by the notion of the individuation of oversaturated systems, conceived as successive resolutions of tensions through the discovery of structures at the heart of a system rich in potential.

Rather than tending to the final state of stable equilibrium, evolution produces metastability, “going from metastable state to metastable state” (169), and thus charged with potential. S provides a very Simondonian quote, “the potential is one of the forms of the real, as completely as the actual” (168) [which stands in nice contrast to the position of my high school teacher, Mr. Bonfigli, who used to say, “potential means you ain’t done shit yet.”]

[I must have that quote slightly misremembered, because I doubt Mr. Bonfigli would use the word “ain’t.”]

But in any case it is easy to see how this idea of the reality of potential, having real effects in a system, links us to the physical analogy of metastability, and plays a major role in Simondon’s theory of the evolution of technology, as the “discovery” of potential structure.

He lays out another of his historical just-so stories, which will be developed more fully in the next chapter. Human history begins in the magical phase or mode of relation with the world: “in the magical mode the mediation between man and the world is not yet concretized and constituted as standing apart, by means of specialized objects or human beings” (169). The magical phase splits into technicity and religion, which focus on the functions of figure and ground, respectively. This essentially sets up how S will go about answering his initial question, the relation between technicity and other forms of thought (e.g., religion, art, social science, etc.), through this initial family relationship. To the tendency towards divergence in different kinds of thought, must be opposed the thinking of convergence, “a relational function maintaining unity despite this divergence” (170):

The purpose [sens] of philosophical thought, intervening between the two representative orders and the two active orders of thought, is to make them converge and establish a mediation between them. Now, in order for this mediation to be possible, the very genesis of these forms of thought must be known and accomplished in a complete manner on the basis of previous stages of technicity and religiosity... (171)