The Eye of the Master, Introduction

 

Matteo Pasquinelli (2023) The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. Verso, New York.

Summary of Introduction: AI as Division of Labor

Pasquinelli starts out with some apt quotes from Marx and Gramsci, and indicates the stakes and intent of the book with this great point:

In the twentieth century, few would have ever defined a truck driver as a ‘cognitive worker’, an intellectual. In the early twenty-first, however, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving vehicles, among other artefacts, has changed the perception of manual skills such as driving, revealing how the most valuable component of work in general has never been just manual, but has always been cognitive and cooperative as well. Thanks to AI research – we must acknowledge it – truck drivers have reached the pantheon of intelligentsia. It is a paradox – a bitter political revelation – that the most zealous development of automation has shown how much ‘intelligence’ is expressed by activities and jobs that are usually deemed manual and unskilled, an aspect that has often been neglected by labour organisation as much as critical theory. (12-13)

He notes Sennet and others who have in fact recognized that “making is thinking;” his point resonates with the beginning Gramsci quote, to the effect that everyone is an intellectual. In this context he will take on the standard ideological account of AI and “intelligence:”

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest ‘to solve intelligence’ – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. In this book I argue, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but by the intelligence of labour and social relations. Today, it should be evident that AI is a project to capture the knowledge expressed through individual and collective behaviours and encode it into algorithmic models to automate the most diverse tasks: from image recognition and object manipulation to language translation and decision-making. As in a typical effect of ideology, the ‘solution’ to the enigma of AI is in front of our eyes, but nobody can see it – nor does anybody want to. (13)

He gives the example of the self-driving car:

If the skill of driving can be translated into an algorithmic model to begin with, it is because driving is a logical activity – because, ultimately, all labour is logic. (14)

What, then, is the relationship between labour, rules, and automation, i.e., the invention of new technologies? This entanglement is the core problem of AI which this book seeks to explore.

The title of the book is from a quote from Engels:

‘The economical development of our actual society tends more and more to concentrate, to socialise production into immense establishments which cannot any longer be managed by single capitalists. All the trash of “the eye of the master”, and the wonders it does, turns into sheer nonsense as soon as an undertaking reaches a certain size. Imagine “the eye of the master” of the London and North Western Railway! But what the master cannot do the workman, the wages- paid servants of the Company, can do, and do it successfully. Thus the capitalist can no longer lay claim to his profits as “wages of supervision”, as he supervises nothing.’ (220n8; from Friedrich Engels, ‘Social Classes: Necessary and Superfluous’, Labour Standard, 6 August 1881.)

He will trace the history of AI more broadly through the developments of Babbage, Taylor, etc.

This book follows these analytical studies of the labour process through the industrial age up to the rise of AI, aiming to show how the ‘intelligence’ of technological innovation has often originated from the imitation of these abstract diagrams of human praxis and collective behaviours. (15)

Here is a thesis:

When industrial machines such as looms and lathes were invented, in fact, it was not thanks to the solitary genius of an engineer but through the imitation of the collective diagram of labour: by capturing the patterns of hand movements and tools, the subdued creativity of workers’ know-how, and turning them into mechanical artefacts. … this book argues that the most sophisticated ‘intelligent’ machines have also emerged by imitating the outline of the collective division of labour. In the course of this book, this theory of technological development is renamed the labour theory of automation, or labour theory of the machine, which I then extend to the study of contemporary AI and generalise into a labour theory of machine intelligence. (15-6)

[Wouldn’t this latter in fact be a subset of the former, not a generalization?]

Following Marx, P says the “master” is not in fact an individual but “an integrated power made up of ‘the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of the social labour embodied in the system of machinery’” (16).

All of society has become a “digital factory” mediated by computer tech, social media, etc. “It is not difficult to see AI nowadays as a further centralisation of digital society and the orchestration of the division of labour throughout society.”

The thesis that the design of computation and ‘intelligent machines’ follow the schema of the division of labour is not heretical but receives confirmation from the founding theories of computer science, which have inherited a subtext of colonial fantasy and class division from the industrial age.

He gives an example of such fantasy from Turing, of his imagined Automatic Computing Engine, with humans divided into its “masters” who control it, and “servants” who it controls as its sensory organs; [aka those above and below the algorithm]; Turing argued that both classes of humans would be progressively replaced, though the masters would have more power to resist this:

Turing’s vision is contradicted today by the army of ‘ghost workers’ from the Global South, who, as Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri have documented, are removed from sight to let the show of machine autonomy go on. Paradoxically for Turing, AI came to replace mostly masters, that is managers, rather than servants – workers are needed (and always will be) to produce data and value for the voracious pipelines of AI and its global monopolies, and, on the other hand, to provide the maintenance of such a mega-machine under the form of content filtering, security checks, evaluation and non-stop optimisation. (17)

As gender studies scholars Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora have pointed out, the dreams of full automation and AI such as Turing’s are not neutral but are historically grounded on the ‘surrogate humanity’ of enslaved servants, proletarians, and women that have made possible, through their invisible labour, the universalistic ideal of the free and autonomous (white) subject.

Writing a history of AI in the current predicament means reckoning with a vast ideological construct: among the ranks of Silicon Valley companies and also hi-tech universities, propaganda about the almighty power of AI is the norm and sometimes even repeats the folklore of machines achieving ‘superhuman intelligence’ and ‘self-awareness’.

Mythologies of technological autonomy and machine intelligence are nothing new: since the industrial age, they have existed to mystify the role of workers and subaltern classes. (17-18)

He quotes Simon Schaffer:

‘To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.’ (Schaffer, quoted on page 18)

In addition to these ideological “speculative narratives” offered of AI by Silicon Valley futurists, there are also “technical histories” which voice corporate perspectives and “rarely consider the historical contexts and social implications of automation, and draw a linear history of mathematical achievements which reinforces technological determinism.”

But there are also critical histories, of “the social implications of AI from the standpoint of workers, communities, minorities, and society as a whole,” aka “critical AI studies.”

Within the expanding landscape of critical works, this book’s concern is to illuminate the social genealogy of AI and, importantly, the standpoint – the social classes – from which AI has been pursued as a vision of the world and epistemology. (19)

[Eg. AI as a class project.] Many histories trace AI and related computer techs to WWII and the cold war, but it goes back further than this, and is tied most directly to data collection by the “government machine,” not just wartime; P’s numerous references to Foucault are relevant to this point.

In summary, AI represents the continuation of data analytics techniques first supported by state bureaus, secretly cultivated by intelligence agencies, and ultimately consolidated by internet companies into a planetary business of surveillance and forecasting. (20)

However, this version of the story (which P shares with many of the above critical histories) presumes the targets of control are passive; P reiterates Gramsci’s “everyone is an intellectual” argument, to note that we also have to see (in classic Operaist form) that [the agency of workers is in fact first, and the ruling class’s move to control or coopt it is reactionary, secondary.]

this book aims at rediscovering the centrality of the social intelligence that informs and empowers AI. It also contends – in a more radical thesis – that such social intelligence shapes the very design of AI algorithms from within.

This book is intended as an incursion into both the technical and social histories of AI, integrating these approaches into a sociotechnical history that may identify also the economic and political factors that influenced its inner logic. Rather than siding with a conventional social constructivism and going beyond the pioneering insights of social informatics, it tries to extend to the field of AI the method of historical epistemology …

Where social constructivism generically emphasises the influence of external factors on science and technology, historical epistemology is concerned with the dialectical unfolding of social praxis, instruments of labour, and scientific abstractions within a global economic dynamics.

This links to the political epistemology of feminist critics of science and technology. P states that the title of the book has a double meaning, because current AI tech arose out of the drive to automate pattern recognition; he provides the etymology:

‘Master’ and ‘pattern’ share a common political etymology. The English term ‘pattern’ comes from the French patron and the Latin patronus. Both have the same root of the English ‘paternal’ and ‘father’, that is the Latin pater. The Latin patronus means also protector, also in relation to servants. The French patron has the meaning of leader, boss, or head of a community, which, in patriarchal contexts, implies a model to follow. (223n39)

He turns to the distinction between the original, symbolic AI, and the newer, connectionist AI:

The two lineages pursue different kinds of logic and epistemology. The former professes that intelligence is a representation of the world (knowing- that) which can be formalised into propositions and, therefore, mechanised following deductive logic. The latter, in contrast, argues that intelligence is experience of the world (knowing-how) which can be implemented into approximate models constructed according to inductive logic. (22)

[But is connectionist AI really inductive? It seems like it creates vast categories, and locates tokens inside those, and would thus be deductive. Wouldn’t induction would be a small-data, not a big-data approach? Also, LLMs do not have “experience of the world.”]

P points out that “neither of these two paradigms has managed to fully imitate human intelligence,” but the latter is better at pattern recognition and automation of tasks, and so is the foundation of the current boom. P implies the irony that the hype and ideology surrounding the first kind of AI is now applied to its rival.

Against a tradition which repeats the overly celebrated saga of the Dartmouth workshop, this book highlights the origins of artificial neural networks, connectionism, and machine learning as a more compelling history of AI about which, especially regarding Rosenblatt’s work, critical and exhaustive literature is still missing.

The rest of the chapter provides an overview of rest of the book, then summarizes:

This book proposes the labour theory of automation, in the end, not only as an analytical principle to dismantle the ‘master algorithm’ of AI monopolies but also as a synthetic principle: as a practice of social autonomy for new forms of knowledge making and new cultures of invention. (28)

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Conclusion

Summary of Conclusion

Whereas D&G’s Conclusion was essentially a rehearsal of several key concepts from throughout their text, Simondon’s is more of a brand new agenda building off the book so far, like a passionate instructor who excitedly introduces a slew of new concepts into the last day of class.

Simondon declares:

To this day, the reality of the technical object has been relegated to the background behind the reality of human work. The technical object has been apprehended through human work, thought and judged as instrument, adjuvant, or product of work. However, one ought to be capable, in favor of man himself, to carry out a reversal that would enable what is human in the technical object to appear directly, without passing through the relation of work. It is work that must be known as a phase of technicity, not technicity as a phase of work, for it is technicity that is the whole of which work forms a part, and not the reverse. (247, emphasis added)

The old “naturalistic definition” of work [travail], as human shaping of nature, is no longer sufficient, as it does not capture work as a part or phase of technicity.

There is work only when man must offer his organism as tool bearer, that is, when man must, along with his organism and his psychosomatic unity, follow the step-by-step unfolding of the human-nature relation. Work is the activity through which man actualizes the mediation between the human species and nature within himself; in this case we say that man operates as tool bearer because he acts on nature in this activity and follows this action, step by step, gesture by gesture. There is work when man cannot entrust the technical object with the function of mediation between the species and nature, and must fulfill this function of relation himself, through his body, his thought, his action.

Work is the shaping of natural matter into human-designed form:

The activity of work is what forms the link between natural matter and form, which comes from man; work is an activity that succeeds in making two realities as heterogeneous as matter and form coincide and renders them synergetic. And the activity of work makes man aware of the two terms he synthetically relates, because the worker must have his eyes fixed on these two terms which he must bring closer together (this is the norm of work), not on the interiority itself of the complex operation through which this bringing together is obtained. Work masks the relation in favor of the terms. (248)

S states that it is in part the “servile condition of the worker” that makes “the operation by which matter and form are made to coincide more obscure,” insofar as

the man who orders [commande] work to be done is concerned with what must appear in the given order [ordre], in terms of content and of the raw material that is the condition of execution, rather than with the operation that enables the process of taking form to occur: the attention is given to form and matter, not to the process of taking form as operation. The hylomorphic schema is thus a couple in which the two terms are clear and the relation obscure.

So interestingly S does not see work itself as the “process” of giving form to matter, but rather as, just another input? along with matter and the organization achieved by the “man who orders work to be done.” A focus on labor per se is, acc S, obscurantist because it hides the real “process” of which labor is just a part or phase. Cf. this quote from way back in Part Two, Chapter Two:

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

Pace Hegel, it is neither the Master, nor the Servant, for whom there is a path toward transcendence. S illustrates his point with a passage about clay which is worth quoting at length:

Indeed, it is not enough to enter the workshop with the worker or slave, or even to take the mold into ones own hands and to operate the potter’s wheel. The point of view of the working man is still too external to the process of taking form, which is the only thing that is technical in itself. It would be necessary to be able to enter the mold with the clay, to be both mold and clay at once, to live and feel their common operation in order to be able to think the process of taking form in itself. For the worker elaborates two technical half-chains that prepare the technical operation: he prepares the clay, makes it malleable, without lumps, without air bubbles, and correlatively prepares the mold; he materializes the form by making it into a wooden mold, and makes matter pliable, capable of receiving information; then, he puts the clay into the mold and presses it; but it is the system constituted by the mold and the pressed clay that is the condition of the process of taking form; it is the clay that takes form according to the mold, not the worker who gives it its form. The working man prepares the mediation, but he doesn’t fulfill [accomplit] it; it is the mediation that fulfills itself on its own once the conditions have been created; even though man is very close to this operation, he does not know it; his body pushes the mediation to fulfill itself, enables it to fulfill itself, but the representation of the technical operation does not appear in work. It is the essential part that is missing, the active center of the technical operation that remains veiled. (248-9, emphasis added)

[Simondon apparently has a similar discussion of clay at the beginning of his other book, on individuation (cf. Lambert 2012)]. In any event, the worker’s labor is external in S’s account, because it is just setting up the “condition of the process” by preparing the clay and the mold; it is the clay that takes form, which action is the “active center of the technical operation.”

For as long as man practiced work without using technical objects, technical knowledge could only be transmitted in an implicit and practical form, through professional habits and gestures: this motivating [moteur] knowledge is effectively what enables the elaboration of two technical half chains, the one starting from form and the one starting from matter. But it does not and cannot go further, it stops before the operation itself: it does not penetrate inside the mold. In its essence, it is pre-technical and not technical. (249)

I was recently reading about the transformation of beer-brewing in the 19^th century, from old, more-art-than-science practices formed through observation and tradition, toward those informed by scientific investigations into how yeast, malt, hygiene, etc. actually worked (Sigsworth 1965); the old, artisanal brewers were essentially setting up the Simondonian “technical half chains,” with no full understanding of how fermentation (or other related processes such as malting, etc.) actually worked. Nevertheless for S the key step is not just growing scientific understanding, but the switch from “tool-bearing” to “using technical objects.”

Technical knowledge, on the contrary, consists in starting from what happens inside the mold in order to find the different elaborations that can prepare it by starting from this center. Man cannot leave the center of operation in the dark, when he no longer intervenes as tool bearer; it is the center that must effectively be produced by the technical object, which does not think or feel, and which does not acquire habits. In order to construct the technical object that will function, man needs to represent to himself the way of functioning that coincides with technical operation, which accomplishes it.

[He makes distinctions in use between “function” and “operation” which I find it a bit hard to puzzle out (contrast the quotes above and below); clearer is the difference between “function” and “work:”]

One cannot speak of the work of a machine, but only of its functioning, which is an ordered ensemble of operations. Form and matter, if they still exist, are at the same level and belong to the same system; there is continuity between the technical and the natural.

Making the technical object is no longer accompanied by this obscure zone between form and matter. Pre-technical knowledge is also pre-logical, in the sense that it constitutes a couple of terms without discovering the interiority of the rela­tion (like in the hylomorphic schema). Technical knowledge on the contrary is logical, in the sense that it seeks the interiority of the relation. (250)

Different “paradigmatisms” arise from considering the “relation of work,” as opposed to considering technical operation and “technical knowledge.” This leads into a discussion of the hylomorphic scheme as essentially a misunderstanding preserved from ancient, pre-technical thought (apparently linked to the experience of the two half-chains, instead of understanding what happens in the middle, the zone left obscure before the development of true technicity? S also insists that technical objects are “detachable” mediations between nature and humanity [akin to Latour’s immutable mobiles, although part of their power derives from the fact that they are not exactly “immutable” in L’s sense, but rather adaptable? to new contexts; in any event their detachability from context of production [an aspect of alienation, in Marx’s view] gives them a power and importance which is part of what the new mechanological or whatever understanding needs to capture and bring to the fore. [Even though it’s sometimes a pain in the ass, I like having a detachable mediation.]

For all Simondon’s conscious differences with Marx he shares some of the early Marx’s arguably mystical ways of talking about work as the mediation between humanity and nature. “Work adheres to the worker, and reciprocally, through the intermediary of work, the worker adheres to the nature on which he operates.” Because of their detachability, technical objects are not, er, sticky in this way... and for this reason they somehow enable a better mediation:

The relation of man to nature, rather than being only lived and practiced obscurely, takes on a status of stability, of consistency, making it a reality that has laws and an ordered permanence. In edifying the world of technical objects and by generalizing the objective mediation between man and nature, technical activity re-attaches man to nature through a far richer and better defined link than that of the specific reaction of collective work. A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human establishes itself through the technical schematism. (251)

[It is not clear from the context, to me at any rate, when this is happening. Is it happening throughout history, during the course of technical development? Or is it happening in the future, after this book has transformed cultural understanding of technicity?]

S makes a distinction between function [fonctionnement] and work [travail] (in French it makes more sense to say that machines “function” and people “work”). S writes, “The technical object thus carries with it a broader category than that of work: operational functioning [fonctionnement opératoire]” (252). [I’m still not clear on the difference or relation between “operation” and “function”]. Operational functioning is more than work because it includes also a previous act of invention.

Now, invention is not work; it does not presuppose the mediation between nature and the human species to be played out by somato-psychic man. Invention is not only an adaptive and defensive reaction; it is a mental operation, a mental functioning that is of the same order as scientific knowledge.

“Work” for S is limited to this physical mediation between nature and the human species; invention, by including mental operation, is not work, and can be communicated, transmitted through the technical object, unlike work, which as we saw above, somehow “adheres” to the worker. (The terms “mental operation, mental functioning” further distinguish invention from “work” in S’s usage.) The communicative, informational aspect of invention leads to the development of a “universe of technicity:”

Henceforth, above the social community of work and beyond the inter-individual relationship not supported by an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity establishes itself, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up ... by a human subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would like to name transindividual.

The potential of this mental universe can only be grasped or developed by people who can appreciate it “according to its essence” (cf. the previous chapter):

The technical object can be read as carrier of a definite information; if it is only used, employed, and consequently enslaved, then it cannot bring any information, any more than a book that would be used as a wedge or pedestal. The technical object that is appreciated and known according to its essence, i.e., according to the human act that has founded it, penetrated it with functional intelligibility, valorized it according to its internal norms, carries with it pure information. (252-3)

The “human act that has founded it,” per S, is not labor as some might claim, but rather invention. “what is known in the technical object is the form, the material crystallization of an operational schema and of a thought that has resolved a problem” (253).

S makes a crucial distinction between the individual and the subject:

Work, conceived as productive, insofar as it comes from the localized individual hic et nunc, cannot account for the invented technical being; it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject, vaster than the individual, richer than it, and having, in addition to the individuality of the individuated being, a certain weight of nature, of non-individuated being. (253)

Per Barthélémy (2012: passim) the “subject” is more than the mere “individual” because it carries also the “pre-individual charge;” collectively subjects form the transindividual, which for this reason is also more than a mere collection of individuals. S uses the terms “community” and “inter-individual” to refer to this lesser sort of collective, which he associates with the thought of Marxists, sociologists, etc. In relation to this S opines that, contra Marx, it is not the social relations of work in capitalism, but work itself that is inherently alienating.

If this hypothesis is right, then the true path toward the reduction of alienation would not be situated within the domain of the social (with the community of work and class), nor in the domain of inter-individual relationships that social psychology habitually envisages, but at the level of the transindividual collective. (254)

S’s is here taking on both Marx’s critique of labor and alienation within the conditions of production, but also what he calls a “counter-Marxism” of social psychology (the organizational sociologists of the human relations school, whom Braverman criticizes, come to mind). “Work,” being a concept left over from the era of mere utensils, is not the right way to understand technical objects:

the relation of the worker to the machine is inadequate, because the worker operates on the machine without his gesture continuing the activity of invention in this gesture. The obscure central zone characteristic of work has transferred itself to the utilization of the machine: it is now the functioning of the machine, the provenance of the machine, the signification of what the machine does and the way in which it is made that is the obscure zone.

A worker, according to Simondon, confronts a machine as something they use without understanding; the action which “continues the activity of invention” is the adjustment, maintenance, or repair of the machine, which requires understanding of the technical schema. (S adds the “breaking in” of machines a page later (256)).

The worker’s alienation is translated by the break between technical knowledge and the exercise of the conditions of use. This break is so noticeable that the function of adjusting the machine is strictly distinct from that of the machine’s user in a large number of factories, in other words, distinct from the worker, and it is prohibited for workers to adjust [régler] their own machines by themselves. The activity of adjustment, however, is the one that most naturally continues the function of invention and construction: adjustment is a perpetual, if limited, invention. (255)

Braverman, of course, would strongly object that it is precisely within the “domain of the social” that we can find the cause of this separation. Simondon would apparently rather situate it on a cultural or even civilizational level, as the effect of continued hylomorphic thinking, than situated socially and historically as an aspect of the class struggle over the control of knowledge in the productive process. S talks about the knowledgeable user/adjuster who has “forms within himself” which allow for an understanding of the “forms carried by the machine;” through this communication “the work done on a technical object becomes a technical activity and not simply work” (emphasis added). [In Heideggerian terms, for the worker the machine is ready-to-hand; for the adjuster/controller it is present-at-hand:]

The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction. (emphasis added)

S then goes into an interesting (and today very relevant) discussion of alienated consumers: “The technical objects that produce the greatest alienation are those meant for ignorant users.” [Cf. Stiegler on technology making people “stupid.”]

Such objects progressively deteriorate: they are new for a short time, and quickly begin to devalue when losing this aspect of being new because they can only distance themselves from the conditions of initial perfection. The sealing of delicate organs is indicative of this divide between the manufacturer, who is identified with the inventor, and the user who only acquires usage of the technical object through an economic process … (255-6)

“The machine remains one of the obscure zones of our civilization, at all social levels. This alienation exists as much at the management level … as it does at the level of workers.” Thus, contra Marx, this alienation is not solvable by the mere ownership of the means of production:

... it wouldn’t be enough for workers simply to be the owners of their machines in order for alienation to be abruptly reduced; to possess a machine is not to know it. Non-possession, however, increases the distance between the worker and the machine on which his work is accomplished; it makes the relation even more fragile, more external, more precarious. It would have to be possible to discover a social and economic mode whereby the user of the technical object would not only be the owner of this machine, but also the man who chooses it and who maintains it. (256-7)

[Finally Simondon and Braverman agree about something!] Nevertheless Simondon says nothing more about this promising “social and economic mode.”]

Per S, both labor and capital are “inessential with respect to technical activity;” as we have seen earlier in the book, he considers economic and political context “extrinsic” to the essence of technics. The sort of [transcendence] he is aiming for is somehow thus distinct from that achieved through class struggle:

This level of technical organization where man encounters man not as the member of a class but as a being who expresses himself within the technical object which is homogeneous with respect to his activity, is the level of the collective, going beyond the inter-individual and the given social. (257)

“The relation with the technical object cannot become adequate individual by individual” because the desired condition of the transindividual requires “a coupling between the inventive and organizational capacities of several subjects.” Yet interestingly he does not seem to see this as coming about through a reorganization of society at large, but as happening through companies, which unify labor and thought through the organization of “technical committees at the level of their employee councils:”

in order to be efficient and creative, an employee committee should be essentially technical. The organization of channels of information in a company must follow the lines of technical operation and not that of social hierarchy or of purely inter-individual relations, which are inessential with respect to technical operation. The company, being the ensemble of technical objects and men, must be organized on the basis of its essential function, that is its technical functioning; it is at the level of the technical operation that the whole [ensemble] of the organization can be thought, not as a confrontation of classes, i.e., as a pure social ensemble, or as a grouping of individuals each having their psyche, which brings the ensemble down to an inter-psychological schema, but as a unit [une unité] of technical functioning. (258)

It is a bit jarring to see such innovative and thought-provoking philosophical reconceptialization lead up to such tepid reformism. Simondon’s idealism leads him yet again to imagine that existing hierarchies are “extrinsic” to the alienation of labor and thought, which can be overcome simply by introducing a new way of thinking. [And how surprising that sixty years after this book’s publication, our society remains so alienated!]

He goes on to criticize Bergson, Poincaré, Le Roy, and pragmatists in general for “conflating” work and technical operation; they attempt to overturn the Classical hierarchy (e.g., in Plato, etc.), in which mental activity (σχολή) was seen as superior to manual labor, by insisting on the primacy and validity of the latter. This, however, only preserves the false opposition of utility to truth:

Pragmatism, by appearing to reverse the hierarchy of values, defines the true by the useful; but it preserves the schema of opposition between the norm of utility and the norm of truth, to such an extent that it results in a relativism in the order of knowledge, or at nominalism if this attitude is pushed to its most rigorous and extreme consequences; science is not more true, but more useful for action than common perception. (260)

Technics is an “intermediary reality” between work and σχολή, and thus not understandable through either concept.

It seems that this opposition between action and contemplation, between the immutable and the moving, must cease in the face of the introduction of the technical operation within philosophical thought as area of reflection and even as paradigm.

Barthélémy, Jean-Huges (2012) “Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon” in de Boever, et al., eds. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Lambert, Léopold (2012, Dec. 8). “Form and Matter: Gilbert Simondon’s Critique of the Hylomorphic Scheme Part 1” The Funambulist (blog). https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-form-matter-gilbert-simondons-critique-of-the-hylomorphic-scheme-part-1

Sigsworth, E.M. (1965) “Science and the Brewing Industry, 1850-1900.” Economic History Review, 17(3): 536-550.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 3, Chapter 3

Summary of Part 3 Chapter 3: Technical and Philosophical Thought

In this chapter Simondon lays out his prognostications for how a presumably emerging or soon to emerge “philosophical thought” will characterize, or help bring about, the passage from our current split world toward a world which renews the unity or wholeness or whatever, which had characterized the original, magical world. He goes through the different kinds of thought which characterize our stage in world history – technical, religious, and aesthetic – showing how they fail to reach the desired outcome, and yet all include aspects which need to be included in the coming philosophical thought. Technics “grasps” us and our world below the level of unity, and social and political thought (which are the “functional analog of religions” (223) (and which he later specifies as national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet Communism (231)) grasp us from above the level of unity (224).

but these two representations are not enough, because the human world can be grasped in its unity only at the neutral point; technics pluralize it, and political thought integrates it into a higher unity, that of the totality of humanity in its coming-into-being, where it loses its real unity in the same way that the individual loses its unity within a group.

Aesthetic thought “grasps” reality at the “neutral point” between these, and philosophical thought will as well; but it will have to go beyond the merely representational level which aesthetic thought is stuck at, it will also require an “aesthetics of aesthetics,” putting the different stages of aesthetic thought into relation.

S goes through the limitations of current technical thought: it focuses on technical objects instead of seeing at the needed level, of the concrete technical individual (226). Instead of focusing on discipline-specific understanding, it will be necessary to understand the similarity (or identity?) of schemas at the intersection of multiple sciences and practical domains (227). Philosophical thought will need to grasp the “polytechnic — both natural and human — universe” (228); though the term “network” (réseau) goes a way towards this, it is too imprecise, S argues, in that it “does not account for the particular regimes of causality and conditioning that exist in these networks, and that functionally attach them to the human world and to the natural world, as a concrete mediation between these two worlds.” [But “réticulation” totally nails it? This might be related to his critique of cybernetics as too focused in homeostasis, and too readily positing what S considers false equivalences between different kinds of system.]

The introduction of adequate representations of technical objects into culture would result in the key-points of technical networks becoming real terms of reference for the ensemble of human groups, whereas they currently are only key terms for those who understand them, which is to say for the technicians of each specialty; for other men, they only have a practical value, and correspond to very confused concepts; technical ensembles introduce themselves into the world as if they had no natural or human right of belonging, while a mountain or promontory, which have less concrete regulatory power than some technical ensembles, are known by all men of a region and belong to the representation of the world.

[I have to admit I have not been tracking to what extent Simondon’s concepts of “key points” (points clés) and “high points” (hauts lieux) correspond; this passage makes me think they do.] Anyway this sentence sums up “what is wrong with people and society today” in S’s view, and this is the situation which the coming philosophical thought will correct. S notes the different experiences of the human individual toward tools and networks:

one changes tools and instruments, one can construct or repair a tool oneself, but one cannot change the network, one doesn’t construct a network of one’s own: one can only connect to a network, adapt to it, participate in it; the network dominates and frames [enserre] the action of the individual, it even dominates each technical ensemble. (229)

S goes into a very interesting discussion of the human experience of the technical and natural world in terms of respect and the sacred. To non-technically aware people, big things like a harbor, a freeway interchange, or the aforementioned mountain peak, command respect; but the technical networks of which they are not aware of, do not command such respect. He describes an occasion in which the clock of the Paris Observatory was thrown off to some fractional degree (less than could cause any practical disruption at large) by “the tumultuous visit of science students passing by it on their way to the catacombs,” and the scandal this caused among the scientists who were attuned to this clock’s importance, and thus hold it in respect. S points out that humanities students would not have even thought to profane the workings of the clock, since they would not understand it to be sacred; likewise, a classroom experiment in disrupting a similar clock would not be scandalous, because such a clock does not hold the same sacred, key-point position in a crucial network. So, a future, better society in which we all had better technical understanding, would also be one in which we were more respectful of such networks and their “key-points.”

Turning to social-political thought, S lists its three main forms in the mid-20^th century (national socialism, “American democratic doctrine,” and Soviet communism), and how these are each related to technology (e.g., Soviet communism “gains self-awareness through the use of tractors, the foundation of factories” (231):

the distribution and integration of key-points of social and political thought in the world at least partially coincides with the distribution and integration of the technical key-points, and ... this coinciding becomes all the more perfect as technics becomes increasingly integrated within the universe, in the form of fixed ensembles, attached to one another, constraining [enserrant] human individuals into the links they determine.

Part of what S is doing through this chapter is noting the deficiencies of each of the existing forms of thought, and also the promising aspects which philosophical thought can draw on, when it unifies or transcends them or whatever. Technical and religious (including social-political) thoughts separate the world, when what is needed is to grasp its continuity (233). Part of the solution is the development of what S has elsewhere in the book called “technical culture” (cf. Combes 2013: 57ff.):

it is culture, considered as a lived totality, that must incorporate the technical ensembles by knowing their nature, in order to be able to regulate human life according to these technical ensembles. Culture must remain above all technics, but it must incorporate into its content the knowledge and intuition of genuine technical schemas. Culture is that through which man regulates his relation with the world and with himself; and yet if culture were not to incorporate technology, it would contain an opaque zone and wouldn’t be able to contribute its regulative normativity to the coupling of man and the world. For in this coupling of man and the world, which is that of technical ensembles, there are schemas of activity and conditioning that can be clearly thought only by virtue of concepts defined by a reflexive but direct study. Culture must be contemporary with technics. Culture must reshape itself [se reformer] and must once again take up its content stage by stage. (234)

Per S, contemporary culture fails in this regard because it lags behind technology, understanding it through concepts and ethics which were suitable for earlier stages of history, but are now no longer sufficient. [Though of course, what S does not appear to consider is why this should be the case other than the extent to which “nobody has figured it out yet.” He does not consider what role such “opaque zones” [aka black-boxing] plays in contemporary political and social structures; how, for instance, the fact that users have only an opaque idea of the workings of social media, AI, and so on, is not a bug but a feature from the viewpoint of those who control platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.] Nevertheless, with such sociopolitical context added in, S’s vision has some resonance with thinkers like Bookchin or even Ruskin, who advocate a society whose technology is accessible to, and understood by, all members at large. Ruskin, however, would be susceptible to Simondon’s next argument, which is that

the confusion of technical realities with utensils is a cultural stereotype, founded on the normative notion of utility that is at once valorizing and devaluing. But this notion of utensil and of utility is inadequate to the effective and actual role of technical ensembles within the human world; it thus cannot be regulative in an effective way. (234-5)

S is here specifically arguing against Heidegger, but this also argues against Ruskin’s dream of a return to a day of independent artisans with their utensil-bound technical imagination, inadequate, per S, for the present and future of technical ensembles. The way for humans to learn how to understand technical ensembles is for them to experience, directly, certain situations:

In the same way one used to consider journeys as a means for acquiring culture, because they constituted a mode of placing man into a situation, one should also consider the technical experiences of being placed into a situation with respect to an ensemble, with effective responsibility, as having cultural value. To put it another way, every human being should to a certain extent take part in technical ensembles, that is, take on a responsibility, a definite task with respect to such an ensemble and be connected with a network of universal technics. Furthermore, individual man should not simply experience a single kind of technical ensemble, but rather a plurality of them, just as a traveler will have to encounter several peoples, and experience their mores.

Thus, a future philosophically-informed technical culture would encourage its members to experience a diversity of such situations. Interestingly, S then continues in a manner reminiscent of a famous passage from Marx:

However, this kind of experience must be conceived more as a way of experiencing the situating of each type of technics and ensemble of technics, than as an effort to participate in the condition of man in each of the technics: for in each technics there are technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers, and to the extent that conditions are strictly social, they can be rather analogous, at each level, in the different technics. It is the particular situating in the technical network that must be experienced, insofar as it places man in the presence of and within a series of actions and processes that he does not direct alone, but in which he participates. (235-6)

The resonant, oft-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

… in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (Marx 1978: 160)

Marx then continues, emphasizing why such a range of experience should resist the recreation of what he calls “partial identities:”

This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors of historical development up till now. (ad loc.)

The mere idealism of Simondon’s warning to avoid falling into the limited, socially determined perspectives of “technicians, unskilled laborers, workers, managers,” and so on (cf. his similar argument back in the Introduction) can perhaps here be supplemented with something like Marx’s materialist account of how this involves overcoming exploitation and alienation (cf. the discussion of alienation in the summary of Part 2, Chapter 2). It is also worth noting that Simondon’s earlier argument privileging a particular social-scientific position of the “mechanologist” now appears to have dissolved into a more general argument for a sort of society in which individuals learn such a perspective through their regular course of experience; and in what sort of society would this be more likely, than one in which agency, access to, and responsibility for technical (etc.) organization was evenly distributed? [Daniel Colson, most notably, has found numerous resonances with anarchism in Simondon’s otherwise “largely apolitical” work (Colson 2019: 13).]

The philosopher/mechanologist retains an important role, which is similar to that of the artist in contemporary society:

The philosopher, comparable in this role to the artist, can help in raising awareness of the situation within the technical ensemble, by reflecting it within himself and by expressing it; but, again just as the artist, all he can do is be the one who solicits an intuition in others, once a definite sensitivity has been awakened and allows the grasping of the sense of a real experience. (236)

Again, this has to be more than what is possible today with art, which is, essentially, [aestheticizing]:

All the prestigious color photographs of sparks, of fumes, all the recordings of noise, sounds, or images, generally remain a use [exploitation] of technical reality and not a revelation of this reality. Technical reality must be thought, and even be known through participation in its schemas of action; aesthetic feeling can emerge, but only after this intervention of real intuition and participation and not as a fruit of a mere spectacle: every technical spectacle remains puerile and incomplete if it is not preceded by the integration into the technical ensemble.

“Intuition” and “participation” are among Simondon’s consistent offerings for how to get past the divisions he charts, between the technical and religious, the practical and theoretical, the inductive and the deductive, the a priori and the a posteriori. Religion, “being the paradigm of deductive thought” (240), is responsible for a division between Being (as primary) and Knowledge (as secondary), which has detrimentally influenced non-religious ways of thinking as well. [This may not be what he is referring to, but what springs to mind is the interminable 20^th century epistemological debate, taking a form similar to: S can be said to “know” p if:

1: p is true.

2. S believes that p is true.

3. S has “valid reasons” for believing that p is true.

The subsequent debate then hinges over how precisely to word proposition 3 (and/or 4, etc.), without recognizing that propositions 1 and 2 have set up an insuperable Cartesian binary, namely that which Simondon is here criticizing.]

Besides the “participation” in situations which was discussed above, Simondon’s other important answer for how to get past these binaries is intuition, which he derives from Bergson. Intuition is distinct from both “idea” (inductive) and “concept” (deductive):

Now, it is not entirely correct to identify intuition with the idea; knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble.

Note that this also gets us past the limited perspectives focusing solely on element or totality. The new, philosophical intuition will follow on from, but surpass, the earlier stages of magical and aesthetic intuition (244). It will not grasp technical objects (and their users, ensembles, collectivities, etc.) as stable objects but genetically, in becoming. The essence will be going beyond previous, limited and divided ways of thinking, to grasp technicity through an understanding of concretization (thus establishing the importance of the rest of the book to this goal):

this conditioning of the technical object’s genesis are indeed effectively translated by a particular type of the technical object’s coming-into-being, what we have called the concretization of the technical object. The process of this concretization can be directly apprehended by the examination of a certain number of examples of technical objects. But the sense of this concretization, which is an inherence in the object of a technicity that is not entirely contained in it, can be understood only by philosophical thought following the genesis of the technical and non-technical modes of the relation between ... man and the world. Whence the use in this study of a genetic method applied first to technical objects and then to the study of the situation and role of technical thought in the whole [l'ensemble] of thought. (245-6)

Colson, Daniel (2019) A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze. Tr. by Jesse Cohn. Autonomedia, New York.

Combes, Muriel (2013) Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Marx, Karl (1978) “The German Ideology: Part I” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: WW Norton.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 19

Summary of Chapter 19: Productive and Unproductive Labor

Braverman reiterates that being in the working class is determined by a social relation, not the specific form of work that is done:

The various forms of labor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value. Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense. (284)

There remains the question of what constitutes “unproductive” labor. B notes that the distinction between “productive and unproductive” originates with the classical economists, whom Marx was critiquing:

In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature of the work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was concerned specifically and entirely with the role of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor. (284-5)

… Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. (285)

Self-employed proprietors, such as independent farmers, artisans, professionals and so on, are unproductive for capital, or even outside the productive/unproductive distinction and in fact “outside the capitalist mode of production.” Servants are also outside the distinction, since their labor is not exchanged against profit but against revenue (e.g. the capitalist pays for the gardener at his home out of his own pocket). [But does this change if the maintenance of the home for future sale is seen as an investment? Not to mention the other forms of “capital” which having a home with a garden and a gardener produces, outside of a strictly Marxist framework—by which I mean to refer not so much to Bourdieu’s original forms of “capital,” but attempts to integrate these with Marxian concepts, e.g. Zhu (2020) on the “cultural fix.” (Which also being a variation on Harvey’s “spatial fix,” is linked to the expansion of capitalist relations which Braverman is talking about).]

B points out that the productive/unproductive distinction is important because as more kinds of work are brought into direct exchange for capital, this shows the expansion of capitalism, and capitalist relations, through society. He gives the example of an individual tailor employed by a customer for one suit alone, vs. a capitalist employing a roomful of tailors for suits, plus profit. “Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value” (286).

In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transformation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist’s purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.

... the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all forms of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.

The unproductive labor which capitalism increasingly pays for is involved, not in the production of value, but in the work of the appropriation of surplus value, and in the “realization problem” of ensuring that products get sold, so they can be turned back into capital.

These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enormous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode of production, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota. (287)

[This is furthermore important, because in a different organization of society, these would be unnecessary, or not as important; there would be no need, or less need, for these kinds of “unproductive” labor in a socialist economy.]

B gives an example of the same kind of work being in one case productive, in another unproductive:

The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits—­all of these forms of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle. Yet this lack of effect is not due to the determinate form of their labors—the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all of which do contribute productively to commodity value, according to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization of value in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the “services” of capital in the form of credit, etc.

Summarizing his argument so far:

Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit. … the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.

Modern bourgeois economics has failed to grasp this change, because it can’t account for it, only being able to see things from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. Thus, for bourgeois economists, “the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation” (288).

And the very idea of the “wealth of nations” has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of “prosperity,” a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.

[Here, couched in Adam-Smith-ian terms, is another implicit critique of the capitalist international economic system vis-a-vis a possible socialist system.]

Unproductive workers employed in early capitalism had a certain high status as enablers of the capitalists’ wealth, but the new system means they have lost this status. Just as productive workers lost their individual input and now create value only as a mass (for example, the individuals on an assembly line only contribute partially, and production is actually brought about by all of them together), unproductive laborers have also lost their individuality and are now also a mass, “which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers” (289).

And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. (290)

B clarifies how his own argument is rooted in Marx’s sketches of the issue. Contra Ian Gough, B insists that Marx never described commercial workers as a “commercial proletariat,” but as “wage-workers,” this distinction being important because, although they do have the same employment status as industrial workers, they are not productive of surplus value, like a true proletariat:

The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is in Marx’s mind like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value. (292)

However, Braverman also notes that Marx did not peer far into the future of capitalism, since he was more intent on ending capitalism, soon:

... it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.

And, as a revolutionary sharing this conviction, B concludes by noting that unproductive laborers now share much in common with the true proletariat, hinting at (though not stating here) their potential role as co-revolutionaries:

That which in Marx was a subordinate and inconsequential part of the analysis has thus for us become a major consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The few commercial wage-workers who puzzled Marx as a conscientious scientist have become the vast and complicated structure of occupations characteristic of unproductive labor in modern capitalism. But in so becoming they have lost many of the last characteristics which separated them from production workers. When they were few they were unlike productive labor, and having become many they are like productive labor. Although productive and unproductive labor are technically distinct, although productive labor has tended to decrease in proportion as its productivity has grown, while nonproductive labor has increased only as a result of the increase in surpluses thrown off by productive labor—despite these distinctions, the two masses of labor are not otherwise in striking contrast and need not be counterposed to each other. They form a continuous mass of employment which, at present and unlike the situation in Marx’s day, has everything in common.

Zhu, Annah Lake (2020) “China’s Rosewood Boom: A Cultural Fix to Capital Overaccumulation.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(1):277-296.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 2, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part 2, Chapter 2: The Regulative Function of Culture in the Relation between Man and the World of Technical Objects. Current Problems.

In this chapter Simondon makes his case for mechanology as a corrective to the historical and cultural failure to properly make sense of the relationship between humans and machines. He starts back again with the Encyclopedists: they did not understand machines as fully automata; instead, they still thought of them as assemblages of devices, in other words, at the level of the element. This led to a false sense of, and belief in, continuous progress (because it is possible to see such continuous progress in the saturation/concretization of elements; if they had been thinking at the level of individuals or ensembles (I think he would say), progress would not only appear “serrated” in S’s terminology, it would also not be misunderstood as some mystical process that happens by itself).

In any event, it is the way change happens at the level of the element in the 18^th century, which characterizes that period’s mix of euphoria and anxiety regarding technology. Euphoria arises from the experience of continuous improvement ongoing during that time; anxiety in this period regards “those transformations that provoke a break within the rhythms of everyday life, making the old habitual gestures useless” (130). S delineates an interesting distinction between tools and instruments, “if by tool one understands the technical object enabling one to prolong and arm the body in order to accomplish a gesture, and by instrument the technical object that enables one to prolong and adapt the body in order to achieve better perception.” He gives an interesting discussion on how many tools will be both tool and instrument, for instance a hammer also gives feedback to the user on the resistance and movement of the nail being driven; his point is though that in this case the hammer is still primarily a tool, since its quality as an instrument is subordinate to its use as a tool; he holds that this is still the case even when a mason uses a hammer to tap a wall to get a sense of its composition. In contrast, telescopes, microscopes, etc. are instruments, pure and simple.

With the advent of “complete technical individuals” in the 19^th century, the previous anxiety with technological change becomes much more acute, as there are now machines which replace humans.

It is not necessarily through its size that the factory distinguishes itself from the craftsman’s workshop, but through the change in relation between the technical object and the human being: the factory is a technical ensemble that is comprised of auto­matic machines, whose activity is parallel to that of human activity; the factory uses true technical individuals, whereas, in the workshop, it is man who lends his individuality to the accomplishment of technical actions. (131)

The progress of the nineteenth century can no longer be experienced by the individual, because it is no longer centralized with the individual as the center of command and perception in the adapted action. (132)

The notion of progress thus “splits in two,” as humans lose their earlier “kinesthetic” contact with technology, and alongside the sense of progress exists a growing anxiety due to the disconnection with technology and its growing incomprehensibility of scale.

Progress is henceforth thought of as cosmic, at the level of its overall results. It is thought abstractly, intellectually, in a doctrinal manner. Progress is no longer thought by craftsmen, but by mathematicians, who conceive of progress as man taking possession of nature.

“The individual who thinks progress is not the same individual as the one who works,” S argues – note that, in contrast to, e.g., Braverman, or Bookchin, who made the same historical observation, S attributes this differentiation between the thinker and the worker to the effects of the societal experience of this stage of technological development (viz., of the technical individual), rather than to the social or economic order per se. For all S’s disavowal of having any dialectic going on in his account of history, his model does feel like it has the somewhat dissociated clockwork effect of an idealist dialectic, in which stages just somehow follow each other (his invocation of context, experience, etc. being too a priori to be properly termed materialist, imho).

S in fact goes on to argue that his account provides a deeper understanding of alienation than that of the Marxist concept, which is, in S’s view, superficial, merely “juridical and economic”:

Beneath this juridical and economic relation exists an even more profound relation, that of the continuity between the human individual and the technical individual, or of the discontinuity between these two beings. … 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. (133)

He goes on to state that bankers, etc., are just as alienated as anyone else, despite not being exploited for their labor – and quickly dismisses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an explanation for this – his ultimate point being, basically, that everyone is alienated and has only a partial understanding of contemporary technology and its relation to the human. It could be quite easily demonstrated that Simondon is not accurately representing or engaging with the full elaboration of the process of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (and the first kind, alienation from nature, would pretty much cover the “machinic alienation” or whatever you might call it, that he is trying to outline; he could also be said to be describing what Marx would see as the role of automation as an aspect of real subsumption). But his agenda is actually, once again, to explain away any given subject-position within society as partial and alienated, thus showing the need for a new mechanological perspective.

The perspectives of both labor and capital are “late” (presumably meaning “outdated”) with regard to the modern technical individual; and the “dialogue” or struggle between the two is “false because it is of the past” (134). [To the extent that there is a validity to the stages of technical development and awareness that S elaborates, his error is the presentist one, in supposing that each stage completely displaces or supplants the previous stages, instead of layering over and interacting with the previous stages complexly]. [And this is an aspect of how his account reads like an old-fashioned, simplistic idealist dialectic (like, say, Stirner’s (sorry, Max!)) instead of, say, more nuanced Bakhtinian dialogism).]

S concludes this discussion with a much clearer exposition of his concept of finality (which I confess I was a bit confused by in the previous chapter). It is, basically, instrumentalism, and it shapes and limits the perspectives of both the worker and the capitalist. They understand machines, thus, in terms of the purpose for which they are put to work; this [external condition?] prevents them from understanding the “internal coherence” of the machine, and thus its true nature. The development of which understanding will, of course, be the goal of the mechanologist.

He goes on to discuss the ideal form of coupling between human and machine as equals, in other words with the human “not merely as a being who directs or utilizes it through the incorporation of ensembles, or as a being who serves it by supplying matter and elements. … There is an inter-individual coupling between man and machine when the same self-regulating functions are better and more subtly accomplished by the man-machine couple than by man or machine alone” (135).

To illustrate this, he posits a difference between how the memories of machines and humans work, and how they can work together combining their distinct strengths. Machines can only record; their memory does not even strictly speaking contain forms (because this would require an awareness of these forms), “but merely a translation of forms, by means of an encoding in a spatial or temporal distribution” (136). Humans are required to perceive the forms recorded in machine memory. This indifference to form is a strength of machine memory, in that it allows it to record “elements without order;” human memory, in contrast, requires a sense of order in order to remember. Also, though machine memory has a certain plasticity, this is the plasticity of being able to be written and erased. Human memory, less reliably “monomorphic” and reliable than machine memory, nevertheless also has the ability to infer and interpret, aka the “plasticity of integration” (137), and thus is able to draw on experience and memory to make predictions and fill in gaps in its knowledge. Thus, the proper context for the “coupling” of human and machine memory is those complex procedures in which both are needed.

This leads to a reiteration of S’s insistence that “Despite appearances, it is, on the contrary, the truly automatic machine that least replaces man” (139); this is still true a priori, because (in previous chapters) he has defined automata as lacking any “margin of indeterminacy” or openness (and machines which do have such a margin of indeterminacy are not “automata”); human interlocutors are thus necessary in any operation more complex than pushing a button to start and end an automatic process.

It becomes a reasonable question as to whether the development of machine learning has led this aspect of Simondon’s thought to become outdated, with potential consequences for his entire model of ideal human-machine interaction. Surely, Simondon is aware that automata can involve sensors and actuators, and thus be open to outside information; it is just that they are limited in their ability to respond. Thus, an air-conditioner can turn on and off in response to ambient temperatures, but it cannot turn itself off because the water-drain line is backing up – unless such a capacity has been built into the machine. A human observer, in contrast, needs no previous specific programming to go “oh shit, the water is backing up” and take some action in response. [Though it still seems to me, that the difference between closed/automatic system and open/ad hoc system should be a continuum, not a binary as S treats it.]

Briefly reviewing a few recent articles which discuss machine learning in a theoretical context informed by Simondon, we can see Rantala and Muilu (2023: 8) asserting that machine learning does have a “margin of indeterminacy” but that learning machines are still limited by their programming in terms of their ability to respond. Haworth (2020), discussing the “possibility of independently creative machines,” argues that the very idea of these machines as “independently creative” is based on the “fantasy of absolute autonomy” whereby we imagine ourselves as sovereign subjects instead of as parts of complex human-machine ensembles (and then, in a nightmarish vision, transfer this autonomy to the uncanny action of machines, instead of recognizing that they, as well, are more accurately understood as also embedded in such ensembles). Haworth thus seems to follow the Simondonian line of dismissing “the Robot” as a nonsensical figment, instead of addressing the question directly as to whether machine learning can or could render learning machines independent of any need for human interaction.

In any case, machines need humans as servants, technicians, or organizers; the self-regulation of automata is not enough for the machine to comprehend “the whole of the milieu,” for which both human and machine are required (139-40).

S criticizes the “autocratic philosophy” of the technocrats, who seek to use machines as slaves; the human should be at the same level as the machine, not an inferior, nor a superior. He embarks on a discussion of the limitations of 19^th century understanding of machines; “The nineteenth century could produce only a technological techno­cratic philosophy because it discovered engines and not regulations” (i.e., feedback/information theory). He discusses examples of 19^th century technology in which there is no distinction between the energy channel, and the information channel; understanding the different needs of these, and developing distinct channels, is the key aspect of progress in 20^th century technics; this changes even the concept of efficiency, which is different for the flow of information than it is for energy used in production, motive force, etc.

This leads him into an interesting discussion of information, which requires that its channel of transmisson be capable of variability – consistent order, always the same, cannot transmit new information. Thus, information bears a resemblance to chance, yet it must, ultimately, be distinguishable from both order/form and pure chance, as a sort of intermediate entity (150). The distinction between form and information is linked to that between the machine and the human:

There is, in effect, an important gap between the living thing and the machine, and consequently between man and machine, which comes from the fact that the living thing needs information, while the machine essentially uses forms, and is so to speak con­stituted with forms. …

The human individual thus appears as having to convert the forms deposited into machines into information; the operating of machines does not give rise to information, but is simply an assemblage and a modification of forms; the functioning of a machine has no sense, and cannot give rise to true information signals for another machine; a living being is required as mediator in order to interpret a given functioning in terms of information, and in order to convert it into the forms for another machine.

[Returning us again to the question as to whether this stark opposition is still valid, and/or whether this is a useful way to define “automata.”]

He goes now into reiterating the difference between his view and that of the cyberneticians, based on the progress of his discussion to this point. “The machine is a deposited fixed human gesture that has become a stereotypy and the power to restart” (151). The cyberneticists overemphasize the analogy between machines and living organisms, but the truth is that the former “neither nourishes itself , nor perceives, nor rests,” like an actual living organism. He continues for several pages with a discussion of the distinction (from Bergson with some amendments) between open and closed machines, the former allowing for some margin of indeterminacy, and the latter are true automata, per his definition.

He returns to the key concept of transduction, with the example of a continuous relay that converts (transduces) potential into actual energy; information is also linked to this moment of transduction: “It is during the course of this passage from potential to actual that information comes into play; information is the condition of actualization” (155). The concept of transducer is expanded to “a regulative function in all machines having a certain margin of localized indeterminacy in their func­tioning;” in turn, humans, and all living creatures, are also transducers, as convertors/modulators of potential into actual energy. This capacity as transducer is part of what ensures a particular role for humans in the human/machine assemblage:

It is in fact very easy to construct machines that ensure a much greater accumulation of energy compared to that which man can accumulate in his body; it is equally possible to use artificial systems that constitute effectors that are supe­rior to those of the human body. But it is very difficult to construct transducers comparable to the living thing. (156)

In fact the “transducers” found in machines are not actually fully “transducers,” according to Simondon’s definition [arguably, this is a result of his practice of constructing definitions from presumed essences; cf. my earlier criticisms of his definition of “automata”], because of the role of information; machines must be given information, while living things can give themselves information [this seems to be relevant to the example I gave above with the air conditioner]. Machines can only approach problems according to the way they have been programmed; they cannot “solve” problems because this involves that extra, human, step of inference/transduction:

To solve a problem is to be able to step over it, to be capable of recasting the forms that are given within the problem and in which it consists. The solution of real problems is a vital function presupposing a recurrent mode of action that cannot exist in the machine: the recurrence of the future with respect to the present, of the virtual with respect to the actual. There is no true virtuality in a machine; the machine cannot reform its forms in order to solve a problem.

Machines can generate information but they cannot understand it unless it is presented or “given” to them, and this requires the human as a “witness,” transducing this information and representing the machines to each other (157). S concludes this section with a discussion of culture’s current inability to think correctly about the human-machine relation; “culture is unjust toward the machine” (158), and this is illustrated by comparison to cultural stereotypes of foreigners, etc., which are the product of limited familiarity and experience; with greater familiarity and experience these stereotypes can be unlearned, and a better understanding achieved.

Finally S turns to his main point, which is the conditions giving rise to an improved cultural understanding of the relationship between humans and machines, a la mechanology:

The advent of the conditions allowing man to see the technical relation functioning in an objective way is the prime condition for the incorporation of the knowledge of technical reality and of the values implied by its existence into culture. Now, these conditions are realized in the technical ensembles employing machines that have a sufficient degree of indeterminacy. For man, the action of having to inter­vene as a mediator in this relation between machines grants him a situation of independence in which he can acquire a cultural vision of technical realities. … Only a situation in which there is a concrete link with machines and a responsibility toward them, but which is liberated vis-à-vis each one taken individually, can provide this serenity of having technical awareness. (159)

This perspective will not be achieved from a practical use of machines (governed by an instrumental “finality”), nor from the partial perspectives from below (viz., the workers) or above (owners, overseers, etc.):

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

However, there is not yet a “social place” or role corresponding to this mediating perspective; it would be that of the production planning engineer, except that this role is also, like those of the owners and workers, governed by the limitations of “finality.” So what is needed is—surprise!--a “psychologist” or “sociologist” of machines, “what we might call a mechanologist.”

He ends with a discussion of the relation of this mechanology to its precursor, cybernetics. Cybernetics is clearly a first step, full of promise, but hampered by several limitations, which is why it needs to be transcended. In passing, S criticizes Wiener’s simplistic opposition of information to noise [S having, in this chapter, identified information as being, rather, intermediate between form and chance] and for his faith in homeostasis [as opposed to S’s serrated evolution]. More importantly, S takes issue with Wiener’s pessimism, as W has mistakenly, and unsuccessfully, been trying to get cybernetic understanding into the minds of the powerful. S sagely advises:

For it is difficult to make philosophers kings and kings philosophers. It often hap­pens that philosophers who have become kings cease to be philosophers. The true mediation between technics and power cannot be individual. It can be realized only through the mediation of culture. For there is something that allows man to govern: the culture he has received; it is this culture that gives him significations and values; it is culture that governs man, even if this man in turn governs other men and machines. (161)

The power of culture comes from the “great mass” of the governed; power in this model flows upward, not downward from the elites. [This may sound at first like an almost anarchist or democratic sentiment, but it is rather that of the enlightened elite, who recognize the source of their power; cf. Ruskin.]

In a time when the development of technics was poor, the elaboration of culture by governed men was enough for the government to think the problems of the group as a whole: because it went from human group to human group via the government, the recurrence of causality and information was complete and accom­plished. But this is no longer true: the basis of culture is still exclusively human; it is elaborated by the group of men; however, having gone through government, it returns and applies itself to the human group on the one hand and to machines on the other: machines are ruled by a culture that has not been elaborated according to them, and from which they are absent; this culture is inadequate for them and does not represent them. (162)

So culture, as the source of power and of understanding, fails to prepare us for the technical reality of our age because it has not caught up. Machines have yet to be properly “represented” in culture the way humans are (e.g., in literature, as S discusses). Thus, the task of the mechanologist is to transform culture by means of this more accurate representation, and to do this they need to understand the essence of technicity, not via “inductive study” [which led the cyberneticists astray] but by “a direct examination of technicity according to a genetic method that must be attempted, by employing a philosophical method” (163).

Haworth, Michael, (2020) “Automating Art: Gilbert Simondon and the Possibility of Independently Creative Machines.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 7:1, 17-32.

Rantala, Juho; and Mirka Muilu, (2023) “Simondon, Control, and the Digital Domain.” Theory, Culture & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02632764231201337