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)

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 9

Summary of Chapter 9: Technology and its mediated use

Vaneigem’s summary:

Contrary to the interest of those who control its use, technology tends to demystify the world. The democratic reign of consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. At the same time, organisation – the technology of new technologies – deprives modern productive forces of their subversive and seductive qualities. Such organisation is simply the organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations weaken men by making themselves indispensable. A social mask conceals people and things, transforming them, in the present stage of privative appropriation, into dead things - into commodities. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social relationships. The shell of the old hierarchical society will be burst open from within by the cancerous expansion of its technical apparatus (2). (83)

The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilisations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in automated civilisations, where people are already dying of boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival sickness.

“Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration.” Machines are both perfectly intelligible, and miraculous.

this ambiguity is useful to the masters: old con about happy tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to justify the rational exploitation of people today. (84)

[Interestingly enough, both this phenomenon and its opposite are at play in the current AI hype. As Bender and Hanna (2025) point out, the “doomer” scenario also helps, by making AI seem more capable and important than it is.]

In his typically dense and wide-ranging manner, V runs through desanctification, liberalism, and fascism, all in one paragraph (with a nod to Ubu thrown in). The basic argument is that commodity culture has created the conditions for its own destruction, through general dissatisfaction and disenchantment.

Today the promises of the old society of production are raining down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody is likely to call manna from heaven. You can hardly believe in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people used to believe in productive forces. There is a certain hagiographical literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine much on the electric toothbrush.

He takes aim at the “cyberneticists” and their dream of a general science of organization transforming society; read today, it is easy to substitute the fantasies of Silicon Valley technocrats:

The first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed at Disneyland.

He contrasts the fantasies of the cyberneticists with the utopianism of Fourier, and foretells the failure of the former:

By laying the basis for a perfect power structure, the cyberneticians will only stimulate the perfection of its refusal. Their programming of new techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned to its own use by another kind of organisation. A revolutionary organisation. (85)

V’s summation of the dual alienations of production and consumption in the modern world contrasts and resonates with Simondon’s conclusion (covered recently):

It has been known for ages that the master uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective world, that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion of action in a real passivity and transform him into an essentially dependent being.

Again paralleling Simondon, he goes into the whole “technology-as-humanity’s-confrontation’with-nature” theme, and how this becomes superficial in a world in which everything is fake, including “nature.”

What we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialise it by liberating the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation, by snatching it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only at the end of a process of social disalienation will nature become a worthwhile opponent, in a society in which man’s creativity will not come up against man himself as the first obstacle to its expansion. (87)

Technocratic organization aims at a mastery it cannot achieve, and in its failure, will create the space for a revolutionary transformation of society.

But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. And cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of organisation will be laughed off the stage. (86)

Technological organisation cannot be destroyed from without. Its collapse will result from internal decay. Far from being punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power they would have a hard time staying there. (87)

Let us so hope!

Bender, Emily M.; and Hanna, Alex (2025) The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper-Collins, New York.

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

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Humiliation

This is the first of five chapters on “the mechanisms of attrition and destruction,” which render “participation” “impossible,” through “power” as a “sum of constraints." The five mechanisms are humiliation, isolation, suffering, work, and decompression.

V’s summary of this chapter:

The economy of daily life is based on a continual exchange of humiliations and aggressive attitudes. It conceals a technique of attrition itself prey to the gift of destruction which paradoxically it invites (1). Today, the more man is a social being, the more he is an object (2). Decolonisation has not yet begun (3). It will have to give a new value to the old principle of sovereignty (4). (29)

He begins with an example of Rousseau being ridiculed by villagers:

Aren’t most of the trivial incidents of daily life like this ridiculous adventure? But in an attenuated and diluted form, reduced to the duration of a step, a glance, a thought, experienced as a muffled impact, a fleeting discomfort barely registered by consciousness and leaving in the mind only a dull irritation at a loss to discover its own origin?

“Humiliation” for V is about the micropolitics of interpersonal interaction, microaggressions in particular, along with the “timid retreats, brutal attacks,” the  momentary failures and embarrassments which constitute the sort of war of everyday interaction in a meaningless society.

All we can do is enclose ourselves in embarrassing parentheses; like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which pick it up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious to conceal the infamy which they have consented to, assume an expression of utter indifference. (30)

There is an economy of insults: “From the point of view of constraint, daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.” He places this economy of insults in relation to the claimed victory of capitalism over the loss of a sense that the state socialisms formed any kind of real alternative. He calls for an economy of the gift to replace the stale and soulsucking capitalist model of exchange

In fact, a truly new reality can only be based on the principle of the gift. Despite their mistakes and their poverty, I see in the historical experience of workers’ councils (1917, 1921, 1934, 1956), and in the pathetic search for friendship and love, a single and inspiring reason not to despair over present “reality.” Everything conspires to keep secret the positive character of such experiences; doubt is cunningly main­tained as to their real importance, even their existence. By a strange oversight, no historian has ever taken the trouble to study how people actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary movements. (31)

There are two sides to the point he is making. On the one hand, the economic relations of life (exchange in capitalism, control in state socialism) are seen as entering into the logic of everyday interpersonal interaction, transforming it to match the image of society. At the same time, everyday life is more the engine of real revolution than the surface form of worker’s councils, etc. Even the “pathetic search for friendship and love” is of the same material or force as revolutionary actions. Cynicism about the importance of such yearnings plays a role in keeping everyone docile and accepting, because there is no alternative.

He celebrates the violence of anarchist terrorists, but also murderers like Lacenaire, etc. as the “concave form of the gift” motivated by rejection of “relationships based on exchange and compromise” and “hierarchical social community.” V does not agree with murder, but wants to seize the emotional passion and rejection that motivates murderers like Lacenaire. Revolutionary tactics must have collective attraction (not just radically individual like Ravachol, the Bonnot gang, etc.); they must “attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to kill or to kill themselves” (31-2).

No murderers – and no humanists either! The first accepts death, the second imposes it. Let ten people meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the agony of survival; from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of daily life. (32)

[Propaganda by the deed] is effective in that it exposes the workings of power:

Hierarchical social organ­isation is like a gigantic racket whose secret, exposed precisely by anarchist terrorism, is to place itself out of reach of the violence it gives rise to, by consuming everybody’s energy in a multitude of irrelevant struggles.

The uneasiness of handshakes, of eye contact:

When our eyes meet someone else’s they become uneasy, as if they could make out their own empty, soulless reflection in the other person's pupils. Hardly have they met when they slip aside and try to dodge one another; their lines of flight cross at an invisible point, making an angle whose width expresses the divergence, the deeply­ felt lack of harmony. (33)

A whole ethic based on exchange value, the pleasures of business, the dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival and on their opposites, pure value, gratuitousness, parasitism, instinctive brutality and death: this is the filthy tub that human faculties have been bubbling in for nearly two centuries. From these ingredients -refined a little of course – the cyberneticians are dreaming of cooking up the man of the future. (33-4)

[This is one of several references to “cyberneticians” planning a future perfect society, perhaps what he means when he says capitalism will end in a planned economy, that would put the paltry Soviet model to shame.]

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object. Once understood as such, it becomes the basis for a combative lucidity in which the critique of the organisation of life cannot be separated from the immediate inception of the project of living differently. Construc­tion can begin only on the foundation of individual despair and its transcendence; the efforts made to disguise this despair and pass it off under another wrapper are proof enough of this, if proof were needed. (34)

He then adds:

What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration of values, the ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?

The link between humiliation and this question is objectification: the illusion is happiness—not yours, because you aren’t happy—but that of others, whom you suspect to be happy, and envy.

To define oneself by reference to others is to perceive oneself as other. And the other is always object. Thus life is measured in degrees of humiliation. The more you choose your own humiliation, the more you ‘live’ the more you live the orderly life of things. Here is the cunning of reification, the means whereby it passes undetected, like arsenic in the jam. (34-5)

So being envious of others turns you into an object (you self-objectify), and you thus become a thing. This is the “gentle” oppression of the [post-modern liberal-capitalist state]:

The gentleness of these methods of oppression throws a certain light on the perversion which prevents me from shouting out "The emperor has no clothes" each time my sovereignty over daily life is exposed in all its poverty. (35)

So “My Sovereignty” is perhaps the illusion of agency or heroism, or whatever the belief in the subject is or that it should have (the dream of real liberation or individual sovereignty a la Stirner), but in capitalism, there is only a mockery, a shadow version. Would shouting about the nakedness of “the emperor” (which is you, but in third person, or “your sovereignty” separated from you and treated like an object) be some dialectic of separating the objectified self, of disarticulating the abstract subject? The subject of the statement being separated from the subject of enunciation? In any event he feels this shock of humiliation and objectification is one the one hand the effective means of oppression, but also a first step to the development of [critique] and [the whole master-servant dialectic of liberation].

The new-style police are already with us, waiting to take over. Psychosoci­ological cops have need neither of truncheons nor of morgues. Oppressive violence is about to be transformed into a host of equitably distributed pinpricks. (35)

Humanism is taken to task as more of a [loyal opposition] than a real challenge, and itself a pacifying illusion. He returns to the point that even apparently superficial or minor humiliations and angers are in fact important, perhaps moreso than those that are supposed to me most significant:

There are no negligible irritations: gangrene can start in the slightest graze. The crises that shake the world are not fundamentally different from the conflict in which my actions and thoughts confront the hostile forces that entangle and deflect  them.

Sooner or later the continual division and re-division of aggravations will split the atom of unlivable reality and liberate a nuclear energy which nobody suspected behind so much passivity and gloomy resignation. That which produces the common good is always terrible. (35-6)

Colonialism has played a role as a useful enemy for the left, as an acknowledged evil they can criticize without being able to actually do anything about:

FROM 1945 to 1960, colonialism was a fairy godmother to the left. With a new enemy on the scale of fascism, the left never had to define itself (there was nothing there); it was able to affirm itself by negating something else. In this way it was able to accept itself as a thing, part of an order of things in which things are everything and nothing. (36)

After the “end of colonialism” (which is just a change of stance, since it has not ended). the left has turned to anti-racism, etc.; but V dismisses these concerns as just phenomena of humiliation, which is the core of it all.

Aime Cesaire made a famous remark: “The bourgeoisie has found itself unable to solve the major problems which its own existence has produced: the colonial problem and the problem of the proletariat.” He forgot to add: “For they are one and the same problem, a problem which anyone who separates them will fail to understand.” (37)

On the subject of “sovereignty” he makes a Stirneresque/Nietzschian sort of argument (reminiscent also of the debate on kings in For Whom the Bell Tolls):

Today France contains twenty-four million mini-kings, of which the greatest - the bosses - are great only in their ridiculousness. The sense of respect has become degraded to the point where the right to humiliate is all that it demands. Democratised into public functions and roles, the monar­chic principle floats belly up, like a dead fish: only its most repulsive aspect is visible. Its will to be absolutely and unreservedly superior has disappeared.  Instead of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we try to base our sovereignty on other people's lives. The manners of slaves. (37)

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter One: Genesis of the technical object: the process of concretization

From previous experience with Simondon I expected him to be very dense and hard to follow, but at least in this chapter he was not. He comes straight at you with his precise and distinct terminology (“concretization,” “individualization,” etc.) but always provides definitions for his terms, often multiple times. Much of the chapter is taken up with detailed description of diodes, tetrodes, and so on, which the reader can either 1) follow, if they understand it, or 2) ahem, sort of glaze over it, and wait for him to get around to saying, “and the moral is...,” which he reliably does. The chapter is also handily divided into four sections, each of which makes its own basic argument.

I. – The abstract technical object and the concrete technical object. Concretization is the process of change from the abstract technical object to the concrete (or more concrete) one. Abstraction corresponds at the same time to the representation of an engine (for example) on a blackboard as it is explained to students (27), and to the “primitive” stage of technology in the system of artisanal production. Each of the elements of the engine, in the abstract stage, performs one particular function, and there is no cohesion as a whole:

In the old engine each element intervenes at a certain moment in the cycle, and then is expected no longer to act upon the other elements; the pieces of the engine are like people who work together, each in their own turn, but who do not know each other.

The abstract machine, with these separately acting parts, is inefficient in that certain possibilities are unexplored, and also because the different parts cause various kinds of interference, etc. so that they have to develop “defense structures” to protect their own zone against the action of the other parts. In contrast, the concrete machine is illustrated by cooling fins, which originally had performed the sole purpose of cooling, but have evolved to also add strength to the cylinder head, allowing for a lighter, thinner construction; “this unique structure is not a compromise, but a concomitance and a convergence” (28). The elements of the concrete machine thus play multiple functions as part of the same machine, interacting with other parts in unison or cooperation, instead of each playing their own separate functions.

In outlining the process of concretization, as machines become more concrete, S is opposing the idea of simply categorizing them according to species and genera, and also to taking some given object, frozen in time, as the form in itself.

The gasoline engine is not this or that engine given in time and space, but the fact that there is a succession, a continuity that runs through the first engines to those we currently know and which are still evolving. (26)

To understand machines, then, we need to understand them as moments of this process of concretization.

II. – Conditions of technical evolution. “Technical evolution” and concretization are about fulfilling potentials that are already existent in the technical object or technology; thus, “it is not the production-line that produces standardization, but rather the intrinsic standardization that allows for the production-line to exist” (29). There are two points being made here. First, S is distinguishing between “extrinsic” causes and internal causes, as factors shaping the evolution of objects; his point is that “internal necessity” is the more important. Secondly, he is arguing that concretization tends to reveal or approach the essence of the object, which is that underlying, “intrinsic standardization” which replaces the “made-to-measure” variation of the artisanal era. Hence, the development from artisanal production to industrial production is driven by concretization, and a better understanding of a more evolved and “coherent” technical object (or system of technical objects). He gives the example of a customized automobile; this will, in its essence, be the same as any other automobile as far as the important parts are concerned, all that will be different are unimportant, superficial aspects: “what can be made to measure are inessential aspects, because they are contingent” (30). Too much of this frivolity can even hurt the car and make it less functional: “The made-to-measure aspect is not only inessential, it goes against the essence of the technical being, it is like a dead weight being attached from the outside.” This again ties back to the contrast between extrinsic causes (adding dead weight) and intrinsic functioning (which which the development of the machine approaches its essence).

Not unlike Wiener, Simondon seems to view capitalism, not as a key factor in modern industrial production, but as a somewhat unfortunate delusion or add-on, which complicates things frivolously, interfering with the serious work of engineers and scientists. He contrasts “economic constraints” (extrinsic) and “technical requirements” (intrinsic) in the development of technology, and notes that “it is mostly within the domains where technical constraints prevail over economic constraints (aviation, military equipment), that become the most active sites for progress” (31). [Yet somehow the presence of war, and of the State as a funding agent (removing in wartime, as in the cold war development of the computer, etc. the issue of “economic constraints” so that “technical constraints” can be explored) is not itself to be considered as an “extrinsic” factor? What would Virilio interject here?] “Economic causes are not pure, they interfere with a diffuse network of motivations and preferences that attenuate or even reverse them (a taste for luxury, … taste for very apparent novelty, commercial propaganda)” to the extent that “the technical object is known through social myths or fads in public opinion.” This results in irrational (and non-concretizing) design decisions influenced by marketers and the need to always project an image of novelty. His example is the elimination of a hand-crank as a backup way to start a car; this elimination actually involves making the engine more complicated, and is thus an unnecessary complication, not an improvement; yet the lack of a crank is presented as new, and a “nuance of ridicule is thus projected onto other cars” which continue to have cranks. “The automobile, a technical object charged with psychic and social inferences, is not suitable for technical progress” (32); the auto becomes a kind of technological leech, borrowing developments from less fettered domains, instead of being the site of development itself.

S outlines his arguably [saltationist] view of technological evolution, wherein concretization is not a continuous process, but proceeds through “successive systems of coherence,” “due to the progressive perfection of details resulting from experience and use”:

the play of limits, whose overcoming constitutes progress, resides in the incompatabilities that arise from the progressive saturation of the system of sub-ensembles… (32, emphasis in original)

“Saturation” will be discussed later in the chapter, but it seems to basically mean the filling out of the potentials of the technical object. The primitive technical object is non-saturated, because its possible lines of development and improvement remain abstract, unfulfilled. Saturation is thus part of the process of concretization but not identical with it, as it also leads to “incompatibilities” within each “system of coherence,” which need to be resolved by evolution to a new stage.

It is important that these difficulties get resolved rather than merely avoided (33), the latter of which involves the insertion of new palliative elements in a misguided attempt, a reversal to abstract thinking. “Genuine progress” involves stabilizing functioning without adding new structures: “The adjunction of a supplementary structure only constitutes genuine progress for the technical object if this structure incorporates itself concretely into the totality [ensemble] of dynamical schemas of functioning” (35).

The term axiomatic is used: “the dynamic system closes in on itself just as an axiomatic saturates” (36). According to Barthélémy’s glossary, “In Simondon, this notion does not designate a formal system as in the case of logico-mathematical axiomatics, but simply a set of principles, or first propositions, that enable the linking of fundamental concepts” (Barthélémy, 2012: 208). The axiomatic thus relates to what will be called later the “essence” of the technical object, and its working-out through concretization. The distinction between abstract and concrete is revisited, with a clear articulation:

in the abstract technical object, [each structure] only fulfills one essential and positive function, integrated into the functioning of the ensemble; in the concrete technical object, all the functions fulfilled by the structure are positive, essential, and integrated into the functioning of the whole; the marginal consequences of the functioning, eliminated or attenuated in the abstract technical object by corrective measures, become stages or positive aspects in the concrete object... (39)

S turns to the subject of “universal scientific knowledge,” which appears to be the sum total of scientific understanding at a given point in history (?). “The difference between the technical object and the physico-chemical system studied as an object only resides within the imperfection of the sciences,” a presaging of a later point he will make at the end of the chapter, regarding mechanology as a science that studies technical objects, the way physics, etc., study natural objects. The imperfection of scientific knowledge is linked to the unfinalizability of the process of concretization: “the technical object is never fully known; for this reason it is never fully concrete;” basically, concretization does not come to a conclusion, it simply continues endlessly (“unless it happens through a rare chance occurrence”).

There could have been a nice little debate between Braverman and Simondon over the role of science in the development of technology: S states that concretization is a “narrowing of the interval that separates the sciences and technology” (40), with the primitive artisanal stage showing a wide gap, and the industrial stage a narrower one. “The construction of a determinate technical object can only become industrial when this object has become concrete,” linking back to the earlier argument that the production line is made possible by “intrinsic standardization,” not standardization by the production line.

III. – The rhythm of technical progress; continuous and minor improvements; discontinuous and major improvements. The point of this section is to distinguish between major improvements, which “modify the distribution of functions, increasing the synergy of functioning in an essential way,” and minor improvements, which “without modifying this distribution, diminish the nocuous consequences of residual antagonisms” (42). The former constitute true progress towards concretization, but the latter “obstruct major improvements, because they mask the technical object’s true imperfections” with incomplete and temporary solutions which will need to be swept away for the next stage of coherence to be reached. “The path of minor improvements is one of detours” (43); they “hide behind a pile of complex palliatives” and “entertain a false consciousness of continuous progress” which is demanded by the “false novelty” of commerce and the market, not by the actual, discontinuous progress of actual concretization. The latter only occurs in “leaps,” in the form of “mutations.”

IV. – Absolute origin of the technical lineage. Simondon now raises the question as to whether an origin can be determined, as to when the progress of any technical object actually began. To be honest, I assumed the answer would be a resounding no, because of the antipathy of later scholars influenced by Simondon (viz., Deleuze and Guattari) to the idea of origins. However, Simondon is quite happy to talk about origins, and of essences to boot. So, the answer is yes, and he gives the example of the invention of the first diode as the “absolute beginning” that contained the technical essence of all the later inventions which would develop on, yet share the “technical essence” of, the diode (the technical essence of which is “assymetrical conductance” (45)). S reiterates a point he had made back at the beginning of the chapter, that it is not the context of use that determines the essence of the technical object, because often an object with a completely different history of development could be substituted, or an object can be adopted to a new use. Instead, it is the lineage of objects sharing this “pure schema of functioning” which form the technical object over time, as an object of mechanological study. The non-saturation of the initial invention gives it “fecundity,” meaning a large progeny or posterity of inventions that will proceed down the path of greater saturation. He defines technical essence:

A technical essence can be recognized by the fact that it remains stable across the evolving lineage, and not only stable, but also productive of structures and functions through internal development and progressive saturation ….” (46)

There is a lot of use of language I can’t help but think of as mystifying/fetishizing, after the manner of Marx’s wooden table that creates itself instead of being created by human labor: “the technical object alters and changes its structure,” it “evolves by generating a family.” He is of course trying to emphasize how this path of development is not due (or not due solely) to the chance whims or insights of human inventors and tinkerers (as could perhaps have been said for the artisanal era), but unfolds according to its own intrinsic causality, or essence. But when he calls this “natural technical evolution,” this sounds a lot like one of those schemes of cultural evolution which, though modeled on the status and model of the theory of evolution by natural selection, share one major difference from it, which is that the latter is completely non-teleological. For all Simondon’s numerous disagreements with Aristotle, it is interesting that he here seems to clearly adopt a concept like that of telos, to the extent that the technical object develops, in accordance with its intrinsic essence, from abstract to concrete, in much the same way as Aristotle’s acorn becomes an oak tree.

He concludes the chapter by showing how the previous discussion is meant to ground the proposed science of mechanology, and improve upon the insights of the cyberneticists. “Concretization gives the technical object an intermediate place between the natural object and the scientific representation,” (49), i.e., between the natural world and abstract knowledge. Natural objects have an inherent coherence; concretized technical objects also have a coherence, although this has been developed over time, yet this means the concretized technical object “comes closer to the mode of existence of natural objects” than does the primitive object or scientific abstraction. He tangents into an interesting discussion of artificiality, how, for example, a greenhouse plant that has been modified to produce flowers but no fruit counts as an artificial, not a natural object, in a path of development which is the opposite of that of concretization: “Artificialization is a process of abstraction within the artificial object.”

In any event, “By existing, [concretized technical objects] prove the viability and stability of a certain structure that has the same status as a natural structure,” because obviously made possible by natural laws, even if they had to be brought into existence through human invention instead of being found in nature (50). This is what makes them fitting objects of mechanology. However, it is important to understand that these technical objects are still distinct from natural objects, and particularly from living beings. This is the heart of his disagreement with Wiener and the cyberneticists, who reasoned by analogy from automata to posit that machines and living creatures are all simply types of self-regulating systems. (Simondon is also against this kind of reasoning by “external” analogy). Cybernetics is “partially inefficient as an inter-scientific study” due to its “initial postulate concerning the identity between living beings and self-regulating technical objects” (51). However, this is to confuse natural objects, which “are concrete to begin with,” with technical objects which only become so through the process of concretization, and the study of this process itself (rather than jumping to the end and treating them like natural objects) needs to be part of their study.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Introduction

Gilbert Simondon (2017 [1958]), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Summary of Introduction (and other prefatory matter)

Simondon lays out his agenda, which is “introducing a knowledge into culture that is adequate to technical objects” (xv). S sees culture largely in terms of a regulatory function:

a culture establishes regulatory communication among those who share that culture; arising from the life of the group, culture animates the gestures of those who ensure the command functions, by providing norms and schemas. (19)

The problem is that our cultural vision of technical objects is outdated, and needs to be brought up to date. However, certain illusions or prejudices prevent this from happening. “Culture is unbalanced” because while some objects (viz. aesthetic objects) are privileged, others, in particular technical objects, are seen as only having a “utility function.” A false opposition is set up between “man and machine” (15), which results in two somewhat diametrically opposed misconceptions. The first is misoneism, or fear of the new; S asserts this is really a rejection of the foreignness which the machine is mistaken as; in reality, the machine is “the stranger in which something human is locked up, misunderstood, materialized, enslaved, and yet which nevertheless remains human all the same” (16).

The opposite error is technofetishism, which, failing to find a proper way to understand the technical object, comes to treat it as a sacred object. S has some choice words for this “idolatry of the machine,” and its associated “technocratic aspiration to unconditioned power”:

The man who wants to dominate his peers calls the android machine into being. He thus abdicates before it and delegates his humanity to it. He seeks to construct a thinking machine, dreams of being able to build a volition machine, a living machine, in order to retreat behind it without anxiety, freed of all danger, exempt from all feelings of weakness, and triumphant through the mediation of what he invented.

However, this machine-as-substitute for the human, which Simondon terms the robot, is a myth, a mere illusion: “the robot does not exist.” Both those who celebrate it and keep trying to bring it to life, and those who fear it and its presumed “hostile intentions toward man” (17) are mistaken based on their respective misunderstandings of the mode of existence of technical objects.

S bases this argument in part on a distinction between automatism and the margin of indeterminacy. Automatism he sees as a closed system, in which a machine completes a predesignated task without any further input. Such a closed system “must sacrifice a number of possibilities of operation as well as numerous possible usages.” In contrast, the margin of indeterminacy is the openness of the machine to outside information. Part of his point is thus that automation limits, rather than fully enabling, the productive and progressive capacities of machines. There is presumably a continuum between relative automatism and relative openness; otherwise S’s terminology would have a hard time accounting for modern machine learning, etc. In any event the openness or margin of indeterminacy of machines are what makes machines amenable to interconnection or communication between machines, which S calls an ensemble; he imagines humans as necessarily involved in the management and operation of these by humans, as the “permanent organizer” (17) and “interpreter” (18). Simondon appears to take for granted that there will necessarily always be a ["human in the loop."]

S goes through several subject positions, arguing why each is incapable of coming up with a new and more accurate “awareness of technical reality,” to disseminate into the culture: workers who work with machines, managers who oversee them, and technically-oriented scientists are all dismissed. What is needed is a social scientist, someone who will be like “a sociologist or psychologist of machines” (19). Simondon thus proposes the new science of mechanology, the goals of which will be to remove the man-machine divide as a source of alienation, and restore the regulatory function of culture in regard to machines. This will be done through an exploration of the three “levels” of technical objects: element, individual, and ensemble (20). An understanding of these three levels corresponds to stages in the historical development of modern technology:

1. The level of element does not cause anxiety; it corresponds to the “climate of eighteenth century optimism, and the idea of constant progress or technical improvement.” Tools apparently fall under this category; “man had centralized technical individuality within himself at a time when only tools existed” (21).

2. The individual level, however, “becomes for a certain time the adversary of man, his competitor” (21). Unlike the tool, the machine replaces the human worker. This goes along with a [dominant ideology] with a ‘dramatic and impassioned notion of progress, which turns into the rape of nature, the conquest of the world, and the exploitation of energies.” With this last, White’s Law or the Kardashev scale spring to mind, though S goes on to locate this ideology in “the technophile and technocratic excesses of the thermodynamic era,” and it is not clear from his usage here if that refers to the 19^th century industrial revolution only, or refers to that as a sort of foundational era on which the present is premised. [Because surely this “rape of nature” is still ongoing!].

3. Ensembles come into existence in the 20^th century, and the supplanting of the “thermodynamic energeticism” of the previous level is replaced by information theory [and cybernetics]; it seems that the proper mode of understanding of this level is yet to come, through the success of mechanology, and the spread of its insights through the education system.

So to provisionally summarize, we as a culture understand the first level, but are stuck there; we misunderstand the second level, resulting in all kinds of alienation, anxiety, and environmental destruction; finally, we have not yet (as of S’s writing, in 1958) grasped or adequately imagined the final level of the ensemble. The point of mechanology is to get us there:

The machine, as an element of the technical ensemble, becomes that which increases the quantity of information, increases negentropy, and opposes the degradation of energy; the machine, being a work of organization and information, is like life itself and together with life, that which is opposed to disorder, to the leveling of all things tending to deprive the universe of the power of change. The machine is that through which man fights against the death of the universe; it slows down the degradation of energy, as life does, and becomes a stabilizer of the world.

Reputedly this book is in part a rejoinder to Wiener’s writings, and we can see here the same theme of life as order, opposed to death as disorder. There is also the same anxiety regarding this whole “death of the universe;" ironically, given that S’s critique of technofetishism evoked a certain anxiety of the alienated technophile to create a robot to hide behind. The difference appears to be not that the anxiety has been resolved, but that it has become collective (“man” and “universe” as opposed to selfish individual subjects), and that it is based on an accurate understanding of the three levels. So far, many of the concerns and issues which S promises to address are strikingly relevant to the current day, and now and then it is easy to forget that this book was written in the 1950s.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam

This concluding chapter starts off with a promising idea: Wiener states that he will explore the “philosophical assumptions” underlying the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and Roman Jakobson. However, he ends up making no more than passing reference to these two, namely that:

They consider communication to be a game played in partnership by the speaker and the listener against the forces of confusion, represented by the ordinary difficulties of communication and by some supposed individuals attempting to jam the communication. (187)

[Another thing: Based on the title of the chapter I was really hoping W was going to use the word “jam” in some jazzy/beatnik-derived sense, which would have been adorable and also refreshing. “Jam” in that sense could have been an opening for a positive sense of entropy and/or disorder as something creative, which W is lacking.]

This is based on Von Neumann’s game theory, in which one team tries to communicate a message, and the other tries to “jam” it. He then makes the point that, strictly speaking, in Von Neumann’s theory of games, both sides are pursuing rationally optimal strategies; they will not “bluff” to confuse each other, but are being in a sense perfectly honest and open, despite being opposed. He relates this to a quote from Einstein: “God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.” (188)

The point being that, unlike humans, nature is not deceitful. This means that scientists, used to studying nature, are naïve out of necessity. Scientists are not like detectives, a kind of thinking which has its role in other fields, e.g., “official and military science.” This kind of thinking is counterproductive in actual science, as it is a waste of time:

I have not the slightest doubt that the present detective-mindedness of the lords of scientific administration is one of the chief reasons for the barrenness of so much present scientific work. (189)

[whatever “barrenness” means]

Thus, a position of being overly “suspicious” like a detective makes you no good at science, because scientists have to trust that nature is honest, not deceitful. [He does not address this, but his odd anthropomorphizing stance must break down when it comes to the social sciences, which study humans, who can be deceitful.]Another kind of position that is bad for science is the “religious soldier,” who is a follower of propaganda of either the right or the left (he singles out “the soldier of the Cross, or of the Hammer and Sickle” (190)).

He ties this back to his earlier distinction between Augustinian and Manichaean perceptions of the devil: the first is just a force of nature, in the service of God (and thus equivalent to entropy in his worldview). The second is willfully malicious and in fact has some chance or belief in the chance that it can prevail (like Milton’s Satan). Scientists need to maintain an Augustinian view, but this is difficult because

The Augustinian position has always been difficult to maintain. It tends under the slightest perturbation to break down into a covert Manichaeanism. (191)

This is because Manichaeanism has more emotional and dramatic attraction; and also because Manichaeanists of the right and left create political conditions which they force upon scientists.

In this present day when almost every ruling force, whether on the right or on the left, asks the scientist for conformity rather than openness of mind, it is easy to understand how science has already suffered, and what further debasements and frustrations of science are to be expected in the future. (190)

A Manichaean suspects the world of being dishonest, and so adopts dishonest strategies in turn; this is obviously not good for science and the search for truth. There is an irony that the world created by these Manichaean faiths undermines the possibility of faith, which requires the existence of free choice. Science requires its own form of faith:

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the accept­ance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. (193)

The needs of science, and of a free and democratic society, necessarily dovetail:

Sci­ence is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a com­munity which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 10

Summary of Chapter 10: Some Communication Machines and Their Future

Whereas the last chapter was about automata replacing workers, this one will address “a variety of problems concerning automata,” more specifically, automata of three categories: 1) some which “serve either to illustrate and throw light on the possibilities of communicative mechanisms in gen­eral,” 2) a few which serve as “the prosthesis and replacement of human functions which have been lost or weakened in certain unfortunate individuals,” and finally 3) those with a more sinister potential (163).

He discusses his tropism machine, called alternately the Moth or the Bedbug depending on whether it has been programmed to seek or avoid light; this has been developed to illustrate the role of competing types of feedback in the tremors of people with Parkinson’s. [There is a website with photos and discussion.]

Such machines may appear to be “exercises in virtuosity” (167) but they have been actually useful to a degree; there is another class of machines which provide more direct health benefits: better prostheses, readers for the blind, etc. He discusses his idea for a machine to communicate language using touch, as better than visible speech; (the so-called “hearing glove” which was apparently later tried with Helen Keller, but did not meet with much success).

Wiener gives a cybernetic three-stage description of “language,” by which he means speech (168-9; cf. Chapter 4). He notes that “deaf-mutes” can easily learn lip reading, but speak harshly and this is “inefficient.”

The difficulties lie in the fact that for these people the act of conversation has been broken into two entirely separate parts. (170)

He discusses this in relation to the “sidetone” feedback of hearing one’s own voice in telephony, and also to the Vocoder speech synthesizer by Bell, which greatly reduces the information in human speech but is still understandable and recognizable, leading to a distinction between “used and unused information in speech:”

When we distinguish between used and unused in­formation in speech, we distinguish between the maximum coding capacity of speech as received by the ear, and the maximum capacity that penetrates through the cascade network of successive stages con­sisting of the ear followed by the brain. (172)

The reduction of information in the message is necessary to be able to transfer the information from the medium of speech through “an inferior sense like touch.”

From this point on, the chief direction of investigation must be that of the more thorough training of deaf-mutes in the recogni­tion and the reproduction of sounds. (173)

[In other words, his focus is on getting “deaf-mutes” to be able to speak more clearly; basically to invent a device to assimilate them to the speaking population, rather than using sign language (which he has not mentioned as a fascinating alternative medium, which loses certain capacities of speech but opens up many more).]

He gives the example of an artificial lung which uses “the nor­mal feedback in the medulla and brain stem of the healthy person will be used even in the paralytic to supply the control of his breathing. Thus it is hoped, that the so-called iron lung may no longer be a prison in which the patient forgets how to breathe, but will be an exerciser for keeping his residual faculties of breathing active, and even possibly of building them up to a point where he can breathe for himself and emerge from the machinery enclosing him.” (174)

He now turns to more sinister machines, beginning with his own idea for a chess machine, and discusses the limited possibilities of chess machines in his day: one that could plan two steps ahead was thought of as optimal, the idea of creating an actually perfect or good player was “hopeless.”

The number of combinations increases roughly in geometrical pro­gression. Thus the difference between playing out all possibilities for two moves and for three moves is enor­mous. To play out a game—something like fifty moves— is hopeless in any reasonable time. (175)

The problem is the slowness; Shannon has an idea to take the game further than two moves, but it would probably get slower and slower (and not make the time limits in the rules). Its play would be “stiff and uninteresting” but possibly good, and chance could be introduced to prevent humans from beating it methodically.

Though we have seen that machines can be built to learn, the technique of building and employing these machines is still very imperfect. (177)

He makes a comment that now seems prescient in regard to various recent chat AIs which turned racist, etc.:

A chess-playing machine which learns might show a great range of performance, dependent on the quality of the players against whom it had been pitted. The best way to make a master machine would probably be to pit it against a wide variety of good chess players. On the other hand, a well-contrived machine might be more or less ruined by the injudicious choice of its opponents. A horse is also ruined if the wrong riders are allowed to spoil it. (177)

[Though on stating this it occurs to me that I am treating racism the same way as I have accused Wiener of doing, as an irrational anomaly rather than as a central part of the functioning of social inequality.]

He notes two kinds of learning machines, those characterized by preference (“a statistical preference for a certain sort of behavior, which nevertheless admits the possibility of other behavior”) or by constraint (“certain features of its behavior may be rigidly and unalterably deter­mined”). [And the chess playing machine he mentions would be a hybrid of these, with the rules programmed in as constraints, but still learning “tactics and policies” through preference.]

Shannon has already pointed out the potential military applications of such learning machines, as has a Dominican priest Dubarle, in a review of Wiener’s Cybernetics. Wiener quotes Dubarle at length regarding the possible misuse of a machine à gouverner. Dubarle makes a point that machines can only understand human behavior through probability:

At all events, human realities do not admit a sharp and certain determination, as numerical data of computa­tion do. They only admit the determination of their prob­able values. A machine to treat these processes, and the problems which they put, must therefore undertake the sort of probabilistic, rather than deterministic thought, such as is exhibited for example in modern computing machines. (179)

The machines à gouv­erner will define the State as the best-informed player at each particular level; and the State is the only su­preme co-ordinator of all partial decisions. These are enormous privileges; if they are acquired scientifically, they will permit the State under all circumstances to beat every player of a human game other than itself by offering this dilemma : either immediate ruin, or planned co-operation.

[This is] the adventure of our century: hesitation between an indefinite turbulence of human affairs and the rise of a prodigious Leviathan. In comparison with this, Hobbes’ Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are run­ning the risk nowadays of a great World State, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. (180)

Dubarle’s somewhat weak proposal in response:

Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters.

Wiener notes that the machine itself would not be all-powerful (because “too crude and imperfect”) but would enable those who control it to become so:

or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and in­different to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. (181)

[or as it turns out so far, corporations focused only on manipulating partial identities for profit.]

The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that character­izes the human situation. The dominance of the ma­chine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state.

He provides an interesting reflection on how this sort of philosophical possibility becomes the foundation of a non-technological (per se) way of thinking in the context of the cold war:

A sort of machine à gouverner is thus now essentially in operation on both sides of the world con­flict, although it does not consist in either case of a single machine which makes policy, but rather of a mechanistic technique which is adapted to the exigen­cies of a machine-like group of men devoted to the formation of policy. (182)

Wiener echoes Dubarle’s call for getting some kinder, gentler experts in on the decision-making:

In order to avoid the manifold dangers of this, both external and internal, he is quite right in his emphasis on the need for the anthropologist and the philosopher. In other words, we must know as scientists what man’s nature is and what his built-in purposes are, even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him.

[And so, the Macy conferences. But isn’t it this very, Dewey-esque or Kerr-esque view of the university/scholarly world that is currently dissolving, the idea that somehow the humanists and social scientists (and Dubarle perhaps hoped, the theologians) would temper the excesses of the technocrats?]

He emphasizes that “the machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it,” and distinguishes between “know-how” and “know-what:”

Our papers have been making a great deal of Amer­ican “know-how” ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know­-what” by which we determine not only how to accom­plish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. (183)

Again, the problem is not actual exploitation or capitalism or anything like that per se, but a lack of sense of direction in where we want to develop technology, or thoughts on how it will actually affect the world (and this appears today in the “Oops, our bad” discourse on the accidental side effects of ChatGPT, art generators, etc.). Wiener turns to the lessons of fairy tales (e.g., you find a bottle with a genie in it, leave the genie in the bottle and don’t make wishes) as illustrations of “the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess” and which Americans need to learn (183-4). The myth of Prometheus serves as an example of the ambivalent attitude of the ancient Greeks toward technology, which we moderns could learn from.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. It is a dangerous world, in which there is no security, save the somewhat negative one of humility and restrained ambitions. (184)

If a man with this tragic sense approaches, not fire, but another manifestation of original power, like the splitting of the atom, he will do so with fear and trembling. He will not leap in where angels fear to tread, unless he is prepared to accept the punishment of the fallen angels. Neither will he calmly transfer to the machine made in his own image the responsi­bility for his choice of good and evil, without con­tinuing to accept a full responsibility for that choice.

Modern Americans, lacking a sense of “know-what,” continually get trapped by their blind faith in technology. He compares intelligent machines to two kinds of fairy-tale device, the magical monkey’s paw (which is always very literal-minded), and the genie in the bottle (which is mercurial and disinterested in human happiness). The former is the more constrained and thus literal device; the latter the kind which learns through preference. “For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind” (185).

Moving beyond literal machines, he returns to the point he had made earlier about the dangerous rise of machine-like organization and thinking in the Twentieth Century:

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human be­ings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to ma­chines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right an­swers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. (185-6)

He ends with another reference to evil, perhaps meant to help accustom American readers to a “tragic” mindset:

The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. (186)