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)

Writing And Identity, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Writer Identity on the agenda in theory and in practice.

In this concluding chapter Ivanič sums up the “so what?” of her work, and lays out suggestions for further explorations along the same lines. Her contribution toward an understanding of writer identity is relevant to two main “agendas:” theorizing writing in general, and the teaching and learning of academic writing, in particular. Though her study has honed in on a particular type of writer in a particular type of setting, it could be usefully applied in a wide range of other contexts, to other populations of writers.

Much of the chapter reiterates important concepts and key points made in the rest of the book, chapter by chapter, and indeed could be used as a basic outline of the text. She also lists concepts and questions that she has not pursued, which could usefully orient future research. Citing bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she advocates a liberatory, [Freirean] pedagogy, listing four “criteria” for research and practice: 1) relevance (to writer-learners), 2) explanatory power, 3) accessibility, and emancipatory power (336-7). “Such a pedagogy is founded on a view of learners as intellectuals, as researchers, and as active participants in social struggles, not just passively receiving knowledge and advice,” but learning writing as a tool for “their own emancipatory and transformatory action (337-8).

“Writing is not a neutral ‘skill,’ but a socio-political act of identification” (345). “The fact that we are putting ourselves on the line in a relatively non-negotiable way is one of the things that makes writing difficult.” [It is interesting in this context to consider how this description of writing aligns with a disciplinary regime; how does this change in the current, increasingly post-disciplinary context? Assuredly, one attraction of the automated plagiarism we see today is that the “writer” can avoid “putting themselves on the line.” Throughout the book, we have seen students wrestling with academic discourse and working to choose how much to accommodate to, what to internalize, and what to resist; now they can simply push a button and Copilot (etc.) will “rewrite” their text in any desired style or “mood.”

Ivanič has earlier shown great empathy with struggling writers, and reasserts her own ideas (from chapter 4) for how plagiarism should be addressed, not as a crime, but as a (misguided?) attempt to identify with the academic community (330).

I have often had the experience myself of not being able to find the right words for what I want to write, and then realizing that it is not so much a problem of the meaning I want to convey as a problem of what impression of myself I want to convey. (336)

This passage perfectly summarizes the tension in the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B,” between the white teacher’s confident assertion

let that page come out of you— 

Then, it will be true. 

And the black narrator’s response,

I wonder if it's that simple?

since for this writer, the question of how his writing will be received and the “impression of myself I want to convey” cannot be backgrounded. In any event this sort of anxiety is what Grammarly and other “word-smoothers” feed off of, “correcting” the text into a blandly acceptable form. Just type up that text that came “out of you,” then hit this button and the text will be white.

Swindell et al., Against Automated Education

 

Swindell, Andrew; Luke Greeley, Antony Farag, and Bailey Verdone (2024), “Against Artificial Education: Towards an Ethical Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use in Education” Online Learning 28(2), 7-27.

Summary:

This interesting article argues for an ethical framework drawing on the work of Gunther Anders, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Benjamin Bloom (actually, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy), and Hannah Arendt. In the event, Anders, Foucault, and Freire are discussed briefly for broader ethical context, but the main focus of the article is the addition of an ethical dimension to Bloom’s Taxonomy using Arendt’s hierarchy of labor, work, and action.

They apply this to the actually existing use of AI by imagining this, frankly, quite likely scenario:

Let’s consider an example of how AI might be used with current GPT technology in a classroom. A journalist, under pressure to produce more consumable content for its struggling publication, uses a GPT to write a story about the benefits and costs of electrical vehicle production and use. A teacher, excited by the labor-saving allure of an AI teaching assistant product called Brisk, uses the software extension to read the news story about electric vehicles and design a 60-minute lesson plan for their students, complete with learning goals, discussion prompts, a presentation activity, and summary quiz about the reading. The students, given carte blanche to use their school-provided Chromebooks, “read” the story using an AI platform like Perplexity, which provides summary analysis and key takeaways for them to use in their discussion and respond to the quiz. Simultaneously, they use Microsoft’s AI image generator to create a slide deck for the class to graphically represent their group’s ideas. The teacher completes the assessment cycle by having their AI assistant grade the quizzes, provide feedback to the students, and input their scores into a learning management system. (Swindell et al., 2024: 17).

[Brisk is a classic example of the stark cynicism of our current use of GAI, allowing “instructors” (the term loses meaning in this context) to automatically generate “feedback” on student essays, which you (the instructor) are then encouraged to “personalize” and present to the students as “from you.”]

The authors’ critique of such a situation:

In this scenario, the AI engages in activities of labor and consumption, while all of the parties involved advance nothing of lasting significance, and if debate or critical reflection arise amongst students it is an incidental, rather than planned, outcome of the AI-prescribed lesson. Indeed, the Brisk teaching assistant might be well programmed to incorporate into the lesson features of the RBT such as understanding, evaluating, and creating activities; but unless a human being in this process is attuned to helping learners act in the world and make it a place, using Arendt’s (1963/2006) words, “fit for human habitation,” ... the most common educational experience might become, ironically, ones in which humans are unnecessary. (ibid., 18)

They go on to propose a “Framework for Ethical AI Use in Education,” in the form of a graphic inputting insights from each of the five philosophies they are drawing on. They apply this framework in two examples, which are, unfortunately, not particularly satisfying. They begin with a list of “guiding questions” for lesson design using AI:

1. In what ways are our historical, technological, social contexts shaping how we think and act; what activity or experience can shock learners into appreciating their contingency?

2. Will the technologies we are going to use advance humanizing ends? In what ways can the technology enhance or harm the co-creation of knowledge?

3. How can we design learning activities that have benefits beyond their own sake; how are the learning activities helping students to act in the world?

4. In what ways can AI reduce the burdens of teaching and learning labor while increasing the capacity to act in the world? (ibid., 22)

[The first two questions show the influence of Foucault and the rest; the last two are primarily informed by Arendt.]

Their first proposed exercise involves a research project in which students seek to learn about their local “political landscape.” AI is used to conduct research on who the local elected officials are, what the local issues are, and what are the important fora for discussion and debate. Students then form their own positions using this knowledge: the idea is that AI performs the “labor” (Arendt’s lowest category), leaving humans free to focus on “action” (Arendt’s highest category.

However, having done exercises like this in the past without AI, this just seems like so many attempts to rationalize an “ethical” or “harmless” use of AI – namely, AI is inserted as an extra element where it is not actually needed. Local political entities, candidates, electoral bodies, and so on, have websites with all this information – it is not hard to find. Using a generative AI search tool only introduces the likelihood of errors, along with the dangerous habit of taking AI as a reliable source of information. At best, AI could be asked what websites contain this information, and then the information looked up on those websites (with the added hope that the list is correct, of course). What is more difficult is not the “labor” of looking up information, but the process of reading through debates, articles, and so on to try and evaluate and formulate issues and positions, and it is this that students are likely to use AI for – against the recommendations of Swindell et al, since after all this involves higher-level Bloom’s and corresponds with “action,” which is supposed to be left to humans.

In their second example,

students are tasked with researching a topic of their choosing both to learn about it and apply this knowledge to their own context. To facilitate this endeavor, AI acts as an agent of Socratic dialogue and questioning for the student, helping students generate research idea topics that will be specifically catered towards student interests. AI will be equipped to ask students questions regarding their level of interests and commitment, suggest other topics of potential interest based on specific student response in addition to refine students’ thinking regarding logical sequencing of topic selection and eventually argument. This personalized approach allows them to analyze how these topics manifest in their own lives and communities, gaining valuable insights. (ibid., 24)

Again, why is AI required to engage in Socratic dialogue? First of all, isn’t this the instructor’s job? (And one of Brisk’s more cynical applications is just such an automated “feedback” generator). But more deeply, isn’t this an opportunity for students to engage in Socratic interaction and mutual critique with each other? After all, the authors have been citing Freire on conscientization and the need to allow students to develop control over their learning process. The instructor could easily model Socratic questioning in class, and give students example questions and topics to guide them in developing their own practice. Delegating this to AI is an opporyunity lost.

Thus, we have yet another attempt at reasoning out an ethical use for AI in the classroom, which fails to provide any good reason for actually using AI in the first place. Seeing as the primary use of AI today is 1) to avoid having to do any actual work or difficult thinking, and 2) to avoid interacting with people, it is hard to see how a “humanist” or ethical use can gain much traction, until this situation – and the underlying causes, pre-existing the development of generative AI – are addressed.

Another limitation of the model could be the reliance on Arendt’s hierarchy of labor-work-action, which has been reasonably criticized as reproducing an arbitrary, classist distinction (cf. also Sennett 1990). It is not true that we don’t learn or gain from anything classed in this model as “labor,” or that there can in fact be a clear line drawn between the actual, complex, productive activities which Arendt has delineated into these three a priori types. More to the point, it is not the type of work, but the social context, aka the relations of production, which render some kinds of work more meaningless or alienating than others. Likewise, it is not the mere fact of automation that is problematic, but how that automation is deployed, to what ends, and in whose ultimate interests. The authors make some nods to this political-economic context (via their discussion of Freire, Foucault, etc.) but the proposed ethical framework does not much reflect this.

Beyond this, the insistence on a “humanist” framing could be a limitation (Arendt in fact called herself an “anti-humanist”). The result is yet another call to keep “humans in the loop,” as masters, rather than servants, of the technology—as if it were the relations between humans and machines, rather than those between humans and other humans, that was ultimately at stake.

What difference might a post-humanist view have on the issue? ANT, for example, could have been brought in to consider the human subject as a historically and contextually created “figure” in a larger more-than-human assemblage, and the dissolution of this figure, with the supplanting of the disciplinary society with the control society, occurring, in Foucault’s words, like the erasure of “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970: 387).

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. Vintage Books, New York.

Sennet, Richard (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 17

 

Summary of Chapter 17: The Structure of the Working Class and its Reserve Armies

An elegant statement of the duality of labor and capital:

Labor and capital are the opposite poles of capitalist society. This polarity begins in each enterprise and is realized on a national and even international scale as a giant duality of classes which dominates the social structure. And yet this polarity is incorporated in a necessary identity between the two. Whatever its form, whether as money or commodities or means of production, capital is labor: it is labor that has been performed in the past, the objectified product of preceding phases of the cycle of production which becomes capital only through appropriation by the capitalist and its use in the accumulation of more capital. At the same time, as living labor which is purchased by the capitalist to set the production process into motion, labor is capital. That portion of money capital which is set aside for the payment of labor, the portion which in each cycle is converted into living labor power, is the portion of capital which stands for and corresponds to the working population, and upon which the latter subsists. (261)

The working class is the “animate part of capital,” upon which the operation of all of capital, and the production of surplus value, depends. Though it has independent existence as a class, it is “first of all raw material for exploitation” from the capitalist perspective. “It is seized, released, flung into various parts of the social machinery and expelled by others, not in accord with its own will or self-activity, but in accord with the movement of capital.”

B notes the “formal definition” of the working class as “that class which, possessing nothing but its power to labor, sells that power to capital in return for its subsistence.” Though a static definition, this is a necessary starting point for understanding the working class in modern times. Braverman traces the growth of working class as a percentage of working population, over last century, from 50% to over two-thirds.

He argues that “the new mass working-class occupations tend to grow, not in contradiction to the speedy mechanization and ‘automation’ of industry, but in harmony with it” (264). Automation depresses employment in the fields automated, but [because it increases overall productivity] leads to expanded employment elsewhere. “The fastest growing industrial and occupational sectors in the ‘automated’ age tend, therefore, in the long run to be those labor-intensive areas which have not yet been or cannot be subjected to high technology.” [So far!] These are, in Braverman’s time, the clerical, service, and sales fields. The true function of automation is not to replace labor, but to deskill it, and to produce also a “reserve army of labor:”

The mechanization of industry produces a relative surplus of population available for employment at the lower pay rates that characterize these new mass occupations. In other words, as capital moves into new fields in search of profitable investment, the laws of capital accumulation in the older fields operate to bring into existence the ‘labor force’ required by capital in its new incarnations.

He turns to the role of colonialism in disrupting world populations, making them available to the core as surplus population for labor, a global “labor reservoir” (266). Women also have become “the prime supplementary reservoir of labor”, along with families increasingly needing multiple incomes to get by.

Unemployment is not a “problem” for capitalism, but an essential aspect of how it depresses wages and maintains a ready surplus army of potential workers when needed: “Under conditions of capitalism, unemployment is not an aberration but a necessary part of the working mechanism of the capitalist mode of production” (267). This is not just the unemployed, but the part-time employed, “houseworkers,” migrant laborers, etc.

Marx’s three forms of the reserve army: floating, latent, and stagnant:

The floating form is found in the centers of industry and employment, in the form of workers who move from job to job, attracted and repelled (that is to say, hired and discarded) by the movements of technology and capital, and suffering a certain amount of unemployment in the course of this motion.

B details the importance and growth of this form in the 20^th century capitalist economy. The latent relative surplus population is that which has yet to be drawn into capitalist production; in Marx’s day this was the rural agricultural population, in Braverman’s, that of the post/colonial states. Marx’s stagnant surplus labor reserve is “pauperism,” or the desperately poor; B promises to speak more of this category later.

B quotes Marx on “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,” which “establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with the accumulation of capital” (Marx, Capital, quoted on page 269). This had seemed to be “the weakest aspect of the Marxian analysis” in the flush growth after the Second World War, but this was no longer the case by the early 70s. He discusses the trends since World War II of male workers moving out of the labor force into the reserve army, and women moving into the workforce; these are only apparently contradictory, as both show the growing importance of the floating and stagnant pools of reserve labor. It also reflects the replacement of higher-paid, more skilled, masculinized jobs with lower-paid, less skilled, feminized jobs, according to the processes he has been outlining throughout the book. He backs this up with data from Victor Fuchs on the stagnation of the higher-paying industrial sector, and the growth of the lower-paying “services” sector. He notes that pay in the service sector is so low that it is below subsistence for a family, and this accounts for the growing number of employed people on welfare, along with the growth of multiple-income families. In addition, many low-income families are supported by less-than-full-time work. Nevertheless, traditional employment statistics undercount “discouraged” workers who have given up job seeking, and underemployed workers.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 16

Summary of Chapter 16: Service Occupations and Retail Trade

The giant mass of workers who are relatively homogeneous as to lack of developed skill, low pay, and interchangeability of person and function (although­ heterogeneous in such particulars as the site and nature of the work they perform) is not limited to offices and factories. Another huge concentra­tion is to be found in the so-called service occupations and in retail trade. (248)

The reasons for the growth of the service sector have already been discussed in chapter 13; they fill in for functions previously played by communities, etc.:

the completion by capital of the conquest of goods-producing activities; the displacement of labor from those industries, corresponding to the accumulation of capital in them, and the juncture of these reserves of labor and capital on the ground of new industries; and the inexorable growth of service needs as the new shape of society destroys the older forms of social, community, and family cooperation and self-aid.

B quotes Marx to the effect that a “service” is “nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value.” However, unlike directly productive labor creating objects, in this case no object is created:

The useful effects of labor, in such cases, do not serve to make up a vendible object which then carries its useful effects with it as part of its existence as a commodity. Instead, the useful effects of labor themselves become the commodity. When the worker does not offer this labor directly to the user of its effects, but instead sells it to a capitalist, who re-sells it on the commodity market, then we have the capitalist form of production in the field of services.

B notes that the census, etc., are much more lax in their definition of “service work” than his “scientific” definition, including, for example, restaurant cooks, etc. who produce tangible objects, as “service workers.” Part of this is the same old obfuscatory counting which gives the illusion of a shift from production to “service” work. A note on transportation:

Workers in transportation are often regarded as workers in a “service” industry, but if the location of a commodity is taken as an important physical characteristic, transportation is a part of the process of production. And if we do not take this view we fall into insuperable difficulties, because we are forced to extend the distinction between “making” and “moving” back into the factory, where many workers do not play a role in fashioning the object with their own hands but merely move it through the plant, or through the process. The distinction so applied becomes meaningless and even ridiculous. (149)

Management in fact recognizes this when they do time and motion studies on their “service” workers such as chambermaids [cf. In-N-Out!].

All this really just illustrates that capitalism does not care about the “determinate form” of labor, but its social form:

They merely illustrate the principle that for capitalism, what is important is not the determinate form of labor but its social form, its capacity to produce, as wage labor, a profit for the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to the particular form of labor; he does not care, in the last analysis, whether he hires workers to produce automobiles, wash them, repair them, repaint them, fill them with gasoline and oil, rent them by the day, drive them for hire, park them, or convert them into scrap metal. His concern is the difference between the price he pays for an aggregate of labor and other commodities, and the price he receives for the commodities—whether goods or “services”—produced or rendered. (250)

Thus, capitalists do not care about the “determinate form” of the labor, (whether something tangible or intangible is produced), but of the social form, that is, whether this sort of work, which has always been done, has been transformed into wage work from which a profit is extracted. “And this began on a large scale only with the era of monopoly capitalism which created the universal marketplace and transformed into a commodity every form of the activity of human­kind including what had heretofore been the many things that people did for themselves or for each other.”

B discusses Adam Smith’s misunderstanding of service labor as merely wasteful, because in his day it was something capitalists spent their own income on, rather than something they invested in for further profit. B adds that it has been an error among economists of every age to always assume that the most prevalent or growing form of labor of their own time is the most important; it becomes increasingly clear with monopoly capitalism and the universal market that in the end, they are all the same and interchangeable from a capitalist perspective.

He turns to the effects of mechanization and industrial processes in deskilling even this sector, for instance restaurants relying on frozen foods, so they don’t need skilled cooks, they need “thawer-outers” (256). He talks about supermarkets and checkout clerks, describing the beginning of checkout scanners in his day, speeding up and eroding the skill and knowledge needed by grocery checkout clerks who now just wave the produce over the scanner [although it is easily seen how much faster even these “deskilled” clerks of today are compared to the customers in the self-check out line; at my local store they will see you searching for your produce on the screen, walk over, and rapidly push several buttons to get you on your way; so it is notable that even in “deskilled” operations workers still develop situational knowledges and skills, basically out of whatever is available to them in that setting. This is not to argue against B’s point but rather to suggest that human creativity and – whatever the word would be, ability to create situational knowledge and skill? – is unlimited and undefeatable.]

In sum, much of the new service work sector is poorly paid, dead-end work, and it is primarily women who are stuck in it; this puts the lie to the breathless spoutings of “enthusiastic publicists and press agents of capitalism (with or without advanced degrees in sociology and econom­ics)” (258), of Braverman’s day, who touted the supposed societal benefits of the increasing service sector.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 15

Summary of Chapter 15: Clerical Workers

This is the first chapter of a new section on “the growing working-class occupations,” and at 42 pages, quite lengthy by Braverman’s standards. The shifting use of the term “clerical work” has led to confusion, because over time this does not represent “the continuous evolution of a single stratum” (203). Rather, the clerical workers of the 19^th century are the “ancestors of modern professional management,” and today’s clerical workers are in fact a new stratum. Acamedic sociology and popular journalism fail to understand this, leading to “a drastic misconception of modern society” whereby great numbers of working class occupations are miscategorized as “middle class,” or with the “common but absolutely meaningless term ‘white-collar worker’” (204).

The creation of a new class of workers, having little continuity with the small and privileged clerical stratum ofthe past, is emphasized by fundamental changes in two other respects: composition by sex, and relative pay. (205)

He documents the shift from 19^th century clerical work being paid twice as much as production work, to being paid at rates lower than “so-called blue collar work.” Clerical work in earlier times was craft-like; skilled, and lower levels worked up the ladder to mastery and/or management. He discusses the various industries which rely heavily on clerical work. A footnote on banking:

The fact that banking corporations produce nothing, but merely profit from the mass of capital in money form at their disposal through activities which once went by the name “usury,” no longer subjects them to discredit in monopoly capitalist society as it once did in feudal and in early capitalist society. In fact, financial institutions are accorded a place at the pinnacle of the social division of labor. This is because they have mastered the art of expanding capital without the necessity of passing it through any production process whatsoever. (The magical appearance of the feat merely conceals the fact that such corporations are appropriating a share in the values produced elsewhere.) The cleanliness and economy ofthe procedure, its absolute purity as a form of the accumulation of capital, now elicit nothing but admiration from those who are still tied to production. (208)

These management functions of control and appropriation have in themselves become labor processes. They are conducted by capital in the same way that it carries on the labor processes of production: with wage labor purchased on a large scale in a labor market and organized into huge “production” machines according to the same princi­ples that govern the organization of factory labor. Here the productive proc­esses of society disappear into a stream of paper – a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meatpacking line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.

This ghostly form of the production process assumes an ever greater importance in capitalist society, not only because of the requirements of the new way in which production is organized, and not only because of the growing need for coordination and control, but for another and more significant reason as well. In the social forms of capitalism all products of labor carry, apart from their physical characteristics, the invisible marks of ownership. Apart from their physical form, there is their social form as value. From the point of view of capital, the representation of value is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labor product. The particular kind of commodity being sold means little; the net gain is everything. A portion of the labor of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages. The battle to realize values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. Just as in some industries the labor expended upon marketing begins to approach the amount expended upon the production of the commodities being sold, so in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit) – including the policing, the cashiers and collection work, the recordkeeping, the accounting, etc. – begins to approach or surpass the labor used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire “industries” come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this. (209)

He notes a recurrent theme: the inefficiencies of capitalism leads to the new technologies being used in more wasteful ways than would presumably be the case in, say, an economy organized through worker cooperatives. The distrust between corporations means they all do their own accounting, with great reduplication of effort: “each set of records is as a rule a private affair to be used not for helpful coordination but as a weapon.”

The internal record keeping of each corporate institution is, moreover, constructed in a way which assumes the possible dishonesty, disloyalty, or laxity of every human agency which it employs; this, in fact, is the first, principle of modern accounting. (209-10)

The need for independent outside audits, to establish the veracity of records, is an additional reduplication, all based on “presumed dishonesty” of corporations and their employees in the general capitalist context of universal mutual suspicion.

Thus the value-form of commodities separates itself out from the physical form as a vast paper empire which under capitalism becomes as real as the physical world, and which swallows ever increasing amounts of labor. This is the world in which value is kept track of, and in which surplus value is transferred, struggled over, and allocated. A society which is based upon the value-form surrenders more and more of its working population to the complex ramifications of the claims to ownership of value. (210)

He explores the history of office managership as a specialized form of management, dealing with this workforce; by 1917 there was already a book emulating Taylor’s system, applied to offices. He discusses the various ways typists, mail clerks, etc. are measured and controlled in manners similar to factory production. It is the mere fact of surveillance and the fear it generates, rather then the mystique of “scientific” techniques, which increases production:

A great many of the effects obtained by scientific management came from this alone, despite the pretense that the studies were being conducted for purposes of methods improvement. When Leffingwell says, for example, that “the output of one clerk was doubled merely by the re-arrangement of the work on the desk,” we may understand this was an effect of close and frightening supervision rather than a miracle of efficiency; this was understood by the managers as well, although concealed beneath a “scientific” mystique. (213)

He discusses the control of workers through piecework systems, and the placement of water fountains, etc. to limit walking time; this leads to some great comments, comparing this to Ford’s assembly line, and to a feed-lot:

All motions or energies not directed to the increase of capital are of course “wasted” or “misspent.” That every individual needs a variety of movements and changes of routine in order to maintain a state of physical health and mental freshness, and that from this point of view such motion is not wasted, does not enter into the case. The solicitude that brings everything to the worker’s hand is of a piece with the fattening arrangements of a cattle feed-lot or poultry plant, in that the end sought is the same in each case: the fattening of the corporate balance sheet. The accompanying degenerative effects on the physique and well-being of the worker are not counted at all. (214-5)

Just like in the factory, the transformation of office work comes about through the technical division of labor, and increased mechanization; he discusses these in turn. Office work is analyzed as a “continuous flow process;” just as with production, there is the increased replacement of all-around clerical workers with detail workers:

the work of the office is analyzed and parcelled out among a great many detail workers, who now lose all comprehension of the process as a whole and the policies which underlie it. The special privilege of the clerk of old, that of being witness to the operation of the enterprise as a whole and gaining a view of its progress toward its ends and its condition at any given moment, disappears. Each of the activities requiring interpretation of policy or contact beyond the department or section becomes the province of a higher functionary.(217)

Clerical work by its nature lends itself more easily than production work to this rationalization process; the previous division between manual labor of the shop, and mental labor of the office no longer applies. He discusses Babbage’s “On the Division of Mental Labour,” which provides a historical example from decimal conversion in French Revolution, which was accomplished through a division of labor into three levels of workers, in terms of how much of the overall process they need to understand, and how much skill they need.

The way is thereby opened for two conclusions which capitalism finds irresistible, regardless of their consequences for humanity. The first is that the labor of educated or better-paid persons should never be “wasted” on matters that can be accomplished for them by others of lesser training. The second is that those of little or no special training are superior for the performance of routine work, in the first place because they “can always be purchased at an easy rate,” and in the second place because, undistracted by too much in their brains, they will perform routine work more correctly and faithfully. (219-20)

Babbage also foresaw a “calculating engine” that would replace the lowest kind of worker, and simplify the work of the middle tier.

In Babbage’s vision we can see the conversion of the entire process into a mechanical routine supervised by the “first section” which, at that point, would be the only group required to understand either mathematical science or the process itself. The work of all others would be converted into the “preparation of data” and the operation of machinery. (220)

The progressive elimination of thought from the work of the office worker thus takes the form, at first, of reducing mental labor to a repetitious performance of the same small set of functions. The work is still performed in the brain, but the brain is used as the equivalent of the hand of the detail worker in production, grasping and releasing a single piece of “data” over and over again. The next step is the elimination of the thought process completely – or at least insofar as it is ever removed from human labor – and the increase of clerical categories in which nothing but manual labor is performed.

This reduction of work to abstract labor, to finite motions of hands, feet, eyes, etc., along with the absorption of sense impressions by the brain, all of which is measured and analyzed without regard to the form of the product or process, naturally has the effect of bringing together as a single field of management study the work in offices and in factories.

B goes into lots of relishing detail on time-motion measures of different steps in office work (walking, typing, reading figures, using scissors) with occasional somewhat catty observations; even the time to punch a time clock is measured in detail. He provides a nice observation on one table of the times involved in punching a numeric key on a typewriter:

It is worth noting that this simple list of three unit times, with their total, is made into a “table” by the addition of two useless lines and two useless columns. This is typical of the manner in which management “experts” dress their presentations in the trappings of mathematics in order to give them the appearance of “science”; whether the sociologists have learned this from the schools of business administration or the other way around would make a nice study. (224)

In the clerical routine of offices, the use of the brain is never entirely done away with – any more than it is entirely done away with in any form of manual work. The mental processes are rendered repetitious and routine, or they are reduced to so small a factor in the work process that the speed and dexterity with which the manual portion of the operation can be performed dominates the labor process as a whole. More than this cannot be said of any manual labor process, and once it is true of clerical labor, labor in that form is placed on an equal footing with the simpler forms of so-called blue-collar manual labor. For this reason, the traditional distinctions between “manual” and “white-collar” labor, which are so thoughtlessly and widely used in the literature on this subject, represent echoes of a past situation which has virtually ceased to have meaning in the modern world of work. And with the rapid progress of mechanization in offices it becomes all the more important to grasp this. (224-5)

In mechanization of the office it is no longer motion and production per se which the machines take control of, but information:

Machinery that is used to multiply the useful effects of labor in production may be classified, as we have seen, according to the degree of its control over motion. Insofar as control over motion rests with the operator, the machine falls short of automatic operation; insofar as it is rendered automatic, direct control has been transferred to the machine itself. In office machinery, however, the control over motion is generally incidental to the purpose of the machine. Thus the rapidity and precision of the high-speed printer are not required in order to print rapidly – there are other and faster ways to ink characters onto paper – but in order to record a controlled flow of information as it is processed in the computer. It is one part of a machine system designed to control not motion but information. (225)

As long as information was only conveyed in notation comprehensible by humans, “each of these machines could only carry or process information through a very short part of its total cycle before it again had to involve the human brain to move it into its next position. In this sense, the office process resembled a pipeline that required a great many pumping stations at very close intervals.” He discusses the invention of punched cards that machines can read (for the 1890 census); developments along this line (electronic impulses, etc.) result in much greater speed and scale for the mechanized flow of information:

This automatic system for data-processing resembles automatic systems of production machinery in that it re-unifies the labor process, eliminating the many steps that had previously been assigned to detail workers. But, as in manufacturing, the office computer does not become, in the capitalist mode of production, the giant step that it could be toward the dismantling and scaling down of the technical division of labor. Instead, capitalism goes against the grain of the technological trend and stubbornly reproduces the outmoded division of labor in a new and more pernicious form. The development of computer work has been so recent and so swift that here we can see reproduced in compressed form the evolution of labor processes in accord with this tendency. (226-7)

The positions of systems analyst and programmer are at the top of the new computer hierarchy; that of programmer becomes split into program analysts who are like engineers, and program coders who merely carry out the process; below these computer work is working class, with pay scales which align with those in factories. Key punch operator is the single largest job created by computerization, in B’s day. These jobs require less and less training; they are very boring, with no possibilty for advancement, and high turnover. B quotes an insurance company vice president, who notes that “the machines” keep the key-punch girls chained to their desks; B observes that this is typical “fetishism,” as it is the boss, not the machines, which does this. (232) He quotes debates among managers, etc., about how educated the girls should be, is a high school diploma really required? There is the question of [overqualified] workers, “of too high an intellectual calibre for the new simple machine jobs,” because they don’t stay in data-processing, because it is dead end job.

These effects of computer mechanization impact all clerical workers, not just those “grouped immediately around the computer” (234) for two reasons. First, the need to create information in a form that computers can understand and process spreads throughout the entire office, as “the reduction of data to symbolic form with accurate positional attributes becomes, increasingly, the business of the office as a whole, as a measure to economize on labor costs.” Second, in addition to computers, there are other machines which are being inserted into office work, which result in the deskilling of workers. He gives the example of bank tellers, whose work is more and more automated and controlled, and faces replacement with ATMs.

B traces the history of the occupation of secretary; it is motivated by the Babbage principle (the secretary does work more cheaply, which it would be wasteful for the manager to be bothered with).; plus there is the prestige factor of having a “personal secretary.” The division of labor in office work spreads to “wherever a mass of work may be subdivided and its “lower” portions separated out and delegated” (236). Having a personal secretary becomes a “traditional and entrenched privilege” to the alarm of upper management, who seek to “tackle this monstrosity in order to reduce the drain on the corporate pocketbook;” yet “these very trappings and pretenses of managerial status” are key to the loyalty of lower management.

There is ample evidence, however, that this situation is ending, and that management is now nerving itself for major surgery upon its own lower limbs.

This is done by breaking down the work of secretaries into typing, and administrative routine, then delegating these to different groups of workers.The first function is assumed by typists using word processing machines (pre computers per se), who “process” the words coming from “word originators,” meaning managers, etc. B interestingly gives a definition of “word processing” from the journal Administrative Management, 1972, as automated word substitution – personnel are trained on codes the machine can recognize, so it will spit out the formula or phrase; this speeds up typing and reduces the need for training. [This is an interesting predecessor to autocomplete, and for that matter to text-generating AI.]

The second function of the secretary (filing, phone answering, and mail handling )is taken over by an “administrative support center” serving four to eight “principals” (managers). Thus is the modern office converted into a factory-like system. Just as with the factory, the struggle over knowledge remains crucial in the office:

The greatest single obstacle to the proper functioning of such an office is the concentration of information and decision-making capacity in the minds of key clerical employees. Just as Frederick Taylor diagnosed the problem of the management of a machine shop as one of removing craft information from the workers, in the same way the office manager views with horror the possibility of dependence upon the historical knowledge of the office past, or of the rapid flow of information in the present, on the part of some of his or her clerical workers. (239)

[This reminds me of one of my old Anthropology departments, in which the Department Secretary was key to running everything in the department, while faculty members took turns playing the role of “department head” or whatever. Then as I was leaving the university was downsizing, combining department staff, probably with disastrous consequences for continuity and the ability to get anything done.]

Mechanization produces the recording of everything that is done, and mechanical control, and is thus ideal for freeing management from reliance on this kind of worker knowledge:

But this conversion of the office flow into a high-speed industrial process requires the conversion of the great mass of office workers into more or less helpless attendants of that process. As an inevitable concomitant of this, the ability of the office worker to cope with deviations from the routine, errors, special cases, etc., all of which require information and training, virtually disappears. The number of people who can operate the system, instead of being operated by it, declines precipitously.

B observes:

Managers often wag their heads over the “poor quality of office help” available on the labor market, although it is their own system of office operations which is creating the office population suited to it. This complaint is, unfortunately, too often echoed by unthinking “consumers” when they run into trouble with an office, as they often do. Such difficulties will tend to increase in the same way that the quality of factory production tends to decline and the servicing of consumer appliances tends to worsen even as it becomes more expensive, and for the same reasons. (240)

[This reminds me of a guy working in the management of a solar panel company who told me, some years ago, that they preferred hiring people without experience because it was easier to train than to retrain; I immediately thought, who would want to go into a field where having experience has no value, or is even seen as a disadvantage? You would learn skills you could never use if you needed to switch companies, or moved to another city, for instance.]

When office work was first expanding in early 20^th century, it was misunderstood as a new middle class. B points out that the commonly used demarcators “white collar” (dress) and “salaried employee” (form of compensation) are merely secondary characteristics of these workers, not true markers of their class relation to the means of production. He provides another eloquent and impassioned footnote on how the term “white-collar” plays a obfuscatory role:

The continued use of this terminology long after the realities behind it have disappeared is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the analysis of this subject. A term which lumps together into a single class grouping the authoritative executive representing capital on the one hand, and the interchangeable parts of the office machine which serves him on the other, can no longer be considered useful. This terminology is, however, considered serviceable by those who are alarmed by the results of a more realistic terminology – those, for instance, whose “sociology” pursues apologetic purposes. For them, such terms as “white-collar employees” conveniently lump into a single category the well-paid, authoritative, and desirable positions at the top of the hierarchy and the mass of proletarianized inferiors in a way that makes possible a rosier picture: higher “average” pay scales, etc. In this use of the term, the '”white-collar” category tends to get its occupational flavor from the engineers, managers, and professors at the top of the hierarchy, while its impressive numerical masses are supplied by the millions of clerical workers, in much the same way that the stars of an opera company occupy the front of the stage while the spear-carriers provide the massive chorus. (241)

As machinery, “dead labor” plays an increasing role in the office:

The use of automatic and semi-automatic machine systems in the office has the effect of completely reversing the traditional profile of office costs. A situation in which the cost of operating a large office consisted almost entirely of the salaries paid to clerical employees has changed to one in which a large share of the total is now invested in the purchase (or paid out monthly for the leasing) of expensive equipment. Past or “dead” labor in the form of machinery owned by capital, now employs living labor, in the office just as in the factory. But for the capitalist, the profitability of this employment is very much a function of time, of the rapidity with which dead labor absorbs living. The use of a great deal of expensive equipment thus leads to shift work, which is particularly characteristic of computer operations. (243)

He discusses the mechanization-enabled separation of office spaces, with fancy executive offices downtown, and lower clerical work relegated to lower rent districts. The class distinction between production and office work is disappearing, though a gender distinction is reinforced:

The sex barrier that assigns most office jobs to women, and that is enforced both by custom and hiring practice, has made it possible to lower wage rates in the clerical category, as we have seen, below those in any category of manual labor.

...one of the most common United States occupational combinations within the family is that in which the husband is an operative [i.e., works in production] and the wife a clerk. (245)

He provides several lengthy quotes on “semi-skilled labor” as an amorphous category; then summarizes:

The problem of the so-called employee or white-collar worker which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by anti-Marxists as a proof of the falsity of the “proletarianization” thesis, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarization of office employment and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage-workers. The apparent trend to a large nonproletarian “middle class” has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form. In its conditions of employment, this working population has lost all former superiorities over workers in industry, and in its scales of pay it has sunk almost to the very bottom. But beneath them, in this latter respect at least, are the workers in service occupations and retail trade, whom we must consider next. (245)

 

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter Two: Evolution of Technical Reality; Element, Individual, Ensemble

I. Hypertely and self-conditioning in technical evolution

“Hypertely” (or “hypertelia”) is a word with a fascinating history, apparently beginning in Lamarckian evolutionary theory. Many sources (e.g., Merriam-Webster) give definitions such as “an extreme degree of imitative coloration or ornamentation not explainable on the ground of utility,” but those are examples of hypertely, not definitions. The main point seems to be evolution to a degree or direction which is not really adaptive: over-specialization; Pierre Jolivet (2008: 1897) summarizes hypertely as “beyond the bounds of the useful,” while pointing out that alleged cases of hypertely can be better explained by natural selection (and it is thus interesting to consider how Simondon’s thinking on evolution was affected by non-synthesis strands which apparently survived longer in France than elsewhere (Boesiger 1980). The concept seems to have remained much more popular in France than in the US; Baudrillard, for example, uses it to refer to processes like cancer, capitalism, and so on, which have “no other end than limitless increase, without any consideration of limits” (Baudrillard 1990: 52).

Commentators on Simondon seem to get two related meanings out of his usage, both of which are referenced by Stiegler in Technics and Time. The first, and most broad, is “functional over-adaptation” (53); an example that comes to mind would be a Christmas present of pot-holders that fit over the end of the pot’s handles, thus being specialized and useful in particular circumstances, but less widely useful than square flat potholders, which could be used for the same purpose, and many others. (It seems likely that such hypertely is more common among Christmas presents compared to other objects). The second, more particular, sense, is that in which hypertely “limits the object’s indetermination by leaving it dependent upon an artificial milieu” (Stiegler 1998: 78). Simondon’s example is a transport glider, which can only fly with the assistance of a tow plane (54). “Indetermination” in the Stiegler quote refers to the openness of the technical object to be adapted to a broader range of uses, or to further technical evolution; the “artificial milieu” is a technological milieu upon which the object is dependent, and thus stands in contrast to the associated milieu, which it carries with itself, thus making the technical object more autonomous. 

S starts the chapter (53) by noting that the “schema that constitutes the essence of the technical object” can adapt in two ways: first, it can adapt to the “material and human conditions of production;” and second, to “the task for which it is made.” The second leads to overspecialization and hypertely. S then adds that there are two kinds of hypertely: 1) “a fine-tuned adaptation to well-defined conditions without breaking the technical object up and without a loss of autonomy” (e.g., the specialized pot-holders?) and 2) “a breaking up of the technical object” (54), as in the case of the transport glider and tow plane. He then describes a third kind, of “mixed hypertely,” in which the object becomes dependent on a particular environment to function. This leads to a distinction between two kinds of milieux or worlds: the geographical milieu and the technical milieu (55); the technical object is involved in both, at their meeting point: the two worlds act on each other through the technical object, which is “to a certain extent determined by human choice, attempting to realize the best possible compromise between these two worlds.” 

“The evolution of technical objects can only become progress insofar as these technical objects are free in their evolution and not pushed by necessity in the direction of a fatal hypertely” (58). There thus needs to be a third, “techno-geographic” milieu which allows for the “self-conditioning” of the object, that is, its evolution according to its schema or whatever, instead of imposed external conditions or whatever. Sorry if I sound like I’m not fully buying it here. At the end of this section S takes up the role of human intelligence, which will be explored in more detail subsequently.

II. Technical invention: ground and form in the living and in inventive thought.

S summarizes his argument so far:

We can therefore affirm that the individualization of technical beings is the condition of technical progress. This individualization is made possible by the recurrence of causality within a milieu that the technical being creates around itself and that conditions it, just as it is conditioned by it. This simultaneously technical and natural milieu can be called the associated milieu. (59)

Thus, individualization is a matter of increased autonomy, the technical object being able to re/act by itself in relation to its “associated milieu.” The “recurrence of causality” within this milieu is what allows for “self-conditioning,” which either means self-maintenance/homeostasis, or evolution, or both (if the former, it is a condition for the latter). The argument is in some ways a more sophisticated development on the cyberneticists’ interest in feedback, adding in the relationship between individual and milieu, and the insistence that these should be understood in time, as part of an “evolution.” 

“Invention” is distinguished by S from gradual development, apparently in line with his [saltationist] vision of technical evolution (the term he actually uses is “serrated” evolution). “The only technical objects that can be said to have been invented, strictly speaking, are those that require an associated milieu in order to be viable; these cannot in fact be constituted part by part via the phases of successive evolution, because they can exist only as a whole or not at all.” The example of the Guimbal turbine, from the previous chapter, is given again here as an example. “The reason the living being can invent is because it is an individual being that carries its associated milieu with it” in the form of culture, material culture, technical knowledge, etc.; this allows the [human] individual inventor to see beyond the present conditions to imagine a not-yet-existent future which then affects the present in a “reverse conditioning in time” (60).

The translators point out a key pun or word-play in the title of this section: the French term “fond et forme,” which normally means “content and form,” here is used by Simondon as a reference to Gestalt theory, and thus to mean “ground and form.” Much like it is necessary to understand the technical object in terms of its milieu, so is it necessary to understand form as contrasted against its ground; but here (in the case of invention),

the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve out their own path, whereas forms are the system of actuality. Invention is the taking charge of the system of actuality through the system of virtualities... (61)

[I made a note that articulation in discourse works similarly, on the “form” of the present in terms of possible futures or alternative “systems of actuality.”] S continues to talk about symbolization and alienation, both of which will be returned to later; he ends the section with some remarks on the relations between organs and organisms.

III. Technical individualization.

In this short section S explores the relations between element, individual, and ensemble, starting by clarifying the distinction between a technical individual (of which the associated milieu is a necessary aspect of its functioning) and a mere “collection of organized individuals” working together, the latter of which is an ensemble. He explores the example of a laboratory as ensemble to show that the ensemble does not have a “truly associated milieu” (65); this appears to be because the different machines, experiments, etc. which are part of or can be done in the laboratory require different setups, cannot be allowed to interfere with each other, and so on, and thus the laboratory-as-milieu for these experiments or processes is adapted or changed in particular ways for each. There are nevertheless “relative levels of individualization” present (64), so the ensemble can contain relatively individualized sub-ensembles. This relativity of individualization extends as well to “infra-individual technical objects” (66).

IV. Evolutionary succession and preservation of technicity. Law of relaxation.

The “law of relaxation” has to do with causality within S’s theory of the  “serrated evolution” of technology, which means evolution that is not continuous but rather proceeds in stages, each of which apparently has its own “solidarity” or coherence or whatever. He illustrates this through the history of energy sources, with the pre- or proto-industrial artisanal stage powered by waterfalls, wind, and animal power (68). Within this era thermodynamic elements are invented, leading to the development of thermodynamic machines/individuals such as the steam engine, resulting in the transition, with thermodynamic ensembles such as factories and industrial centralization, to the succeeding thermodynamic or industrial era. [And it seems that “thermodynamic” applies here not only to the source of power but to the thinking that organizes this era.] Out of the thermodynamic ensemble emerges electrotechnics, which follows the same basic pattern, resulting in a new electrotechnical era, in which (in an interesting observation) the role of the railroad in spatially organizing and distributing production and relations in the thermodynamic era, is now played by high voltage transmission lines [and also of course by highways, railroads, etc.].

“At the moment in which electrical technics reaches its full development, it produces new schemes in the form of elements that initiate a new phase” (70); this quote reveals the sense in which this phase of  “relaxation” spends itself with a “full development” of its potentials or whatever, producing the elements of the new, succeeding phase. Here Simondon explores two related but competing technologies being developed in his day, which he sees as likely to form the basis of the succeeding stage – and, presciently, these are solar and nuclear power. (Though I do wonder what S would think about the fact that, over sixty years after this book was published, the confrontation between these two, and the promise of a new technological system following from this, has yet to have fully played out. Perhaps this is a limitation of the focus on “energy sources” as driving or shaping technological change; he does mention information elsewhere, but does not in this passage foresee the growth of computing and its high energy demands; nor does he mention fossil fuels in his discussion of “electrical technics.” (He drifts from focusing on the power source, to the mode of transmission, and back, without apparently realizing this). And of course we know that the fossil fuel industry and its vested interests would be, in Simondon’s eyes, an  “extrinsic cause” like all “economic constraints,” and thus not really of interest for his history of technological evolution.) For all that his discussion of nuclear and solar power as potentially competing, or potentially aligned, visions/power sources for a coming technological era, seems still quite relevant today.

V. Technicity and evolution of technics: technicity as instrument of technical evolution.

S asserts that, despite progressing in stages, his model of technical progress is distinct from dialectics because there is no negation or negativity playing a role as engine of progress in his model. Instead, negativity, in the form of a lack of individuation, plays a minor role and does not lead to progress, itself. He furthermore distinguishes between progress and change, per se, in that not all change counts as actual progress.

“For progress to exist, each age must be able to pass on to the next age the fruit borne of its technical effort” (71); this is passed not through individuals or ensembles (which must change more dramatically with each step of evolution), but through elements. He restates a key difference between technical beings and living beings: only the latter can engender other living beings (S dismisses as silly some attempts by cyberneticists to create machines that mimic the process). Technical beings, however, because they have less “perfection” than living beings, have more “freedom” of recombination and transmission of elements (rather than whole individuals); [this is perhaps why the Lamarckian-style evolutionary concepts can be applied to the evolution of technology, even if they don’t work for living creatures].

The question then becomes what “technical perfection” consists in, and S illustrates this with an adze, which, though appearing fairly simple, has several different parts which have to be forged to the correct strength, etc.; “as if, in its totality, the tool was made of a plurality of functionally different zones, welded together” (72). The point is that:

The tool is made not only of form and matter; it is made of elaborate technical elements according to a certain schema of functioning, and assembled into a stable structure though the operation of fabrication. The tool unites within itself the results of the functioning of a technical ensemble. In order to make a good adze a technical ensemble of a foundry, forge, and quench hardening is required.

The technicity of an object is thus more than a quality of its use; it is that which, within it, adds itself to a first determination given by the relation between form and matter; it acts as an intermediary between form and matter …. Technicity is the degree of the object’s concretization.

Even a simple element, like a coil spring, requires a complex and advanced technical ensemble to produce it; “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the quality of a simple needle expresses the degree of perfection of a nation’s industry” (73). “What the element transports is a concretized technical reality” (73-4) of the ensemble that produced it, “just as seeds transport the properties of a species and go on to make new individuals” (74). Technicity as a “positive aspect” of the element corresponds to the role of the associated milieu in constituting the individual (73).

Since this model of evolution does not have negativity a la the dialectic, invention appears to step in as the added ingredient causing progress. 

Invention, which is a creation of the individual, presupposes in the inventor the intuitive knowledge of the element’s technicity; invention occurs at this intermediate level between the concrete and the abstract, which is the level of schemas, and presupposes the pre-existence and coherence of representations that cover the object’s technicity with symbols belonging to an imaginative systematic and an imaginative dynamic. (74)

This appears to refer to not only an “individual” imagination, but a cultural imagination, involving representations and the capacity of prediction of new future individuals and ensembles assembled out of existing or possible elements. S does focus on the inventor as possessor of a particular sensitivity to the technicity of elements; yet the inventor does not give form to new elements and individuals out of the blue or out of their individual genius, but relies on the preexisting elements, ensembles, etc.

The technicities of elements are stable behaviors, or powers: “capacities for producing or undergoing an effect in a determinate manner” (75). S adds that “the higher the technicity of an element, the wider the conditions of deployment of this element are, as a result of the high level of stability of this element." He gives the example of a spring which can be used at a wide range of temperatures without losing its elasticity. Also, “the technical quality once again increases with the independence of its characteristics from the conditions of utilization;” S provides several technical examples, noting in passing that economic constraints affect the individual rather than the “element as element.” [Because it is at the individual level that cost, for example, might result in cheaper parts substituting for better or more efficient ones].

Simondon starts dropping in one of his key concepts, transduction, for which Barthélémy provides some dense definitions, “the process of individuation of the real itself,” and “a physical, biological, mental, social operation through which an activity propagates gradually within a domain, by founding this propagation on a structuration of the domain that is realized from one place to the next” (Barthélémy 2012: 230). (Ah, well that’s perfectly clear now!) A technical object here plays a “transductive role … with respect to a prior age” (76). Prior ensembles and individuals have become obsolete: but “at certain moments in its evolution the technical element makes sense in itself, and is thus a depository of technicity” that can be transmitted to the succeeding age. S turns to the role of technology in different cultures: there are always elements and ensembles, but pre-industrial tech seems to be characterized by “the absence of technical individuals” (77) (naturally, as it was already stated that the industrial era is that of the individual, while the pre-industrial was that of the element). Humans thus play the role of technical individuals in the pre-industrial era, providing the associated milieu for the various tools, etc, and this applies not only to individual human workers or artisans, but to “men employed as technical individuals rather than as human individuals,” which appears to refer to teams of workers operating together and thus forming one “technical individual” in Simondon’s sense.

S has an interesting footnote on “a certain nobility of artisanal work” (77n9), and notes that

the existence of separate [i.e., non-human] technical individuals is a rather recent development and even appears, in some respects, like an imitation of man by the machine, where the machine remains the more general form of a technical individual.

However, S argues, this is only a superficial analogy, because machines usually operate very differently than humans; “yet if man often feels frustration before the machine, it is because the machine functionally replaces him as an individual: the machine replaces man as tool bearer.” (78)

This is the opening to a very interesting discussion which goes a step or so beyond Marx’s observations in the Fragment on Machines. S starts by pointing out that in the artisanal stage there had also been a frequent distinction between the artisan who was “bearer of the tools” and a helper, such as the hod carrier who assists a mason. [Naturally, here is where Braverman (for Ruskin, for that matter) could object that this could have been part of a guild system in which the master’s assistant is an apprentice, learning the trade; Simondon is, typically, disregarding this sociopolitical context.] There is certainly a discourse today that we are to think of ChatGPT, etc. as “assistants” rather than “replacements,” but S acknowledges that it is not only the role of helpers which are taken by machines today; “one could even define the machine as that which bears and directs tools” (78). Humans become disengaged from this direct production, taking roles either as overseers directing one or more machine-tool-bearers, or playing an “auxiliary” role, in which “he greases, cleans, removes detritus and burrs.” What takes S’s discussion beyond Marx’s instrument/machine distinction is the recognition that a human can play both this overseer and assistant role to machines, at once, both “servant and regulator.” [And which of these come into play takes us back to the social relations of production, despite S’s general neglect of these.] (Also cf. Stiegler on technology as pharmakon).

Simondon then more directly addresses Marx’s instrument-machine distinction, in his own terminology. When “man applies his own action to the natural world through the machine,” this takes the relation man-machine-world; the machine becomes “a relay, an amplifier of movements, but it is still man who preserves within himself the center of this complex technical individual that is the reality constituted by man and machine … the man is the bearer of the machine, while the machine remains the tool bearer” (79). 

S now gives a broad historical overview of the relation between humans and “technical individuals.” With the individualization of technical objects beginning in the industrial era, “human individuality is increasingly disengaged from the technical function through the construction of technical individuals; for man, the functions that remain are both below and above that of the tool bearer, oriented both toward the relation with elements and toward the relation with ensembles.” Because, in the artisanal era, technical individuality had been associated with human individuality, in the industrial era (he appears to be saying), “it became customary to give each individual just one function in regard to work.” [He could be referring to his earlier distinction between mason and hod carrier, but the point would make better sense in relation to discretized factory labor.] 

But it now creates unease, because man, who still seeks to be a technical individual, no longer has a stable place alongside the machine: he becomes the servant of the machine or the organizer of the technical ensemble; yet, in order for the human function to make sense, it is necessary for every man employed with a technical task to surround the machine both from above and from below, in order to have an understanding of it in some way, and to look after its elements as well as its integration into the functional ensemble. (80; emphasis added)

S is saying that the ideal, and non-alienating, situation, is for the human to play the above-and-below-the-machine roles, simultaneously, since this is the only way to obtain a full “understanding” of it (and this point appears to link back to the first chapter’s discussion of the need for a science of mechanology to enable this understanding, and the reasons why the situated knowledges of various kinds of worker, engineer, etc. were dismissed as potential foundations for this new science). In fact, S now states that it is wrong to see these two positions as “above” and “below” (or, perhaps, to separate them into an above and a below):

Technicity is not a reality that can be hierarchized; it exists as a whole inside its elements and propagates transductively through the technical individual and ensembles: through the individuals, ensembles are made of elements, and from them elements issue forth. The apparent pre-eminence of ensembles comes from the fact that the ensembles are currently given the same prerogatives as those of people playing the role of the boss.

Historically, work relating to the ensemble has been that of the boss, and work with the element that of the servant; with the middle role of technical individual that of the artisan (and thus associated with democracy, equality, etc.). However, the modern machine renders all these anachronistic: “Ideas of servitude and liberation are far too strongly related to the old status of man as a technical object for them to correspond to the true problem of the relation between man and machine” today (81). Simondon’s goal is to articulate the necessary new and more accurate understanding.

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

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Fatal Strategies. Semiotext(e), New York.

Boesiger, Ernest (1980) “Evolutionary Biology in France at the Time of the Evolutionary Synthesis.” in Mayr and Provine, eds., The Evolutionary Synthesis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 

Jolivet, Pierre (2008) “Hypertely.” in John L. Capinera, ed., Encyclopedia of Entomology.

Stiegler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time 1. Stanford University Press, Stanford.