Degrees of Artificialization of Technics

One particular aspect forced itself upon us in contact with the works, but also on the basis of an almost permanent felt sense during the practice. It manifested itself before Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie (2005), from which emerges the idea of an altered technics, translated into a digital image that is “too” normalized, an aspect also grasped by Rosa Menkman: these artists manage to “liberate” the digital image by imposing the more affective and Dionysian registers of datamoshing and databending. This impression also arose with Wagon and Degoutin’s Random GPS (2010), which unveils the technical element as primed to serve as a surveillance dispositif, and in Elisabeth Caravella’s Howto (2014), which reveals that the “useful¹” side of technics – as implemented – is accompanied by a “biopolitical” counterpart that tends to isolate the human. These artistic gestures give a glimpse of a biased form of technics, as if an additional and strategic layer of artificialization could be added to the artifact, a layer that redirects the forces of technics, henceforth “over-artificialized,” toward an enterprise of domination of humans by humans.

We thus observe degrees of artificialization of technics, an idea that does not necessarily emerge from the traditional theories of which technics is the object. These theses often attribute a negative essence to technics, above all to industrial technics, which sees the emergence of the machine. Industrial technics is thus envisaged as an entity that corrupts the human, whereas this research does not have the sense that technics could possess a fixed and immutable essence.

In his famous essay The Question Concerning Technology (1953), for example, Heidegger does indeed attribute a negative essence to modern technics. Whereas artisanal technics has, for the philosopher, the capacity to unveil the real in the sense of truth², modern technics would be a “challenging (Herausfordern) by which nature and the human themselves are summoned to deliver an energy that can, as such, be extracted (herausgefordert) and stored³.” Thus, if we find in Heidegger an original state of technics, close to artisanal activity and in resonance with the Greek technè, this state would be irremediably lost with the advent of the industrial machine. Within this framework, Heidegger contemplates, inspired by lines from Hölderlin – lines that we will explain further on – what could “save” a technics that would have a “destining” mode of Enframing, but also another, productive mode: poièsis⁴. Yet what seems to prevail in the philosopher is a form of pessimism. Thus, as we have seen, in his last interview Heidegger maintains that “Only a god can save us⁵.”

The idea of a form of ambivalence of technics, with a positive side revealed in the light of art (a hypothesis whose origin goes back to the aforementioned essay by Heidegger), reappears subsequently, modulated in different and generally more optimistic ways: it is associated with the détournements of apparatuses in Vilém Flusser, with the dispositif/apparatus dialectic in Jean-Louis Déotte, and with the notion of pharmakon in Stiegler. In their work, technics often appears, in varying doses, as what distances the human from nature, and art as what, through technics, might reduce this gap. This is also the case in Adorno, who speaks of art as the “reconstitution of oppressed nature⁶.” But none of these thoughts, of these “theories of the apparatus,” leads to envisaging degrees of artificialization of technics, a notion that can nevertheless be detected in Gilbert Simondon, in – visionary – formulations such as this one:

If the technical object is corrupting and alienating, it is because it has been manufactured to arouse violent motivations: it creates needs because the manufacturer has loaded it with secondary, inessential, venal, social aspects, addressing the most corruptible part of the user; this makeup, these deceitful appearances, this coquetry of the technical object are phenomena of civilization, psychosocial phenomena, for which pure technical essences are in no way responsible, and which a psychoanalysis of technicity must exorcise […]⁷

This troubled psychic and social dimension, which the technical object can convey but which was introduced by the human, diverts technics from its “pure⁸” progression. This strategic diversion of the technical object is superimposed on the mediation of that same object when it is apprehended as a commodity, a dynamic that did not escape Simondon, as we have already mentioned, for whom what is at stake in this context is an “extratechnical” logic that denatures the technical object⁹ while running up against its openness¹⁰.

1. Howto parodies a tutorial for learning to use 3D modeling software.↩︎

2. “What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything.” In Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférences, op. cit., p. 17.↩︎

3. Ibid., p. 20.↩︎

4. Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférences, op. cit., p. 40.↩︎

5. Martin Heidegger, ”Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” in Der Spiegel, op. cit.↩︎

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit., p.187.↩︎

7. Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (1953-1983), op. cit., p. 363-364.↩︎

8. Which is never an essence, but always the result of processes in Simondon, even though he himself uses the term when speaking of an ”essence of technics” in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Indeed, this ”essence” is to be linked to his notion of individuation, which is at once a thought of being and of becoming.↩︎

9. Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (1953-1983), op. cit., p. 60 ff.↩︎

10. Friedrich Kittler later developed a similar idea, carrying it to its paroxysm and targeting the computing machine more specifically. See in this regard: Friedrich A. Kittler, Mode protégé, op. cit.↩︎