Liberating (Oneself from) Technics

We find in Heidegger the idea that technics, within an instrumental framework, acts in the direction of human alienation. Caught in the trap of instrumental logic, the more the human tries to master modern technics, the more they are dominated by it and the less they are able to grasp its true essence. Enframing (arraisonnement), as a mode of destining, reveals modern technics, according to Heidegger, as bearing within it the “supreme danger” that troubles the human’s relation with themself and hinders any possibility of unconcealment, that is, of the presencing of truth¹. However, even within the rather pessimistic framework that Heidegger sets out with regard to technics, a hope arises. Indeed, seeing the becoming of the human sink into a bond of alienation with technics, Heidegger conceives a hope of poetic inspiration, as we have mentioned, in Hölderlin’s verses:

It is to poetry, as an expression of art, that the task falls of reinjecting into modern technics something of the order of poietic unveiling, capable of suspending the dynamic of alienation proper to instrumentalized technics. Like Heidegger, Adorno conceives artistic activity as a factor of liberation of technics and of the human with whom it is associated, art being able to invest technics “in a direction opposite to that of domination³.” This within the framework of an aesthetics that sees art as the creator of spaces of freedom within a world increasingly administered by technocracy⁴. For if the culture industry, criticized by Adorno, promises happiness within a free framework, it cannot keep its promises:

All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as, since the historical neutralization of religion, they are free to join any of the countless existing sects. But freedom in the choice of ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same⁵.

There is also in Simondon a form of “liberation” of technics by art, for art is, for Simondon, a function of convergence capable of stabilizing the domain of human activities when these evolve by growing more complex. Indeed, in Simondon’s cosmogony, the social, epistemological and material becoming of human societies is understood on the basis of a “primitive magical unity⁶” saturated with potentials⁷ that evolved by splitting in two. Thus there appeared, through the structural complexification of this “stock,” on the one hand the mystical⁸, which comprises properties of ground, and, on the other, technicity, in which formal qualities flourish⁹. Technics, like all activities, can tend toward a dangerous isolation¹⁰ within an evolution that works by differentiation, by the creation of phases, by the upsurge of heterogeneities. In Simondon, the work of art helps to avoid forms of divergence of technics when it manages to reactivate, within technics, properties of ground proper to mystical thought, in an approach that restores a form of saving continuity within a system that is increasingly complex and always exposed to the risk of instability.

Be that as it may, the liberation of technics carried out by art implies the suspension of the instrumentality of the technical dispositif as it is implemented. This process serves to describe what is clearly manifested in most of the works we have studied, such as the hacking of facial recognition systems carried out by Benjamin Gaulon, or the algorithmic alchemies through which Perconte produces forms by diverting image compression codecs. The liberation of technics in turn implies the liberation of the human, as we shall see next.

1. See in this regard Martin Heidegger, Essais et conférences, op. cit., p. 11.↩︎

2. Ibid., p. 47.↩︎

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit., p. 85.↩︎

4. Marc Jimenez, Adorno, esthétique (A) [en ligne]. 2022. disponible à l'adresse : https://encyclo-philo.fr/item/1715, accessed December 1, 2024.↩︎

5. Max Horkheimer, La dialectique de la raison, op. cit., p. 246.↩︎

6. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 217.↩︎

7. This is the preindividual level to which we referred in chapter 3, which individuates itself by generating phases, by creating heterogeneities, and from which the creative process draws on the preindividual: by enlarging the latter, the work is projected toward the transindividual (this is the hypothesis of this research). Chapter 2, moreover, as the works progressively traversed a stratified digital image, led us to a fundamental level, designated as metaphysical, which resonates with this primitive magical unity to which Simondon refers in Du mode d’existence des objets techniques.↩︎

8. Simondon uses the term religion, in its most general sense.↩︎

9. This transformation, of maximal generality, is the primitive expression of the individuation of being, understood as an original supersaturated system, a transformation proposed by Simondon as going beyond both evolution by adaptation and the Bergsonian élan vital.↩︎

10. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, op. cit., p. 247.↩︎