‘Technical Mentality’ Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon

Boever, Arne De; Murray, Alex; Roffe, Jon

doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748677214.003.0002

Cited by 19 publications

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“…Despite the fact that Cassirer is sometimes accused of being too much of an epistemologist 10 and despite the fact that Simondon is sometimes claimed to treat epistemology as a mere function of ontology (De Boever et al 2009), Simondon follows Cassirer's point regarding the lawfulness embedded in technology. Simondon even goes so far as to insist that an investigation of technology's mode of existence is always simultaneously epistemological (Simondon 1958, p. 255).…”

Section: The Ontological Force Of Technicitymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively

Hoel

Tuin

2012

Philos. Technol.

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This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer's "Form und Technik" (1930) and Gilbert Simondon's Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the "being" of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of emergence that gives ontological priority to "technicity," that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer's and Simondon's insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of "nature" and "the human," which are now understood as coevolving with technology.

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Section: The Ontological Force Of Technicitymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively

Hoel

Tuin

2012

Philos. Technol.

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“…So much so that Massumi can even speak of 'future causes' (De Boever et al, 2012), and to great effect in terms of designing. He explains:…”

Section: Scenarios Styledmentioning

confidence: 99%

Styling the future. A philosophical approach to design and scenarios

Brassett

O’Reilly

2015

Futures

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Please cite this article as: Jamie Brassett, John O'Reilly, Styling the future.A philosophical approach to design and scenarios, Futures http://dx. HighlightsRecent discourses championing the strategic value of design, including Design Thinking, regard Style and Styling as an immature concern. We refute this.At its most productive, styling helps us create affective means of innovating future strategies and scenarios.An affective style is not imposed upon inert matter, but emerges from matter in unpredictable ways.An affective style explodes narratives, stories, plots and other meaning-making devices to champion uncertainty and experimentation.Most importantly, an affective style positions all of us who are implicated in an emergent creativity to reconsider our relation to the future. Abstract Since the end of the 1980s -the Decade of Style (Mort, 1996) -the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times (Whicher et al., 2015) see a focus on style as a sign of design's immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed (Brown

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“…Ezra Pound's valorization in the ABC of Reading of "inventors" whose "extant work gives us the first known example of a [new] process" over "masters" (who exploit inventions perhaps better than the inventors) and "diluters" (just okay) is also apposite [7]. Simondon's own notion of "invention" verges on the definition of "discovery," as one simply can't invent without "capitalizing [on] natural forces, laws, principles, materials and their potential modes and transformation" [8]. Most importantly, Simondon understand invention as a form of thought itself:…”

Section: Toy Made Out Of Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This discontinuous invention is that in which the technical object really "concretizes" itself as reality of a progress, such as the invention of the diesel engine within the technical essence of the "internal combustion engine." [8] That is, a new essence, the "internal combustion engine," is introduced by the inventor and goes through a continuous process of improvement, ultimately converging with other technical essences (machines exploiting diesel fuel) and making the discontinuous leap into the new individual, the diesel engine.…”

Section: Toy Made Out Of Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form

Stefans¹

2017

Humanities

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Abstract:One of the key strands of early thinking by the Language Poets, notably Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery, was that the poem-particularly the mainstream, American lyric in thrall to the Imagist tradition-should be understood as partaking in the commodity system, either in its capacity of presenting the world itself as consumable or as a commodity itself. Strategies to retool the poem included an exaggerated de-naturalization of language (akin to Brecht's Verfremdung Effekt), the permanent deferral of epiphany as "pay off" (i.e., writing as ongoing phenomenological investigation), and, most extremely, the poem as engaged in a "general" as opposed to a "closed" economy-as pure expenditure, linguistic waste, in George Bataille's sense. These practices, however, while they might have, in theory, "de-commodified" the poem (the evidence weighs against it, but it's quite impossible to prove), have nonetheless confirmed the centrality of the early notion by William Carlos Williams that a poem is a "machine," an autonomous producer of meanings, and to that extent an object. The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon argues in his theory of technicity that something human lies at the heart of the technical object and that its technical essence, like any player in the Darwinian evolution, has its own evolutionary journey through time. In Bernard Stiegler's succinct formulation, "[a]s a 'process of exteriorization,' technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life." This confluence of ideas suggests a possibility: that the technical elements of poems-what might have formerly been understood as stylistic tics, characteristic methods, visual and prosodic features-are themselves engaged in a quest for "life," and that poems are in fact always already objects, existing outside of the system of commodities if only by virtue of obtaining an ontological status both: (1) irreducible to an over-determined system of exchanges (an unreachable "essence" in Graham Harman's "object-oriented ontology"), and (2) autonomous from the life, actions and intentions of the poem him/herself. To that degree, the focus of early Language poetry on configuring the poem against the system of commodities overstepped its reach by attempting to "de-objectify" the poem, to dissolve it among systems of relation. Poems are less human to the degree that they are not proxies for the poet him/herself or total subjects to the "social," but more human to the degree that they contain-as a steam engine, a diode or a Swiss watch-a technical essence.

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‘Technical Mentality’ Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon

Cited by 19 publications

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The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively

The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively

Styling the future. A philosophical approach to design and scenarios

The New Commodity: Technicity and Poetic Form

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