I'm not sure I agree with this, or just want to think deeply on it. Like in art, I feel that medium is critical in our understanding of an object. And the implication here seems to be that the manufacture and utility of a technology are separate. I would argue that they are entangled, a little like Hannah Arendt's very pointed objection to using any technologies with histories of violence.
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I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
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It is Simondon's virtue to have seen that technics as network now constitutes a milieu that conditions human action. Out of that milieu, we need simply to invent new forms of fidelity to the transductive nature of beings, both living and nonliving, with new transindividual modalities for amplifying action. For, in our relation to preindividual nature, multiple strands of relation—to others, to machines, to ourselves—entwine in a loose knot or node, and that is where thought and life come once again into play.
— Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual by Muriel Combes (Page 78)
From this point of view, any event, and in particular any social conflict entailing an attack on technics as one of its aspects, can only appear to Simondon as a misunderstanding of the intrinsic normativity of technics, as an essentially reactionary nostalgia for the human-tool-bearer dispossessed of that role: "The frustration of humans starts with the machine that replaces them, with the automatic loom, with the forging presses, with the equipment of the new mills; these are the machines that the worker will shatter during riots, because they are his rivals, no longer motors but tool-bearers (MEOT, 115). Passing as he does in the same phrase from the human as generic subject of alienation in relationship to the machine, to the worker as specific incarnation of the misunderstanding of machines, Simondon does not attribute any specific value to the point of view of workers about machines. At no moment does he ask himself if the violent reactions of workers in their encounter with machines do not express something about their relationship to technics other than a simple blindness to becoming.
— Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual by Muriel Combes (Page 75)
According to Tarde, we never imitate individuals; we imitate flows that traverse individuals, which are always flows of belief and of desire. From this point of view, even invention arises from the imitation of flows, which are conjoined in a new manner in the inventor (and not, properly speaking, by him, as if he were the author)
— Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual by Muriel Combes (Page 52)
This is why, although the fabricational intention deposited in the technical object must not be confused with the utilitarian intention that is essentially exterior to it, we cannot explain the mode of being of a technical object in terms of the fabricational intention that gave rise to it. Insofar as any technical individual is a system of elements organized to function together and characterized by its tendency toward concretization, we must distance ourselves from human intentionality and enter into the concrescence of technical systems in order to understand the mode of existence of technical objects.
— Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual by Muriel Combes (Page 58)
The point of departure for Du mode d'existence des objets techniques is a crisis, a conflict between culture and technology, born of a misunderstanding of technology on the part of a culture considering technology as a "foreign reality" (ΜΈΟΤ, 9) and rejecting it in these terms. "Technical culture" thus gives a name to a manner of thinking that will bear the burden of resolving this conflict, and from the outset, Simondon tells us that only a philosophical manner of thinking can take on the task of rendering culture and technics compatible.
— Gilbert Simondon and the philosophy of the transindividual by Muriel Combes (Page 57)
As this book is an anthology of Simondon's philosophies, it often references them in small parts. The book referenced here is one of those. Much of Simondon's work is still not translated into English so I use these texts as my only point of reference (interestingly one step removed, as so much of Simondon's thinking seems to go into abstraction and language).
Fionnáin finished reading The Barracks by John McGahern
Fionnáin finished reading A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None …
Fionnáin started reading A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None …
Fionnáin reviewed Countercultures, communities, and Indra's Net by John Hutchinson (ACA Public, #5)
From one of Ireland’s leading curators and writers on visual art, John Hutchinson’s Countercultures, Communities, …
as stated
3 stars
This book is a short presentation of a large bank of research tracing counter-cultural movements mostly in the West from the past 200 years. It is well written and researched, and informational.
Fionnáin reviewed Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Above the pale blue dot
5 stars
Orbital is a novel that seems to go nowhere except round and round, and yet it grows into a cacophony of story during its brief and deceptive simplicity.
On the surface, it is a well researched, character-driven fiction about four astronauts and two cosmonauts orbiting the earth in a vessel for scientific observation. However, this container becomes a device for Samantha Harvey to collapse progress, poverty, climate change, ambition, grief and hope into a tiny vessel. All too often we are reminded that only a few inches of metal protect [us?] from complete doom, such is the fragility of life. Beautifully written and concise, this book was a terrific surprise.
Fionnáin finished reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Fionnáin quoted Orbital by Samantha Harvey
We're windblown leaves. We think we're the wind, but we're just the leaf. And isn't it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren't we so insecure a species that we're forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what's different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing.
— Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Page 106)
One of the story's astronauts, Shawn, musing on a question he has been asked to answer: How are we writing the future of humanity?
Fionnáin
boosted
Yambunz quoted Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It's the desire - no, the need (fuelled by fervour) - to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre lowliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with each other? With the earth? It's not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which their lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they've lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They are humans with a godly view and that's the blessing and also the curse.
— Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Page 73)