#simondon

"But in certain cases there is a beauty proper to technical objects. This beauty appears when these objects become integrated within a world, whether it be geographical or human: aesthetic feeling is then relative to this integration; it is like a gesture. The sails of a ship are not beautiful when they are at rest, but when the wind billows and inclines the entire mast, carrying the ship on the sea; it is the sail in the wind and on the sea that is beautiful, like the statue on the promontory. The lighthouse by the reef dominating the sea is beautiful, because it is integrated as a key-point of the geographical and human world. A line of pylons supporting the cables that traverse a valley is beautiful, whereas the pylons, seen on the trucks that bring them, or the cables, on the big rolls that serve to transport them, are neutral. A tractor, in a garage, is merely a technical object; however, when it is at work plowing, leaning into the furrow while the soil is turned over, it can be perceived as beautiful. Any technical object, mobile or fixed, can have its aesthetic epiphany, insofar as it extends the world and becomes integrated into it. But it is not only the technical object that is beautiful: it is the singular point of the world that the technical object concretizes. It is not only the line of pylons that is beautiful, it is the coupling of the lines, the rocks, and the valley, it is the tension and flexion of the cables: herein resides a mute, silent and ever continued operation of technicity applying itself to the world.

il n’y a d’opération d’individuation qu’à l’intérieur d’un système qui recèle suffisamment d’énergie potentielle pour que la survenue d’une singularité, c’est-à-dire d’un germe structurant y déclenche une prise de forme. Prise de forme qui s’opère toujours comme mise en relation de deux ordres de grandeur entre lesquels n’existe d’abord aucune communication. C’est ainsi qu’un végétal, pour reprendre un exemple déjà développé, se définit d’instituer une relation entre l’ordre cosmique de la lumière et l’ordre infra-moléculaire des sels minéraux, au point qu’il soit défini comme le « nœud interélémentaire » (IG, note 12, p. 33) qui fait communiquer à travers lui les sels minéraux contenus dans la terre et l’énergie lumineuse émise par le soleil.

"The man who wishes to dominate his fellows creates the android machine. He abdicates in favor of it and delegates his humanity to it. He tries to construct the thinking machine and dreams of being able to construct the willing machine, the living machine, so that he can remain behind it without anxiety, freed from all danger, exempt from every feeling of weakness, and enjoying a vicarious triumph through what he has invented.”

The factory rediscovers something of the workplace when it is transformed into a laboratory. It is no longer for the individual user, as in the artisanal modality, but for the simultaneously collective and individual user -nature itself- that the laboratory anticipates a made-to-measure assemblage.

"The true progressive perfecting of machines, whereby we could say a machine's degree of technicity is raised, corresponds not to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy."

Culture is unbalanced because it recognizes certain objects, like the aesthetic object, granting them citizenship in the world of significations, while it banishes other objects (in particular technical objects) into a structureless world of things that have no signification but only a use, a utility function. Confronted by such a defensive rejection, pronounced by a partial and biased culture, men who have knowledge of technical objects and who appreciate their signification seek to justify their judgment by granting the technical object the only status currently valued besides that of the aesthetic object, namely that of the sacred object. This, then, gives rise to an intemperate technicism which is nothing other than idolatry o f the machine and which, through this idolatry, by means of identification, leads to a technocratic aspiration to unconditional power. The desire for power consecrates the machine as a means of supremacy, it makes of it a modern philter. The man who wants to dominate his peers calls the android machine into being. He thus abdicates before it and delegates his humanity to it. He seeks to construct a thinking machine, dreams of being able to build a volition machine, a living machine, in order to retreat behind it without anxiety, freed of all danger, exempt from all feelings of weakness, and triumphant through the mediation of what he invented. 11 In this case, however, the machine, after having become, according to the imagination, the robot, this duplicate of man devoid of interiority, quite evidently and inevitably represents a purely mythical and imaginary being.