Including technology within culture
Source: (G. Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects, Introduction).
Culture ignores a human reality within technical reality - in order to fully play its role culture needs to include technical beings in the form of knowledge and in the form of a sense of values.
There are three level of technical objects (TO's): elements, individuals, ensembles. The confused rapport with technology arises in consumers, manufacturers and workers. In order to maintain a healthy relationship with technical objects, we need to become aware of their mode of existence which takes place in three stages: genesis, ensemble and becoming aware.
True nature of human is not to compete with machines but invent "technical and living objects capable of resolving problems of compatibility between machines within ensemble".
When the primitive magical relation between human and the world ruptures, it goes into either technical (figural) direction or to religious (ground functions).
While Simondon argues that “the opposition drawn between human and machine is false and has no foundation” (P.9), I cannot as yet see how is it an urgent matter, since it is quite obvious that by default culture includes technical objects too (old computers, cars, etc.)
To Simondon there are two contradictory views in culture:
TO are pure assemblages of matter, presenting utility;
TO are animated by hostile intentions towards humans.
Operating a machine is different from a master-slave position: “[hu]man is the permanent organizer of a society of TO” that need the human in the same way musicians in an orchestra need the conductor.
What I found interesting here is that he sees technical education as a necessary part of basic education for all humans the same way as basic scientific education. I can argue this, that in the Global South the idea of tech education always bears a bizzare air of potential exploitation of the workers in future as cheap remote workforce. “A child should know what regulation is, or what a positive reaction is, the same way as they know mathematical theorems” (here I may want to look up technical education in the Global South, and any existing policies attached to it, additionally to Jamaican container project, maybe I cuold find more successful projects).
Genesis has three levels (P.21):
1) Element: Climate of XVIII century optimism, the idea of infinite progress, constant improvement of human life.
2) Individual. Anxiety here rises from the idea that machine disempowers humans because it now does their job. Answer to this anxiety is technophile and technocratic excesses of the thermodynamic era - rape of nature.
3) Ensemble. the information theory of 20th century is regulative and stabilizing. “Once technical reality has become regulative it can be integrated into culture, which is regulative in its essence” (P.21)
Thus technicity can be added into culture at different stages in the following ways:
1) the age of element: by addition; 2) the age of individual: by revolution; 3) in the age of ensemble, technicity can become a foundation of culture, due to its stabilizing power.
