Timothy Jackson

Towards a humanities worthy of the event A human techné

After an extended hiatus (including a long break from social media) I'm revivifying my blogging practice. Like everyone else (late to the party as usual), I've migrated to Substack.

open.substack.com/pub/timothyj...

Ooooh. Will have to try and check that out, thanks!

Potentially! He's also, two sentences after the Cincinnatus reference, saying "..A regulative relation of circular causality
cannot be established between the whole of governed reality and the function of authority...." this is an argument against a pure top-down authority.

Mystification is something that is often, but not exclusively, intentionally done by those using it to wield power. This is the antithesis of what Simondon is calling for.

As I said it might be a naïve program. But he's very clearly not saying the technocrats should lead the world. He's saying general education can help us ensure they don't.....and he may indeed be wrong about that.

This is the point - Simondon is calling for a demystification of the customers. So that they are not so easily preyed upon by the technocrats. This is the whole thesis of re-integrating technicity into culture via generalised technology (which means the knowledge of technicity, for him).

Gaining technical knowledge in a number of scientific fields is a wonderful way to demystify this stuff. Hence Simondon's call for a reform of education.

...cf. theoretical physics, but basically the legacy of the mechanical philosophy tout court. It's been a genuinely huge problem for the world, and continues to be, that a mystified form of theology masquerading as the "objective truth" have overdetermined our sense of our place in the cosmos.

....general education. That we treat technicity as distinct from (alienated from) the rest of culture is part of the problem, for him. This enables the technocratic class to emerge, with their "drive" (or "idolatry") of/for power. This is not unrelated to a general mystification of science....

Again where I think it becomes useful (not only here, but) is in tracking the relationship between the mystification of technologies and this "drive towards machines". Simondon is saying we're going to be overwhelmed by technocrats if we don't integrate technicity back into human culture via....

There are Hegelian aspects to his thought. But it's also important to understand why he doesn't consider the individuation schema "dialectical". I think whether he acutely (pre)diagnoses RW accelerationism or not is a distinct question from whether he is giving off "technocratic fascist" vibes.

....LLMs (just to take one obvious example) do a lot more damage, culturally, to the extent that they are mystified. And there is a huge amount of mystification of LLMs coming out of the tech/data science sector itself right now.

....of aspects to this. And of course the call for a "general technical education" might be naïve if we imagine it's going to redress the issues we're currently faced with (especially at this point!). But I think there's something important in Simondon's diagnosis here nonetheless. And certainly....

And I don't see the current technocracy in the way you do, seemingly, either. I think it feeds very heavy on our general lack of technical knowledge. That we don't know how the vast amount of technology we're engaging with works, we are "alienated" by it for this reason. There are a number....

So I'm certainly not getting any "technocracy fascism vibes" myself. That's why I provided the quote where he explicitly decries exactly that - technocracy and the desire for absolute power.

....to its costs and the results of its operation." - it's certainly possible that Simondon misdiagnosed the nature of the contemporary technocracy, which arose decades after he wrote this book. But its very clear that he's decrying technocracy, and any attempts at absolute or abstract power.

Elon is more like someone "Running a company that uses machines," which is "no more useful for the attainment of his awareness than is labor: it creates abstract points of view regarding the machine, causing it to be judged, not in its own right, but according....

....fascination with automatons/autonomous machines, made in the image of the human. He's warning against this fantasy - machines are within the human lifeworld and require human regulation/mediation.

....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's very explicitly warning *against* technocracy. The obsession with the "idea of the robot" is about the....

A couple of pages earlier: "This, then,
gives rise to an intemperate technicism which is nothing other than idolatry of the machine and which, through this idolatry, by means of identification, leads to a technocratic aspiration to unconditional power......

🙏

...events, i.e. as though they have essences associated with specific functions to which they can be more or less adapted (like a tool in a specific sociocultural assemblage).

Where do these quotes you're pulling come from?

...model to natural objects (the classic cybernetic and adaptationist confusion), which would actually throw us back onto hylomorphism. Recalling that hylomorphism is precisely a *technical* schema inappropriately applied to natural objects as though the latter are the result of "special creation"..

..."concretisation", because they are always-already concrete. Concretisation is the analogous process undergone by *technical* objects. And they are subject to a convergence to the extent that they are optimised for a specific purpose. But it would be a confusion to apply this optimisation....

....pre-individual "charge". In very basic thermodynamic terms, it can do more "work" - it is more metastable because it has internalised more gradients/tensions that are subject to differential canalisation. A key point here being that "natural objects" are not subject to a process of.....

...is *not* some "final unification" on offer. A system that "envelops and compatibilises" more pre-individual "difference" within itself has a greater capacity for *ongoing* individuation. It can become more things - in a context-elicited manner - than a system which incorporates less of that....

This is complicated. I've previously mentioned to you Simondon's anticipation of the "evolution of evolvability", in the context of our discussions of numericity. Personally I am not a fan of this terminology of the "elevated level of individuation", but the key here is precisely that there....

…construction, which reveals certain insufficiencies relative to the purpose of the object, which prompts a refining of the schema and then another round of construction, and so on.

But it’s certainly no stronger than the differentiation emphasis. It’s a complementary of opposites. “Concretisation” is really about the progression from an abstract schema (in invention) to a concrete technical object. And this is not a one-and-done transition, but involves an initial….

Simo’s dynamic is integration *and* differentiation. Concretisation is not necessarily about some total convergence, but it *is* a concept specifically applicable to technical objects, which acquire their telos from their inventors, though they are also capable of “abstraction” (exaptation).