Academic literature on the topic 'Machinisme – Philosophie'

À partir d’un enrichissement de la clinique des problématiques limites grâce à la theorisation des psychoses ordinaires, nous développerons la notion d’horizon numérique à l’œuvre dans leurs pratiques des social game. Il s’agira d’appuyer la psychanalyse sur une analyse de l’objet technique qu’est l’informatique pour conceptualiser l’horizon à l’œuvre dans cette pratique. Cette analyse nous mènera à confronter les écrits sur l’horizon du logicien et philosophe de l’informatique Gérard Chazal, à la lecture lacanienne de ceux du philosophe Martin Heidegger et à la pensée clinique des game studies à la française (Michaël Stora, Serge Tisseron, Yann Leroux, Thomas Gaon, etc.). Ainsi la clinique éclaire quatre caractéristiques de la subjectivation possible par le numérique pour ces problématiques limites : le masque numérique, les paradoxes du silence, le fantasme du vidéodrome et la jouissance machinique. En prenant appui sur la conception de la machine inhérente à la psychanalyse de Sigmund Freud et Jacques Lacan, nous proposerons une approche psychanalytique du vidéoludique, prenant en compte la dimension mortifère de toute machine nécessaire au vivant pour s’inscrire dans la société des hommes.

The relation between organisms and machines is very old. Over a century ago, the French historian and philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas observed that from the Greeks onwards the intelligibility of the organic world presupposed a comparison with technical objects. Aristotle, for instance, associated living organs with mechanical artefacts in order to understand animals ‘movements. In the modern period, Descartes, Borelli and other mechanists defended the idea that organisms are, in reality, machines. Today, philosophers and scientists still argue that the genome is like a software and the brain is like a computer. In this article I reconsider the relation between organisms and machines from the perspective of the German geographer and philosopher Ernst Kapp (1808-1896), one of the founding fathers of the Philosophy of Technology. Breaking with a long and venerable philosophical tradition, Kapp argued that machines are, in reality, “organic projections”. Organisms are not machines; they are an imitation or reflection of the organic world. First of all, I clarify the hypothesis of “organic projection” (including its virtues and limits). Secondly, I consider some of the philosophical consequences that such a hypothesis entails over the debate between machinists and anti-mechanists. Finally, and following the previous considerations, I defend the importance of reconnecting the philosophy of technology with philosophy of biology in order to better understand the development of contemporary biology.

Abstract This paper examines the lived experiences of Canadian machinist and double-amputee Andrew A. Gawley (1895–1961), whose prosthetic “steel hands” rose him to fame during the mid-twentieth century, to analyze how disability objects can illuminate complex tensions of unruliness to represent a fraught epistemological materiality. Drawing on Williamson and Guffey’s “design model of disability,” I argue that Gawley’s prostheses are physical and tangible representations of his need to achieve functional normalcy. His self-reliance and identity was not only premised on ability, but dependent upon the complex unruliness ascribed within the prostheses, such that the sensationalized freakery of the “steel hands” become as crucial to Gawley’s identity as his performances of normative masculinity.

This paper presents the story of two calculating machines invented by Sir Samuel Morland (1625–95) in the 1660s. These instruments are the earliest known mechanical calculators made in England. Their designs are unusual and very much of their time. They appealed to some, especially at court, and were dismissed by others, such as Robert Hooke. The first part of the paper introduces Morland and the courtier–inventor's world, in which a reputation as a ‘machinist’ or an engineer could accompany high social status. It considers why a former diplomat and postal spy would turn to invention in general and to mechanical calculators in particular as a career move in the Restoration court. The second part addresses the instruments – attention to their design reveals Morland's inspiration. The paper concludes with an examination of the market for the calculators in London, Paris and Florence. While it is notable that the calculators circulated both in court and in the commercial sphere, even more interesting is the contrast between their receptions in these two spheres. The story of these machines and their maker helps flesh out the poorly understood world of the courtier–inventor in early modern England.

One of the problems working with and about technology is trying to define what exactly technology actually is. This seemingly straightforward, even banal question -- because, let's face it, we all know what technology is, don't we...? -- has caused philosophers since Aristotle no end of grief, and causes humble graduate students like myself unspeakable dilemmas. Attempting to define what technology is involves diving headlong into such murky problems as the subject/object dichotomy, the ontology of artefacts and the limits of the body -- that is, the very definition of humanity, if I may be so melodramatic. I won't pretend this piece will be even able to address all these problems, let alone solve them, but it may at least point to some of the ways the implications of this very simple question -- 'what is technology?' -- might be thought through. in which things seem so simple Of course, it is always possible that I am making a doctorate out of a molehill here, as there are a number of ostensibly straightforward and simple answers to this question. The first one is basic common sense, and which we might call naïve realism. It says that technology is artefacts made for and used by humans. End of story, right? Well maybe, but what is an artefact? It's an object-in-the-world, a thing-in-itself, which can be directly experienced through sense-impressions by conscious beings. It isn't a subject, obviously, because it's inert, nonhuman, constructed and totally nonconscious. (Remember -- guns don't kill, people do!) There are a few philosophical problems with such a naïve realism though, no matter what use as a rule of thumb it might be. For one, basic semiology demonstrates that whatever objects may or may not exist out there in the world, they are only sensible, comprehendible through and via discourse: to so much as understand an object means one is making sense not of the referent but of a signifier, which is, as we know, very definitely not an 'object-in-the-world'. Furthermore, to make the sort of ontological assumptions necessary to take for granted that objects are in fact objects-in-the-world, experienced or not by a subject, leads one more or less inexorably to the sort of crypto-fascism popularised by Ayn Rand and known, appropriately enough, as 'Objectivism'. in which things get a bit messier Another approach derives from our sense-impressions, and might be called inductive, or less charitably, naïve empiricism. We can, after all, decide fairly easily that some things -- cruise missiles, computers, automotive vehicles and microwave ovens, for example -- are quite obviously 'technological'. They don't appear in nature or spontaneously, they need a good deal of both human effort and other, pre-existing pieces of technology, to come into existence, and they consist largely of inorganic componentry. Other things -- human beings, most obviously, but other organic matter as well -- can reasonably be categorised as non-technological. Of course, once we move on past these simple examples, things get a bit messier: what exactly is a fulcrum, or a hammer, or a screw? Or a bandage? Technology, tool, non-technology or something else? Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect that these problems might, in theory, be solvable with enough time and consensus. And yet, where does this leave someone like the Melbourne performance artist Stelarc? When he's not suspending himself from ceilings with fishhooks, he has a project known as the Third Arm. This consists of a metal arm-like mechanism, containing computer componentry, which is attached to his body. Simple enough -- sounds like technology: inorganic, non-natural and requiring sophisticated manufacturing capacity. Except that it is controlled and operated by the nerve-endings in his body, just like a real arm -- or a prosthetic arm, for that matter. It isn't attached like a dildo or a belt, it is attached and controlled like any organic limb. Okay, so maybe what Stelarc needs is not a new definition of technology but a strong bout of therapy and a good lie down, but what about pacemakers? Replacement hips? Dildos, for that matter? Or belts, for that matter? Or what about running shoes or football boots? There is a television advertisement for adidas football boots and featuring Alessandro del Piero, in which the ideal football player is built from the ground up according to written and reproducible specifications (that is, as a piece of technology) -- wearing adidas boots and looking exactly like the Juventus striker. True enough, this is just an advert on telly, they're allowed to use metaphor to shift their technologically produced product, but what about other sports people? James Hird, the AFL footballer, is about to have another (metal, technological) pin put in his foot; Michael Voss, another AFL footballer, has a plate in his leg and pins in his knee following a complete knee reconstruction. Where do their bodies end and the technology begin? Or mine, for that matter: I have a mouthful of mercury amalgam fillings, the result of a misspent childhood eating too much sugar. The fillings are obviously technological: they're inorganic, they require sophisticated manufacturing technology to install (unless your dentist is a butcher ouch!) and they're not naturally occurring. But they've been in my mouth for nearly two decades now, they're older and more part of me than any of my hair, nails or skin. Our inductive logic is just another rule of thumb, which breaks down just where it gets interesting, at the boundary of the body and the technology. It is neither by accident nor to be obfuscatory that Foucault talks of 'technologies of the self'. in which things cease making any sense whatsoever So if there is no technological ontology or taxonomy we can discern, what other possibilities are there for definitions of technology? One useful way forward comes from the Italian psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. In Chaosmosis, his last work before his untimely death, Guattari suggests that common usage would speak "of the machine as a subset of technology". However, he argues, we should "consider the problematic of technology as dependent upon machines, and not the inverse. The machine would become the prerequisite for technology rather than its expression. Machinism is an object of fascination ... about which there's a whole historical 'bestiary'. (33) A machine, or more precisely, a 'machinic assemblage' is thus a functional ensemble of different components that are swept up and reshaped by a power of ontological auto-affirmation (35). These components are by no means limited to material existence, however -- Guattari gives the example of the hammer, which can be destroyed through various ingenious means until it reaches "a threshold of formal consistency where it loses its form" -- where it ceases to be a hammer. This threshold beyond which a hammer ceases to be a hammer is not simply physical, however -- it might be semiotic or representational, for instance: "this machinic gestalt", says Guattari, "works moreover as much on a technological plane as an imaginary one, to evoke the dated memory of the hammer and sickle" (35). That is, "the technical object [is] nothing outside of the technical ensemble to which it belong[s]" (36): technology is never simply inert alterity, the silent other -- it always contains humans inside it and before it, and contains within it "a 'nonhuman' enunciation", a protosubjectivity (37). Another way to consider this queasy combination of subject and object that makes up technology -- and by corollary, makes up the body of the subject -- is through Bruno Latour's conception of the 'quasi-object' (closely allied, as it is, to the 'cyborg' deployed by Donna Haraway in some of her earlier work). Latour shares much of Guattari's unease at common-sense definitions of technology and his desire for 'ontological relativity' (51). Working from a sociological (albeit a French sociological tradition that is far less obsessed with particular forms of reductive rationality than the mainstream Anglo-American sociological tradition) rather than a philosophical or psychoanalytic perspective, Latour's quasi-object is perhaps more user-friendly and widely applicable than Guattari's machinic assemblages. In his work We Have Never Been Modern, his most sustained attempt at a coherent philosophy rather than a contingent pragmatics, Latour argues that the distinction between the Object and the Subject is not ontologically given nor a pre-existing truth, but rather the result of struggles over the naming of things as 'objects' or 'subjects'. "We do not need", says Latour, to attach our explanations to these two pure forms known as the Object or Subject/Society, because these are, on the contrary, partial and purified results of the central practice which is our concern. The explanations we seek will indeed obtain Nature and Society, but only as a final outcome, not as a beginning. (79) The quasi-object -- which Latour sometimes refers to as 'quasi-subject' to remind us that he is not simply describing especially complex objects -- is thus an entity of variable ontology and dimensions, structured by the particular and contingent needs of its own and of other quasi-objects who/that seek to enrol, mobilise or define it. Quasi-objects are, says Latour, "[r]eal as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being" (90). Questions like 'where does the body end?' or 'what is technology' therefore, are not so much abstract philosophical questions as very real struggles between different agglomerations -- different networks or arrangements, if you would -- of quasi-objects, the answer to which will not result from a logical exercise so much as a 'reality on the ground', to use current NATO parlance. As Latour says in a companion piece to We Have Never Been Modern, the quasi-object is a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes in humans. It transplants the one into the other. This thing is the nonhuman version of people, it is the human version of things. (ARAMIS or The Love of Technology 213) So there we have an answer -- questions concerning technology and the body do not need to be answered before one proceeds to study any given socio-technical imbroglio, because they are not ontological realities. Rather, such questions become answerable -- albeit in highly contingent and specific ways -- as one proceeds through the research and the variable geometries and ontologies of the assemblage of actors becomes apparent and definable. Sure, its not as universal as Heidegger, I admit, but it's a damn sight more useful. postscript: in which the plot has been lost If we take seriously Latour and Guattari's imputation of agency and removal of certainty from what used to be harmless objects, we are led, eventually, to question just what we, as speaking, thinking, centres of agency -- i.e., as subjects -- actually are. If we too are quasi-objects, where does subjectivity reside and come from? Although I can confidently state that there are several doctoral theses in that question, I'd like to hazard a solution in the space available. Guattari and his frequent collaborator, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in their immense work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, define a mode of individuation that is not a subjectivity as a haecceity (261). The haecceity precedes, exists underneath and exceeds the subject -- they are "the subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages" (266), "the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate" (262). That is what people are, that is what we are: collective assemblages of haecceities -- of looks and stomachs and fillings, of becomings and desires and histories and career paths, of tired feet and sore heads, of emotions, mood swings and family backgrounds, and many more individuations and affects. As Deleuze and Guattari state, you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realise that is what you are, and you are nothing but that. ... You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a life (regardless of its duration) -- a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it. (262) Where does my body end? Well, that depends upon the question. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Vol.3 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Latour, Bruno. ARAMIS or the Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. ---.We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sean Aylward Smith. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php>. Chicago style: Sean Aylward Smith, "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) Where does the body end? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php> ([your date of access]).

Fondée sur un corpus d’essayistes-philosophes français des années 1930, cette thèse est une contribution à l’histoire des critiques du progrès au XXe siècle. Elle montre que le machinisme, cible principale des critiques, est promu comme une catégorie légitime pour penser le monde contemporain, qui oblige à élargir le champ de la philosophie. Aux yeux de ces essayistes, la philosophie doit partir des contingences historiques et des hommes concrets pour penser le tragique de/dans l’ordinaire. Ces auteurs marginalisés enrichissent le diagnostic sur la modernité industrielle, le capitalisme et le soviétisme en les examinant sous l’angle du productivisme. Soucieux de comprendre les spécificités idéologiques de l’entre-deux-guerres et de mieux situer les contours de la controverse sur le machinisme, cette thèse propose un tour d’horizon des discours sur la modernité de cette époque. La « Machine » devient le lieu d’une explication entre plusieurs auteurs sur le sens de la modernité industrielle. D’où une tension entre l’impératif de rationalisation associé au productivisme et la dénonciation de ce qui est perçu comme un ordre hétéronome, dépossédant les individus et les sociétés de leurs devenirs propres. Après avoir dégagé les enjeux des discours sur la modernisation, nous distinguons deux types de critiques : une critique spiritualiste et une critique socio politique de la société industrielle où capitalisme et soviétisme se rejoignent dans leur élan productiviste. Si tous les auteurs considérés s’élèvent contre la philosophie de l’histoire dominante et sa promesse d’un progrès linéaire, certains essayistes-philosophes invitent à penser une histoire désorientée, ouverte à une transformation révolutionnaire
Based on a corpus of French essayist-philosophers from the 1930s, this thesis is a contribution to the history of the critics of the idea of progress in the 20th century. It argues that these critics promoted the concept of machinism as a legitimate category for thinking the contemporary world, which should widen the field of philosophy in return. In these essayists’ point of view, philosophy should think the tragedy of/in the ordinary by paying attention to historical contingencies and real people. These marginalized authors considered industrial modernity, capitalism, and sovietism as processes falling under the category of productivism. In order to identify the ideological specificities of the interwar period and to better understand what is at stake the controversy over machinism, this thesis surveys the discourses on modernity of this period. The "Machine" became the major focus of these authors’ attempts to capture the meaning of industrial modernity. A tension emerged between the imperative of rationalisation associated with productivism, and the rejection of what was perceived as a heteronomous order, dispossessing individuals and societies of their own futures. After having identified the issues at stake in the discourses on modernization, we distinguish two types of critics: a spiritualist cultural critique and a socio-political critique of industrial society, where capitalism and sovietism merged in a common cult of productivism. While most authors of our corpus here spoke out against the hegemonic philosophy of history with its promise of a linear progress, some essayist-philosophers tried to elaborate a disoriented history, open to revolutionary transformation

De quoi la révolution numérique est-elle la révolution ? Le premier niveau d'analyse s'inscrit sur le plan de l'histoire. Il vise à dégager la structure historique de la révolution numérique, en délimitant d'abord son périmètre diachronique et en dégageant sa place particulière au sein de l'histoire générale des techniques. L'hypothèse, c'est que la révolution numérique n'est pas un changement d'outillage mais un événement d'histoire, qui s'inscrit dans le long processus de la machinisation de l'Occident et de la succession des systèmes techniques pour aboutir à l'émergence d'un nouveau " système technique " : la révolution numérique, c'est la révolution de notre infrastructure technique systémique, c'est-à-dire l'avènement du " système technique numérique ". Dans cette partie, nous privilégions le terrain historique et les données empiriques qu'il fournit, au nom d'une philosophie de la technologie fermement opposée à toute métaphysique misotechnique. Le second niveau d'analyse s'inscrit sur le plan de la perception. Au-delà de la seule révolution numérique, il vise à dégager la structure phénoménologique de toute révolution technique, en remontant aux conditions techniques de toute perception en général. L'hypothèse, c'est qu'une révolution technique est toujours une révolution ontophanique, c'est-à-dire un ébranlement du processus par lequel l'être (ontos) nous apparaît (phaïnô) et, par suite, un bouleversement de l'idée même que nous nous faisons de la réalité. Nous nous appuyons ici sur la notion de " phénoménotechnique " empruntée à Gaston Bachelard, qui nous conduit à défendre un constructivisme phénoménologique selon lequel toute technique est une matrice ontophanique, dans laquelle se coule notre expérience-du-monde possible. Comme les précédentes, la révolution numérique apparaît alors comme une révolution de nos structures perceptives, dont la violence phénoménologique permet au passage d'expliquer le succès et le déclin de la notion de virtuel. De cette dernière, nous proposons une généalogie critique et nous montrons qu'elle n'a été jusqu'ici qu'une tentative ratée d'élucider la phénoménalité numérique, en raison de la rêverie de l'irréel qu'elle induit. Le troisième niveau d'analyse s'inscrit sur le plan de la phénoménalité numérique enfin abordée dans sa positivité. Il vise à saisir la structure ontophanique de la révolution numérique, c'est-à-dire la nature de l'être des êtres numériques. L'hypothèse, c'est que l'ontophanie numérique résulte de onze caractéristiques phénoménologiques propres à la matière calculée, qui sont présentées dans un ordre didactique favorisant la compréhension globale du phénomène numérique. Il s'agit de la nouménalité, l'idéalité, l'interactivité, la virtualité, la versatilité, la réticularité, la reproductibilité instantanée, la réversibilité, la destructibilité, la fluidité et la ludogénéité. Nous terminons alors en analysant la responsabilité des activités de conception-création dans la genèse phénoménotechnique du réel et en particulier le rôle du design dans la constitution créative de l'ontophanie numérique. En tant qu'activité phénoménotechnique, le design est non seulement une activité créatrice d'ontophanie, mais encore une activité intentionnellement factitive, c'est-à-dire qui vise à faire-être autant qu'à faire-faire, en vue de projeter l'enchantement du monde. C'est pourquoi le design numérique, parce qu'il a la capacité d'engendrer de nouveaux régimes d'expériences interactives, joue un rôle essentiel dans le modelage de la révolution numérique. La révolution numérique, c'est aussi quelque chose qui se sculpte et se façonne, se coule et se moule dans les projets des designers. C'est une révolution de notre capacité à faire le monde, c'est-à-dire à créer de l'être.

Chapter 4 examines how Daniel Heinsius’ path-breaking treatise De Tragoediae Constitutione (1611) belongs not only to the Arminian Controversy but also to larger debates concerning providence and predestination in early modernity. Theologies of election and reprobation necessarily traffic in mystery, taxing the limits of the human understanding. Tragedy, however, enables readers to comprehend actions in terms of natural cause and effect; in this sense Heinsius renders divinity intelligible, even tentatively, when he develops Aristotle’s comments concerning necessity and probability (or verisimilitude) as well as his strictures regarding devices and dei ex machinis. In his tragedy Herodes Infanticida, moreover, Heinsius reframes Scripture as a tragedy, eschewing miracles and theological explanations, demonstrating instead how this key evangelical episode—Herod’s massacre of the innocents—is an all-too-human story of fear, power, ignorance, and interpretation.

This chapter considers how the American avant-garde utilizes landscape as a site in-between the subject and the world, one which negotiates skepticism’s dilemma of the perceiving subject’s simultaneous distance from and conflation with the world. Examining the films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, David Gatten, and Ernie Gehr, as well as Phil Solomon’s machinima and the figure of the border in Chick Strand’s work and recent work by Peggy Ahwesh, the chapter argues that these cinematic takes on landscape forge multiplicity within a singularity of space, staging a paradoxical plurality of encounters with the “same.” Taking up the figure of geological strata prevalent in Benning’s and Gatten’s work, the chapter theorizes the function of the interstitial where re-encounters invited by extreme long takes (Lockhart, Benning) or the obsessive review of “missable” details (Gatten, Solomon) yield forking conceptions of historical time and meaning rather than linear ones. Similarly, the chapter turns to how films by Benning, Gatten, Strand, and Ahwesh use the figure of the in-between to undermine the authority of man-made borders.