Organising invention through technical mentality: Simondon’s challenge to the ‘civilisation of productivity’

Gilbert Simondon and the Technical Mentalities and Transindividual Affects of Art-science

“…In this article, I argue that if indeed the field of art-science represents an important contemporary site for the formation of an alternate technical culture then it is because of the new technical mentalities that its practices might cultivate. The topic of an unpublished essay only recently translated into English (Simondon, 2012a); technical mentality is a crucial yet underexplored concept in Simondon’s philosophy which, as Bardin and Carrozini (2017: 29) put it, ‘works as an intermediate dimension between technicity and culture’. It thus serves as something of a ‘missing link’ between Simondon’s account of the process of technical invention and the psychic and collective individuation of subjects, which have often been treated as separate concerns in the Anglophone literature (Chabot, 2013).…”

“…However, with the advent of industrialization, we witness the growing separation of these processes, with different individuals attending to different tasks in an ever-finer division of labour. As Simondon (2012a: 7) writesThe effects of this amplification and complication of the industrial world is to spread out the different roles from each other: not only the source of information from the source of energy and the source of primary material, but even the different tasks of information contribution […] the figure of the unhappy inventor came about at the same time as that of the dehumanised worker: it is its counter-type and arises from the same causeIn the industrial epoch, both the inventor and worker are alienated from technics by industrial production and its social division of labour, with the result that the products of their labour – that is, the technological objects they create – tend also to be alienated from culture (Bardin and Carrozzini, 2017).…”

“…‘Openness’, in contrast, represents ‘the sign of the perfection of the technical mentality’ (Simondon, 2012a: 13). Simondon writes that a technical object or process is ‘open’ to the extent that it can maintain its ontogenetic process of concretization, creatively resolving the incompatibilities and tensions of its surrounding environment towards the invention of new material orders that transform pre-established boundaries and expectations of what is possible (Bardin and Carrozzini, 2017; Roberts, 2018). In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects , Simondon (2017: 18) adds that the ‘open machine’ is one whose functioning is defined by a wider ‘ margin of indetermination ’, which allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information, to generate new connections with other (technical and vital) systems and to reconfigure the dominant forms of value and modes of thought circulating in the social field.…”

Individuación y transindividuación —Dos trayectorias laborales desde la perspectiva de G. Simondon—

“…Sin dejar de advertir que un sistema social, más aún en su dimensión de trabajo o relación técnica, no es siempre abierto (cf. Bardin y Carrozzini, 2017); más que estados, abierto y cerrado son fases que atraviesa todo sistema con sus ideologías, contradicciones y conflictos. Se busca que éstas sean tolerables para la organización a medida que acontece la individuación.…”

“…La relación hombre y objeto técnico es de causalidad y condicionamiento recíproco, por lo que la cultura en su relación indisoluble con la técnica incorpora esquemas mentales y axiológicos (cf. Bardin y Carrozzini, 2017). La filosofía de la técnica -sin tecnofobia y sin tecnofilia-es el puente o la mediación entre la naturaleza y la cultura propuesta por Simondon.…”