RELATED TERMS: Apparatus – Dispositif
Gilbert Simondon (2017: 231), in a text written in the 1950s but not translated into English until 2017, makes an interesting claim about the articulation of technologies and three major socio-political regimes of the 20th century. Each has incorporated, in a different way, a representation and a valorisation of integrated technical systems.
He argues that National Socialist thought is attached to a certain conception that links the destiny of a people to a technical expansion. This thinking goes as far as conceiving the role of neighbouring peoples as a function of this master expansion.
The American democratic doctrine has an alternative definition of technical progress and of its incorporation into civilisation. Thus, he argues, the content of the notion of the standard of living, which is a social concept that constitutes a cultural reality, is such that important terms are technological. This is not only through the possession of particular instruments or utensils, but also through the fact of knowing how to use this or that network, of knowing how to be functionally connected.
Finally, the Communist Marxist doctrine, as it is lived and has been realised, takes technical development to be an essential aspect of the social and political effort to be made. It gains self-awareness through, for example, the use of tractors in agriculture and the foundation of factories in industry.
Simondon argues that, as individual technologies becomes increasingly integrated within a world, in the form of fixed ensembles attached to one another, they begin to constrain human individuals into the links these ensembles (dispositifs) determine. How this differs from Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’ (Ge-stell) is a topic to be pursued.
Reference
Simondon, G. (2017) On the mode of existence of technical objects. Translated by C. Malaspina and J. Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.
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