{"title":"Immediacy, causality, plasticity: Catherine Malabou and the future undoing of philosophy","authors":"Greg Hainge, Richard Iveson","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2020.1815359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1815359","url":null,"abstract":"ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rctc20 Immediacy, causality, plasticity: Catherine Malabou and the future undoing of philosophy Greg Hainge & Richard Iveson To cite this article: Greg Hainge & Richard Iveson (2020) Immediacy, causality, plasticity: Catherine Malabou and the future undoing of philosophy, Culture, Theory and Critique, 61:1, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2020.1815359 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2020.1815359","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"15 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82516126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Battle lines: E.1027","authors":"B. Colomina","doi":"10.1080/14735789609366597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735789609366597","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1466 1","pages":"95-105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86500514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How can culture and technics be reconciled in the digital milieu and automatic societies? Political implications of the philosophies of technology of Simondon and Stiegler","authors":"Anne Alombert","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1674678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1674678","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses the relevance of Gilbert Simondon’s proposals with respect to the challenges of contemporary technical transformations, and to weigh his influence and legacy in contemporary French thought. For Simondon, two major political challenges appear with the industrial revolution: firstly, the alienation of producers and consumers by technical machines and technical objects, and secondly, the increasing gap between the (rapid) evolution of technical realities and the (slow) evolution of cultural contents. These two challenges seem to take on new dimensions today, through generalised automation, algorithmic governmentality and digital disruption. Bernard Stiegler describes these features of contemporary society as a dis-adjustment between technical and social systems, leading to a process of generalised proletarianisation. He suggests that they may be overcome through experimenting with what he calls a contributory economy and contributory technologies. I will try to point out the theoretical gesture that makes it possible to shift from Simondon’s analysis of technical objects to Stiegler’s analysis of automatic societies. I will suggest that in spite of their theoretical divergence, Stiegler’s analysis can be seen as a way to continue Simondon’s political project, i.e. to ‘reconcile culture and technics’ in a completely transformed – and still transforming – technical epoch.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"23 1","pages":"315 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82290319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Simondon and the technologies of control: on the individuation of the dividual","authors":"Pierluca D’Amato","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1694211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1694211","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Can Simondon’s thought provide us with the tools to consider the evolution of computational technologies of power in their intersection with capitalism’s digital turn? To answer to this question, this essay projects a line of interaction between Simondon’s and Deleuze’s philosophies in order to enable the comprehension of the technical means through which twenty-first-century domination is exerted in the form of digital modulation. The description of this form of domination must take into account the relation between topology and individuation and how this relation is altered by the computational, that reconfigures the naturalisation of technical objects as a process of ‘becoming-alive’ of digital technologies. To this end, this essay considers Deleuze’s insights in matters of non-Euclidean spaces and describes one of the central concepts of the Post-scriptum sur les sociétés du contrôle, the dividual, from the standpoint of its associated digital milieu. Attempting to update Simondon’s mechanology to address a digital technology of power, this essay will then describe the technical lineage of the dividual and its peculiar process of individuation in its hybrid or monstrous character.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"4 1","pages":"300 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82242333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Traversing states: a reflection on digital technology and Simondon's critique of hylomorphism","authors":"Michael M. O’Hara","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1677485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1677485","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I examine Simondon's concept of the technical object reflecting on its analogous relationship to digital technology. Intrinsic to such an analysis is Simondon's distinction between the abstract and concrete and his specific critique of the hylomorphic model. In a deeply rich example, Simondon, contra Aristotle, mobilises the process of mould-making as an exemplar of the modulated ensemble of forces that prefigure any formations of matter through form. I analyse Simondon's paradigmatic criticism while at the same time carving out the potential intersections that emerge through the kinaesthetic awareness of the body. By doing so I highlight the implicit relational formation that occurs through the process of object making that is at odds with ontologies that underpin digital technology. Finally, I analyse how the transformation of object making realised through digital fabrication radically transforms our relationship to objects claiming that such technology remains beholden to hylomorphic schemata.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"12 1","pages":"223 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90742688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blockchain as a medium for transindividual collective","authors":"Juho Rantala","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1694213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1694213","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Today, digitalisation is penetrating every corner of our mundane life, thus affecting our being in manifold ways. In spite of this, digital technologies provide us with paths towards advancing humanity. One way to model the possibilities of the new technologies in a sustainable way is to frame them in light of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy and especially his understanding of ‘transindividuality’, which is the foundation for a robust, evolving collective. The transindividual relation, mediated by technical objects, is the possibility of a concurrent problem-solving at the collective and individual level. One of these new technologies, blockchain, a decentralised peer-to-peer database, practically demonstrates a complex system that can cultivate this transindividuality. Although not without its flaws, blockchain nonetheless presents a serious innovation for collective being.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"42 1","pages":"250 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76358464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The disparity between culture & technics","authors":"Conor Heaney","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1689626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1689626","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay serves as an introduction to the Special Issue entitled ‘Culture & Technics: The Politics of Simondon’s Du Mode’. This issue follows the pivotal and important translation of Gilbert Simodon's supplementary dissertation, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, which offers a rich and layered approach to technics which, through his other works, we see integrated into an entire philosophical approach. This Issue seeks to consider how we might read Simondon today in what is a completely transformed technical epoch from his own, faced with new technological and global challenges. After briefly introducing, first, some comments on Simondon’s account of the process of disparation, this essay will make some observations on how Simondon conceptualised the relation between culture and technics. It is the space between these two latter notions – and the potential for their systematic, open, and processual integration – in which this introduction contextualises this Special Issue.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"193 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88864392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pure information: on infinity and human nature in the technical object","authors":"Cecile Malaspina","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1680300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1680300","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The technical object is said to carry a pure information. This idea is as bold as it is perplexing, seeing that it does not refer straightforwardly to a technical concept, such as negentropy, nor to any semantic sense related to communication. This purity of information can indeed be understood in light of something human, whose trace we find in the technical object, but Simondon once more confounds expectations. Untying the idea of human nature from anthropological, social or even psychological terms, he refers instead to what, in each of us, remains tributary to the metaphysical notion of the unlimited and indefinite (ἄπειρον; ápeiron). We are thus in the presence of an aporia, a puzzlement. To grasp the idea of pure information and to understand it in light of in the human ‘ápeiron' requires that we think through the apparently paradoxical notion of an imprint of infinity on the technical object. To help us in this endeavour is Simondon’s conception of a power of initiative that marks both human collectivity and the technical object with an axiomatic audacity.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"9 1","pages":"205 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87686476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Invention and capture: a critique of Simondon","authors":"Daniela Voss","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1679652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1679652","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The evolution of technical objects is a central theme in Simondon’s book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. He describes it as though it were a natural process akin to the evolution of living beings; yet technical objects are invented objects that necessarily relate to human beings. The process of invention is analysed in great detail as the accomplishment of a cycle of images in Simondon’s lecture course ‘Imagination et invention’ (1965–66). However, while Simondon pays much attention to the internal logic of invention, he completely brackets off the socio-political and economic context. This essay will develop a critical perspective on Simondon’s quasi-biological conception of technical evolution and his notion of technical invention. To this end, I will draw arguments from Marx and the Marxist tradition that resonate with certain critical voices in the secondary literature on Simondon today. The goal of this essay is to show that technical invention is not an absolute and pure beginning that stimulates innovation and technical change, and to suggest an alternative and more complex view in which the pressure of economic drives and socio-political interests directly incite invention, especially where there is an institutionalised context that organises techno-scientific research.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"279 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77073082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The calculation of meaning: on the misunderstanding of new artificial intelligence as culture","authors":"Mercedes Bunz","doi":"10.1080/14735784.2019.1667255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2019.1667255","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A wide range of different AI systems based on the promising technology of machine learning has been implemented into everyday life without further ado, at times supplanting and delivering institutional decisions. Following Gilbert Simondon’s analysis in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, this essay explores the contemporary technical objects of new Artificial Intelligence systems to ask if their premature acceptance might be based on a misunderstanding: AI systems are able to calculate meaning, whereby they are performing a task traditionally rooted in the sphere of culture. Are AI-informed technical objects, because of their new ability of calculating meaning, mistakenly being read as an ‘aesthetic object’ thereby creating the illusion of being ‘integrated’ into the world? And how could their integration be understood differently? The article contributes to studies located at the intersection of work on Simondon and digital technology, thereby traversing Science and Technology Studies and Philosophy of Technology.","PeriodicalId":43943,"journal":{"name":"Culture Theory and Critique","volume":"432 1","pages":"264 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76543766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}