François Laruelle, The Concept of ‘First Technology’: A ‘Unified Theory’ of Technics and Technology, trans. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (original) (raw)
Related papers
This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.
The First and Modern Notion of Technology: from Linnaeus to Beckmann to Marx
Consecutio Rerum, 2019
The paper shows that the English language has great limitations in the treatment of the concept technology, and provides a rough but necessary taxonomy of the main uses of the term 'technology' in the present Anglo-Saxon debate on social sciences and humanities. Then, it shows the first steps of the modern notion of technology , which formerly referred to rhetoric and philology. Christian Wolff (1679-1754) introduced the notion of Technologia (in Latin) with little success within a philosophical essay in 1728. The actual development of technology (Technologie) as an autonomous subject is due to the work of Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), and particularly to his seminal work Anleitung zur Technologie (Direction for Technology, 1777), which draws significantly on Linnaeus' work and the social requirements of Cameralism. Much time later, the notion of Technologie was taken up and re-elaborated by Karl Marx (1818-1883), inserted in the manuscripts preceding the Capital, and finally in the Capital (1867).
The Three States of Technology : an Historical Approach to a Thought Regime, 16th-20th century
New Elements of Technology, 2012
This book picks up the question of a science named “techno-logy”, a science of technique allowing us to conceive its foundations, forms and issues. Its title harks back to Jacob Bigelow’s Elements of Technology (1829), a collection of lectures given at Harvard. Bigelow supports an articulation between science and technique in which science focuses on technical applications and in which techniques (‘useful arts’) feed on scientific advances. We have inherited such a definition of technique which is seen as a neutral, mechanical and transparent application of science and thus masked by it. It is precisely this paradigm which we intend to question in this book by sketching the outlines of a technology and of a science of technique. We think we can develop a scientific knowledge of technique without limiting the latter to a mere application of science. We are sure that the instauration of a “techno-logy” can contribute to redesigning the type of education given in engineering universities, placing at its core a true science of technique encompassing design, creativity, innovation and also the critical exercise of a conception of technique. Several French researchers from different disciplines have been invited to contribute to this book which is for us the beginning of a dialogue with our English-speaking academic counterparts and a manner of contributing to the distribution of works illustrating a French tradition of reflection on technology.
(Post)constructivism on Technoscience, „Avant”, Vol. IV, 2013, nr 1, 317-338.
2013
The main aims of the article are as follows: (1) to indicate that cognition (in particular the conditions of effectiveness in laboratory practices) may be satisfactorily modelled from a (properly determined) constructivist perspective (2) to reconstruct the latest tendencies within science and technology studies encapsulated in the term (post)constructivism rather than in the notion of social constructivism, (3) to show how technoscience is conceptualised from the (post)constructivist standpoint. Key words: science and technology studies/sociology of scientific knowledge, (post)constructivism, technoscience, laboratory practices
Technology and Materiality of Scientific Knowledge: A Postphenomenological Analysis
I discuss technological characteristic of materiality of scientific knowledge. My term for interpretations of materiality of knowledge through technological construction and mediation is hermeneutics of instrument. I elaborate Don Ihde’s postphenomenology as argument that scientific facts constructed on human-technology relations. Scientific instruments become extension of human body in their capacity to perceive, transform and measure the world and they are also seen hermeneutically as the world itself. I describe also about the concept of multistability regarding instrumentation in science. They are understood mostly by technologist (or scientist) who constructs and uses them in scientific practice. Their transformative process and function are known limited to scientific community. Technological multistability here is when our comprehension of them are not limited to their technological process but include its science. I end my paper elucidating cyberspace realism. This philosophical concept explains how they connected to cyberspace and extend globally in the form of hypertext. Cyberspace presents phenomena that has two parallel mediators: a) materiality of particular instrument and b) internet technology. Internet makes possible instruments with robotics technology domesticated on screen-space. In addition to postphenomenological approach of cyberspace, computer as infrastructure of cyberspace should be categorized into different mode of relation, because it’s not only mediate but transform and calculate the world.