Concepts of Gilbert Simondon applied to sociotechnical and scientific imaginaries, Panel "Making Media Futures" @EASST Madrid 2022. (original) (raw)

Abstract

CONCEPTS OF GILBERT SIMONDON APPLIED TO SOCIOTECHNICAL AND SCIENTIFIC IMAGINARIES Bellon Jacqueline (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) With French psychologist and philosopher Gilbert Simondon a medium can be described as a milieu, that is, the surrounding environment for any entitiy we choose to analyse. From this perspective, for example, a brain can be grasped as the milieu of a thought/image, but instead of a brain we could conceptualise a person’s personality or a collective consciousness as the milieu for a thought/imagination just as well. The closeness of Gilbert Simondon’s approach to try to look at a reasearch item of interest – here, sociotechnical or scientific imaginaries – by distinguishing between a ground and a figure to System’s Theory’s distinction between ‘System’ and ‘Umwelt’ has not yet been explored into depth, but could add an original perspective on how scientific imaginaries come into being and are passed on. Adding Simondon’s idea of an evolution of technical objects and his notion of an age of information theory and linking those concepts of his to meme theory could provide an interesting take on how not only imaginaries, but also institutionalized forms of order and reason can be analysed. Furthermore, from a perspective of a history of ideas taking into account the manifold influences that technical objects and related scientific theories have on the overall scientific discourse and theory building of a certain time, scientific imagniaries can be described as existing in a milieu of a certain time’s reigning paradigm. For this, Simondon proposes several examples in his On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects that I will refer to and put them into context with the panel’s endeavour to explore scientific imaginaries “according to their interrealtions with diverse comminities and contexts”

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