1 Subjectivation from a Technological Stance
In its broadest sense, agency consists of both the capacity or intention to act and the mediated or immediate awareness of past, present, and eventual interactions. It thus constitutes a mode of subjectivation that we propose to discuss in correlation with techno-mimetism. Techno-mimetism is inseparable from any subject, even if the latter is not necessarily aware of the techno-mimetic aspects of its own development. It is based on both the learning and the unlearning of forms of action, whether or not they are reflected upon. This means that an agentive pattern has to be abstracted, if not rationally deduced, from each impending situation, so that the (re)production of action can be perceived as appropriate or, at least, as plausible. Take communication at a distance, where the participants interpret the sedimented praxis and may also divert it, for it is a function of the degrees of focus, of the speeds of reaction, and of the margins of maneuver allowed, if not completely set, by the technical means involved. Whether or not we follow Ernst Kapp, who brings the genesis of the technical object back to the unconscious projection of bodily organs and organic systems,1 it is clear that the subject-technics co-entailment articulates itself concurrently in a transfer of an agentive pattern and in a techno-mimetic coutertransfer through which a retrospective relationship of intelligibility is
To recognize such techno-mimetism, it is not even necessary to question governmental, educational, and financial organizations on a national or international scale, as Thomas P. Hughes does in referring to the “institutional structures that nurture and mirror the characteristics of the technical core of the (technological) system.”3 It is sufficient to share Madeleine Akrich’s insight that “technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act,”4 when they do not directly “define actants and the relationship between actants”5 by stabilizing and channeling the latter.6 It would be an oversimplification to see in the actant the cause of the action, insofar as he only achieves the effect in terms of which his action can, on occasion, be apprehended as techno-mimetic. The actant does not intervene in a causal order of events leading up to his action and “those who speak as if an action were an event one candidate for whose cause is an agent make it seem as if an action might be identified independently of any
However, beyond the current “idea of technology as the focus for continuing debates about the essential qualities of ‘humanness,’”9 what does the link established here between posthuman agency and techno-mimetism allow us to discuss? Does techno-mimetism imply agency in a transitive as well as in a reflective sense? Does the behavior adopted in front of the so-called technical tool, if not induced by it, constitute an action coupled with the consciousness of acting? In order to explore these issues further, a distinction must first be made between techno-mimetism and mimicry in the sense of ethology. This distinction is also envisioned to avoid any use of naturalistic analogies, in view of the fact that they are often not exempt from anthropocentrism. On the other hand, mimicry is not agentive in the sense just defined, because there is not, necessarily, consciousness of acting, knowledge of cause and effect relations, or awareness of being acted upon. Despite its apparent finality, mimicry isn’t final at all,10 while despite its eventual uncritical dimension techno-mimetism implies agency. This distinction already allows us to approach posthuman agency, insofar as the awareness of being acted upon in spite of oneself, if not always without one’s knowledge, exceeds the instrumental relations established, in classical humanism, with the technical apparatus.
Thus, the posthuman actant would be distinguished, among other characteristics, by the capacity to transitively and reflectively situate his own action
To come to the example that will serve as a touchstone, that is, technological transfer, the eventuality of agency is shaped differently if what is transferred is no longer apprehended instrumentally, in the light of a transcendent subjectivity that would be able to set the conditions of agentive possibility in the context of technology by reducing it to a set of tool representations. At the end of this reduction, technics and agency would become spatio-temporal abstractions based on an ontological divide, for there could be a technical object only in terms of the objectification of an instrumental relation through which the assumed transcendence of the subject would substantiate itself. Contrariwise, the focus on the transformational character of technological transfer, on the fact that acting implies being acted upon, allows us to recognize that techno-mimetism withdraws from the apparent causality that links the different techno-mimetic phenomena. The causal links between these phenomena shield techno-mimetism as a mode of agency whose contours are radically withdrawn in space and time. In space because it is impossible to determine the scope of techno-mimetism empirically, from the phenomena that instantiate it. In time because, without even positing that “at the origin [of
In a similar way, albeit in a different order of analysis, Guchet notes that there is a “technical evolution, but technical objects do not evolve, they are not transformed into something else. The isolated technical object is not the support of evolution”14 and “it is only because we have a pre-understanding of what technical evolution is that there are technical objects situated in history.”15 The same applies to techno-mimetism, which is apprehended as diffuse and discontinuous because of its withdrawal behind each isolated techno-mimetic phenomenon, and to posthuman agency, which is apprehended as circumstantial and dispersed because of its withdrawal behind each isolated subjectivizing dimension. To again quote Guchet, “it is precisely insofar as it appears to be linked to other objects by the idea of evolution that the technical object acquires all sorts of determinations.”16 As for the ideas of techno-mimetism and posthuman agency, they make it possible to indicate certain techno-mimetic phenomena and certain subjectivizing dimensions, to wit those who exceed the intentions of the transcendent subjectivity postulated by humanism, whose apprehensions are in turn meant to be necessary and encompassing.
2 The Challenge of Theoretical and Praxical Antinomies
Guchet reminds us that technical evolution “is not in its essence an historical relation,”17 but “the mode in which the technical object actually manifests itself as a technical object.”18 Techno-mimetism and posthuman agency are
Practical intelligence, as a mental phenomenon, deals with ideal possibilities. Motivated by the urge to live and to thrive, practical intelligence sorts these envisaged possibilities into orders of relevance for realization
and attempts to guide action into the fruitful channels of regular method. … The history of human technologies shows that after a discovery is made of some method with its associated artifacts, the new complex is quickly brought to maturity within its own terms, is radiated geographically, and then is repeated and repeated by the adopting cultures.23
In these passages, technological transfer is reduced to mere imitation and even to instrumental learning through repetition. This conception of technology is far too generic and does not account for the fact that the same tool can acquire different methodological dimensions and support different techno-mimetic agencies, not to mention that the same method can call for different tools and even lead to different actions. Whether or not a possibility is held as intrinsic or conjunctural depends on the confusion or on the distinction between tools and instruments. A tool is an object produced to serve a technological purpose, while any object expected to carry an intention can become an instrument or, more specifically, a technology. Expectations or anticipations about someone else’s agency are formed in both cases, even though in the latter case they may remain merely conjectural. So, in contrast to Ferré’s voluntarist approach to intentionality and agency, Ihde seeks to highlight instances that, from the subjective point of view, turn out to be unintentional and with which technological intentionalities overlap. In summary, the actant and the technical object are constituted of a convergence of intentionalities whose subjective side is techno-mimetic, to a certain extent.
To enter any human-technology relation is already both to “control” and to “be controlled.” Once the notion of technology in the ensemble is raised, particularly insofar as technologies are embedded in cultural complexes, the question of “control” becomes even more senseless. … The very question of control takes its shape within an implicit, but outdated, metaphysics of determinism. Just as the debate of technological versus social determinism is rejected here, so it should be seen that technologies-in-use do not, as such, determine.27
The status of minority is one whereby the technical object is firstly an object of utility, necessary for everyday life, belonging to the heart of the environment where the human individual’s growth and training takes place. … Technical knowledge is [in this case] implicit, non-reflective, and habitual. Conversely, the status of majority corresponds to an operation of reflection and self-awareness by the free adult, who has at his disposal the means of rational knowledge, elaborated through the sciences: the knowledge of the apprentice is thus distinguished from that of the engineer.29
The question of the criteria of mastery or loss of control does not allow us to dismiss the idea that technics as such determines an agentive conformity, if not a desubjectivizing techno-mimetism. In this respect, the antinomy between mastery and loss of control refers to the antinomy between necessity and contingency. When apprehended in the light of a transcendent subjectivity necessarily destined to exercise choices that themselves seem to become necessary, techno-mimetism can only be reduced to an alienating agency. From a similar assumption, Langdon Winner draws some extreme conclusions about the place assigned to the subject in the technical environment. With no room to maneuver, the subject would be caught in “the gap between complex phenomena that are part of our everyday experience and the ability to make such phenomena intelligible and coherent.”30 In other words, the intellectual mastery previously taken for granted as a transcendent technological tool only achieves a fallacious synthesis that inevitably undermines agency. “People work within and are served by technical organizations that by their very nature forbid a perspicuous overview. … Human beings have still a nominal presence in the network, but they have lost their role as active, directing agents,”31 Winner asserts.
3 Techno-mimetism as Twice Withdrawn from Focus
It finally appears that technological transfer serves here as a borderline example, for it is always difficult to know, decide, and predict what is transferred, as transference involves a certain degree of unlearning. Ihde observes that “the adaptation of a transferred technology—at least, at first—depends upon its being able to fit into an extant praxis. But even when it is adapted, the context of significations may differ quite radically relative to the sedimented type of praxis in the recipient culture”35 or individual, we could add. Due to such
Now, according to Albert Borgmann, all “technological existence”43 oscillates between two contradictory states: the engaged and the disengaged. Because of its withdrawal, techno-mimetism can indeed be modeled on a “technological pattern”44 consisting of the continuous replacement of the presence of objects by the availability of commodities delivered by devices. A technological pattern entails a number of devices that render commodities available. Devices replace objects, whereas they cannot be reduced to (mere sets of) them. Devices also substitute the actant, rejecting him from the action they perform in his place while directing his agency. Were techno-mimetism in the foreground, not withdrawn, the device would require involvement—even in the form of the awareness of both acting and being acted upon to which posthuman agency seems to relate—rather than inducing consumption indefinitely.
One might be tempted to approach the question of the rule of technology from the side of freedom [intentionality or mastery] and determinism [unintentionality or loss of control], to ascertain the ethical and metaphysical [or transcendent] groundwork on which to erect a theory of technology [and subjectivation].45
However, for him too, “one cannot fall back on a universally accepted answer to this question.”46 It is rather a matter of “delineating the scope of action and the occasion of decision where people work out their position in relation to engagement and technology.”47 And this “requires reflection on the kind of awareness [or agency] with which people work out their … technological existence,”48 since “technology [or techno-mimetism] has the tendency to disappear from the occasion [or techno-mimetic phenomenon] of decision by insinuating itself as the basis of the occasion.”49
In conclusion, Ihde and Borgmann revive the ontological explication of the tool-being undertaken by Martin Heidegger, while developing it in two complementary directions. In a series of passages on which we will rely to complete our theoretical purpose, Heidegger distinguishes readiness-to-hand from presence-at-hand, which he relates respectively to an engaged (praxeological) attitude and to a disengaged (theoretical) attitude toward technology.50 Whereas “in the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something,”51 he argues that awareness arises only through a disentanglement from “our ‘dealings’ in the world and with entities within-the-world.”52 He adds that “the peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is
Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those entities within-the-world which are brought along [beigebrachte] in the work and with it (that is to say, in the assignments or references which are constitutive for it) remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying circumspective penetration. The kind of Being which belongs to these entities is readiness-to-hand.57
In the final analysis, the question of techno-mimetism becomes a matter of focus. We discern focus in posthuman agency as a transitive and reflective alternative to the misconception of the current subject-technics co-entailment by the transcendent subjectivity discussed earlier. Such a focus calls for a deictic shift which, unlike the theoretical approach pursued in this chapter, would stop at the threshold of presence-at-hand, to borrow again from Heidegger’s lexicon. The term “deictic” is introduced by Borgmann to designate the character of the discourse indicating a “focal practice.”62 Borgmann does not exclude
By its unconscious nature, projection is distinguished from the mechanical reproduction of bodily organs or sensory apparatuses to which techno-mimetism is often and fallaciously reduced: “An organ is never a machine part, nor is a hand tool the limb of an organism. A mechanical organism would be tantamount to something like organic clockwork—a squaring of the circle. … We can account for the confusion of concepts in the essential relations subtending the process of projection as a sort of involuntary and unremarked slippage of the representation of the organic from the prototypal image to its mechanical after-image, and vice versa: when the machinal is used to explain organic processes, then, in the fervor of experimentation, the mechanical slips into the organism unremarked, such that impermissible confusions necessarily arise alongside problematic figurative explanations”; Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture, trans. Lauren K. Wolfe (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 75. Hence the need “to firmly establish the difference between unconsciously occurring absolute self-production and the conscious reconstruction of an organic structure” (76).
An analogous dynamic underlies the spiraling feedback loop that Nidesh Lawtoo conceptualizes in terms of hypermimesis, to “indicate a torsion within hyperreal simulations that do not remain in the sky of digital second lives behind this world but, rather, retroact on an embodied, relational, and porous all too human, posthuman subject in this world”; Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis i: Concepts for the Mimetic Turn,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (June 2022): 101–14, 112.
Steve Woolgar, “Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1989), 311–28, 312.
Madeleine Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1992), 205–24, 208.
Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” 207.
Bruno Latour speaks of an anthropomorphism of technical objects, given that “anthropos and morphos together mean either that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans”; Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1992), 225–58, 235. According to him, artifacts “have to thoroughly organize the relation between what is inscribed in them and what can/could/should be pre-inscribed in the users” (237). He calls “conscription the mobilization of well-drilled and well-aligned resources to render the behavior of human and nonhuman predictable” (257) and states that the “label ‘inhuman’ applied to technique simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices that exist for figuring and defiguring, personifying and abstracting, embodying and disembodying actors” (241).
Jennifer Hornsby, “Agency and Actions,” in Philosophy of Action. An Anthology, eds. Jonathan Dancy and Constantine Sandis (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 48–62, 56.
Hornsby, “Agency and Actions.”
Woolgar, “Reconstructing Man and Machine,” 312. “Discussions about technology—its capacity, what it can and cannot do, what it should and should not do—are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans. … In discussing and debating new technology, protagonists are reconstructing and redefining the concepts of man and machine and the similarity and difference between them. As well as providing a tangible focus for continuing debates about the uniqueness of man, technology may also act as a catalyst for changing conceptions of the nature of man. Assessments of the character and success of new technology can both reify existing assumptions and provide powerful images for further attempts to establish (construct) ‘the character of man’” (312).
A connection can be made here with the mimetic unconscious, in Nidesh Lawtoo’s terminology, to stress “the centrality of mirroring forms of involuntary imitation in this unconscious or nonconscious processes [mimicry, simulation, etc.], … to differentiate it [the mimetic unconscious] from the Oedipal variant, but also to indicate the role of aesthetics, relationality, and contagious pathos of affect as its via regia. … Still, the mimetic unconscious also differs [from the Oedipal one] for it adapts, chameleon-like, to the new natural-social-technological environments that surround it”; Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis i,” 109.
Xavier Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2005), 83.
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique, 96–97.
Jacques Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” trans. Richard Beardsworth, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2000, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 215–56, 248. On this topic, see Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique, 25.
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique.
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique, 26.
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique.
Guchet, Les Sens de l’évolution technique.
Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 102.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld.
Frederick Ferré, Philosophy of Technology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 30.
Ferré, Philosophy of Technology, 36.
Ferré, Philosophy of Technology, 36–37.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 70.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 141.
“In the age of the mass media, [despite the unobservability of the world and the non-transparency of individuals to themselves and to others,] they [the conditions of plausibility of the schemata recognizable in others and in ourselves] are virtually unthinkable without the participation of the media. Like theatre, the mass media also put the individual into a scene that is outside the scene set on the stage. … What is presented to them affects them too, since they have to lead their lives in this world; and it affects them even when they know very well that they will never get into the situations or play the roles presented to them as factual or fictional. … When individuals look at media as text or as image, they are outside; when they experience their results within themselves, they are inside. They have to oscillate between outside and inside, as if in a paradoxical situation: quickly, almost without losing any time, and undecidably”; Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 114–15.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 140–41.
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal Publishing, 2017), 118.
Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 103.
Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as the Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1977), 283.
Winner, Autonomous Technology, 28–29. “The idea that civilized life consists of a fully conscious, intelligent, self-determining populace making informed choices about ends and means and taking action on that basis is revealed as a pathetic fantasy. … On occasion a particular system generates an unexpected event whose origins and cause are a puzzle. Mistakes, errors, and extraordinary lapses of control occur which simply should not have happened. Deeds and misdeeds are done which seem to defy any reasonable account” (296).
In opposition to this presupposition, our reflection on posthuman agency and techno-mimetism joins the Homo Mimeticus Project as an extension of its decentering of the subject. On this topic, see Nidesh Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).
Joseph Margolis, “The Technological Self,” in Technological Transformation: Contextual and Conceptual Implications, eds. Edmund F. Byrne and Joseph C. Pitt (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 1–16, 5.
Margolis, “The Technological Self.”
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 127.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 126.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 127.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 128.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 70.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 86.
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 103.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 5.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 102.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 103.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.
“As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden”; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie (New York and Evanston, Ill.: Harper and Row, 1962), 100.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 97.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 95.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 99.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 98. “Equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure (hammering with a hammer, for example); but in such dealings an entity of this kind is not grasped thematically as an occurring Thing, nor is the equipment-structure known as such even in the using.”
Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 53.
Ihde, Instrumental Realism.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 101.
“To lay bare what is just present-at-hand and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern. Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are ‘in themselves’ are defined ontologico-categorially”; Heidegger, Being and Time, 101.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 33.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 100.
Heidegger, Being and Time.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 208.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 221.
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, 288.
References
Woolgar, Steve. “Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, 311–28. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1989.