In the fragments from his estate’s papers translated and published as Technical Mentality Simondon focuses on the event of human invention, how it was unified with the artisan, but then becomes dispersed in the industrial age. He describes this in terms of the distribution of information and the distribution of energy, where they do not overlap. He suggests, “industrial modality appears when the source of information and the source of energy separate, namely when the Human Being is merely the source of information, and Nature is required to furnish the energy”. He continues a little later, “Unfortunately, the entry of information that comes into the work is no longer unique in the way it is with the artisanal gesture: it happens through several moments and at several levels.”
Simondon describes four moments of the entry of information 1) Invention, 2) construction, 3) learning to use and 4) operation. I’d like to add a fifth, repair. Simondon should be celebrated for focusing squarely on the role of the technical object in the constitution of the technical reality. He writes:
“Technical thinking has by nature the vocation to represent the point-of-view of the element; it adheres to the elementary function. Once technicity is admitted into a domain it breaks it up and starts a chain of successive and elementary mediations governed by the unity of the domain and subordinated to it. Technical thinking conceives the operation of an ensemble as a chain of elementary processes working point by point and step by step; it localises and multiplies the schemas of mediation, always remaining lesser than the unity.” (421)
Different subjectivities are distributed through this chain in many ways and for Simondon this is unfortunate. The separation of subjectivities arranged through this chain of mediations of the technical reality of a singular object is manifest in the character of socio-technical discourse through which each of the subjectivities apprehends the technical reality. In most circumstances the operation, maintenance and repair of a technical system demands participation in this technical reality for the human that is actually divorced from the abstracted scientific theory and the pure automatic incorporation of Ellul’s ‘technique’. The ‘technical reality’ is like ‘technique’ in that describes a reconfiguration of subjectivity appropriate for functioning at an appropriate moment between thresholds in the chain of the technical reality. This is similar to the actor-network theory of ‘black boxing’ but at each moment in the entire mediative chain of technical reality for a given socio-technical object. Simondon argues there is no organic totality or unity between the mediations.
For the thinker of ontogenetic accounts of the individual clearly there must be an organic dimension at each moment in the chain of mediation whereby the correlative subject is co-individuated with the ensemble of the socio-technical reality. Simondon also briefly discusses the way consumers of socio-technical objects, such as consumers of the automobile, are kind of suspended between the symbolic dimensions of the object and its functional aspects. The point being that are alienated from the actual technical discourse through which they could be individuated as a technical subject able to participate at other moments in the mediation. The solution to this problem is to not regard knowledge as ever totalising but as a partial development determined by the process of individuation. This partial, situated knowledge is better understood in terms of singular points, phase spaces and thresholds of understanding, or what Deleuze and Guattari called a ‘minor science’.
What about (5/6) Obsolescence?