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Book Symposium on The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation

By Pascal Chabot (translation Graeme Kirkpatrick) Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

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Notes

  1. I first made such a connection in Critical Theory of Technology (1991). See for example pp. 193–195. The argument is developed further in the second edition of that book, Transforming Technology (2002), pp. 186–190.

  2. Not all definitions of technological determinism agree but at least one basic feature of them all is the notion that technology has an internal logic that determines its development independent of society. For an argument against determinism in Simondon's case, see (Barthélemy 2012).

  3. “Invention intervenes when the social filter allows it.”

  4. “the pluri-functionality of usages corresponds to the essential function of invention as the creator of compatibilities…The object can totalize and condense the informational element expressing needs, desires, expectations; the recurrent circulation of information between production and virtual usage communicates directly between the image and the created object, enabling the compatibilizing invention.”

  5. “It is not as a whole that it relates to man; it is in the free plurality of its elements, or in the open series of his possible relations with other machines within a technical ensemble.”

  6. “The relation of the individual human being to the community is mediated by the machine in a highly industrialized civilization.”

  7. “In the authentic complementary relation, man must be the being that the machine completes, and the machine a being that finds in man its unity, its finality, and its connection to the whole of the technical world…They is a chiasmus between two worlds that would be separate…”

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Correspondence to Marc J. de Vries.

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de Vries, M.J., Feenberg, A., De Boever, A. et al. Book Symposium on The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Philos. Technol. 28, 297–322 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0144-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-013-0144-5

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