I present Gilbert Simondon’s thinking of technics, that I take to be so compelling today because it articulates technological reality in ecological terms as a technogeography and life as being-with-the-machines. I will flesh out Simondon’s program for a being-with-the-machines, show how it corresponds to the essence of the technical objects described in terms of milieu and relation indicate how this is based on Simondon’s ontology of individuation suggest a criticism of Simondon, insofar as he would underestimate the technicality of the (...) human being him/herself and of his/her world. (shrink)

The most recent tool for acting on the world, the exosomatization of cognitive activities, is often considered an autonomous and objective replacement of knowledge construction. We show the intrinsic limits of the mechanistic myths in AI, from classical to Deep Learning techniques, and its relation to the human construction of sense. Human activities in a changing ecosystem – in their somatic and sensible dimensionalities proper to any living experiences – are at the core of our analysis. By this, we stress (...) the key role of the knowing subject, far away from any allegedly objective big collections of data. The production of organized structures of physics, biology and in societal analysis will be compared and distinguished by trying to set on more robust grounds the constructive as well as the disruptive roles of entropic, negentropic, anti-entropic dynamics that are different concepts in different domains, to be handled with care: the use of machine learning and optimization methods as tools and models to analyse and manage human activities in view of their scientific and political ideology of technoscientific governance. They suppose that which they try to produce is objective, that is, standardized and controllable behaviours. In this dialogue we stress a mirror symmetry between the lack of theoretical interpretation of scientific data and the lack of democracy in this fiction of neutrality. Moreover, bad analogies constitute an obstacle to grasp the anteriority of biological and ecological constraints which enable and limit all artificial products of human intelligence. We will thus stress biological specificity, the role of normativity and constraints in evolution, of labour in structuring the human historical construction of sense by common activities. (shrink)

This essay takes from Gilbert Simondon's work some elements of political philosophy, developing the implications of a pathway where the problem of technique turns out to be essential. Through a constant comparison with the present debate, this dissertation takes into account the entire corpus of Simondon’s work and its sources, inherited mainly from the phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty) and epistemological tradition (Canguilhem). The first section analyzes the way Simondon tries to re-configure the conceptual apparatus of philosophy according to some instruments given by (...) the scientific and epistemological thought, especially the physics of quanta, thermodynamics and cybernetics. The second section shows in particular the impact of biological patterns into the theorization of social systems’ genesis and functioning, and analyzes its Bergsonian source. The third section eventually follows Simondon in his drawing up a theory of the political function, which implies a dynamic conception on what forms the social bond, and the problematisation of the idea of human nature. The programming of an intervention on technological infrastructures involving directly the constituent frames of the social system entails - beside a questioning of the ontological constitution of society - a meditation on the epistemological constitution and the predictive power of the sciences dealing with it; and, most of all, it brings up the issue of the actual efficacy of the cultural universe in which such sciences are formulated and the intervention is programmed. Precisely at this point the question about the political effectualness of philosophical thought arises. (shrink)