/lit/ - Literature

>Modern technics is concretized in the Gestell apparatus of all resources. For Heidegger, systematicity, in terms of that which "challenges," is what absolutely distinguishes modern technics from any other epoch. Technics commands (kubernaô, the etymon of cybernetics) nature. Before, nature commanded technics. Nature is consigned by technics in this sense: nature has become the assistant, the auxiliary; in similar fashion, it is exploited by technics, which has become the master.

>Technics constitutes a system to the extent that it cannot be understood as a means—as in Saussure the evolution of language, which forms a system of extreme complexity, escapes the will of those who speak it.

>Like the machine, the human of the industrial age is dependent on the technical system, and serves it rather than making it serve itself; the human is the "assistant," the auxiliary, the helper, indeed the means of technics qua system.

>We find in Gille a concept that attempts to give a historical answer that reverts to the question of decision and anticipation, that is, of time: the concept of programming. Gille's hypothesis is that we are moving into a new technical system that requires adjustments to the other social systems. The question that comes to mind is knowing whether the social and the cultural systems are themselves "adjustable" in the sense of "programmable."

>Leroi-Gourhan will enable us to broach the question of the adjustment between the technical and the social from an anthropological point of view. More precisely, with the unity of the social being named the ethnic a relation between the ethnic and the technical is set forth as grounding all anthropology. Leroi-Gourhan's question is that of an essential, and thereby originary, characterization of the anthropological by the technological. In his first works, Leroi-Gourhan elaborates the project of a technology's grounding of an anthropology.

>The necessity of technics qua the science of technical evolution or technogenesis makes up the terms in which Marx carries out his critique of the traditional point of view on technical invention:

>A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. And yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, that is, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, deserve equal attention? Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from these relations.

>Gille and Simondon, as much as Leroi-Gourhan and Marx, essentially tie the scientificity of a technics to such a critique.