/lit/ - Literature

>A technical system constitutes a temporal unity. It is a stabilization of technical evolution around a point of equilibrium concretized by a particular technology: "The establishment of these connections can only take place, can only become efficient, once the common level of the ensemble of techniques is realized, even if, marginally, the level of some of the techniques, more independent than others, has remained below or above the general level."

>The evolution of technical systems moves toward the complexity and progressive solidarity of the combined elements. "The internal connections that assure the life of these technical systems are more and more numerous as we advance in time, as techniques become more and more complex." This globalization of such dependencies—their universalization and, in this sense, the deterritorialization of technics— leads to what Heidegger calls Gestell: planetary industrial technics—the systematic and global exploitation of resources, which implies a worldwide economic, political, cultural, social, and military interdependence.

>The question, in sum, is to know how an evolution of the system is decided: this is the problem of the logic of invention. The horizon of a mutation is a play of limits within a system, forming an evolutional potential; the effectuation of the mutation is the technical invention itself, qua the catalyst of this potential, qua the act of evolutional potentiality.

>Technical invention, not being guided by a theoretical formalism preceding practical operation, remains empirical; however, the inventive operation cannot be said to be produced by chance, for an essential part of innovation is accomplished through transfer, whereby the functioning of a structure in a technical apparatus is analogically transposed into another domain. There is, then, a combinatory genius in technical invention.

>Everything comes about as if technical innovation accomplished randomly, but certainly, the fulfillment of a technical, or techno-logical, "intention."

>In technical invention, other levels intervene above the technological lineage as such: scientific knowledge and interdependencies with other systems, along with external constraints in general, for example economic constraints (as was the case with the Bessemer smelting furnace), but above all, technical systematicity itself, that is, the play of constraints imposed by the interdependencies between technical elements and those intrinsic to the system. The systems dynamic offers the possibility of invention, and this is what is essential to the concept of technical system: the choice of possibilities in which invention consists is made in a particular space and particular time according to the play of these constraints, which are submitted in turn to external ones.