On the Soul of Technical Objects: Commentary on Simondon’s ‘Technics and Eschatology’ (1972)

Eschatology and Technology

The relationship between technology and eschatology has been widely discussed in past decades in view of the constant occurrence of industrial catastrophes. Climate change, drone warfare, air, water, soil and nuclear pollutions have all been calling for a postindustrial eschatology. We can also find this kind of concern in the work of Paul Virilio (2002), Jacques Ellul, Jean-Luc Nancy and, more recently, authors writing on the Anthropocene (Hamilton et al., 2015). In contrast, in this text of Simondon, he was not referring to a postindustrial eschatology, but rather one that is even more speculative and contemporary to our current discussion on non-human politics: the eschatology of technical objects. ² For this reason, we hope to give a different reading from what has been addressed and interpreted by the commentators of Simondon, for example the ‘difficult humanism’ brilliantly elaborated by the philosopher Jean-Hughes Barthélémy (2014) and ‘technological humanism’ proposed by Xavier Guchet (2011).

It is debatable whether these technological eschatologies can be squared with ‘eschatology’ in the strict sense of the word. We have to bear this nuance in mind throughout this article, since it involves a certain analogy between two different realities: God-humans and creator-technical objects. The Greek word eschaton means the last thing that remains; eschatology is the Christian doctrine concerning what remains after the apocalypse and the second coming of Jesus Christ. The paradise of God is promised as the compensation for a long period of waiting and the enduring faith of the followers. The postindustrial apocalypse may not be treated in a strictly religious way in our time. Nonetheless, like its root in Christianity, eschatology points to another beginning, where what remains remains, and what remains implies a new order. That is why Jacob Taubes, in his philosophical treatise on Occidental eschatology, wrote that ‘all apocalypse tells of the triumph of eternity’ (Taubes, 2009: 4). In the end-time, the eternity is no longer limited to the logic of the chronos or kairos, but rather the end of time:

The triumph of eternity is played out on the stage of history. When at the end of time, the Prince of Death is overthrown, the End Time begins. The End Time is the end of time. The end is the fulfillment [Voll-endung] as the order of time has been sublated [aufgehoben]. (Taubes, 2009: 4)

In fact, Simondon’s take on eschatology in the article ‘Technologie et Eschatologie’ doesn’t give us a full picture of his understanding. Instead we can find only some motifs and some potential moves towards an ‘eschatology of technical objects’. The question of eternity or immortality occupies a central place in Simondon’s take on Christian eschatology. Eternity stands against death, which Paul calls ‘the last enemy that shall be destroyed’ (Paul 1 Corinthians 15:26). ⁵ Striving for immortality is the telos of the spirit. He opened the talk with the following question:

Human eschatology largely refers to a principle of duality: the soul follows the body. But one can also find in technics the same duality, and it is a deontological question which is posed here: should we favour this duality or on the contrary try to diminish it in our way, since it shows a vicious usage of technical activity, taken in the frenzy of a suspended production to an assurance of a quasi-immediate consumption? (Simondon, 2013b: 331)

His interest in technical objects started rather early, and he had already systematically developed it in his supplementary thesis Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958). In this book Simondon laid down a theory of the evolution of technical objects from elements to individuals and then ensembles, traversing the concept of concretization. He wanted to respond to the problem of industrial alienation proposed by the Marxists with an alternative solution. Instead of emphasizing the role of capital and seeing machines as economic categories (e.g. fixed capital), Simondon wanted to show that capital only amplifies and stabilizes the alienation (Simondon, 2012: 341); what is more fundamental is the relation between human and machine, which demands a deeper understanding and knowledge of technology. This understanding has a deeper meaning, namely to take care. But taking care in what way?

Technical objects, throughout Simondon’s writings, gained another ontological meaning: they are not dead labour but rather appear to be like living beings. To claim that there is a soul in the technical object will necessarily involve a demonstration that can be easily charged with panpsychism – believing that the soul is omnipresent in all beings. However, the way he described them and treated them made it seem as if technical objects were beings endowed with a soul. They are not just tools or machines. This is very clear when, in Du Mode, Simondon starts with the question of the alienation of technical objects (Simondon, 2012: 10). In the conception of technical objects as beings with a soul, the artisans take up the position of the creator. They don’t only create these technical objects, such as different tools, but also take care of them, so that they can live as long as possible and be passed from one generation to another. Simondon gives an example of the duality between the construction site (chantier) and the tools. The tools can be used from one site to another, like the soul being incarnated from one body to another. The ancient tools are precious objects. A good tool is indispensable for an artisan or a worker. Simondon evokes a popular story from ancient times about a man working in the forest who carelessly dropped his axe in the river. A sage came and made the axe come back to the surface of the water. Taking care of the tool means keeping it in good condition, like taking care of a soul – a recognized Platonic doctrine. Simondon cites Thucydides’s κτῆμα ἐς άɛι (Simondon, 2013: 332), Horace’s non omnis moriar, ⁶ as well as Keats’ ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ to describe the creator’s search for the immortality of his or her products. ⁷ A good tool also resists time (not only depending on the care of its owner), and it has the quality – which is anticipated by its creator – of maintaining its status as a good tool.

The Soul of Technical Objects

One may argue that Simondon is just drawing an analogy between the durability of the tool and the immortality of the soul, and that therefore a serious discussion on eschatology is not worthwhile, even invalid, since durability is not equivalent to immortality. However, I think we should even push Simondon’s idea of eschatology further, in the hope that it may also give us some insights about our contemporary situation. I will therefore suggest that if one wants to look for a ‘soul’ in technical objects, one should consider the soul not as an animated substantial entity that dwells within the body, as described in Aristotle’s De Anima, but rather one that is actualized in the creation of the creator and activated by the milieu wherein it dwells. That is to say, we consider the role of human being as creator like the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus. We have to admit that this is a delicate analogy: I say it is an analogy in the spirit of Simondon, since for him it is a philosophical method, which he uses to analogically understand different individuations; ⁸ it is delicate, since on the one hand it is the reason why we align Simondon with Plato, while on the other hand we will not be able to follow the same creator-beings relation according to Plato.

This analogy is a way to elucidate the ‘soul’ which we are addressing. In the Timaeus, the soul is made by blending together three elements, namely existence, sameness and difference, in both divisible and indivisible forms. The soul or psychē is what posits itself and constantly comes back to look at itself, in the alternation of sameness and difference. It is the circular movement as self-positing that makes the soul an autonomous being; and the circular movement as looking back at itself makes it a conscious and eternal being. ⁹ The concept of the world soul that Plato further developed in the Timaeus encompasses all beings, which as part of the world soul (anima mundi) possess their own souls by virtue of the principle of isomorphism (Bigger, 1967: 5). The world soul is a form, but not a form in the sense of a shape (morphe). Rather, it is a general form of the composition of the elements of existence, same and other. The composition gives order and harmony according to well-calculated proportions (in the mathematical sense). Plato’s concept of the soul is often compared to the concept of the form (eidos), and in fact, as some commentators have observed, the two support one another toward securing the superior status (Solmsen, 1983: 360), as it is said in the Phaedo, which is known as the source of Plato’s argument on the immortality of the soul.

If the objects exist which are always on our lips, the beautiful and the good and all reality of that kind, it follows that as surely as those objects exist so surely our souls exist before we are born. (76d7ff)

According to Platonism and Neoplatonism, the soul that occupies a higher reality is independent of the body; the death that belongs to the realm of the soma doesn’t affect the eternity of the psychē. ¹⁰ Instead, as we know, what comes into being originates from its contrary: death and life are only phenomena of the eternal soul. It may look as if we are now using Plato against Aristotle, and indeed the way we are aligning Simondon with Plato has to be explained. That Simondon has written in the opening sentence ‘the soul follows the body’ might remind many readers of Aristotle’s discourse on the soul in De Anima. The soul to the body is like the form (eidos) to matter (hylé): matter is potentiality, and form is actuality (energeia). It is actuality in two senses: knowledge and contemplation (Aristotle, 2002: 412a6). It could be logical if we follow a Simondon-Aristotle alliance to see the parousia-ousia, since the essence (ousia), which takes the form of eidos in Metaphysics Book Z, is analogical to the soul. Considering an axe, its matter (e.g. iron, which is also its potentiality) is subsumed under the form (which is the actuality and its soul). This analogy is imperfect, however, since the soul is only given to an organism, not to inanimate beings like the axe:

Compare the following: if an instrument, e.g. an axe, were a natural body, then its substance would be what it is to be an axe, and this would be its soul; if this were removed it would no longer be an axe, except homonymously. (Aristotle, 2002: 412^b10)

The other point against this alliance is that Simondon is very critical of hylomorphism, since it is not able to explain individuation, and is even an obstacle to understanding it. We therefore see more of an affinity between Simondon and Plato than Simondon and Aristotle, for the above-mentioned reasons: the eternity of the soul, against the dualism of form-matter, and so on. Indeed, we still need another step to take the soul beyond the body. It is true that, as modern human beings, we are not sensible to the question of the soul in the tool, like the computer and the pen I am using as I write this paper. Indeed, it will be against common sense to recognize such a soul. However, it is also the stereotype of conceiving souls only in living beings such as plants and animals which prompts us to consider the possibility of the soul of technical objects in the writings of Simondon. The question of the soul remains obscure in Simondon’s thought since it is not elaborated in the way that we can clearly identify with a particular school, Platonism or Neoplatonism. The artisan, as Simondon maintains, has an immediate relation to nature; by nature, he doesn’t mean the immediate reality external to us, but rather nature in the sense of the Pre-Socratics, especially the apeiron in Anaximander. In this case, the artisan is the provider of both information and energy. This realization process is also a life-giving process, in which the object obtains its world. One can call this process detachment from thought and entering into the world, which exceeds the predefined scheme and the problem that the creator wants to solve. It is in this worlding process (in the sense of Heidegger; Hui, 2016) that constellations of relations are produced around technical objects. These relations also represent a form of excessiveness, which goes beyond its functionality or pragmatic purposes. In the matrix of relations, the technical object obtains its value not only as a tool but also its halo as a commercial product (Simondon, 2013c).

By considering technical objects as beings with a soul, the question for Simondon is concerned less with usage and functionality than it is with the primordial relation of human beings with technical objects. The question of the soul is therefore crucial for a re-imagination of the relationship between humans and machines. It seems to Simondon to present a possibility for breaking out of the technology-alienation paradigm of the Marxist critique, and imagining an ideal situation of being with technical objects: the human being as the conductor of the orchestra and the machines being musicians. In between the conductor and his musicians, the relation is subtle and mediated by a complicity between them, which is no longer about control or mastery, but rather ‘resonance’:

The conductor of the orchestra can only direct the musicians because he plays like them, as intensively as they do, the executed piece; he moderates them and is pressed by them; in fact, through him, the group of musicians moderate and press each other, he is for everyone the actual and moving form of the group which is in the process of formation; he is the mutual interpreter of all in relation to all. Therefore man can be the permanent coordinator and inventor of machines that are around him. He is among the machines that operate with him. (Simondon, 2012: 12)

In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon reproaches the attitude of treating machines as slaves, which for him originates from a misunderstanding or ignorance of the nature and essence of technics, and therefore tends to oppose culture and technics and treat machines simply as servants (Simondon, 2012: 10). The development of complex machines also renders the machines so opaque that not many people – except the specialists – have any knowledge of how they work. Artisans, before being forced to enter into factories and sell their labour time, were able to create an associated milieu with their tools, and in such a functioning they have the status of technical individuals, while in factories, facing the automatic machines which are themselves technical individuals, workers still had the illusion of resuming their role as technical individuals even when this was no longer possible. The only knowledge they have will typically be limited to pressing buttons or cooperating with the rhythm of the assembly line. This produces a malaise and therefore alienation. In ‘Technical Mentality’, Simondon proposes that this process could be understood as the change in the role of the producer from the artisanal to the industrial mode of production. The artisan has an immediate relation to nature, and he or she is at the same time both the provider of information and of energy. For example, with the traditional glass-making method, the worker gives both information and energy according to his own bodily rhythm. However, in the industrial mode, the energy is given by the compressor (Simondon, 2009: 20). Moreover, the role of human as information-giver is further divided into more fragmented quantities, according to the complexity of the production process and the logistics of information and raw materials. The information that a worker needs to give may become so insignificant that he or she only needs to repeat the same movement over and over. The fragmented information neither gives the worker knowledge of him- or herself, nor knowledge of the machine. Simondon considers this the problem of the affective modalities of the current incomplete technical mentality, which needs to be further developed. Here we notice that the alienation of machines is also the correlate of the alienation of the workers, in the sense that the workers no longer have the knowledge to work with the machines, and to take care of them.

The other type of alienation can be found in the course on the ‘psychosociology of technicity’ that Simondon gave from 1961 to 1962, only a few years after the publication of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. In this course Simondon extended his analysis to the question of consumerism. We will focus on the concept of the ‘overhistory’ or ‘superhistory’ (surhistoricité) that he employed as a key term to describe the alienation of technical objects. Simondon proposes to take the concept of historicity in a broader sense. He adopts the differentiation made by the Romanian-American historian of religion Mircea Eliade between the timelessness (intemporalité) of culture and the historicity of civilization. The historicity of a simple technical object like a hammer is less noticed, since it passes from one generation to another; even if there is a problem, one can easily change the handle without concerning oneself much with the date of production. A complex technical object, on the other hand, is more attached to the social aspect of its usage, and hence more selectively dated (Simondon, 2013a: 53). This psychosocial aspect, on top of the new mode of industrial production, has changed the historicity of technical objects. For this reason one can understand why Simondon proposes to study ‘technical reality’ in contradistinction to ‘human reality’. Simondon defines historicity in contrast to the timelessness of an abstract culture:

the essential historicity of technical objects consists in this fact, that it is really an object, a thing that can be sold, bought and exchanged, instead of staying anchored in the citadel of culture: it is mobile, detachable from the group that produced it, from the social circumstances that have brought about its appearance. (Simondon, 2013a: 55)

Becoming of Technical Objects

The question that Simondon posed, and that we cited at the beginning of this article, was: ‘Should we favour this duality or on the contrary try to diminish it in our way, since it shows a vicious usage of technical activity, taken in the frenzy of a suspended production to an assurance of a quasi-immediate consumption’ (Simondon, 2013b: 331). Simondon poses this question because of what seems to him to be the ambivalence of judging what industrial progress has brought to technical objects. Simondon didn’t simply depreciate industrial technical objects; instead, he found that industrialization is also the ‘opening condition’ (condition d’ouverture) of technical objects, because standardization has rendered the artisanal organismic model obsolete (Simondon, 2013b: 334). To be precise, the artisans produce objects of which every part is tailor-made and singular. The different and singular parts form organic and non-mechanistic relations to one another. Industrial standardization makes every part reproducible and easily replaceable, and this procedure can be repeated, theoretically at least, infinitely. Will this give eternality to the soul of technical objects? There are two negative answers, which allow us to understand what Simondon means by ‘vicious usage’. The first is more easily observed by users of our epoch than Simondon’s. The social and psychological aspects amplified by modern marketing, as well as the rhythms of innovation and consumption, have accelerated the obsolescence of technical objects, regardless of the fact that they can still function well. For example, iPhone 6 has rendered the previous versions obsolete by simply amplifying its ‘halo’ without really presenting groundbreaking features or significant improvements. The other example we encounter in our daily lives is that it is becoming more and more difficult to replace electronic devices, for example a printer, since the cost of getting it repaired is probably the same, if not more expensive, than ordering a new one from Amazon.

The second point mentioned by Simondon concerns standardization. According to Simondon, standardization allows us to produce all the pieces with the same resistance to usage. Thus even when one part shows signs of being overused, one can wait until the other parts are in equally bad condition (Simondon, 2013b: 337), so by then the user can replace the whole machine without even attempting to repair it. This point is rather obscure, however, since as we see from our example of the iPhone or the printer, consumers who can afford it will rarely wait until electronic devices reach such a decrepit state before replacing them. The case is even more significant regarding what are called ‘digital objects’ (Hui, 2016: 23–9). These are merely data objects formulated by different metadata standards. In fact, digital objects, e.g. digital images and videos, are much more animated than those technical objects that Simondon had in mind, e.g. automobile, turbine, triode, etc. Theoretically they can make the question of the soul more transparent. However, these objects, once produced, risk getting totally lost in the ocean of data, without being discovered by their users; in most cases (e.g. digital images), after they have been used once, they will not be used again. Maybe because of their silence, we can imagine that they become eternal, if the servers are going to keep these data forever. Unlike the physical technical objects, which may be recycled (reduced to raw materials) for producing other goods, the unnoticed digital objects will remain silent on the server. In what way should we address this ‘vicious usage’ that worried Simondon?

In retrospect we may consider the critique in ‘Technique et eschatologie’ to be consistent with Simondon’s earlier works, such as Du Mode and ‘Technical Mentality’. In Du Mode Simondon had clearly proposed to reconsider the mode of existence of technical objects and their genesis in order to reduce the rupture between the two. This rupture, as we have seen above, is expressed in the alienation of both human beings and technical objects: in the psychosomatic alienation of the workers, and in the psychosocial alienation of the technical objects. The genesis of technical objects is determined by technological progress, while their mode of existence, transformed by industrialization, was not able to cope with their genesis: they constitute two realities, one technically determined and one social-psychologically determined:

The fundamental alienation resides in the rupture that is produced between the ontogenesis of the technical object and the existence of this technical object. It is necessary that the genesis of the technical object effectively takes part in its existence, and that the human–technical object relation pays attention to the continuous genesis of the technical object. (Simondon, 2013b: 339)

If we say that, for Hegel-Feuerbach-Marx, the alienation of man means the alienation of self-consciousness (Taube, 2009: 185), then for Simondon the alienation of the technical object means the suppression of its role as a technical being for and with human beings. ¹² However, giving rights to technical objects – including a CD, a triode or a closestool – doesn’t seem to be what Simondon wants to propose. Simondon wants to overcome the alienation of technical objects by completing the technical mentality to bridge the rupture mentioned above. In such a future, as envisaged by Simondon, all technical objects could be repaired and modified, and the owners would be capable of doing so – like hackers or handymen, as Anne Sauvagnargue puts it (2015: 401–2). None of these objects would be obsolescent. The example of the ‘Le Corbusier monastery’ that Simondon evoked towards the end of ‘Technical Mentality’ may give us a clearer picture of this vision of the future:

The ‘Le Corbusier monastery’ is a beautiful example of the contribution of the technical mentality in architecture: it includes within its plan its proper line of extension, for a further enlargement. And this is possible not only because of the architectural conception of the whole, but also because of the spirit of paring down that manifests itself in the choice of forms and the use of materials: it will be possible, without any break between the old and the new, to still use concrete, shuttering, iron, cables, and the tubulature of long corridors. (Simondon, 2009: 24–5)