Technics

Without a doubt, the question of rave culture’s politics – or lack thereof – has polarized debate concerning the cultural, social and political value of rave culture not only within electronic dance music culture (EDMC) studies, but in disciplines that look to various manifestations of subculture and counterculture for political innovation. It is time for the groundwork of this debate to be rethought. Ask not what rave culture’s politics can do for you; nor even what you can do for it. Rather, ask what the unexamined account of politics has ever done for anyone; then question all that rave culture has interrogated – from its embodied and technological practices to its production of ecstatic and collective subjectivities – and begin to trace how it has complicated the very question of the political, the communal and the ethical. This complication begins with the dissolution of the boundaries of labour and leisure and the always-already co-optation of culture. To the negation of ethics, community and politics, this tracing calls for the hauntology of technics, precarity and exodus. And it ends with a list of impossible demands demonstrating the parallax gap of rave culture’s politics.

This dissertation investigates human-robot encounters and how robot existence here is calibrated to the social lives of humans. Based on a year of fieldwork in two laboratories dedicated to the development of human-robot interaction in the Kansai region of Japan, this dissertation follows professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, his associates, and the humanoid beings that populate the two laboratories, Intelligent Robotics Laboratories and Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories. From within the walls of these laboratories, I investigate how the roboticists strive to make robots with systemic and affective capacity for relating to humans.
I approach the laboratories as a specific community that calibrates the social through technical means and through staged and choreographed encounters between humanoids and humans. In these calibrations, the roboticists standardize and attune the humans and robots to each other through patterns of communication, linear algorithms, material affordances and limitations, dynamics and speed of movement. Equally, the roboticists apply models of human behaviour, and repertories of cultural expressions. The calibration of the robots’ social existence involves a search for social and communicative standards that both robots and humans can partake in. But such calibrations are not harmonious, and this work goes beyond the machinic and ordered regimes of calculation. Through their work, the roboticists themselves are affected by the on-going intimate tinkering and calibration of their robots. The robots are unruly, ambiguous, spectacular beings that provoke strong reactions of intimacy, care, recognition and affective uncertainty. Such tensions create affective relations that rouse sensations of excitement, alienation or confusion and render the robots open for conflicting interpretation and meanings. 
In the staging of the encounters between humans and robots, the roboticists try to frame these tensions in productive ways through performative expression that juxtaposes conventional understanding of human sociality, with technical capabilities, and the promise of the innovatively new.

Zahra’s Paradise is a webcomic-turned-graphic novel depicting the
aftermath of Iran’s Green Movement, where untold numbers of
protesters were arrested, tortured and killed. The comic occupies
matrices of liminality, both in its creation and in its impact on
audiences. Through its modes of encounter with readers, or its
virtual technics, Zahra’s Paradise works to disorient audiences,
unravelling the centrality of Western notions like the rational,
individual subject. In this essay, I argue that the virtual technics of
Zahra’s Paradise poses political potential by enrapturing the
attention of Western audiences while dismantling the dominance
of the Western gaze.

This dissertation studies selected works by artists Jane Jin Kaisen (DK/KR, 1980), Mark Leckey (GB, 1964), Henrik Olesen (DK, 1967) and Tabita Rezaire (FR/DK/GF, 1989) with a focus on how these practices - each in their way - interrogate, look into, articulate, reconstruct, and negotiate possible and potential actualizations of the individual and collective alike. The research is informed by theorizations of individuation through technical forms of memory as well as ideas of the contemporaneity of contemporary art. It has been conducted as part of the research project The Contemporary Condition, Aarhus University.

Booklet of the exhibition "La souris et le perroquet", Nice, Centre national d'art contemporain de la Villa Arson, 20 février - 31 août 2015.
With an essay by Thomas Golsenne, "Les Noces d'Art et Technique" and many texts by artists.
Edition : Villa Arson
Graphisme : S-y-n-d-i-c-a-t, Paris

This article reconsiders Stiegler’s account of the emergence of the human species in light of research in the field of transgenerational epigenetics. Stiegler traces this emergence to the appearance of technical artefacts allowing for the intergenerational transmission of acquired memory that would otherwise die along with the organism. This is taken to constitute a rupture in the history of life. The argument that I develop critiques Stiegler’s account at two levels: On the empirical level I argue that emerging neo-Lamarckian developments in the life sciences pose a challenge to the terms in which the specificity of the human is outlined and the notion of the rupture with life that its emergence constitutes. On the logico-transcendental level, I contend that in its account of the rupture, Stiegler’s narrative repeats the logic of the ‘dual origin’ that he ascribes to Rousseau and Leroi-Gourhan in their respective accounts of the origin of the genus Anthropos.

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals how notebooks were extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.

Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space.  But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on the manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility and morality of the data they encountered.  He explores how notekeepers transformed information gleaned from the arts and sciences into knowledge and shows that, in an age preoccupied with ‘enlightened’ values, the skills and materials required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason—they were part of reason itself.

Covering a rich selection of material and visual media ranging from hand-stitched bindings to watercolored pictures, the book problematizes John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Eddy makes a case for using the material culture of early modern manuscripts to expand the meaning of the metaphor in a way that offers a clearer understanding of the direct relationship that existed between thinking and notekeeping. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and then ending with universities, the book explores this argument by reconstructing the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. Eddy’s book is early awaited by those drawn to book history, manuscript culture, history of education, history of childhood, Scottish philosophy, and the Enlightenment broadly understood.

The paper aims to connect the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler in order to formulate a framework through which analyse contemporary digital phenomena. It draws a parallel between Deleuze's notion of virtual and Stiegler's epyphilogenesis, situated in the broader context of phenomenology.

This paper investigates the reciprocal implications between aesthetics and technics, to show how technicity, as a cultural and symbolic attitude, is constitutively rooted in the aesthetic dimension of human experience. The analysis conducted aims to bring into focus the originarity of technicity in the development of the living body, understood in its inseparable connection with the mind, as junction between the sensible and the symbolic, the organic and the cultural, the perceptive and the expressive. I address this question through a parallel analysis of Simondon’s groundbreaking reflection on technics and the less explored account of technics in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. If the latter inscribes our attitude towards technics in the motricity and symbolism inherent to the living body, the former ascribes to aesthetics a form of thinking, thus playing a fundamental role in our relationship to the technical dimension. Despite the differences in their approach to technics, I combine their theoretical perspectives to encompass their internal limits and to outline possible convergences.


Dalmasso, A. (2019). Techno-aesthetic Thinking. Technicity and Symbolism in the Body. Aisthesis. Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico, 12(1), 69-84.

This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.

Recently, geographers and social scientists have done much to develop the conceptual relationship between technology and affect. Notably, nonrepresentational geographies, as well as social scientists contributing to the so called ‘turn to affect’, have contributed ways to understand how technologies modify thought and action via specific kinds of productive relations acting through and between bodies. Reacting to various kinds of anthropocentric conventions that hold thought and action as the sole quality of a human subject, this research has developed various experimental approaches to examine how technologies modify thought and action in terms of nonhuman potentiality and immanent differentiations of life.
In this thesis I contribute to this research by theorising the relationship between technology and affect ethologically. The point of departure for this task is my contention that social scientific engagements with technology and affect tend to be narrowly and reductively focused on the figure of the human individual. My main argument is to say that thinking the relationship between technology and affect ethologically forces the social sciences to consider those compositional movements that are irreducible to the figures of the ‘individual’ or ‘human’ – offering opportunities for conceptualising and experimenting with more expansive relations between thought, affect and technology.
In developing this argument, the thesis draws upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) – two French philosophers whose shared commitment to theorising processes of individuation makes quite clear the problem with framing thought around the figure of the individual. Following Simondon especially, I foreground a way of conceptualising technology and technics ontogenetically – a manoeuvre that insists on understanding technologies in terms of adaptive and creative process. Conceptualising and experimenting with certain technological processes, I argue that the affective capacity of technologies cannot be reduced to individuated terms – a line of thought that refutes a certain tendency within the social sciences to theorise technological affects in terms of the embodied individual and technical object. I conclude by affirming ethological thinking as adequate for analysing the individuating movements of technological affects.

Virtuality as the Totalitarization of Metaphysics

The article attempts to define the phenomenon of virtuality as a process, a procession and a procedure. The question of the processor of virtuality
intensifies the aspect of subjectivity as the will to power, which could be
understood in the context of what Heidegger discussed as the completion of metaphysics with a distinct tendency towards totalization. In this regard virtuality does not cause the fictionalization of reality, but its fixation, which has not been emphasized enough in the postmodern theories of virtuality. The "escape" from reality into virtuality can be viewed differently if we allow ourselves to be confounded by the circumstance that within virtuality there is no place to "escape" to – inasmuch as the presumption is true, that what we are
dealing here with is the completion and the totalization of metaphysics or that which it itself has invented as reality and what seems to be invented as "virtual reality" by us at this moment.

This paper examines the relationship between Derrida’s work and that of Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler’s thinking can be seen as radicalisation of the idea of the supplement in Derrida. Stiegler differentiates his thinking of technics from Derrida's thinking around the supplement by arguing that, whereas Derrida is interested in a logic of supplementarity, he is interested in the historical differentiations of the technical supplement. Having established the basic terrain of Stiegler’s argument in the first volume of Technics and Time the paper moves on to discuss its relationship to Derrida’s work. Here it exposes various problems concerning Stiegler’s use of what he seems fairly determined to regard as the concept of différance. Stiegler himself sees a problem between his analysis of technics and Derrida’s thinking in that the latter doesn't have an account of the emergence of the human as the point at which the ‘living articulates itself upon the non-living’. Here the paper elucidates this difference with reference to Derrida’s own responses to Stiegler in the interviews between the two published as Echographies of Television.

Nous proposons dans cet article une relecture de la théorie de l’énonciation afin de rendre compte des composantes techniques, des supports et des médias des discours. A partir de Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique (1984) de Greimas, nous examinerons tout d’abord les questions posées par les sémiotiques dites visuelles, pour arriver à un problème d’ordre plus général, concernant le rapport entre énonciation productive et signification. Pour cette raison, nous essaierons d’articuler la théorie de l’énonciation de Greimas (Greimas et Courtés 1979) à travers la relecture fournie par Bruno Latour dans son Enquête sur les modes d’existence (2012).

On appelle jeux de ficelle, les jeux où l'on utilise une corde, cordelette d'environ 1m ou 2m et avec laquelle on élabore des figures. Comme le souligne José Braunstein 1 c'est un art qui « relève probablement du patrimoine culturel commun à l'humanité ». Effectivement, on retrouve un peu partout ces jeux, que ce soient dans des fonctions ludiques, rituelles,…C'est souvent une pratique que l'on fait seul, ou parfois à 2. Une fois la ficelle unique nouée, on utilise nos mains principalement, mais parfois aussi nos coudes, nos dents, pour réaliser les figures. C'est une « technique du corps ».

Este artigo é uma introdução geral ao pensamento de Bernard Stiegler em torno da relação entre técnica
e humano. Stiegler desconstroi a tradição filosófica que costumava separar technê e episteme com um enfoque
histórico e materialista, a fim de provar como é impossível pensar a humanidade sem a técnica. Portanto, a relação
não é de oposição, como a tradicional metafísica do espírito defende, mas composição, do modo como defendem
Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Andre Leroi-Gourhan e Gilles Deleuze.

This paper represents a critical engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical and prescriptive exposition of the condition of existence within current Western ‘hyper-industrial’ societies. I contend that Stiegler’s oeuvre is permeated by a complicity with capitalist distinctions, practices and forms of exploitation, as he restricts agency and the possibility for social transformation to the Western middle-class. The argument is developed thus. I proceed by offering the reader, through a Stieglerian approach, an illustration of the pharmacological dimensions and aporetic effects of the digital news media upon memory, work and proletarianisation. I then identify Stiegler’s prescriptions and motivations for a deproletarianised future as being shadowed his depoliticised outlook, as he seeks to oppose consumerism, leaving capitalist and colonial social relations untouched. Finally, I highlight the ethnocentricity and classism which permeate Stiegler’s work, impeding possibilities for emancipatory politics.

La mercantilización de todos los aspectos y ámbitos de nuestras vidas, junto con la hipertecnificación de nuestras existencias y un tecno-optimismo que lo apuesta todo en la vía tecnológica como camino para garantizar el crecimiento económico en un mundo finito y vulnerable, representan dos de los rasgos más salientes de nuestra civilización de la tarda modernidad capitalista, que en la actualidad se halla envuelta en una crisis cuya dimensión socio-ecológica está socavando sus propios cimientos. 
El presente trabajo pretende reflexionar sobre las premisas y las consecuencias de esos dos elementos definitorios de nuestras sociedades, poniendo el foco tanto en los presupuestos culturales en los que se enmarcan y que han constituido su condición de posibilidad, como en la imagen del mundo resultante de la forma de mirar a la realidad que ellos han apuntalado.
La tesis que aquí se defiende es que la solución a la actual crisis tendrá que pasar necesariamente no solo por repensar esa imagen, sino ante todo por cuestionar la que es una de sus piezas claves, la comprensión instrumental de la técnica.

"We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one." —Norbert Wiener (1950) [46]

Wiener's prophetic vision of things to come succinctly captures the pressing concerns of our historical moment.  While we live in an age of tremendous scientific and technological progress, albeit unevenly distributed, the threat of catastrophic climate change, which is certainly the result of said progress, has become a debt for which humanity might not have recompense.  Decades before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring gave birth to the modern environmental movement, Wiener's contention still charts a novel path for thinking about our collective ecological debts.  As he notes, the world is now a man-made artifact—one that comes at a great cost, perhaps even the human itself.  In suggesting that humanity must adapt itself to the world, Wiener was one of the first to conceptualize the tremendous costs of the Anthropocene. 
In response to the nearly absolute scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of global warming and, by extension, climate change, a 2008 petition was put forth by the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to have the Anthropocene listed as the most recent epoch of the geological time scale.  Although the term remains unofficial, Crutzen and Stoermer's neologism has become ubiquitous among scholars, scientists, and futurists.  While the Anthropocene is “widely accepted in the global change research community,” the term's rising omnipresence within popular culture, especially media outlets, speaks to the neologism's actual and perceived power to raise public awareness of the enduring human impact on the planet [p. 843].  Consequently, the Anthropocene has assumed “a focal point in the culture wars over the recognition and interpretation of environmental process,” specifically the decidedly human role in affecting the global climate system [p. 61].
The challenges of the Anthropocene provide a valuable and necessary opportunity to re-examine what it means to be human, especially if various technological endeavors thrust humans into novel roles, bodies, and spaces.  This paper situates the ethico-political implications of seemingly unthinkable countermeasures to global weirding through engagements and provocations with the work of Norbert Wiener, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour—all of whom presence the vital role of technology in thinking the human albeit from divergent perspectives. In 2011, the Geological Society of America selected a conference thematic reflective of the increasing academic accord that the planet has indeed entered a new age—the gathering was entitled: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. 
While many use the term wistfully, scientists, including the Anthropocene Working Group from the International Union of Geological Sciences, continue to debate the Anthropocene's official start date, which may have a dramatic effect on mitigation strategies and tactics.  On one hand, there is a strong argument for the Industrial Revolution, specifically the advent of the steam engine (1784), which is when “polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane."  On the other hand, Ruddiman posits a minor reading of the data in arguing, “the Anthropocene actually began thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice of farming,” which situates major societal disruptions, such as plagues in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the correlative “anomalous gas trends” found in ice-core records [p. 261].  In many ways, this divide centers on questions of scale versus scope, or the relative degree to which human action on the global climate system has been impactful.  The fact that there is any debate concerning the interpretation of ice-core data is itself part of the debate as the political comportment of the Anthropocene as an intended and presumed driver of change is clearly evident, even if the term remains “informal” and somewhat contentious [p. 843].
What is at stake in this debate underlies one of the central questions of geoengineering: if humans have been altering the environment since the advent of agriculture, then why would we not actively and purposefully continue to do so to avert crisis, especially if human activity is “driving the sixth major extinction event in Earth history?” [61, p. 843]  Ultimately, this query centers on command—the perceived and actual capacity for geoengineering actants to assume responsibility for the global climate system.  Clearly, one of the biggest assumptions of this line of thinking centers on the contention that we have always-already been geoengineering, albeit poorly, which portends grave consequences for the future(s).  Reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast an increase in both the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that can and likely will severely impact the projected “1.8 to 5.2 billion” people living in low-lying coastal regions “by the 2080s” [p. 317]. Understanding command as capacity is key as it frames both perceived and actual matters of fact—objects that are taken for reality—and matters of concern—things that are given presence within reality.1  The IPCC's forecasts actually have more weight as matters of concern than matters of fact as the former are more useful for understanding how the latter's relational ecologies emerge.  In light of such radical possibilities, approaches to command vary widely from organic gardening (unilateral strategies and tactics that support and enhance actual and perceived natural processes, such as ocean fertilization) to rocket science (strategies and tactics that account for the workings of complex systems and posit dynamically responsive, if not daring, solutions, such as a solar shield).  In either case, it is clear that the debate over the origin of the Anthropocene has implications for the design, development, and diffusion of possible geoengineering remedies as the issue turns from a question of when to start geoengineering? to how can we do a better job? 
If part of the intent of the Anthropocene is to enliven a sense of responsibility toward the human impact on the global climate system, then Berthon and Donnellan's notion of the Technopocene serves as a useful concept, especially as it was coined to engender “a new level of mindfulness on the part of humans for themselves and their technological offspring” [p. 5].  By affirming the primacy of command inherent to human activities, which has never limited itself to natural processes although it remains intimately interconnected and intertwined to the workings of the world, the Technopocene provides a more acute diagnosis of global weirding.  The concept, however, should not be situated as an extreme version of the Anthropocene but rather its antecedent, as it extends both the scale and scope of global weirding beyond the confines of our historical moment.  In sum, so long as humans, broadly defined, are present, one will encounter the Technopocene, which aligns with Ruddiman's observation that the Anthropocene has deep roots.  As it relates to the “rocket science” pole on the spectrum of command for charting alternative futures of geoengineering, the Technopocene beckons an Earth Systems Engineering and Management (ESEM) perspective, which expresses at its core “a basic, if disconcerting, truth: the Earth, as it now exists, is a product of human design” [p. 16].  Resonating with Anderson's charge that humanity must learn “to govern evolution” and Dator's call to assume “responsibility for our rose," an ESEM capacity draws on “a number of principles from fields such as industrial ecology, adaptive management, and systems engineering that can be relied on to enable rapid progress in developing such an approach” [p. 186].
While many might find this approach preferable given the realities of global weirding, ESEM is not without detractors.  As Hamilton contends, “there is something deeply perverse in the demand that we construct an immense industrial infrastructure in order to deal with the carbon emissions from another immense industrial infrastructure, when we could just stop burning fossil fuels."  While many, most notably a highly influential 2009 Royal Society of London report in favor of geoengineering “as part of a wider package of options for addressing climate change," concede that even if the world capped and/or stopped all carbon emissions at present levels, global warming would continue for years to come, Hamilton's weariness of what he deems to be the “utopian techno-enthusiasm” of Allenby and others offers a clear counter-point, even if the critique may underestimate the severity of what might lie ahead and the political realities of the present.
Extending the enthusiasm of George's metaphor, Donnell cheerfully opines, “Geoengineering may well turn out to be yet another tool of dominance, a newfangled way for human beings to screw things up even faster.  But it doesn't have to by that way.  As David Keith said to me as we were riding up a ski lift one day, 'We're in the gardening business now, damn it!' [p. 220]  If command is tantamount to capacity, particularly the perceptual and actual willingness and means to enact change, either as gardeners or rocket scientists, then the Technopocene/Anthropocene distinction is useful for reifying the poles of the X-axis, which must presence structural and systemic challenges and opportunities.  At both ends of the spectrum, change is inevitable, and the question becomes how much further down the rabbit hole, so to speak, one is willing to venture, since, as Wiener coolly notes, there is no going back.

El presente trabajo se plantea como un esfuerzo para concebir, pensar y analizar una
crítica de los elementos propios que el neoliberalismo impuesto durante el Régimen Militar en Chile ha dispuesto sobre la población de la nación, en cómo el concepto de pueblo se ha transformado y devenido en una singular imagen y ethos (tomando este concepto de Bolívar Echeverría) que habita bajo la óptica de diversos pensadores nacionales e internacionales divididos en los dos primeros capítulos. En el primer capítulo busco analizar y tensionar críticamente el concepto de pueblo propuesto por Martin Heidegger en función de disputarlo y trasladarlo hacia una problematización política en Chile. Por otro lado, el segundo capítulo busca profundizar dicha problematización de aquel concepto en conjunción al cine realizado por Raúl Ruiz y, en menor medida, Glauber Rocha, sus reflexiones sobre el concepto de imagen y su reproductibilidad técnica, tomando como importantes referencias y en diversas medidas al pensamiento de Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze y Bernard Stiegler respectivamente. 

Todos estos elementos serán contrastados y diferenciados tomando en consideración
el contexto neoliberal impuesto en la sociedad chilena desde el Régimen Militar hasta la actualidad, representando la crítica de la industria cultural propuesta por Theodor W. Adorno y su imaginario totalizante desplegado en la sociedad neoliberal desde el pensamiento de Michel Foucault. Elementos claves que serán analizados en un tercer capítulo de esta memoria, el cual se inclina en pensar y edificar una mirada crítica hacia la propuesta de una concepción clave de pueblo, de una potencia de existir que consigue escapar de su gravitante influencia, además de entregar breves reflexiones finales sobre el impresionante acontecer ocurrido en Chile durante el 18 de octubre y posteriores, tomando especial énfasis en el lema de “Chile despertó”.

Palabras clave: Pueblo, neoliberalismo, imagen, técnica, cine, ethos y Chile despertó.

This essay offers a groundwork for thinking space through the relation of nature and technics after Heidegger, Derrida and Stiegler. It departs from historical theoretical constructions of space to explore trace-topologies and the effects produced by different articulations of the relation of the who (subject, Dasein, human) and the how (nature, technics). All tropes of technē, from industrial production to literature assume a direct relevance to the future of the apparatus as the latter is traced back to the heart of nature. The essay closes with an examination of the implications of the technophysical always already for places of dwelling, travelling and production, at a moment when an unprecedented transformation announces itself.

Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to all living things, the closeness of this engagement making any account that seeks to draw a clear boundary between body and artefact problematic. By doing this I seek to clarify the nature of our embodied relationship with various kinds of artefacts; moving from tools to machines to digital interfaces, I consider their differing potentials to be gathered into the body schema, and thus change our embodied horizons of perception and action. While much research currently seeks to facilitate a more ‘natural’ mode of interacting with technology, I argue that such a mode of interaction does not exist outside the particularity of our relationships with specific objects. As a result, rather than trying to cater to supposedly more natural modes of action and perception, future technologies should aim to enrich our experience with new modes, inviting novel relationships that produce new kinds of sensory and other experience.

Lo studio si occupa di ricostruire l'interpretazione che il sociologo Lewis Mumford ha dato, nel corso principalmente degli anni '30, dell'opera di Oswald Spengler. Lo studio si avvale di risorse bibliografiche di Mumford mai tradotte in Italia.
(Il testo seguente riproduce, con successive modifiche stilistiche, la Tesi di laurea triennale discussa dall'autore nell'A.a. 2010/2011 all'Università degli Studi di Torino. Si tratta di un testo non pubblicato che desideravo in ogni caso render pubblico, vista anche l'indigenza di opere e ricerche sull'argomento. SI ricorda che una Tesi non pubblicata è comunque citabile, con l'accortezza di indicare, oltre all'autore, anche l'anno di discussione e l'Università.)

This paper identifies the relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of digital technoculture, especially as it is manifest in the 'terrorism genre' in film and television of the last 25 years. From Homeland and 24 to the Bourne trilogy, Skyfall and Patriot Games, techno-thrillers about counterterrorism and its enemies display the permanent political crisis of the state as a crisis of techno-aesthetic form. The control room in counterterrorism mode, a place from which drones and other remote operations are conducted, is the key manifestation of this crisis. The striking preponderance of screens embedded within screens in these narratives is a techno-aesthetic manifestation of the spatial and logical paradoxes of emergency legislation and, more broadly, of the strange location of political subjectivity in the matrix of technoculture.