Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology?

William Bogard, ‘Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology?’, pp.15-31, in:

Poster, M., Savat, D. (Eds.), 2009. Deleuze and new technology, Deleuze connections. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

p.15

Deleuze is not so much interested in questioning technology, like Heidegger, as in articulating, along with Guattari, a problem about machines.

Deleuze and Guattari’s problematisations of machines lead them, by contrast, to a concept of a multiplicity without an essence – or better, with a ‘nomadic’ essence1 – a complex configuration of machinic and enunciative elements called an ‘assemblage’.

The problem of machines is not Heidegger’s question of technology: Is there a possible escape from Enframing? Can technology save the world before it annihilates it? For Deleuze, there is neither an essential ‘saving power’ nor a nihilism of machines. Safety and danger are matters of experimenting with assemblages, with their compositional forms.

It is not a question of an essence of technology, but of what Deleuze and Guattari call an abstract machine, a machine immanent in assemblages that both integrates them and opens them to an outside, to counterforces that break them down.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages have a dual form: a ‘form of content’, that is, a machinic form composed of variably fixed matters and energetic components; and a ‘form of expression’ or ‘enunciation’ consisting of statements and articulated functions.

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On the mode of existence of technical objects

Gilbert Simondon, ‘Introduction’, pp.15-21, in:

Simondon, G., 2016. On the mode of existence of technical objects. Univocal Pub, Minneapolis, MN.

p.15

Culture has constituted itself as a defense system against technics; yet this defense presents itself as a defense of man, and presumes that technical objects do not contain a human reality within them.

We would like to show that culture ignores a human reality within technical reality and that, in order to fully play its role, culture must incorporate technical beings in the form of knowledge and in the form of a sense of values

The opposition drawn between culture and technics, between man and machine, is false and has no foundation; it is merely a sign of ignorance or resentment.

Behind a facile humanism, it masks a reality rich in human efforts and natural forces, and which constitutes a world of technical objects as mediators between man and nature.

Beyond Machines (but Still within the Phenomenology of Gestures)

Vilém Flusser, “Beyond Machines (but Still within the Phenomenology of Gestures)”, pp.10-18, in:

Flusser, V., 2014. Gestures. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

p.10

During its first phase (antiquity and the Middle Ages), history emphasizes the way the world should be; that is, people work to realize a value—ethical, political, religious, practical, in short, “in good faith.”

During its second phase (modernity), it emphasizes the discovery of being in the world; that is, people work epistemologically, scientifically, experimentally, and theoretically, in short, “without faith.”

Balance Sheet for Desiring Machines

Deleuze and Guattari, “Balance Sheet for Desiring Machines”, pp.90-115, in:

Guattari, F., Lotringer, S., 2009. Chaosophy: texts and interviews 1972-1977. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA.

p.91

The object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the ones for the other, but bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combined with something else to constitute a machine.  The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans. We are not using a metaphor, however, when we speak of machines: humans constitute a machine as soon as this nature is communicated by recurrence to the ensemble of which they form a part under specific conditions.

MirrorCameraRoom: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie

Warfield, K., 2017. MirrorCameraRoom: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie. Feminist Media Studies 17, 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1261843

p.77

Mark Deuze (2012) suggests that in our increasingly mediated lives, perhaps we are the medium. Theorists of Internet and social media studies have tackled similar befuddling questions where we’ve become at once producers and consumers—pro-sumers (Alvin Toffler 1980)—or simultaneously producers and users—produsers (Karl Fahringer and Axel Bruns 2008). Studying audiences at this period in history is like “wrestling with a jellyfish” (Justin Lewis 2013) because, among other things, audiences could be both always and everywhere (Peter Vorderer and Matthias Kohring 2013) or everywhere and nowhere (Elizabeth Bird 2003).

From Elephans Photographicus to the Hybronaut

Laura Beloff, ‘From Elephans Photographicus to the Hybronaut: An Artistic Approach to Human Enhancement’, pp.51-66, in:

Elo, M., Luoto, M., 2014. Senses of Embodiment: Art, Technics, Media. Peter Lang.

p.51

[Ref Bateson and von Uexküll on environment of the organism]

Uexkull’s research revealed that every species has its own constructed Umwelt because each species reacts in a distinctive way to the same signals it receives from the physical world. What is thus necessary for one’s biological survival, is included within one’s perception of the world; the Umwelt.

Artifacts and Attachment

Peter-Paul Verbeek, ‘Artifacts and Attachment: A Post-Script Philosophy of Mediation’, pp.125-146, in:
Harbers, H. (Ed.), 2005. Inside the politics of technology: agency and normativity in the co-production of technology and society. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

p.125

Within Technology Studies, the predominant vocabulary for understanding the role of artifacts in society is offered by actor-network theory. Bruno Latour, one of its major representatives, maintains that the social sciences’ exclusive focus on humans should be abandoned.

The so-called “principle of symmetry” is the most notable feature of Latour’s approach, entailing that humans and nonhuman entities should be studied symmetrically.

p.126

It will appear that Latour’s vocabulary is helpful in answering this question, but that it needs to be augmented in order to do full justice to the role of things in people’s everyday lives. I shall develop this augmentation by reinterpreting phenomenology, and by elaborating it literally into a post-script philosophy of technical mediation.

Functional Information: Towards Synthesis of Biosemiotics and Cybernetics

Sharov, A.A., 2010. Functional Information: Towards Synthesis of Biosemiotics and Cybernetics. Entropy 12, 1050–1070. doi:10.3390/e12051050

p.1051

Understanding of the informational nature of life has led to the emergence of two new disciplines, cybernetics and biosemiotics, which approached the same problem from different angles.

Cybernetics was conceived to study communication and control in machines and living organisms in the light of the information theory. However, because living organisms are too complex and we still have very limited means to control them, cybernetics has much stronger links with technology (i.e., communication industry, computers, and robots) than with biology.

Media Archaeography

Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Media Archaeography: Method and Machine Versus History and Narrative Of Media’, pp.239-255, in:

Huhtamo, E., Parikka, J. (Eds.), 2011. Media archaeology: approaches, applications, and implications. University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif.

p.239

The media-archaeological method as proposed here is meant as an epistemological alternative approach to the supremacy of media-historical narratives. Equally close to disciplines that analyse material (hardware) culture and to the Foucauldian notion of the “archive” as the set of rules governing the range of what can be verbally, audiovisually, or alphanumerically expressed at all, media archaeology is both a method and an aesthetics of practising media criticism, a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, and an awareness of moments when media themselves, not explicitly humans any more, come active “archaeologists” of knowledge.

Media archaeology and re-presencing the past

Vivian Sobchack, ‘Afterword : media archaeology and re-presencing the past’, pp.323-333, in:

Huhtamo, E., Parikka, J. (Eds.), 2011. Media archaeology: approaches, applications, and implications. University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif.

p.323

[…] this discourse of presence (a “presence in absence”) and its particularly concern with the past and the conditions under which it can be re-presenced (as well as historiographically communicated) are central to media archaeology.