For Laruelle, a first important distinction must be made with regard to the assessment of the technical sciences, namely that between technique and technology. By technology, Laruelle understands in the broadest sense the technical object raised by Simondon in his writings, which serves science for analysis, while the concept of technology belongs to the order of discourse and scientific knowledge including human scientific knowledge. Philosophy has favored and established the techno-logos or techno-logical difference within its ontological hierarchies. Laruelle, on the other hand, attempts to target a “uni-lysis” of the non-technical through the means of non-philosophy. Non-standard philosophy or generic science (two terms Laruelle has recently preferred over the notion of non-philosophy) are called upon to provide, in the course of their specific theoretical practice, a new description of the nature of technology-and this means thinking the non-technical precisely no longer through the means, ontologies, and methods of occidental philosophy, but through something that is radically non-techno-logical. Laruelle is concerned with developing a “force-of-thought” that asks what the non-technical is and what it can transform and how. (Cf. Laruelle 2014: 12) The use of the technical with regard to a non-technical activity thus aims at describing the essence of the technical, but which is itself non-technical, at least not in the onto-techno-logical sense. Laruelle attempts to capture the real object of technology as the essence of technology in order to simultaneously provide a generic scientific description of technical phenomena that locates generic causality in a new “techno-fiction” and thus erases the object-form (machine), and thus Laruelle is no longer concerned with the technical object in Simondon’s sense. First, while Laruelle affirms that if technical objects existed at all, they would definitely be those as described by Simondon, Laruelle does not think that Simondon’s technical objects can ultimately exist as scientific objectivity and truly constitute the essence of the technical. With Simondon, however, Laruelle believes that the ensemble of actions, operations, functionalities, and causalities that compose the particular technical phenomenon are condensed in the multiplicity of machines, their material shapes and effects.
When Laruelle speaks of the technical phenomenon, he simultaneously subtracts the subject-object form of philosophy, which most often posits a transcendental subject that constantly seeks to mirror its object by doubling its “an-itself.” (Ibid.: 83) Using the working tools of non-standard philosophy created so far, Laruelle attempts in this context to reduce in particular the philosophical texts of Simondon and Heidegger to a pure material, thus immediately putting a stop to hermeneutic interpretation and instead targeting at this point the non-philosophical use of a techno-logical interpretation of technology in order to finally reinvent the essence of (the) technical as “techno-fiction.” Ultimately, for Laruelle himself, even the remarks of Heidegger and Simondon regarding technology clearly belong to philosophy, to the genre of onto-techno-logical difference. This is a variety of onoto-theo-logic, which grounds being as such from being as the ground. The grounding is theologically infected because the relation of ground and grounded must speculate on a supreme cause.
Both Simondon’s technical objects and Heidegger’s instrumental circuits (Gestell) do not exist in themselves, but thus remain secretly techno-logical universals that smoothly miss the immanent-being of real-formal technical phenomena, that is, the way in which they manifest the world. That which constitutes the technical essence of technology is not itself technical for Laruelle, who at least on this point agrees with Heidegger. However, Heidegger continues to treat technology under the dominance of, or wrapped up in, a meta-technological, philosophical discourse that does reflect on the essence of technology, but does so for Laruelle in an illusory conceptual mode, insofar as for Heidegger it is precisely only for philosophy to entrust to téchne (as opposed to technology) the task of uncovering truth. What Heidegger reproaches Western philosophy for is its ongoing attempt to determine Being onto-theologically through thought in order to finally arrive at a concept of truth, while his concept of “aletheia” introduces a mode of unhiding.
Thus, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that in the technical, which is thought in the sense of availability aiming at securing the existence, the Being of Being hides rather than lightens. Being and thinking, which are mutually placed in the stock and in the ordering, have a common origin of being in the Gestell and this prevents the leap into the abyss of the event. Heidegger speaks of the Gestell and Getriebe, of the “circulation of the orderable into the Be-stellen”, which cannot be reduced to practices and strategies of man and also not to the professional striving of capital, but only goes back to itself. The frame is the stuff or the apparatus with which the technical indicates its dealings with nature. In technology, not only man and nature confront each other, but rather, in the technical, a place is assigned to the existing as the placing and the placed, the ordering and the ordered, whereby it is brought to a standstill in order to challenge a further placing and ordering. Each placing challenges another placing, which in turn is provided again – for another placing and ordering. This chain of ordering does not amount to anything, because the ordering does not produce anything that could have an importance outside of the putting. The ordering is always already and always only oriented towards putting another into success as its always own consequence. (Bahr 2013: 89 ff.) When Heidegger speaks here of success, then for Bahr this is an indication that the modern realm of technology could include not only the apparatuses and machines, but also techniques of economy (which, however, do not constitute its essence).
The technical media are thus neither to be understood as prostheses nor as mere things, devices or apparatuses. The essence of the technical also already lies for Hei-degger in a rather transhuman realm, which has long since left the scope of subject and object, of means and ends. Understanding modern technology as a framework that cannot be grounded in human practices alone raises the question of technical artifacts that can never be subsumed under a single end, but in potentia always refer to other ends as well, which Heidegger does not necessarily take into account. (Schlaudt 2022) A thing is first of all a matter, a something, about which, according to Heidegger, things are ver-schieden. What conditions the thing, however, can only be an unconditioned thing, which, moreover, is historically changeable and not directly experienceable. Insofar as the Ge-stell places the human being, i.e. challenges him to order from now on all property as a technical stock, the Gestell resembles the historical event, but at the same time disguises it, because all ordering sees itself integrated into the calculating thinking. Language becomes information, which stands for the mathematical. (Heidegger 1959: 263) For Heidegger, the mathematical is less the number than the always newly added. It is a draft of their thingness that jumps over things, as it were. The draft only opens a space in which the things, i.e. the facts, show themselves. (Ibid.) Every axiom, owes itself to the basic theorem of setting, but a differential axiomatics is only able to indicate how the universal Turing machine shifts the structure of former technical determinations of things. Despite all the precision of Heidegger’s determination of modern technology as a skill of unconcealment, Heidegger’s theory of the information age is still dominated by the scheme of naturalness versus artificiality within the framework of an onto-techno-logy.
Any adherence to the onto-techno-logy (Heidegger’s included) can ultimately be understood as a metaphysical program for the philosophical grounding of technology, as a meta-technology that even still ties the téchne to an ontological ground. But if the téchne remains sewn to the ontological foundation, then, for example, according to Guattari, a processual opening of the téchne with the help of the invention of new stratagems is virtually prevented. (Cf. Guattari 2014: 48) Similar to Guattari and Laruelle, Michel Serres notes at this point that one cannot “crack” philosophical discourse by always just inventing more philosophical terms, because then it is of course also a matter of further philosophical decisions, and precisely not an attempt to carry out the analysis of a (generic) science. (Serres 1994: 92) In this context, the question brought into play by Oliver Schlaudt in his book Das Technozän (The Technocene) would have to be asked again, namely whether, in the context of the discourse of progress, technology is a means to freedom or to the self-enslavement of man. (Schlaudt 2022) This requires a new rigor in the generic description of technical objects, we translate Serres or Schlaudt into Laruelle at this point. For example, topology and non-Euclidean sciences have to establish themselves as new rigorous techno-aesthetics. Thus, a new pluralization of apriori given forms may occur.
Laruelle’s invention of generic science is concerned with limiting the hegemonic claims of philosophy also with respect to its access to the technical. Namely, when philosophy turns to the technical object, it wants to continue to exercise its dominance as the king science within the framework of its onto-techno-logical discourse (here, too, there is a constant, mirroring, confusion and reflection between the real and the ideal). According to Laruelle, however, technical being must be radically understood as non-techno-logical. In this context, the goal of Laruelle’s reduction of philosophy is to dissolve the amphiboly through which philosophy and human science play their devious game with the essence of the technical and thereby virtually flourish. Moreover, there is also a permanent confusion of the essence of the technical with its regional, material, and economic conditions, and this because of the idea that there must be an original continuity between technical experience and the essence of the technical.
For Laruelle, technology is by no means to be understood as a syncretic result of natural science, and this observation entails the demand to invent machinic procedures beyond the analysis and critique of technology, by granting the assemblages of machines (objects and propositions) their own rhythms, their own style and, moreover, their deferrals (beyond a subordination under the philosophical subject), in order to possibly even reinforce the machines in their evidences, insofar as their processes remain related to the real. Laruelle postulates a reinforcement of the evidences of the technical by a transcendental automaton that neither reflects nor argues, but situates the intelligible identity of the technical in sheer independence from the technosciences, namely in the context of an essence of the technical that can only be the result of a new generic science. Here, the technical is ever already in relation to the real, whereby, if one does not recognize the determination of the real in the last instance, one always overweights the actual conditions of existence of the technical (economy, culture, politics), which do indeed exist. (Laruelle 2014: 35) Laruelle also wants to stop thinking technical causality either by means of the physical model of inertia/inertia or mechanics, by means of the techno-philosophical model of production, or by means of the measured models of the wheel, the engine, or the computer (all of which remain transcendent ensembles here). In all these discourses, one still imagines an all-too-simplistic essence of the machine or the technical that can supposedly unfold out of itself without depending on the favor of the particular technical situation. By making the appearance here again completely appropriate to the essence, the manifold necessarily loses its social place (the richness of folds becomes the ornamental). Every technical object is thus supposed to confess its scarcity, insofar as it is nothing more than an example of the essence of the technical conceived as metaphysics. This, on the other hand, is to be countered by a formal or an immanent-ness of the technical phenomenon, by showing that the latter manifests the world but does not represent it. (Ibid: 23)
For Laruelle, the various discourses that sometimes extensively reproduce the philosophical universals that are in vogue at the moment cannot explain the essence of technology at all. Nevertheless, these discourses can at least serve as objective data or as material to reinvent, with their transformation, the essence of technology in a way opposed to the circular interplay of science and philosophy. The point is to make technology intelligible through a radically abstract theory (without abstraction), without deducing or inducing the technical phenomenon in an intuitive or ambiguous way. Instead, Laruelle considers the description of the essence of the technical to be a purely underdetermined generality that remains related to the real in the last instance, and in this context the techno-logical scheme is precisely to be used only as an index or sheer material. And by no means can it succeed in inventing a more powerful technique than the already existing techniques, or in developing a new philosophical conception of technique that dominates science, or even in producing a conversion of technique and philosophy (a techno-logical investment of technique) – rather, generic science is characterized by the production of a rigorous, non-interpretive knowledge of the technical. What is needed here is a generic knowledge that makes a radically different use of technology, deploying new technical inventions differently from technology but thanks to its existence.
Laruelle does not look for the common characteristics of the wheel, the engine, and the computer, whether understood as an abstraction or as an autoposition of properties, each of which is already presupposed as that of technical objects. Rather, the description (hypothesis, deduction, and experiment) of the nature of the technical requires the invention of a new theoretical type of technical object, with which one no longer recurs to a philosophically imagined origin or to a speculative continuity, as exemplified, for example, by the theories of mirror projection and imitation, but also, to some extent, by theoretical mechanics and cybernetic systems theory. Philosophy and human sciences, thanks to their common affirmation of capital, have created the monstrosity of a techno-logical discourse, a true amphiboly around the essence of technology, a reciprocity and intermingling of cognition (technological discourses as onto-techno-logical form) with the technical object, reality and objectivity (and finally with the real itself). It would be a big mistake to say that there are no singular technical phenomena at all, but only their techno-logical interpretations, because just with this assertion a generalized techno-logy would be imagined and suggested as a general form, quite simultaneously to the production of the respective philosophical machines and their productions: The myth around the unknown technical object, which remains completely philosophical. Heiner Mühlmann argues not entirely dissimilar at this point when he tries to show that týche-technical thinking (týchetechnik as the craft that works on the raw material chance (týche)) can explain the thought contents of transcendental philosophy, but conversely the latter cannot interpret týche-technique. (Mühlmann 2013: 23) There are týche-technical effects that occur exactly when results of chance and technique interact in such a way that something new emerges (see also the theses of Oliver Schlaudt), which in turn has to take care that future coincidences get at least partially a certain orientation. (Ibid.: 15) In this way, technology can distinguish itself from the world and its objects.
Yuk Hui has also made a strong case for technical recursivity and contingency. Recursivity is a general term for looping. This is not a mere repetition, but rather a spiral where each loop is different, with the process generally moving toward an end, whether a closed end or an open end. With a few lines of recursive code, you can solve a complicated problem that would require much more code if you tried to solve it in a linear way. Recursivity, then, is not at all an identical repetition or a simple (random) variation on the edge of a rule modeled in a code, but is the very operation of statistics, which on the one hand tries to continue an image beyond its limits, and on the other hand is interwoven with human perception and interpretation. In fact, from an informational point of view, an image is nothing more than organized noise from which recurring patterns can be derived, which are themselves parameterized according to words. It acquires the status of a representation only when it is perceived by a biological system. From this it can be deduced that recursivity always lies in a duplication between the machine recursivity and the anthropological recursivity, opening up the difference at the heart of the anthropotechnological. The latter is never realized, but is the difference as suffering, not in the sense of pain, but as suffering from, that is, lack of.
It is precisely at this point, between the recursivity of the imagination (understood transcendentally) and the inductive recursivity, that the paradox of recursivity opens up, generating the horror of a discrepancy. This sense implies that, far from being a symbiosis between technology and man, it is an irreconcilable and irrevocable difference, a notion preferred to the notion of the impossible.
This is probably why generative AIs are not new tools for human creativity but, like a chemical reagent, can make the transcendental surface of the image react: There is the image, without representation, which is the formlessness of all future representations.
In this, contingency is central to recursivity. In mechanical functioning based on linear causality, a contingent event can cause the system to break down. For example, a malfunction of a machine can lead to an industrial disaster. In recursive functioning, however, contingency is necessary because it enriches the system and enables its evolution. A living organism can absorb contingencies from the outset and make them valuable. But so can today’s machine learning, according to Hui. (Hui: 2022)
For Hui, he agrees with Heidegger that cybernetics ends philosophy, at least as far as metaphysical dualism in ontology and epistemology is concerned. In terms of exploring the question of a general ecology, Hui wants philosophy to go beyond the universal status claimed by cybernetics. For Hui, we now live in an age that is bidding farewell to mechanism as technological objects themselves become organic. Computers, smartphones, and robots are no longer mechanical; they are becoming organic. Or, to take it away from the metaphor of the organism, the smartphone is an elegant gadget with a massive infrastructure, the technosphere.
Theoretical description, in the sense of a generic science that is a new form of knowledge, clones the physical and technical sciences, no longer resorting to philosophical or ontological transcendence on the part of non-standard philosophy. What Laruelle writes about non-photography applies precisely to the non-technical: there is a thinking in technology and a thinking of technology, the latter functioning as the radical description of the ideational conditions or essence of technology, in that the techno-perceptual conditions are reduced to the description of the technical, and thus can only be related to the identity of the real. (Laruelle 2014: 39) The essence of technology consists neither solely in the technical phenomenon nor in the technical object, neither in the technological thought nor in the technological means; rather, with respect to the technical, Laruelle calls for an intransitive cause in the last instance, i. e. the radical immanence of an identity in the last instance, that is, the Real. The technique as such is the effect of the real by manifesting the real, whereby the real leaves the technique in existence, because from the side of the real no reversibility or convertibility with technique, science or philosophy is indicated. It is not about the being of technique, but about the technique-being of technique. It is a matter, as Laruelle writes, of replacing the blindness of the light of logos with the truly blind thinking of the non-technical. (Ibid.: 55) Thinking is understood here as “power-of-thinking” or as “labor-of-thinking.”
At least two subtractions are necessary to radically separate the description of the essence of technology from philosophical contemplation and its doubles: 1) The non-ontological subtraction from technical appearances, which has so far been subordinated under techno-logical difference. The regional or ontic appearances of technology, on which the human sciences constantly feed, are also to be subtracted. 2) The subtraction of the perspectives of the engineer, worker, sociologist, anthropologist, economist, psychologist, etc. And this even if these do not follow the perspective of the philosophy of “techno-logy” and its correlate, the onto-techno-logical relation or difference, on which ultimately even the descriptions of Heidegger and Simondon still focus, in order to deploy an invariant techno-logical scheme that serves to synthesize still any regional perspective on the technical with the superior perspective of philosophy. However, what is to be known in the non-technological mode is also not the object represented by the natural sciences.
Regarding the four causes (materialis, formalis, finalis, and efficiens), one often tries to represent the machine as absolutely caused. But already for the causa materialis the problem arises that one can hardly describe the machines with their empirical, material properties still as fixed dispositions, whereby also the respective formations, designs and structures of the machines (causa formalis) do not point to a unified interaction of causes. For its part, causa finalis as a principle of differentiation points to a plurality of finalities (Bahr 1983: 232), whereby the conflict between the technical feasibility of machines and their economic profitability outlines the problem of a unified finality particularly clearly. Here, however, a finality might be implied in the final instance, namely that of the economic, while conversely the economic is not dependent on the technical in the same way. For without the prospect of being able to successfully index economic profitability, even the most promising innovations will not be turned into investments.
Finally, the causa efficiens. Aristotle assumed that the figure “movement of movement” could not be thought, because the change of movement could always only be the unchangeable of movement itself, and thus every change would fall back into itself as an appearance. Consequently, Aristotle subsumes the ontic under the logical, the propositional form of reason and consequence, i. e. the cause must have reason/existence, because otherwise the passing/existence could not exist. (Ibid.: 233) Humes objections against this way of constructing causality are well known, as well as Kants replication, in which he points out that the aleatory movement of consequences is not accessible to sensations, but only to the inner form of Anschauung (time), but with this he only further radicalizes Hume`s approach. Many things can be said about the plurality of effect connections in the context of dialectical reasoning. With this, however, the empirical on the level of reason is not yet recognized, whereby immediately the question arises whether nature offers itself to technology or the technical method – in the sense of dealing with it – in the form of cause-effect chains (imitation/imaging) at all. Here again the question of the eternal convertibility of theory and real object has to be asked.
At this point Kant introduces the heuristic of “as-if”, as if nature corresponds to the understanding or the power of judgment. And this means nothing else than that causality can only be symbolized in discursive representation. Bahr shows that Kant encounters an ontologically insoluble problem when he wants to answer the question whether nature can offer itself to the natural sciences according to their principles of causality with the intervention of the philosophy of “as-if”. According to this, the mind must proceed as if nature corresponds to it, it must invent simulations that have no referent or at best lead to approximations to nature. (Ibid.: 235) And this means that Kant does shift the concept of truth when he speaks of understanding prescribing the laws to nature, as it were, but he always falls back on truth as the correspondence between understanding and nature, so that in the end he does not leave the game of the reversibility of thought and object, but constantly runs this game anew, starting from understanding. And Kant, of course, could not have imagined at all that with quantum physics material-discursive apparatuses have come into being, which by their experimental machine arrangements and measuring instruments produce non-empirical phenomena of nature in the first place, in order to translate them again into the empirical in a second step, and that before they are even perceived by subjects. And this machinic intervention in the metaphenomenon of nature cannot be retrospectively factored out of the results of the experiments again. (Ibid.: 236) Natural science now measures itself by validity, which initially consists in the production of empirically referenceless phenomena that are contingent in themselves. If phenomena exist in particular through relations, without any temporally pre-existing relations, then in experimental natural science they are the result of measurements in which there is no longer any separation of observer and observed. (Barad 2013: 19) At the same time, with respect to the meta-level, speculative reason is now again called for by many theorists. The crisis of causality, now indicated not so much by the blasts of machines but by the question of the indeterminacy of causes (the latter pointing to the contingency of machine orders – in this respect contingency is the ultimate category of metaphysics), leads again and again to the attempt to translate causality into the logical-symbolic functions. Bahr writes: “In the machine, the transcendental function becomes the paradox of its own ’empiricism'” (Bahr 1983: 237).
The relation of cause and effect is ever already torn, with which the concept of truth or, as Derrida rightly notes, the difference between actuality and inauthenticity disintegrates. In the labyrinth or in the chaos of the machine still the last truths of the mathematical or physical sciences disintegrate. That is why Laruelle, perhaps to escape chaos, even more than Guattari in his theory of chaosmosis, speaks of the necessity of inventing a new theory-fiction of the technical as a generic extension of the dispositif of quantum physics, which here is precisely not understood in quantitative-mathematical terms. Matheme-without-mathematics and techniques-without-technology are now to be uncovered. And in this, so perhaps Bahr would again join with Guattari, the machine actually shows itself as a “chaos-motic” explosive machine. Joyful science would be a radically exact science on the one hand, a blind science on the other; it would be a science of blasting-without-chaos.
In this context, Bahr is clear that Kant has not entirely obstructed the question of appearance, which is one of labyrinths. It remains incumbent upon non-philosophical thought to think a reality quite different from the intermingling of discursivity and the world, namely a techno-fiction, thus no longer thinking of technology as a variable of philosophy. In the phenomenon of the technical, the universally possible unites with the reality of technical objects to produce an a priori quasi-field of fictions that is determined by the real in the last instance.
Generic science must itself develop a method to produce the unification or, as Laruelle has recently said, the superposition (overlapping) of science and philosophy differently than before, with the results of this methodological operation providing useful transformations of the scientific and the philosophical material. (Laruelle 2010b: 262) Laruelle first refers to two quantum mechanical principles in his late writings: To superposition and non-commutativity and, moreover, to idempotence. He immediately emphasizes that the algebraic operations of superposition and addition, as well as idempotency (mathematical rule used to describe the superposition of two waves in a single one: 1+1=1), should be understood neither as synthetic nor as analytic in the classical sense, but rather they should be applied as open analysis and/or as non-closed synthesis (synthetic-without-synthesis). (Laruelle 2014: 148) In doing so, Laruelle treats the principles neither as principles of a first philosophy nor as positive principles of quantum physics, but as in the last instance determinant (more precisely under-determinant) conditions, with the generic science based on them ultimately having to be more complex and at the same time poorer than its materials of science and philosophy, if it wants to develop its own theoretical practice, that is, to establish a relation between sciences and philosophy in the immanence of a unified connection that is always determined by the real, a figure of thought that Laruelle calls “unilateral duality.” Laruelle thus mobilizes for this kind of theoretical practice a series of models from quantum physics, in which, however, he refrains from their mathematical descriptiveness. Like economics, for Laruelle the technical sciences are only possible as fractal generic sciences beyond perception. Laruelle speaks of a fractal irregularity force, which of itself subverts the given.
Foto: Sylvia John
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