The Devices of Time

Lubar, Steven und W. David Kingery: History from things: Essays on Material Culture. Washington, 1993

4th J.J. Bachofen Lecture: Basic Questions of Anthropology. University of Basel: Institute of Social Anthropology, 2018

In this year’s JJ Bachofen lecture, the anthropologist Katrien Pype considers anthropological approaches to the relationship between human beings and the material world, especially the worlds humans create. Around the globe we are witnessing unprecedented forms of „making“, of people inventing, recycling and repairing, with or without highly advanced technological apparatuses. In this lecture, Katrien Pype will reflect on the engagements between society and materiality in terms of belonging, representation and communication. She will also pay attention to the moral panics that undergird collective and individual choices when confronted with man-made machines that become too smart, and at times, that appear beyond the control of their creators and/or users. The presentation will situate the „homo faber“ of electronic modernity, or man who „makes“, fabricates, in a world governed by high-tech devices, within a long durée of scholarship on the socio-cultural contours of creativity and knowledge, and the ever-changing configurations of nature and culture.

This book is about machines: those that have been actualized, machines that have existed solely in our imaginations, or those deployed as metaphorical devices to describe complex social processes. The word and concept appears to evoke a host of emotional responses from humanity that emerges over a broad register; fear to jubilation, trepidation to caution, elation to regret. Machines transcend time and space to emerge through a variety of spaces and places, times and histories, and various representations that exist from film to literature; science to psychoanalysis; postcolonialism to artistic representations. Films have been fascinated with them and literature has created fantastical worlds in which machines play prominent roles. Machines shifted agricultural production and helped to usher the Industrial Revolution as one of the central experiences of 19th century life in places like the United States and Western Europe. They are also at the heart of sophisticated military technology and recent scientific discussions about interstellar space travel. Machines have become such a daily reality that their disappearance would have immediate and dire consequences for the survival of humanity. They are part and parcel to our contemporary social order. From labor to social theory, art or consciousness, literature or television, machines are a central figure; an outgrowth of affective desire that seeks to transcend organic limitations of bodies that eventually will wither and die. The robots of science fiction and the machines of capitalist production demonstrate their trans-disciplinary emergences that firmly place machines at the center of a collective social imagination. This book explores how machines have emerged through popular representations, the imaginations of artists and poets, and how they have been actualized in contemporary society. This book takes the reader on an intellectual, artistic, and theoretical journey, weaving through a wide variety of texts and representations, historical eras, and social locations. Machines is a call to examine not only their manifestations, but also to give particular attention to things we create as possessing deeper affective dimensions. Machines emerge, and once one attunes her/himself to the ways in which machines “speak” to us, we can imagine a society that is both dependent and repulsed by what machines do and how they have shifted the meaning of life itself. This book offers alternative ways in which to envision machines, understanding the deep processes that links them in a wide and disparate network of representations, manifestations, metaphors, and multiple meanings. Machines rejects that they are indeed neutral creations and this propels us to think differently about technology that is created under specific economic or historical paradigms. Rethinking machines and a machinic reality provides us with possible alternatives to our current technocratic reality. Let us sit back and take a journey through Machines, holding their mechanical parts as guides to possible alternative futures.

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 1992

The article discusses the trade-off hetween stundurdizatior~ and choice as a central issue that permeates the entire range of questions relating to the instrumental ahility of contemporary organizations and institutions. Within this hroad context the machine is seen as the main instrument and embodiment of standardization. and the notion of organization as largely consubstantial with the forms assumed by man-machine

Technology and Culture, 2014

2016

but it provides a distant echo of Heidegger‘s notion of “enframing” (Gestell) and his observation that the essence of technology is not anything technological (Heidegger, 2007, p. 5). For Heidegger, this means, first of all, that the essence of technology has nothing to do with meansends relations or with technology as a tool or an instrument. References in the following to “nontechnical” or even “technophobic” images of technology invoke magical notions of technology. According to these magical notions, technology is not primarily an ingenious way of extracting as much as possible from the limited resources of a limited world. Instead, nontechnical dreams of technology envision that the world could turn out to be limitless, after all, and that technology can alter even our conceptions of what is technically possible. While Ernst Cassirer draws a strict dividing line between this magical image of technology and the realities of engineering in the context of nature and society (1930,...

2014

State of the Field: The History of Technology

Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, 2005

Introduction On the opening pages of Manuel DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) the reader is invited to join the author in imagining``a future generation of killer robots dedicated to understanding their historical origin'' (page 2). He then goes on to suggest that``We may even imagine specialized`robot historians' committed to tracing the various technological lineages that gave rise to their species. And we could further imagine that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart'' (pages 2^3). Since he introduced this robot historian, DeLanda has undertaken the tremendous task of thinking through the philosophical architectonics of its history. Among the many disciplines he manages to fuse together, one may especially notice the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Fe¨lix Guattari, the new history of Fernand Braudel, neoinstitutional economics, nonlinear geometry, post-Chomskyan linguistics, neo-Darwinian evolutionism, and digital technology. The result, so far, has emerged as a powerful philosophical realism, where``reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds'' (DeLanda, 1997, page 21, emphasis in original). Understanding these immanent transitions requires``a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences on interactions of these forms'' (pages 21^22). An important and still open issue in DeLanda's work is, however, whether the subject matter of such a history is the matter-energy flows themselvesöthe`abstract diagrams' as he calls themöor the forms these diagrams produce. According to Deleuze, a diagram`i s neither the subject of history, nor something outside of history. It makes history by disassembling previous realities and significations, and in their place constitutes new points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions and improbable continuums. It doubles history with a becoming'' (1986, pages 42^43). One should notice that doubling history with a becoming implies here, in Deleuze's book on Foucault, an irreversible relationship between abstract diagrams and the knowledge archives they give form to. Deleuze says that, even though the diagrams are moving and fluctuating, the autogenerated forms of knowledge they catalyze öfor instance, historyöare unable to grasp these fluxes as properly historical. If history cannot cover the fluctuating diagrams it is because the diagrams keep changing the knowledge we call history.

Art & Culture Studies, 2021

The problem of interaction between machines and humans has been relevant at all times of human civilization’s development. This subject arose most acutely in the era of scientific and technical progress, giving rise to a wide problem field, many aspects of which still require scientific understanding. In this discussion, the researchers tried to analyze the situation of the widespread implantation of new technologies and machines into the art field. The integration of technology generates the necessity of the author’s interpretations about the relationship between the technological and the humanistic. The authors turned to the problem of identification and draw the boundaries of the human “I” in the era of computerization of many spheres of life, to the topic of technology’s images in cinema (Polish, American, documentary), to the image of industrialization in American art of the first half of the 20th century, to modern installations by A. Reichstein, to the screen media in the sta...