Technological Time and

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.

2023

In his works, Reinhart Koselleck does not dwell on the history of the concept of technology (the lemma Technologie does not even appear in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe). However, technology as a concept constitutes the empirical basis of the modern conception of time and plays a major role in the genesis of contemporaneity. Koselleck demonstrates that the issue of technology lies at the very heart of the formation of contemporary culture and offers a solution to the rigid dichotomy between the realm of technology and that of values that has dominated its conceptualisation.

Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, 2018

To fully accomplish the "thing turn" in the philosophy of technology this paper invites shifting the attention from humans towards the world. The concept of world here refers to the complex made of the Earth with all things and living beings, including humans; it ignores the great divide between nature and society or culture. In this worldly perspective, the thing turn means adopting the perspective of things and raising questions such as how artifacts come into being, how they intervene within the world, how they change it. Such issues are vital to prevent the alienation of technology both from nature and from human beings.

The aim of this paper is to try to understand the struc- ture of time in information technologies. Starting with historical ar- guments, it first shows that time is neither linear nor cyclic. This becomes clear if we consider that many technologies which were developed in the past and then gradually ignored have since enjoyed revivals. In a way, information technologies seem to have a life cycle. On the other hand, the time of information sciences and technologies is anything but cyclic, because information sciences and technolo- gies introduce radically new devices that change our lives. One of the consequences of this strange structure of time is that, very of- ten, long term predictions are more reliable than short term forecasts. This paper tries to explain the entangled structure of time in informa- tion sciences and technologies through a cybernetic model. It argues that the differences between information sciences and technologies and other technologies are due to their inter...

Our sciences and technologies develop over long periods of time during which new information and new ideas lead to significant innovations and reconsideration of older views. Thinking of the sciences as providing models yields a more coherent account of the temporal dimension of science and technology than does thinking of the sciences as seeking a final account of fundamental entities and laws.

History and Theory, 2023

One of the main debates regarding historical representation within digital media concerns narrative, particularly the difficulty in articulating it. Digital technologies are usually presented as opposed to linear, written narratives, which is of consequence to historical writing. Despite the many merits of scholarly approaches that try to circumvent this difficulty, the lack of theoretical understanding of the categories implied in such discussions is noticeable. To counter this, this article addresses the relationship between time, technics, and narrative. I contend that the challenges of crafting narratives in digital media conceal a problem pertaining to the relationship between time and technics. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative, Jimena Canales's studies of the history of science, Wolfgang Ernst's and Yuk Hui's discussions of technical temporality, and Bernard Stiegler's understanding of the relationship between time and technics, I argue that it is the temporality imbued in the workings of technical objects (such as computers) that renders them averse to narrative. In making this argument, I employ the notion of "counted time" (in contrast to Ricoeur's "narrative time") to denote a temporal mode that, despite its intersections with social, human temporality, is alien to narrative.

pioneer.chula.ac.th

A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

When people think about technology from a contemporary perspective, they often think about all the gadgets and devices that are commonplace in our lives. For example, only ten years ago we were watching movies on VCRs and were talking on cell phones that would be unrecognizable compared to today's standards. Is this the essence of technology, or is there more to it? Technology has been something that has undoubtedly marked our world and our lives for a very long time, and especially since the industrial revolution occurred in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries. Major changes occurred in the way the world produced its goods, and the level at which goods were produced. Science and technology began changing the world. How then are we to view technology today? It is clearly a phenomenon that as been influencing the world for any centuries. Is it any different today than it was one or two hundred years ago? These are questions that are important in the study of the history of technology, and even culture. There are many theorists who have written on this topic, including Thomas J. Misa who wrote Leonardo: Technology & Culture from the Renaissance to the Present to the Internet. In this essay we will comment on Misa's analysis of how technology has influenced culture since the Renaissance, with specific reference to the industrialization. We will then compare Misa's theories of technology and culture and compare them with that of two other authors who have their own views on the history of technology and how it has affected culture. From this it will be clear that when analysing technology and culture, we need to evaluate not the level of innovation, but rather how the technology is really

2014

This paper addresses auto-destructive artworks by Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York (1960) and Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), to explore a changing consciousness of time in a period of technological transition from modern industrial machines towards the domestication of televisual devices. One effect of these is works is a contribution to a turbulent consciousness of time by orchestrating new perceptions of temporality with mechanical and tele-communicational media. Tinguely's kineticism is useful for articulating how different technologies can be used to rationalize time in different ways and highlight an incompatibility between the expression of time as an unfolding duration with mechanical media, and the temporal demands of televisual broadcast media.